Transcript
See also: Transcripts of the Introduction and Panel II.
ANDREA KANE: Ok, are all our mikes working? Great.
I just want to quickly remind people that all of the wonderful
PowerPoint slides that you just saw are up on the website, so if you didn't have a chance to write down everything that Ron and Belle told you, you can pull it off of our web site.
So I'd like to welcome our two distinguished panelists for our first panel, Tom Downey and Vin Weber. Thank you for being here. These two gentlemen, I think, are well known to most of you. They've had distinguished careers in the U.S. House of Representatives, and since then, have continued to be respected and influential participants in the political and policy world since leaving Congress. Each of them will take about 10 minutes to share their views and predictions about what to expect during TANF reauthorization, and then we'll take questions during the remaining time.
We need to stick to our time frame very faithfully because Mr. Downey has to leave at 10:35, right?
TOM DOWNEY: No.
(LAUGHTER)
KANE: Don't tell us that.
(LAUGHTER)
And probably because people need a break. And for those of you who are watching on the web case, and we're glad that you are, you can send your questions for the panelists by email to communications@brookings.edu, and I'll repeat this again when we get to the question session just as a reminder. So let me just begin by briefly introducing Mr. Downey.
I think, as most of you know, he is now the chairman of Downey McGrath Group, a government affairs consulting firm that he founded in 1993. Before that, he represented the second district of New York for 18 years, and among other things, served on the House Ways and Means Committee for 14 of those years.
He was very active on trade issues, arms issues, and a number of other things. I think of particular interest to all of us here—he served as the acting chairman of the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Human Resources for five years, and was one of the chief House architects of the 1988 welfare reform legislation, the Family Support Act which many of us remember.
President Clinton chose Mr. Downey to work on his transition team, to head his transition team on HHS, HUD and VA in 1992 and also appointed Mr. Downed to the bipartisan commission on entitlement and tax reform. Starting in the 1996 campaign and in the recent campaign, he advised the Democratic candidate, Al Gore.
Mr. Downey serves on the boards of Enterprise Works Worldwide, Child Trends, the RFK Memorial Foundation, and the Center for Social Gerontology. He's also a member of the Council for Excellence in Government.
And we'll just very briefly go ahead and introduce Mr. Weber, as well, and then we'll just go right into it.
Mr. Weber is the managing part of Clark and Weinstock's Washington office, where he provides strategic advice to institutions interested in issues before the legislative and executive branches of the federal government. He served in the United States House of Representatives, representing the second district of Minnesota—both second districts. Anything coincidental about that?
VIN WEBER: We're not into numerology here.
KANE: Okay.
(LAUGHTER)
For 12 years, he was a member of the Appropriations Committee and an elected member of the Republican leadership.
Prior to opening Clark and Weinstock's Washington office in '94, Mr. Weber was president and remains co-director of Empower America, an organization working on a number of the issues that we've been talking about today. He currently co-directs the Domestic Policy Project at the Aspen Institute and is a fellow at the Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota.
He's gone on to do many other things that are distinguished and too numerous to mention, so I think I will turn it over to the two of them.
We know that both of you are very well respected members of your parties, but we also know you've worked in a bipartisan manner and done a lot of work together as well. We'd like to hear in particular from you, looking in your crystal ball a little bit, how you think the political context has changed since 1996, as we go into welfare reform authorization, as well as how much agreement you might expect between Democrats and Republicans on welfare reform reauthorization and, possibly more interesting, how much disagreement there might be between the parties, within the parties, and between the executive and legislative branch.
WEBER: Why don't I start out, if that's okay. I'll probably be a little briefer than 10 minutes. I hope to get some opportunity for discussion by the audience.
It does strike me, by the way, that two recovering politicians are invited here under the auspices of the outreach program.
(LAUGHTER)
I thought that was worth noting anyway.
I think that the emergence of a very uneasy consensus on this issue is one of the underreported developments of the last campaign, which never seemed to end, and which, you know, divided—in reality, but as well in popular mythology—divided the country so deeply.
To read the reports of the last campaign, you'd say, "Gee, the country is so hopelessly divided on almost anything that we can't possibly come together," and yet, on the largest social initiative of the last 10 years or maybe longer, it was remarkable to me that there was not a big debate between Al Gore and George Bush. You could have easily seen such a debate emerge in which Vice President Gore may have talked about, you know, scaling back some of what they might see as more draconian aspects of welfare, but he chose not to do that.
And you might have seen George Bush allying himself with an initiative or at least a suggestion—you might remember from last year—from House Republicans that they start scaling back on some of the work supports, particularly the earned income tax credit. But he pointedly disagreed with that, and beyond that, there wasn't a whole lot of discussion about this whole issue. I think that that is a significant development and something worth talking about.
Just to go—when I first got involved in this issue—and I have to say I was never as involved as Tom Downey was and he's, despite his misplaced views, really an expert on this issue.
(LAUGHTER)
And I don't claim to be one, but when I first got involved in the 1980s with Ron Haskins' leadership at that time, there were precious few Republicans that were involved at all in the issues of poverty and welfare, and most of the debate on the conservative side had been basically bumper-sticker level debate, if you will, about welfare queens and how would you get people off the rolls and cut spending and save money and stop pouring money down a rat hole.
And you know, the left, if you will, basically, simply defended the existing system and tried to shoot down the conservative bumper stickers. Both parties changed quite a bit, but I would argue there was a bigger change on the Republican side, and the debate began to become meaningful, I would say, when you saw the development of a Republican group or coterie of people that were actually serious interested in the poverty question, not just in how to reduce welfare spending.
I don't want to judge what Tom is going to say. He might say that really never happened but they figured out how to advertise their beliefs in a more effective manner. I don't believe that. I think that there are today, in contrast to when I first got involved in this issue 15 years ago or so, a lot of Republicans and conservatives that are seriously interested in this question and seriously believe that what we're doing can be for the betterment of poor people and children.
I certainly understand the jury's out on some of those questions, but I think that's when the debate began to shift, and we saw shifts from both the left and the right that allowed us to both change the welfare program and build support for these—support for working family programs that conservatives, for instance, may have opposed at one time as simply being increased spending, if you will.
Where are we going to go now? Well, first of all, the campaign indicates to me—I believe campaigns have consequences—a campaign in which this issue was not debated heavily between the parties indicates to me the likelihood that major change in this program is not forthcoming. It doesn't mean there won't be a lot of debate. It doesn't mean there aren't going to be some issues. It doesn't mean there might not be some changes. But you know, to the extent that this was an issue in the last campaign, it was an issue by its noncontroversial nature. And even though there are some substantial disagreements still between liberals and conservatives in the Congress, I don't think you're going to see a huge change, but let's at least spend a minute on some of those controversies.
Certainly, there are a lot of people—and Belle has already really gone through this—I'm just kind of restating a lot of what she said—but I certainly think the specter of recession is going to be raised repeatedly, and probably correctly, by people on the left in this debate as we go through the reauthorization process. And I think that's appropriate. That ought to happen.
I mean, I look at these numbers and what's happened, and I'm not completely comfortable at all about what happens when the economy takes a downturn, what happens to kids, what happens to poor people. I think that's going to be the driving force rhetorically from the left and it's going to probably result in an assault on time limits and maybe even an assault on entitlement itself.
My guess is that assault doesn't ultimately prevail, but I think that that's where the challenge is going to come from.
And from the right, from the conservative side, there certainly is going to be a tendency to look at that big pot of money that we are spending—both block grant and the work supports—and say, you know, this is succeeding so well, we don't need to spend so much money on it anymore. Let's find some money out of those accounts that we could put to the military buildup or a tax cut or something else we might want to do with it. That might be a slightly greater risk. I hope that doesn't happen either and will do what I can to make sure that it doesn't happen.
But at the end of the day, my judgment is it's not going to become undone because—and we're going to continue the process of experimentation, which is what this really is, with the perfection of this policy as opposed to its reversal because, frankly, everybody took credit for it. In a campaign in which, you know, the Republicans said that the last eight years were squandered years and the Democrats said the Republican Congress has been a do-nothing Congress, this is one policy everybody took credit for. Maybe people on both the right and the left had a little uneasiness when they gave the speeches taking credit for it because there were things they weren't so sure about. But believe me, everybody went back home and said, one of the great things we did in the Congress this last several years was welfare reform. And they all have a stake in not undoing it.
So my judgment is we have the opportunity to perfect this policy, to resist major changes in it, and the likelihood of a substantial reversal is not really there.
KANE: Okay.
DOWNEY: Good morning. I have a cold, so forgive the scratchiness of my voice.
As I look out at the audience, I see some new faces in the audience, people I haven't seen before, maybe certainly have not seen the two of us because it's been a while since I've been involved in the policy debate on welfare reform and on poverty. And the one thing that's true about this is that the arguments don't seem to change, though thankfully, there are new people to make them. And I'm also reminded of what Mo Udall used to say. You know, all the arguments have been made but everyone hasn't had a chance to make them.
(LAUGHTER)
With that admonition in mind, let me just give you a little historic context to this, and my view of this.
Peter Edelman has recently written a book called "Searching for America's Heart," which is really a wonderful tour of his life as an aide for RFK, and his work in the Clinton administration. And he talks about the 30 Years War that has existed on this subject from the 1960s right up to 1996 where the right used to make the argument—Look, the poor are really poor because it's their fault, and if it's not their fault, it's the fault of the welfare system. And the left was left with the argument—Well, you know, poverty has more than just an urban face. There are lots of reasons for it—the structure and nature of work, the decline in the wage base from the cities, the loss of manufacturing jobs.
And it seems to me that, by 1996, the right had actually prevailed to a certain extent and had because of a number of reasons relating to the spike of caseloads that had occurred in '94 and '95, the very high rates of illegitimacy, and the concern that President Clinton had about being re-elected. He found, during his 1992 campaign, that whenever he said "end welfare as we know it," his number spiked. And not only did it resonate with the American people, but those words had important and profound meaning, because I think, while people could read into what you'd want. I think people said well, end welfare as we know it would be a lot more along the lines of what happened in 1996.
Now, you have heard Ron Haskins, my good friend, pay the ode that has been paid by both candidates to the effects of the 1996 welfare law. As one of the architects of the Family Support Act, I suppose there's a certain amount of pride in authorship that doesn't allow me to be quite as excited about he '96 act. I did not support it. I thought it was a bad idea.
Not only were the time limits a bad idea, but the truly punitive nature of the act with respect to aliens and the work that was done on food stamps was really unacceptable. Now, some of that has been undone. And I tried to play a role in convincing the vice president that it was a bad idea as well, and successfully.
Well, the bill passed and now we are going through this view that—well, we have this dramatic reduction in caseload. Some are people who have been thrown off caseloads who are far more poor than they had been in the past. And it really begs the question of what is the purpose here of welfare reform. And Belle did a fine job of listing some of them.
I guess as a charter member of the Democratic left, my view has always been that welfare reform should be about helping people to work and eliminating poverty. I happen to prefer a discussion about eliminating poverty as opposed to one on welfare reform because we won't be so confined programmatically by such a discussion. We haven't had a discussion like that in a long time. But I think we may be ready for one.
In 1996, one of the roles I played in the campaign that was to be Jack Kemp and I was the mock sparring partner for the vice president. In the year 2000, I was Bill Bradley—quite a contrast.
(LAUGHTER)
And while I enjoyed playing former professional athletes, both football and basketball players...
(LAUGHTER)
I want to tell you a little bit about that process because it is relevant here a little bit.
I spent about two months getting ready, reading everything Jack had written or said, which was actually quite a bit, and trying to memorize lines that he would use in the campaign. I did the same thing for Senator Bradley, and as Vin was talking about how this was a quiet issue in the national election, the idea of caseload reduction, it was not so quiet in the Democratic primary. And in fact, Senator Bradley's position was a little bit closer to my own, so I really enjoyed these particular rounds with the vice president on welfare reform when we had them.
In any event, I was preparing to play George Bush in the mock debates until I got a package in the mail that included his debate material, and a video tape of him debating. But I had spent two months studying everything that Gov. Bush had done on these issues, everything he'd said. I was probably his most frequent visitor to his web site.
(LAUGHTER)
And so I began a certain amount of unease, I must say, during the campaign. I knew it was going to be a close election. But Bush was doing something that Republicans have historically just not done. Prosperity with a purpose. Compassionate conservatism. Stealing the phrase of the Children's Defense Fund—leave no child behind, no children behind.
These are important statements and phrases. They mean something when they're repeated as often as they have been. And I had this uneasy feeling because I always felt that Republicans with a heart—and thankfully, there are not a lot of them...
(LAUGHTER)
... are pretty potent and pretty effective politically. And he was a—I was afraid that this was a Republican with a heart and he was going to be real trouble for us. Well, while I personally think we won this election—he was certainly trouble.
But part of the debate going forward has to be focused on what does George Bush want to do and how is he going to do it? And here, I think there are some very interesting things that I just want to deal with for a minute.
First of all, he's named Governor Thompson to be his health and human service secretary. And in a response to a question by Senator Edwards in his confirmation, Senator Edwards asked him about welfare reform and, you know, do you save money doing welfare reform? And Thompson said, you know, I've been preaching about this forever. Welfare reform is not about saving money. It's about getting people to work and getting them started and, frankly, while I'm not always excited by some of Governor Thompson's rhetoric on the subject, I think that, if all of the states of the Union, did what Wisconsin does in terms of helping people to get to work and to be concerned about quality day care and wage supplements, we'd be a lot better country.
So, I'm encouraged, frankly, by Governor Thompson, and I think that you should be as well.
I'm not as pleased with Senator Ashcroft. I think he's a mistake. I think he's going to be confirmed, but I think on the issue of family planning, the revising of the RU-486 issue, that this is not a particularly good sign. But it's an expected one. Governor Clinton, when he became president, reversed the years of the Bush and Reagan administrations on international family planning, so it's almost the first thing that presidents do now when we switch parties to deal with these issues. And while it is disturbing, it—I don't think it's completely dispositive of what we should expect.
And then there is the inaugural address.
Sadly, Governor Bush just doesn't give speeches very well. He doesn't give them like Ronald Reagan. But I'm going to read you a couple of passages from it, and I might say, I haven't read E.J.'s piece in the Post the other day or my buddy Richard Cohen before I came to this conclusion, but just listen to this.
"In the quiet of American conscience, we know that a deep persistent poverty is unworthy of our nation's promise. And whatever our views of its cause, we can agree that children at risk are not at fault, abandonment and abuse are not acts of God, they are failures of love.
"Where there is suffering, there is duty. Americans in need are not strangers. They are citizens. Not problems, but priorities. And all of us are diminished when they are hopeless.
"Many in our country do not know the pain of poverty. But we can listen to those who do. And I pledge our nation to a goal. When we see that wounded traveler on the road to Jericho, we will not pass to the other side."
Now, my buddy, the vice president, will not like me to say this, but this was a beautiful inaugural address. And these particular words were the first words of President Bush espousing the deep principles of his presidency. So the question will be come in the weeks and months ahead—do these words have meaning?
Well, Democrats will be watching this very carefully and very closely. George Miller, an unlikely supporter of President Bush, said to me last night that he really believes that President Bush is going to do some important work in the area of education of the disadvantages. But he said he believes that there is very likely to be additional resources and additional flexibility. That's very exciting.
And imagine if George Bush will do the following things—and I don't know if there's anybody here who will tell him this. I mean, I'll certainly be happy to try. But there are a couple of things that, if he announces that he is for, they will happen and they will make an enormous difference to the people who are still suffering. And make no mistake about it, there are people who are still suffering, and grievously.
Recently, a Catholic report in the Catholic Charities listed some of the disturbing trends that they have found at their shelters.
And let me just read some of them. I mean—not that I need to address this group—but I think it's important to understand that 14 million children or people poor are just too many. I'm delighted that it's a reduced number, but it's too large and it's am embarrassment given the health of the economy.
The number of people that Catholic Charities's mid-December report showed that that the number of people receiving emergency assistance had increased 22 percent. The number of people receiving emergency food assistance from soup kitchens, food banks, and other food services had surged 32 percent. Emergency cash assistance, which helps people pay for rent, utilities, medicine, rose 29 percent to $80 million, and the number of people who received utility assistance—not a surprising number given what's happened in California—had increased 15 percent, and clothing assistance is up 9 percent, and homelessness is up.
These disturbing trends are also mirrored by the League of Cities and in the reports that they have. And as Peter Edelman has so eloquently pointed out in his book, you have all of these folks who have left the welfare rolls, but who have not found jobs. And the incidence of real grinding poverty, less than half the poverty level, has been pretty persistent and consistent and that's something we need to address.
Well, what can happen?
Well, Gov. Bush can say in the process of education, I'm going to do more for early childhood education. I'm going to expand Head Start for three and four-year-olds. I want to make it a reading program and I want to make it much bigger. Guess what? There are a lot of Democrats just happily applauding on the sidelines.
He can say that the school day needs to be expanded dramatically and the year. We'll cheer him every step of the way. He'll have large majorities to do those things.
He's got an idea—a very good one—for increasing the child credit from $500 to $1,000. That's a good idea, too, a very good idea, but it's not good enough unless it's partially refundable or it's not going to go to some of the people who really need the help. If he makes it partially refundable up to 10 percent, he could have a profound impact on working poor mothers.
And I might add, with welfare, I've always said this somewhat tongue-in-cheek—you know in the absence of running a dating service or a marriage counseling service, we really do need to do things that will help mothers who are single raise their kids and go to work and there's another thing we can do. We can expand, as Belle pointed out, the earned income credit.
Now, he's going to have a gigantic—not only expand it so that there's no marriage penalty there, but also account for a third child. That's expensive to do, but it's the right thing to do. He can expand the CHIPs program, increase the pass-throughs for child support enforcement, and maybe when we talk about TANF, we can begin too reauthorization.
And I'll say one other thing on this and then I will shut up—that the new chairman of the Workforce and Labor Committee, John Boehner, who is a pretty conservative fellow, is also an activist and wants to do things. And I think the combination of Boehner and George Miller will be a really intriguing one in the years to come as this reauthorization process goes forward.
You can expect them to reassert some of their control over the Ways and Means Committee in this process. And if we decide, as I hope they do, to think about non-custodial parents who are not paying child support, not just bluster about how you're going to punish these men, for the most part, but how we're actually going to help them to make the payments, and how their payments will actually wind up in their family's hands, I think we can have a very, very different social dialogue in the months to come.
I'm frankly a lot more optimistic about this than I might have been right after November. I think some of the signs are good. I agree broadly with what Vin has said about there not being a lot of changes. It's very hard to get the time limits. It's going to be even hard to undo them. But maybe we can change the way the clock starts in some parts and also face some of the painful realities that about a third of the folks who have received public assistance over the years are just not going to get to work, and we'd better be damned concerned about what happens to their kids.
So, as I wouldn't imagine coming here on the—what is this the 24th or 25th of January—and being anything other than deeply depressed, which is what I had been since the election, but on some of the issues that concern me the most, I think the president has been eloquent and now it's up to him to show us the money.
KANE: Thanks. We'll hold our applause until the end and...
DOWNEY: Well, they can applaud now. I don't know.
(LAUGHTER)
KANE: Okay, applaud now.
(APPLAUSE)
WEBER: I didn't applaud, but I'd be willing to do anything else I can to end your depression.
(LAUGHTER)
KANE: OK, let's turn it over to the audience in the room and on our web cast. For those of you in the room, if you would raise your hand, I will point to you and then we will walk up to you with a mike. If you will just wait until the mike is in front of you before you begin that would be helpful, and please identify your name and your organization. Please keep your questions to questions and not statements so that we can have time for more people to talk.
And for those of you on the web, again, you can email us your questions at communications@brookings.edu and we'll get to a few of those and that will be interesting to see those others that we don't get a chance to get to today.
So who wants to go first?
Q: I'm Van Ooms from the Committee for Economic Development.
I'd like to ask Belle and Ron if they could address the question of the funding issue having to do with sort of states getting the money out and whether the funds are likely to be cut. Clearly, this is going to be a big issue and it seems to me that the kind of underlying issue is can—I mean, is the inability for some states to move ahead programmatically in order to use the available monies in order to expand the child care and training and transportation and the other things that are needed, is that largely a question of delay and simply the problems of implementing these programs? Or do we have a real political problem here with respect to the reluctance of some states to move forward to use the funds?
SAWHILL: I think there is—has been, at least, an implementation issue, as you're suggesting in terms of getting the money out. But I think, equally important—and it's been alluded to already—is the fact that many states feel that they've got to put some funds aside in order to be ready if the economy goes sour. And if they spend all the money, then it's going to come back on them if suddenly we have a growth in the caseload if the economy softens.
But let me let Ron ...
HASKINS: I agree with that, but I think the biggest point here is that the states have dramatically increased their spending. CBO was estimating two years ago the states would have $24 billion left at the end of 2002. Now that's down to about $10 billion. And as a specific example, states have been spending like mad on day care. They transferred over $3 billion out of the TANF block grants to spend on child care or spent it directly from the block grant on child care.
So the states are definitely doing what I think is implicit in the question. They're using the money more broadly as work supports, and I think they'll continue to do that. Undoubtedly, there are some states that aren't doing that. But on average, the states are very much taking advantage of the flexibility that we gave them.
If the money stays intact, the states will continue to use the money for work supports.
WEBER: Could I make a comment on that?
An area that I think is going to be important to think about—because we're all, as I mentioned before—these discussions will inevitably talk about what's going to happen when we have an economic downturn. And I think that's appropriate.
I don't have a—I have anecdotal data, maybe a little more than in my home state of Minnesota, where I've looked at it. But it looks to me as if one of the problems we're really going to face when there is an economic downturn is—you know, we're all talking about health care and those kinds of supports. But remember, the states have put a lot of other kinds of programs, notably health care programs, on the books in the last 10 or 12 years. And they've been able to do it because of the CHIPs program. They've been able to do it because of state surpluses that have been burgeoning because of the strong economy.
But the issues we're talking about here are going to be decided at the state level in the time of that downturn in the context of their overall state budgets. And we're going to be in competition with health care spending, in my view. And I'd like to be proven wrong in that. But my guess is that's going to become a big problem for us because politically at the state level, it's much, much harder to make a cut in health care spending than it is in supports for working families.
KANE: Next question?
Q: My name is Paul Offner. I'm at Georgetown. Nobody said very much about fathers. And you know, among young African-American adults, women are now working at a higher level than men. And I guess my question is how the Republicans in Congress can expect to do anything significant about marriage and the fact that so many of these births are out-of-wedlock when these women are not going to be, you know, marrying men who are—who don't have jobs and whose lives aren't going anywhere.
So the question is whether there's any prospect that we can do something really significant with respect to the fathers.
WEBER: I don't know the answer to that question. That seems like it's in Belle's camp more than mine.
SAWHILL: And Jeff Johnson.
HASKINS: As you can tell, Paul's problem is we haven't had lunch enough so I can explain this to you.
(LAUGHTER)
He has it backwards. They don't work because they're not married. It isn't that they're not married because they don't work. The complete socialization of young men, all except very sophisticated highly educated males, is marriage. That is the last step in the socialization of men. And one of the biggest problems and the reason that we have black African-Americans 20 to 24 years of age who work less than they have in the past despite this tremendous economic expansion is that they're out of touch. They're left out. And the biggest thing they're left out of is the responsibilities that come with marriage, and the responsibilities and the opportunities to learn that come with living with women and children.
SAWHILL: I have to say a word about this, too.
(LAUGHTER)
HASKINS: I would think.
SAWHILL: Sarah Siegel, who is a research assistant here, has been working on an—and Adam Thomas have been working on a project with me in which my thesis was that, if we could marry more low-income women and women on welfare to the low-income men who are out there so they could combine their earnings or their income, we could get a big reduction in the poverty rate.
Well, Sarah has been analyzing the current population survey, the Census Bureau's annual data, on this and she has discovered—we haven't put this out yet because we have a little more work to do on it yet, but it's very interesting and not surprisingly, there are just, among certain education and racial groups of low-income, poorly educated African-American males, there just aren't enough of them out there to marry everybody off to.
You know, they're dead. They're in prison. I mean, you've heard this story. And when you do a little bit more on the extent to which there's underreporting in the Census on the part of this group, but there really isn't an issue.
Now, second point is what can we do for these fathers who are not married? We have had lots of programs in the past—job training programs, welfare-to-work programs, targeted on this group. They haven't—we've also had something called parents fair share, which has been a demonstration program than MDRC has carefully evaluated.
I would say overall, the results from those earlier programs and from the research on them is not very encouraging. So I think, although we'd all like to help this group, we don't know a whole lot about how to do so.
KANE: All right. Why don't we take one more very quick question and then take a break. In the very back, against the wall.
Q: Hi, my name is Mark O'Keith. I write about values in philanthropy for Newhouse News Service here in D.C. And many states are contracting with private companies to handle much of their welfare caseload. I'm talking about companies like Maximus or Lockheed-Martin. I'm wondering what your assessment is as to how these private companies are doing. Are they, in fact, getting people to work successfully? And what you think the future might hold in this area?
WEBER: Well, again, probably somebody else in the audience has the data on that. My observation—what I understand is that they're working pretty well, although there is some difference between how the different companies actually deliver the services.
But that certainly is going to be a popular trend in this administration. Now, the major advocate of that in the broadly defined Bush camp is Steve Goldsmith, former mayor of Indianapolis, who was domestic policy advisor to the governor throughout two years of the campaign, and it's still not clear to me where he's going to fit into the new order of things. But that's been his major thrust or a part of his major thrust, and I would think that efforts like that are going to be encouraged unless the data sets coming back definitively showing that it doesn't work, which I don't think it is.
KANE: Okay, great. Why don't we wrap it up. Thank you very much. Thank you for your questions. We'll take a break.
(APPLAUSE)
HASKINS: We're going to take about a five-minute break while we reset the stage because the second panel has more panel members.
We are going to try and find a few more seats in here for you who had to stand, and we've also got a second overflow room with TV for those who can't get seats.
[END OF PANEL I.] Go to Panel II.