Vetoes of Defense Authorization Bills, and More from CRS
If President Obama vetoes the pending FY2016 defense authorization bill, “it would mark the fifth time since 1961, when Congress enacted the first annual defense authorization bill, that a president has vetoed that measure,” according to the Congressional Research Service. See Presidential Vetoes of Annual Defense Authorization Bills, CRS Insight, October 1, 2015.
New and updated publications from the Congressional Research Service that were issued in the past week include the following.
Overview of the FY2016 Continuing Resolution (H.R. 719), October 1, 2015
Public Health Service Agencies: Overview and Funding (FY2010-FY2016), updated October 2, 2015
DHS Appropriations FY2016: Security, Enforcement and Investigations, October 2, 2015
Poland and Its Relations with the United States: In Brief, September 30, 2015
State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs: FY2016 Budget and Appropriations, updated October 1, 2015
U.S. Agricultural Trade with Cuba: Current Limitations and Future Prospects, updated October 1, 2015
How Treasury Issues Debt, updated October 1, 2015
Disconnected Youth: A Look at 16 to 24 Year Olds Who Are Not Working or In School, updated October 1, 2015
Kuwait: Governance, Security, and U.S. Policy, updated October 1, 2015
Yemen: Civil War and Regional Intervention, updated October 2, 2015
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.