I have five longer proposals up, on Electoral, Intelligence, National Security, and Governance Reform, as well as an Open Source Agency that enables the reforms and reconnects citizens to information and power, but it has been suggested I offer a simplified variation for general consideration.
1. Stop spending $65 billion a year on secret intelligence that ignores 80% of what can be known in 183 languages (but is not secret), and delivers less than 4% of what the President needs to know, and ZERO to the Cabinet, independent agencies, action officers, and Congress.
2. Create a Smart Nation but connecting education, intelligence as decision-support, and research under one "czar" (Colin Powell or Derek Bok or both), using an Open Source Agency to get smart at all levels about using open sources and methods of information collection and sense-making.
3. Stop focusing $1 trillion a year on inter-state conflict, which is both least probably and only one of ten high-level threats to humanity (the others are poverty, infectious disease, and environmental degradation above, and below, civil war, genocide, other atrocities, proliferation, terrorism, and transnational crime.
4. Use the Open Source Agency to focus on all ten threats by providing decision support across all twelve core policies (Agriculture, Diplomacy, Economy, Education, Energy, Family, Health, Immigration, Justice, Security, Society, Water), and demand that the taxpayer dollars be redirected toward creating prosperity at home and peace abroad.
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