Tag:
Congress
Latest Headlines
Latest Headlines
Congress lacks basic knowledge management, finds paper
Congress lacks basic knowledge management strategies, depending instead on outdated systems for information referral, sorting, communicating and collaborating, according to a policy document (.pdf) published Dec. 4 by the New America Foundation.
Issa open source language comes under criticism
One intention of the bill, said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), is to define the government as one entity for purposes of code redistribution. The most common open source licenses require users who make improvements to open source software to make generally available to the public their updated code, should they distribute that code to anyone outside their organization. Issa said the government shouldn't "exactly match private sector open source, because government is different."
Bowles distances himself from House Republican fiscal cliff proposal
House Republican leaders rejected President Obama's proposed fiscal plan and said Dec. 3 that a deal should approximate a framework Erskine Bowles recommended in November 2011. Bowles, meanwhile, said he no longer endorses the recommendation the House Republicans cite.
Senate defense authorization gets a veto threat
There is a likely White House veto waiting for the defense authorization currently on the Senate floor if significant changes are not made, according to a statement from Obama administration. The bill was considered by the Senate on Nov. 29 and 30, with a cloture motion on the bill set for a Dec. 3 vote.
Senate Judiciary approves ECPA privacy amendment
The Senate Judiciary Committee approved Nov. 29 a bill that would require law enforcement to obtain a warrant to examine emails and other stored electronic communications.
GAO proposes fee for bid protests
Ralph White, the agency's managing associate general counsel for procurement law, says the agency handles at least 16,000 protest-related emails each year, and must manually sort them. What's badly needed, he says, is a docket system – but, based on an earlier responses to a request for information, the agency estimates one would cost between $400,000 and $450,000, and that's money the agency doesn't expect to get from Congress.
Last attempt at Senate cybersecurity bill fails
A last attempt this Congress to pass a cybersecurity bill in the Senate failed Nov. 14 when less than a supermajority of lawmakers voted to invoke cloture, a necessary step before the bill can come to the floor. Lawmakers voted 51-47 for cloture, but with Republican senators voting against, consideration of a cybersecurity measure will likely have to wait until a bill can be reintroduced following the Jan. 3 convening of the 113 th Congress.
Sequestration may not mean immediate cuts
Sequestration's impacts could be mitigated even after it goes into effect, says advocacy group OMB Watch. In a report (.pdf) dated Nov. 2, OMB Watch says a 2013 deal between the president and Congress could retroactively cancel the automatic cuts so that "there would be minimal or no damage to most affected federal defense and non-defense programs."
Terrorism and crime may overlap more than efforts to combat them
Though efforts to fight terrorism and transnational crime separately are substantial, efforts to deal with the overlap between the two may fall short, the Congressional Research Service says. Intelligence gathering, for example, does not seem to deal with the nexus between terrorism and crime enough, the CRS says in an Oct. 19 report (.pdf) that Secrecy News posted online.
Fear of blame could cause Congress to back down from sequestration
If there's to be a resolution to the looming threat of sequestration, it'll stem from party caucus meetings among members of Congress centered on a discussion of "who's going to be blamed more," said Paul Carliner, a former Democratic Senate Appropriators Committee staffer.
