Not surprisingly, all the candidates jockeying for leadership positions in the upcoming House Republican caucus vote to replace Speaker John Boehner claim to have sterling conservative credentials. None has earned a reputation as a legislator eager to reach across the aisle and work with Democrats.... Read More

The Bipartisan Index is intended to fill a hole in the information available to the public about the performance of Members of Congress. There are innumerable studies, rankings, and indexes that grade members according to a partisan, parochial, or special-interest standard.... Read More

Hardly a day goes by lately that there isn’t a new GMO story in the news. Whether it’s scare tactics by someone trying to make a name for himself or a company reacting to these tactics by taking action to hold its market share, the issue is hard to miss. But last week’s announcement by Chipotle that it sells only non-GMO ingredients in its restaurants really struck a nerve. Really, Chipotle is succumbing to fear-mongering and junk science to hold market share?... Read More

April 15 may be tax day, but this year it is also the day on which an important conversation will take place about the accountability of taxpayer dollars in reaching the greatest number of people in crisis with food. Thanks to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, members of the committee will be asking whether the time has come to reform our nation’s food aid program.... Read More

What’s in a Label?

At the risk of sounding like the sky is falling, I am becoming very concerned that the genetically modified (GM) food labeling war at home jeopardizes food security for millions living far from our shores. This is particularly disturbing when there is an existing USDA label that excludes genetically engineered ingredients.... Read More

Last week, MFAN and AidData, in cooperation with the State Department and USAID, hosted Do More with Data: Moving U.S. Government Aid Transparency Forward, an event that brought together internal and external drivers of U.S. government foreign assistance transparency to explore ongoing and new efforts for making data more readily available for more people. Following the event, we asked three of MFAN’s leading thinkers on transparency and accountability to share their takeaways from the event.... Read More

This week one of the federal government’s youngest agencies, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), will once again demonstrate its leadership and forward thinking on accountability and transparency.  After ten years of experience, and with a new Chief Executive Officer at its helm, the MCC is launching a series of events examining what it has learned and what it has accomplished.  This period of reflection will help MCC seize the opportunity to consolidate its gains and stake out the vanguard in data-driven, locally-owned and self-sustaining development.... Read More

Bill and Melinda Gates recently released their annual letter. This one makes a bet that the cycle of poverty in developing countries can be broken by 2030. One reason for this wager is founded on the contributions of agriculture and nutrition to improve peoples’ lives, a cause we at The Lugar Center heartily endorse. Our bet is that we can beat hunger and malnutrition by 2030 by better linking agriculture and nutrition.... Read More

The Feed the Future initiative and authorizing bills introduced in Congress last year endorse a “whole of government” approach. But in fact, the extent that Feed the Future capitalizes on the expertise and budgetary resources of a wide array of U.S. government agencies remains largely in doubt or at best in the dark.... Read More

As with many other actions by the Obama Administration, both the anticipation and political antagonism surrounding his immigration executive order were greater than the actual impact of the policy.  From the perspective of critics who deny complexity in the immigration debate and see deportations and fence building as the only legitimate responses to the question, anything the President did to make the lives of undocumented workers better was going to be an outrage.... Read More