The leading presidential candidates should be questioned about their willingness to depart from the secrecy practices that have characterized the Bush Administration, wrote civil libertarian Nat Hentoff in his syndicated column this week.
Whether it concerns domestic surveillance, coercive interrogation, or extraordinary rendition, “I haven’t heard any of the frontrunners stress this need for a clean break with the Bush administration’s use of a ‘unitary executive’ doctrine to cloak these and other extrajudicial — and indeed extralegal — practices in deep secrecy,” Mr. Hentoff wrote.
See “The Dark Bush Legacy on Secrecy” by Nat Hentoff, Washington Times, February 25.
The article followed up on a related piece that I wrote for the Nieman Watchdog earlier this month, “The Next President Should Open Up the Bush Administration’s Record.”
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.