A new legislative initiative (S. 2590) would require the government to disclose and to publish online all federal contracts, grants, and other forms of spending.
“I like to think of this bill as ‘Google for Government Spending’,” said Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK).
“The concept behind the bill is really quite simple: Put information on government spending out there for all to see and greater accountability will follow. It will also change the expectations of those receiving funds that they will know in advance that the information will be public,” he said.
The bill has neatly circumvented the usual partisan divisions and has won bipartisan support and co-sponsorship from the likes of Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), and endorsements from Greenpeace and the Heritage Foundation.
A July 18 Senate hearing on the proposal featured statements from Senators Coburn, Obama and McCain, and testimony from Gary D. Bass of OMB Watch and Mark Tapscott of the Washington Examiner and the blog Tapscott’s Copy Desk. See their prepared statements here.
The Los Angeles Times editorialized on the bill in “Googling the Feds,” July 21.
To empower new voices to start their career in nuclear weapons studies, the Federation of American Scientists launched the New Voices on Nuclear Weapons Fellowship. Here’s what our inaugural cohort accomplished.
Common frameworks for evaluating proposals leave this utility function implicit, often evaluating aspects of risk, uncertainty, and potential value independently and qualitatively.
The FAS Nuclear Notebook is one of the most widely sourced reference materials worldwide for reliable information about the status of nuclear weapons and has been published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1987. The Nuclear Notebook is researched and written by the staff of the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project: Director Hans […]
According to the National Center for Education Statistics’ August 2023 pulse panel, 60% of public schools were utilizing a “community school” or “wraparound services model” at the start of this school year—up from 45% last year.