Drug overdose, driven largely by overdose related to the use of opioids, is now the leading cause of unintentional injury death in the United States. The ongoing opioid crisis lies at the intersection of two public health challenges: reducing the burden of suffering from pain and containing the rising toll of the harms that can arise from the use of opioid medications. Chronic pain and opioid use disorder both represent complex human conditions affecting millions of Americans and causing untold disability and loss of function. In the context of the growing opioid problem, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) launched an Opioids Action Plan in early 2016. As part of this plan, the FDA asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to convene a committee to update the state of the science on pain research, care, and education and to identify actions the FDA and others can take to respond to the opioid epidemic, with a particular focus on informing FDA's development of a formal method for incorporating individual and societal considerations into its risk-benefit framework for opioid approval and monitoring.

No person or place is immune from disasters or disaster-related losses. Infectious disease outbreaks, acts of terrorism, social unrest, or financial disasters in addition to natural hazards can all lead to large-scale consequences for the nation and its communities. Communities and the nation thus face difficult fiscal, social, cultural, and environmental choices about the best ways to ensure basic security and quality of life against hazards, deliberate attacks, and disasters. Beyond the unquantifiable costs of injury and loss of life from disasters, statistics for 2011 alone indicate economic damages from natural disasters in the United States exceeded $55 billion, with 14 events costing more than a billion dollars in damages each. One way to reduce the impacts of disasters on the nation and its communities is to invest in enhancing resilience-the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from and more successfully adapt to adverse events. Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative addresses the broad issue of increasing the nation's resilience to disasters. This book defines "national resilience", describes the state of knowledge about resilience to hazards and disasters, and frames the main issues related to increasing resilience in the United States. It also provide goals, baseline conditions, or performance metrics for national resilience and outlines additional information, data, gaps, and/or obstacles that need to be addressed to increase the nation's resilience to disasters. Additionally, the book's authoring committee makes recommendations about the necessary approaches to elevate national resilience to disasters in the United States. Enhanced resilience allows better anticipation of disasters and better planning to reduce disaster losses-rather than waiting for an event to occur and paying for it afterward. Disaster Resilience confronts the topic of how to increase the nation's resilience to disasters through a vision of the characteristics of a resilient nation in the year 2030. Increasing disaster resilience is an imperative that requires the collective will of the nation and its communities. Although disasters will continue to occur, actions that move the nation from reactive approaches to disasters to a proactive stance where communities actively engage in enhancing resilience will reduce many of the broad societal and economic burdens that disasters can cause.

"Smarter Government: Governing for Results in the Information Age is about a more effective way to lead that is emerging, enabled by the Information Age. It provides real solutions to real problems using GIS technology and helps develop a management strategy using data that will profoundly change an organization, as successfully implemented by Gov. Martin O'Malley in the state of Maryland"--

The National Protection Framework describes what the whole community should do to safeguard against acts of terrorism, natural disasters, and other threats or hazards. It describes the core capabilities; roles and responsibilities; and coordinating structures that facilitate the protection of individuals, communities, and the Nation. This Framework is focused on actions to protect against the greatest risks in a manner that allows American interests, aspirations, and way of life to thrive. The Federal Government works collaboratively with local, state, tribal, and territorial governments; the private sector; and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to develop and deliver Protection core capabilities. Protection core capabilities are applied in varying degrees to achieve successful implementation of the Protection mission area. The 11 core capabilities described in the National Protection Framework are Planning; Public Information and Warning; Operational Coordination; Access Control and Identity Verification; Cybersecurity; Intelligence and Information Sharing; Interdiction and Disruption; Physical Protective Measures; Risk Management for Protection Programs and Activities; Screening, Search and Detection; and Supply Chain Integrity and Security. The following principles guide the development and support the execution and deployment of Protection core capabilities. These guiding principles are resilience and scalability; risk-informed culture; and shared responsibility.