What I'd love to see is something like the National Academy of Sciences, where you have an organization that year-round advises Congress, and you are elected to it by your peers.

So like the NAS has a lot of Nobel Prize winners, etc... this new "Academy" would have IEEE/ACM recipients, others that have a much longer view, pretty much what a lot of "distinguished engineers" or "fellows" do at private companies.

We've been doing exactly that every ten years for the census, so it's not exactly an unsolved problem.

The federal government has plenty of bursty offices. The census bureau hires like crazy each decade for temporary jobs. There are government advisory positions that academics take for a summer or just go to DC for a week every four months. These things are not impossible.

I like the idea putting expiration dates on most government entities like this (at least the ones not spelled out by the Constitution). I'd even go as far as putting expiration dates on many laws, regulations to force politicians to reconsider their necessity.

Well, the regular debt ceiling fiasco maybe shows the failure of putting that idea into practice?

Yeah, good point. But the process around that allows for it.