A recent workshop sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the Government Information Technology Services Board, and the National Institutes of Health investigated the use of information technology within the federal government. A final report on the findings of that workshop was issued in June. This column reflects a summary of those findings; the full report can be found at www.isi.edu/ ...

Policy statements on health care delivery are issued frequently by various committees and groups at the local, state, or federal level, and most are seldom read and quickly forgotten. Not so with policy statements from the National Academies, which was chartered by Congress in 1863 with a mandate to advise the federal government on scientific and technical matters. Composed of three branches—th...

The mobilization of interest groups is affected not only by social and economic “supply” factors but also by government-related “demand” factors as well. We add to a growing literature noting the impact on interest-group mobilization of government activity by examining how federal policy activity in an issue-area stimulates interest-group activity at the state level in the same issue-area. Empi...

I wrote an expert ethics opinion for the federal government when the case was before the Quebec Court of Appeal.6 I argued that the ever-increasing ability to manipulate human reproductive material (in pursuit of any number of objectives) raised unique ethical issues warranting federal attention. More precisely, I defended the view that federal legislation was needed “to protect and promote pub...

E-government has been identified as the next major application of information systems to fundamentally alter how U.S. federal agencies interact with the public. Through a strategy published by the Office of Management and Budget, federal agencies are formulating and executing plans to realize the many expected benefits from e-government. It is not clear, though, whether there is either a normat...

T he question of whether the federal government should directly intervene in the labor market to expand employment opportunities has long been controversial, regardless of whether the efforts have been directed toward the poor or the nonpoor. In the 1930s, denigrators of the Works Progress Administration dubbed it "We Play Along." Almost fifty years later, George Gilder wrote: "Like welfare, CE...