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The U.S. Department of Justice''s Office for State and Local Domestic PreparednessSupport has awarded the Kennedy School a major grant to conduct an Executive Session on Domestic Preparedness. The Executive Session will be co-sponsored by the Belfer Center and the School''s Taubman Center for State and Local Government. Former BCSIA Executive Director, Assistant Professor Richard Falkenrath will be the principal investigator on the grant, and Arnold Howitt, Executive Director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government, will be the co-principal investigator.
Over a three-year period, the Executive Session will help the U.S. government in defining the terms of a federal-state-local partnership to reduce the nation''s vulnerability to terrorism (whether nuclear, biological, chemical or conventional), through improved domestic preparedness. The Executive Session will conceptualize the problem of domestic preparedness and its variation across threats and regions, examine the emerging policy and management issues associated with preparing America for terrorism (through prevention, consequence management and criminal prosecution), and make practical recommendations for solving these problems to all levels of government.
The Executive Session will bring together a formal, interdisciplinary working group of high-level practitioners and experts from federal, state, and local governments and Harvard University. It will include about twenty-five senior local, state, and federal officials from fire, law enforcement, the military (particularly the National Guard), public health, emergency services, emergency management, environmental, and transportation agencies. Harvard faculty members will include experts in national security, state and local governance, emergency management, epidemiology, constitutional and criminal law, and biochemistry.
The first two-day meeting of the Executive Session is tentatively scheduled for Winter 1999 at the Kennedy School.
For more information, please contact Rebecca Storo by phone 617-495-1410 or email rebecca_storo@harvard.edu.