Noteworthy new reports from the Congressional Research Service include the following (all pdf).
“Open Source Intelligence (OSINT): Issues for Congress,” December 5, 2007.
“Medal of Honor Recipients: 1979-2007,” updated November 13, 2007.
“Homeland Security Department: FY2008 Appropriations,” updated August 20, 2007.
“Greece Update,” updated October 16, 2007.
“The Republic of the Philippines: Background and U.S. Relations,” updated August 10, 2007.
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
The federal government can support more proactive, efficient, and cost-effective resiliency planning by certifying predictive models to validate and publicly indicate their quality.
We need a new agency that specializes in uncovering funding opportunities that were overlooked elsewhere. Judging from the history of scientific breakthroughs, the benefits could be quite substantial.
The cost of inaction is not merely economic; it is measured in preventable illness, deaths and diminished livelihoods.