Additional reports from the Congressional Research Service that are newly available online include these (all pdf):
“Department of Defense Fuel Costs in Iraq,” July 23, 2008.
“The Global Nuclear Detection Architecture: Issues for Congress,” July 16, 2008.
“Foreign Science and Engineering Presence in U.S. Institutions and the Labor Force,” updated July 23, 2008.
“Intelligence Reform at the Department of Energy: Policy Issues and Organizational Alternatives,” July 28, 2008.
“Retroactive Immunity Provided by the FISA Amendments Act of 2008,” July 25, 2008.
As useful as some CRS reports are, they are rarely if ever the last word on any given subject. The new CRS report on retroactive immunity and the FISA Amendments Act, for example, does not encompass the challenging constitutional questions discussed by Glenn Greenwald in this ACLU blog entry.
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.