“Friendly” Fire

Over the years, the military has seen many cases of sexual assaults. Though arrests, laws suits and many other preventative measures have taken place and occurred, non have officially come from the government itself. According to USA Today, the manner in which the military deals with these sexual assaults are “clumsy” especially on the frontline. Humans have a sex drive especially men on the front who according to USA today have a higher level of tetosterones and emotions which only fuel this behavior.

Because this issue is becoming so large and prevalent at hand, the media has brought it to light in hopes of having Congress recognize that this is an issue to be dealt with. The first part of any policymaking process is identifying the issue (Bardes 2009). Here we can see that the media is already a step ahead and identifying the problem in which Congress should set on their agenda  to solve. Congress can apply its last step “policy evaluation” to review what the military has done in the past and recognize that it is not the best means in solving the dilemma of sexual assaults. Congress must realize that the military is there to carry out assaults on the enemy, not females fighting on the same team.

Bardes, Barbara A., Mack C. Shelley, and Steffen W. Schmidt. American government and politics today: the essentials. 2009-2010 ed. Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2010. Print.

Marguiles, Jimmy. “Military sex assaults on the rise”,http://www.politicalcartoons.com/cartoon/e9ceb64e-cb4f-4d1f-b324-4b8893c1f586.html, 2013.

 

NASA’s Sunset

Towards the end of December last year, Congress ended NASA’s shuttle program. The International Space Station had been completed and the use of shuttles became too expensive for the government too fund. Although the Shuttle Program had been shut down, NASA still thrives. The shuttle program is only one of many extraterrestrial scientific research NASA has currently has going on.

The ending of the shuttle program back in December shows Congress’s power and control of bureaucratic agencies. According to the sunset legislation, Congress is obliged to review bureaucratic agencies and their programs to see if whether there needs to be any modification or termination of a program. Because of this the shuttle program has come to an end after many decades of exploration in space. Even if NASA fought to continue the program, because bureaucracies are funded by Congress which holds the power of the purse, it would have no funds to support itself. (Bardes, 2009)

Bardes, Barbara A., Mack C. Shelley, and Steffen W. Schmidt. American government and politics today: the essentials. 2009-2010 ed. Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2010. Print.

 

Parker, Jeff.  “NASA Turnaround” http://www.politicalcartoons.com/cartoon/526da755-f6c2-4637-9cde-5a55ce5c758d.html, 2012.