The National Security Agency published a notice today describing its Power Upgrades Project, which is intended to meet the Agency’s growing demand for electrical power and to replace aging electrical infrastructure.
“The proposed utility upgrades would allow for 100 percent self-contained redundancy, should off-site power sources fail,” according to the January 2 Federal Register notice.
“The demand for electricity to operate its expanding intelligence systems has left the high-tech eavesdropping agency on the verge of exceeding its power supply,” reported Siobhan Gorman in the Baltimore Sun on August 6, 2006.
This rule gives agencies significantly more authority over certain career policy roles. Whether that authority improves accountability or creates new risks depends almost entirely on how agencies interrupt and apply it.
Our environmental system was built for 1970s-era pollution control, but today it needs stable, integrated, multi-level governance that can make tradeoffs, share and use evidence, and deliver infrastructure while demonstrating that improved trust and participation are essential to future progress.
Durable and legitimate climate action requires a government capable of clearly weighting, explaining, and managing cost tradeoffs to the widest away of audiences, which in turn requires strong technocratic competency.
FAS is launching the Center for Regulatory Ingenuity (CRI) to build a new, transpartisan vision of government that works – that has the capacity to achieve ambitious goals while adeptly responding to people’s basic needs.