A move being considered by the Defense Department threatens to place Defense Department advisory boards rife with contractor conflicts of interest under a veil of secrecy, InsideDefense.com learned last Friday. By consolidating service-specific (e.g. Air Force, Army) advisory boards under the mantle of the highly-influential Defense Science Board, there would be a reduction in "'administrative requirements' because committee subpanels are not required to be open to the public and meetings would not have to be announced beforehand in the Federal Register," according to a Feb. 3 memo from the deputy director of the Office of the Secretary of Defense's administration and management office, Howard Becker.
The openness of advisory committees has been under attack in recent years. In 2003, POGO pointed out the danger of exempting the industry-dominated Homeland Security Advisory Committee from openness provisions of the Federal Advisory Committee Act. More recently, the original legislation proposing the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency (BARDA) had provided for the same exemption for BARDA's advisory committees. And the Acquisition Advisory Panel (also known as the 1423 Panel) is considering closed-door working groups where contractors will protest preliminary findings and recommendations.
Some government officials claim that subcommittees or working groups in "fact-finding mode," where only information is collected, sometimes have much more candid witnesses in private than if those witnesses were under the public spotlight.
However, in general, POGO believes that advisory committees and their subcommittees should be open. Though the FACA law does not make it mandatory for subcommittees meeting solely to seek information to make these meetings public, the law does allow agencies to use their discretion. In sum, the DoD advisory committees moving under the Defense Science Board can continue to remain open at the Secretary of Defense's discretion. Rumsfeld once said, "Our great political system needs information to be self-correcting." Let's hold him to it.
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