Random Excerpts

In addition, the President should task the Director with significantly broadening recruitment, expediting onboarding practices, and shifting resources away from headquarters, including terminal generalist GS-15s when OPM buyouts, forced rotations, or up-and-out personnel policies are set for particular positions. The CIA must find creative ways to align mission requirements with hiring needs, recruit diverse sets of individuals with unique backgrounds, and become more open to hiring private-sector experts directly into senior positions. In addition, the Director should break the cabal of bureaucrats in D.C. by permanently moving various directorates, such as Support and Science and Technology, out of Virginia and possibly open campuses outside of D.C. where analysts and other experts could contribute virtually.

After that first edition, a new Mandate was produced every four years. But the 2016 edition was one of particular note. It earned significant attention from the Trump Administration, as Heritage had accumulated a backlog of conservative ideas that had been blocked by President Barack Obama and his team.

Although not every country or issue area can be discussed in this chapter, below are examples of several areas in which a shift in U.S. foreign policy is not only important, but arguably existential. The point is not to assert that everyone in the evolving conservative movement, or, in some cases, the growing bipartisan consensus, will agree with the details of this assessment. Rather, what is presented below demonstrates the urgency of these issues and provides a general roadmap for analysis.

The USTR’s mission is vitally important in reorienting the global trading system in adirection that is open, fair, and prosperous. In order to achieve the President’s policy goals, a strong USTR must be empowered to set trade policy from the White House with the authority and resources to represent the interests of the President’s trade agenda with adequate budget, staff, analysis, and expertise to engage meaningfully in internal and interagency policy deliberations. The USTR should organize and harness existing interagency trade committees to serve the President’s trade agenda and drive a consensus among federal stakeholders, dispose of legacy advisory committees with members who serve special interests, direct action to implement policy priorities, measure progress toward implementing the President’s agenda, and hold agencies and officials accountable for delivering the President’s agenda. The USTR’s leadership should not only coordinate and enforce the President’s agenda across the federal community, but also set and enforce the President’s trade agenda internally.

• Improve accountability and utilization. IAC should be led by a qualified appointee and report directly to the Secretary and Deputy Secretary. IAC will require strong political leadership, which means finding an appointee with an IC background. In addition, upgrading the new DESAS’s general security posture would require the Secretary’s direct intervention to improve protocols and access the necessary resources from the rest of the IC. This would not be achievable at a lower level.

• Recognize the interdependence of electric generation and natural gas. The interdependence of electric generation and natural gas pipelines continues to grow. Given natural gas’s important role in generating electricity, especially as backup when renewables are not available, lack of natural gas pipelines or attacks on existing pipelines could threaten our ability to generate electricity.

Effective outreach to the Chinese people will need the same humility that other sound trade policies require. Government-directed cultural and economic outreach risks being heavy-handed and could backfire. Everyone involved needs to know that the process is generational in scope and will not work overnight. At the very least, Washington should stay out of the way as much as possible when regular people want to contact each other across national, language, and cultural divides.

The CFPB collects fines from the private sector that are put into the Civil Penalty Fund.” The fund serves two ostensible purposes: to compensate the victims whom the CFPB perceives to be harmed and to underwrite “consumer education” and “financial literacy” programs.** How the Civil Penalty Fund is spent is at the discretion of the CFPB Director. The CFPB has been unclear as to how it decides what “consumer education” or “financial literacy programs” to fund.“ As noted, critics have charged that money from the Civil Penalty Fund has ended up in the pockets of leftist activist organizations.

• The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.

At the outset, the FCC can clarify that Section 230(c)(1) does not apply broadly to every decision that a platform makes. Rather, its protections apply only when a platform does not remove information provided by someone else. In contrast, the FCC should clarify that the more limited Section 230(c)(2) protections apply to any covered platform’s decision to restrict access to material provided by someone else. Combined, these actions will appropriately limit the number of cases in which a platform can censor with the benefit of Section 230’s protections. Such clarifications might also include drawing out the traditional legal distinction between distributor and publisher liability; Section 230 did not do away with the former, nor does it collapse into the latter.