Government's Greatest Priorities of the Next Half Century

Transcript

MR. MIKE ARMACOST: I'm Mike Armacost. It's my pleasure to welcome all of you here this morning to a forum sponsored by our Center for Public Service on Government's Greatest Priorities for the Next Half Century. I expect most of you are familiar with a survey and brief that was released about a year ago by Paul Light, the Vice President of Brookings and Director of our Governmental Studies program, on the achievements of government over the past half century.

These were not just Paul's objective judgments, but reflected the results of a survey of over 500 social scientists, mainly political scientists and historians, as I recall. And the survey came at a time when many leading politicians still regarded government as the source of problems rather than as the facilitator of solutions to those problems. And therefore, it was striking to see how widespread admiration was for the role of government in tackling, really, quite major problems and achieving substantial success in alleviating them.

These range from resurrecting Europe after world war, dealing with problems of poverty at home, protecting workers, expanding the right to vote, putting a man on the moon, and so forth. Today, we're going to report on the results of another survey, which Paul has conducted, and which deals, again, with the views of a number of social scientists and relates to the priorities for the coming half century. Though this is a natural progression, whether you agree or disagree with their priorities, it should be a stimulus for all of our thinking.

We are delighted, of course, to have our old friend David Broder and E.J. Dionne, whom we claim along with The Washington Post, to provide their insights on these priorities. But, first, let me invite Paul, who has done great things to Brookings since he came to head the Center and to run our Governmental Studies program, to explain both the methodology and to comment about the results. Paul.

MR. PAUL LIGHT: It's nice that E.J. has started the applause. That's a good sign for me: I'm on the floor. I want to start by thanking the team of people who were involved in this report: Judy Labiner, who's the Deputy Director of the Center for Public Service, Michael Wiesenfelder, Sherra Merchant; Mary Macintosh, who's the Vice President of Princeton Survey Research Associates, who helped with the design of the survey and helped collect the data. This was an internet-based survey, which was very interesting to do.

Thanks to Communications, Ron Nessen and his team, Stacey and others, who've been involved in shifting this event from one room to a larger room. We're frankly surprised that a conversation about the future priorities of this government has attracted this attention, because there's so much focus right now that there is only one future priority, which is the war on terrorism and domestic defense.

Let me start by saying that, looking back into the old millennium last year, at just about the same time, we argued here that Americans could be justifiably proud of what the federal government had tried to accomplish these past 50 years. Name a significant domestic or foreign policy crisis that the federal government faced after World War II, and Congress and the President had tried to solve, often to stunning success. No one knew for sure that the U.S. could solve or could rebuild Europe after World War II, build a truly national highway system, expand voting rights, provide healthcare access to older Americans, reduce disease—but the federal government did them all.

As I said last year, to the extent that a society is measured by what it asks its government to accomplish, and how well government does in response, Americans had plenty to celebrate last January 1st. The world is a much colder place today. The U.S. economy has stalled, partisanship appears to be on the rise, a new war on terrorism is underway, and the events of September 11th continue to cast a long shadow on the national conversation.

Looking forward into the next year, Americans must be wondering whether the war on terrorism and homeland defense will be all that the federal government does in the coming half century. These are virtually the only government endeavors that get much attention today. As I'm going to argue in the next few minutes, however, the past is prologue. Many of the federal government's greatest achievements of the future will be built around protecting and expanding its greatest achievements of the past.

Even as it adjusts to crises such as September 11th, the federal government retains a deep agenda of endeavor that is mostly unchanged since the attacks on New York City and Washington. The nation's highway system is grid locked by rust and overuse, America's long campaign to expand the right to vote is imperiled by antiquated voting machines, the public health system's great victories over life threatening diseases such as polio and tuberculosis are being challenged by new adversaries such as HIV-AIDS, the West Nile Virus, the federal commitment to health care access for the elderly is facing the dual challenge of rising costs and a rapidly aging society, and the nation's guarantee of universal high school education is beset by crumbling classrooms and white flight from poorly performing inner city school systems.

Let me give you a quick overview of what I'm going to say, and I'll try to keep this talk brief so that we can get to some commentary and questions. I want to talk a little bit about what we did last year, a little bit about what we did this year, and summarize government's greatest priorities of the next half century. There are three keywords here today, the first is endeavor, which is basically to find, what did the federal government try to accomplish these past 50 years, and what is it trying to accomplish today?

The second keyword is achievement. What did the federal government actually accomplish by way of raw success on important, difficult problems? And the third question is priority. What should the federal government do in the future in terms of weighting the 50 greatest endeavors currently on its agenda? And by greatest here, I mean most intensive.

Last December, about this time, we released Government's Greatest Achievements of the Past Half-Century, which involved a two-stage setting. Our first goal in the study was to identify the federal government's greatest endeavors, meaning, what did the federal government try to do these past 50 years? We went through the federal statute books and identified 538 major statutes that we then collected into 67 endeavors surrounding problems that the federal government tried to solve.

And then, we did a survey of American political scientists who specialize in American government, and American historians, members of the American Historical Association who specialized in modern American history, to see what the federal government, what their views of the federal government's achievements were on the top 50 endeavors. I should say that on that list of 50 greatest endeavors of the past half-century, campaign finance was not included on that list because the federal government didn't try very hard on campaign finance. And neither was the war on terrorism.

As we did our research on what the federal government has tried to do the past 50 years, as we did that research last year, the war on terrorism just did not show up. The federal government hadn't been doing much, and it didn't look like it was going to be doing much. The second stage of that study asked 450 political scientists and historians to rank each endeavor on three measures: importance, difficulty, and success. And a combination of a sort of Olympic scoring style system produced a list of government's greatest achievements of the past half century that started with rebuilding Europe after World War II, expanding the right to vote, opening public accommodations to all races, reducing disease, and reducing workplace discrimination.

It was a remarkable and wonderful list of what the federal government had tried to do, a list that's often neglected, or that was often neglected in the campaign rhetoric of the time. You know, everybody in America who runs for Congress or runs for government, it seems, runs against government. But what we found in this analysis was that the federal government had a distinguished record of success, one well worth admiring.

The characteristics of those achievements involved bipartisanship, endurance, and courage. The federal government was often taking positions on issues that ran contrary to the prevailing public opinion, on issues like reducing discrimination, where the federal government had to lead and pull the rest of the nation behind it. There was also significant evidence of bipartisanship, bi-institutionalism. The greatest achievements of the past half-century were marked by bipartisanship over time, a kind of constant grinding against the problem rather than a single moment of success. And that's instructive as we look at the war on terrorism and the effort surrounding homeland defense.

Our great achievements of the past have involved not attacking an adversary with one great bill, but year after year, Congress after Congress, grinding away at a problem, like reducing disease, until we can declare victory. And it's a never-ending struggle.

This year's study was designed to ask which of the past 50 endeavors should be the greatest priorities of the next 50 years. That's not a very simple study to design. And I take full responsibility for any criticism of the study, while my team should take full responsibility for the success. They're constantly holding me back from over interpreting and stretching my data, their data, our data. And we'll talk about this as we go further, in terms of what we actually did.

The study of government's greatest priorities of the next half-century started with cleaning the list of what the federal government is still doing. Of the 50 endeavors that we identified as government's greatest activities of the past 50 years, two are no longer part of the federal agenda. We're no longer trying to rebuild Europe after World War II. We can declare that endeavor over and a success. And we're no longer fighting the Gulf War, although we're fighting a different kind of war now.

We replace those two endeavors with two other endeavors on our list of 67 that we started with, one being help victims of disaster, and the other being reduce illegal drug use. Still, campaign finance reform did not make the list of government's greatest endeavors—did not move up off the list of 67 into the top list of 50. Then we went out and interviewed a new group of academics, and we decided to be more ecumenical, broader. We wanted to interview different academics, so we picked political scientists, historians, economists, and sociologists, and drew a national sample from the association to which these academics belong, and interviewed 550 by internet.

Just a quick note to my friends in the economics discipline, a quick kind of gesture and urging: don't be so pessimistic. [Laughter.] There is hope out there. A brief note to my sociologist friends: is everything a priority to you? Can we make some choices? A note to political scientists: it's so delightful to know that political scientists are so often so right. [Laughter.] But that's speaking, of course, as a political scientist.

The question, of course, that confronts us is, how generalizable is this study? And I think Mike started it out by saying this is a provocative study to get us thinking about how you would set priorities and what the federal government should continue to do. This was a very long, detailed, difficult survey. All totaled, every respondent was asked to answer 150 questions. They were difficult questions that required at least some knowledge of policy or history.

We do not believe that a similar study could have been conducted with the American public as a whole that would have been as deep. But it certainly raises the question of whether a study should be conducted of the American public, or what publics ought to be asked about the priorities of the future. One of the goals of including more academics was greater diversity in the sample. Unfortunately, the sample still is not representative of the American public as a whole. It's still mostly male, still mostly white, still mostly liberal, and still mostly Democratic.

Interestingly enough, if we had gotten more diversity by way of gender and race, the results probably would have been more liberal than they already are. This is the face of the academic profession, nonetheless. So if you want to know what the people who are teaching the courses on policy history, what the people who are teaching and doing research on policy issues today, what their views are of the priorities, this is the study to examine.

Let me briefly review the key findings of the report. The first key finding is that September 11th clearly made a difference in the ratings of several key priorities of the next half-century. The war on terrorism, remember, was not on our list of government's greatest current endeavors. It most certainly is today. But when we went into the field with this study last spring, the war on terrorism was a minor priority of the federal government, and you see that in this three-part series that's now running in The Washington Post on how we fought the war on terrorism after the World Trade Center bombing.

War on terrorism was not on the endeavor list, but it did make a significant impact, or September 11th did make a significant impact on what these respondents thought should be the future endeavors of this country. It showed up in this survey in increased concerns among respondents regarding the importance of strengthening the national airway system, health insurance for the poor, arms control and disarmament, the health care infrastructure and reducing disease. It also showed up in spontaneous mention of what priorities were missing from our list at the end of our survey?

Many respondents also changed what they said the federal government should stop doing. Almost half of our respondents after September 11th said the federal government should stop devolving responsibilities to the states. That's certainly a clear indicator of this notion that we need a federal government, we've got a federal government, and perhaps we should hold it together. Tom Ridge made some remarks to that extent last week when he remarked that, as a governor of Pennsylvania, he had been all in favor of devolution. Here he comes to Washington now, and he's in favor of consolidation.

Almost as many of our respondents said stop the war against drugs; almost as many of our respondents said stop the effort to reform taxes. Nevertheless, a majority of our respondents said government should continue to be involved in all 50 endeavors. There's a remarkable story here. Twenty-eight of the 50 endeavors that the government is currently doing were endorsed by 90 percent of our respondents or above. Eleven of the 50 were endorsed by 80 percent of our respondents or above.

In other words, four out of the five of the endeavors that the federal government is currently involved in, our respondents said the federal government should continue to be involved in. That's this agenda of the past penetrating the future. This fits with some of our public opinion data by the Center for Public Service on the percentage of Americans who believe that the federal government should continue to maintain programs that solve important problems.

Now, we asked a number of different questions that I'm going to briefly review before we get to the priority list. We asked our respondents whether the federal government should continue or discontinue its involvement in certain endeavors. The greatest endorsement of continuation, the greatest endeavors there were arms control, continue the effort to reduce nuclear arms, continue the effort to expand the right to vote, continue the effort to improve air quality, continue the effort to improve financial security for the elderly.

The largest federal responsibilities among the people who said the federal government should continue its endeavors were arms control, the right to vote, national defense, financial security among the elderly, and air quality; again, sort of an endorsement that there is a federal responsibility. We also asked our respondents who said that the federal government should discontinue certain endeavors what the federal government's largest failures were. And here you get kind of an interesting reinforcement.

The greatest failure of the federal government, according to the people who said the federal government should get out of certain endeavors, was arms control. Seventy-two percent of our respondents said arms control had been a failure. Market competition through deregulation was considered a failure, the war on illegal drugs was considered a failure, reducing welfare dependency among welfare recipients was viewed as a failure.

Now, the key to this study and the thing that we really want to focus on today are the top priorities of the future. Among the individual respondents who said the federal government should continue with a specific endeavor, we asked what priority they would assign to that endeavor. Should the federal government give a particular endeavor a high priority, a modest priority, not much of a priority at all?

The ten top priorities for the future are the following. Increase arms control and disarmament. Sixty-five percent of our respondents said this should be the top priority or a top priority of the federal government in the future. Increased health care access for low [income] Americans was number two. Expand and protect the right to vote was number three. Promote financial security in retirement was number four. Provide assistance for the working poor was number five. There were ties, two ties at number six: improve air quality, increase health care access for older Americans.

Number eight: improve elementary and secondary education. Number nine: reduce workplace discrimination. And number ten: strengthen the national defense. Those are the top ten priorities of the federal government, according to these respondents. The ten least important priorities of the future are, in reverse order: tied for number 11, increase market competition through deregulation, reduce dependency among welfare recipients. Tied for number nine: strengthen the nation's highway system—our respondents appear to believe that we've done enough there—help victims of disaster, which is a very interesting finding, given post-September 11th. There was some increase among post-September 11th respondents here. But our respondents are basically saying that we are doing enough on that particular issue. Devolve responsibilities to the states was seventh. Tied for six: improve government performance and reduce illegal drug use. Tied for number four: support veterans' readjustment and training and promote space exploration. Number two: expand home ownership. And the least important priority for the future, among these respondents, was stabilize agricultural prices.

Now, what's interesting about this list is they're not saying "Get out of those businesses, get out of those areas," just don't make them a priority. What you see in this list are two significant patterns that we'll discuss perhaps in the question and answer session.

First of all, the list of top ten priorities of the future includes priorities that involve past gains, protecting past gains like the right to vote, like financial security for the elderly in retirement, health care access for the elderly in retirement and past disappointments. If you look back at last year's survey where we asked people where the federal government had done well and where the federal government had done poorly, our respondents last year said the federal government had not done a very good job on arms control, that the federal government had not done a very good job on providing health care access for low income Americans. And here these issues reached the list of important priorities for the future. So our respondents are saying that the priorities of the future involve a mix of past success and past disappointments.

The second pattern in this list—and this is wholly interpretive on my part—is that I believe success on this list of priorities is likely to come from the same factors that were involved in the successes of the past, that success on these top ten items involves perseverance, bipartisanship and bi-institutionalism, and just plain courage.

And what you see in this list is a continuing demand for the federal government to be involved in significant problems, but to work on those problems year after year, law after law, Congress after Congress. And there's not much room in that kind of a recipe for a partisan, one-shot solution to problems like arms control, or problems like reducing or improving access to health care for the American poor.

In conclusion, I see in these data two futures, two possible futures in terms of the priorities of the next 50 years. One is hopeful; it's bold; it's bipartisan; it's bi-institutional; it's even tri-institutional, because much of the success in places like reducing workplace discrimination involved a combination of federal statutes as well as Supreme Court and federal judicial action. The other future is dark and foreboding; it's timid; it's characterized by intense partisanship; it's institution-centric, as we might say, where a President or Congress is ascendant and is working an issue.

I think success in the future on these priorities of the future is in the former, in the continuation of bi-institutionalism, bipartisanship, hard, tough perseverance, working together to solve problems on which the American public believes the federal government. And the federal government, pretty much by itself, has to make progress, if progress is to be made at all. That's the summation of the report.

I'm delighted to invite two colleagues who have commented on this in the past. We've got Dan Schorr, who was here at last year's event, who commented at last year's, so I'm sure you'll feel free to weigh in. David Broder and E.J. Dionne, will you come up, and we'll take your comments, and then we'll open it to questions and answers.

Thank you very much.

Well, we start all the way over on the right with the dean of The Washington Post columnists.

MR. DAVID BRODER: I will be brief. I hope you will indulge me in two personal comments. One, I was thinking, walking over here this morning, that over the years, I don't know of anybody who has taught me more about how government works or why government doesn't work than Paul Light. And I am deeply in your debt, Paul, for many, many instructive studies, conversations, and all the rest.

Second, I have to say I wish Paul were not so damned honest as he is. When I reached the second page of this report and saw his description of the sample, 550 people, overwhelmingly white, liberal Democrats, I thought to myself, I maybe can guess where this study is going. And it went there. Asked which of the programs of the past should be continued, this sample said all of the above. They did not want to throw out anything that the government had attempted to do in the past.

Their list of priorities, as Paul has gone through them, the top five: arms control, health care access, protect the right to vote, retirement security and assistance to the working poor. They were asked seriously to focus on the agenda for the future, and what they gave us was essentially the Mondale campaign platform of 1984. I think that says something about the sort of—the imagination of the folks who were involved here.

Beyond being liberal Democrats, I think the other limitation that you have to put on their recommendations is the fact that these folks come from academic life. I have put my first toe into that life this past fall at the University of Maryland, and it is a wonderful life. I wonder why I didn't find this out much earlier in my life when I could have taken advantage of it. But academics have leisure, they have libraries, they have adoring graduate students who tell them how much they appreciate the wisdom that they are getting, whether sincere or not in their protestations. But most significant of all, they have tenure, and they are relieved of the kind of basic economic insecurities that most of their fellow Americans have to face.

It reminded me of a comment that I used to hear from the late Lane Kirkland about our wonderful late economics columnist Bart Rowen, who was, as many of you know, a passionate advocate of liberal trade policies. And Kirkland used to say, "I wonder what would happen if there were some way that The Washington Post could go offshore for an economic columnist who could write and work for five bucks a week, whether that would change Bart Rowen's views about the virtues of free trade."

I think we have something of that problem with this particular group. I think they were a superb group in terms of judging the accomplishments of the past, where they could bring their wisdom to bear. I think they are less useful to us as guides to the future. I could imagine after reading this report what the discussions might have been like at those gatherings that President Clinton used to have at the White House before each State of the Union address, where he would invite some of his academic buddies to come in and talk about the great future challenges of the nation. And they, I'm sure, would give him an agenda that was full of exactly these kinds of ideas. Then Clinton, being the person that he was, would talk to Dick Morris or Mr. Penn and find out what the hell the public wanted to hear in the State of the Union address and shape the address in that fashion.

I think that gives us a clue as to what the set of Democratic presidential candidates in 2004 may hear from their brain trusts, but I'm not sure that it gives us a clue as to what the country's future agenda would be.

That agenda, I would guess, will be set, as all agendas for presidents are set and governments are set, by three quite different factors. First, external events. Today's agenda is dominated by two factors which nobody contrived. One, the attacks on September 11th; two, the fact that we are now in a recession. And that defines the current agenda of the American government.

Second, public opinion. Over the years, health care issues have risen and fallen in terms of the governmental agenda, but they have never gone away as far as the public is concerned. You cannot have a conversation with a family in any living room in this country for more than 15 minutes before someone in the group is talking about their own personal experience with the frustrations and the limitations of the health care system in this country. And that's why that issue keeps coming back onto the public agenda.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the personal predilections of political leaders. President Bush has said to any number of people now that on September 11th, his reaction was "Now I understand why I was elected President. This is my mission." And as long as he defines that as being his mission, it will be very close to the top of the governmental agenda.

The final point I would make is what Paul brushed off in the last 30 seconds of his comment and modestly put at the end of this report, the section on the two futures, is, to me, the most valuable part of the entire report. Which says to me, once again, a little bit of Paul Light is probably more worthwhile than all of the academic studies and surveys that one could contrive.

MR. LIGHT: That's very nice. Thank you. I still have to defend that sample.

MR. E.J. DIONNE: I warn the entire staff of Brookings, this is all going to Paul's head.

MR. LIGHT: Yeah. Well, I can feel it.

MR. DIONNE: And I want to thank David. You know, David is known as the dean of American political journalism, not because of longevity, but because of wisdom. And as somebody who works here at Brookings, I'm always grateful to him for citing and praising Paul Light, because whenever I do it there's a potential conflict of interest. But I actually agree with David on the subject.

I also loved the idea that Paul used Olympic scoring on all of these issues. So what we'll do is, we'll give Paul and David a 10.0, and I'll drop out of the competition at this point.

I want to begin with David's point. There is a line in Paul's report. It says "These academics clearly had an appetite for endeavor." And in the marginal notes I wrote, I have the word, "liberals" exclamation point next to it. And I think it is important to see that, and I think your study may be used as fodder by all of those conservatives who regularly criticize academia.

But there is an element in this report that might be seen as a tribute to Dick Armey. As you know, Dick Armey this week announced that he was retiring as Majority Leader. David wrote an excellent column on the subject. Dick Armey will cheer the sentence in the report that says that 63 percent of economists rated themselves as conservative or moderate compared to 45 percent of the historians, 37 percent of the political scientists, and only 19 percent of sociologists.

So Dick Armey not only represents his district, but is, to some degree, representative of his profession. So you should definitely send this survey to Dick Armey.

But I think this survey is very useful precisely because it was formulated before September 11th but was conducted over a period that began before, but ended after September 11th. And I think what it underscores is the extent, as David said, to which government's agenda can be powerfully altered by critical events, such as those that happened on September 11th. But it also suggests that even in the face of a major crisis, certain goals are so widely seen as important that they remain at the top of most people's list.

David brought up President Clinton. I want to also. If you recall, when President Clinton was fighting the Republican Congress on the size of government back in 1995 and 1996, he invented what I like to think of as a lovely Star Wars character, M2-E2, and that was Medicare, Medicaid, education and the environment. And later, when he was fighting the Republicans in Congress on taxes, his slogan was, "Protect Social Security first."

And it turns out that those are among the enduring priorities of the American government. In this sense, I don't think our academics are all that far out of line with the public, as David suggested, especially on health care. If you look at that list—number two, increase health care access for low income Americans; number four, a tie, improve air quality and promote financial security in retirement, education and Social Security. Number six, improve elementary and secondary education. Number seven, increased health care access for older Americans. These priorities, I think, endure not only in the academic world, but in the public after September 11th.

And yet I also think the survey very usefully underscores the change in opinion. And I would call your attention to a paragraph on page ten where the results were tabulated by whether people were interviewed before or after September 11th. And these are a kind of surrogate for terrorism. Obviously, if terrorism had been on the original list, had been a national priority, it would have risen right to the top.

But look at strengthening the nation's airway system as a priority: 37 percent after September 11th, only 16 percent before. Ensure an adequate energy supply: 32 percent after, 20 percent before. Enhance the nation's health care infrastructure—that's the whole concern with public health—25 percent versus 13 percent. And it goes on like that. The stability of financial markets, a reflection of concern about the recession, is up, enhancing workplace safety is up. Helping victims of disaster, which was mentioned by only five percent as a high priority, was, post-September 11th, mentioned by 11 percent. I suspect that in the broader public you'd have an even larger number answering that question.

So I think that one way to look at this study is what has changed and what has not changed.

And I think it gives us a pretty good roadmap. I think that there are some interesting anomalies here. The original survey rated the Marshall Plan as the number one achievement of our government in the last 50 years. And I think this crisis may create a similar desire for that level of achievement abroad. I think you're going to see the beginnings of it in the effort to reconstruct Afghanistan.

I think one of the fascinating things is, will this crisis change opinion enough? Foreign aid, I think, will never be popular. The Marshall Plan was initially opposed by majorities in the public, but because the public perceived that the task of rebuilding Europe was important, it, at the very least, acquiesced to the decision to pursue it and eventually endorsed the goal. And I think that we may see that happen again. I think that's one of the open questions here.

The anomaly I mentioned is the sense in which building democracy abroad and building democracy generally dropped as a priority in this group. I think that is a case where the academics may be out of step with the long term, or it simply may reflect the fact that a lot of the survey was conducted before September 11th. Because as the report notes, that is a goal that was often seen as a Cold War goal. I think with our discussion of Islam and the various streams of Islam and the need to spread democratic values elsewhere, I think that is a priority that will rise. Yes, promote and defend democracy was number two on the top ten items on the disengagement list. I don't think that is likely to stand.

I do think it's important to underscore these ideological differences among the academics, because I think it does suggest that consumers of academic information might pay close attention to whom they're listening to. It is no accident that there are probably more economists who are libertarians. And I think it reflects not simply this very interesting gender split in the profession—sociologists more female, economists apparently more male—but it also reflects a way of looking at problems. It appears that for economists, in problems that are not easily solved by markets or not easily assimilated to markets, there is a tendency to say that they may not be problems at all.

But health care, there are some important continuities. For example, the proportion of people seeing health care as a major problem and government's obligation to ensure adequate health care as a major goal, yes, the sociologists were high at 85 percent, the other professions at 74 and 72 percent, but even the economists put that as a high goal. Sixty-two percent of the economists listed that. So I think that underscores the importance of that issue.

I think the other anomaly I found in the survey that is something that I think might change after September 11th, even if it didn't change in the survey, is improving government performance, which is a Paul Light obsession. And I don't want Paul to go out of business. I don't think there's any danger of that. But I actually think that the news events since September 11th have reminded us of the importance of this goal, not only in the sense that we actually want the government to know what's happening with anthrax and we want government officials to be able to inform us in a timely way over what is or is not going on, but I also think the creation of a whole new office and concept, a whole idea of homeland security, a term that was popular in a very small circle before September 11th and is now on everyone's mind, I think that the struggles that Mr. Ridge will necessarily have in trying to build a whole new endeavor, a whole new piece of the federal government, the bureaucratic problems that he will have heading something that is an office but not a department, having a great deal of responsibility, not necessarily a lot of authority over individuals: I believe that that will rise as a priority, and it's another anomaly of the study.

In closing, I'd just like to say that crises do shape people's perception of what major problems are. And the war on terrorism, insecurity at home and the recession are clearly at the top of the list of national priorities. But crises can also alter people's sense of what's possible and what's desirable. There are clearly two major polling changes that have come out of this crisis. One is a seeming renewal of confidence in government. The other says oddly that even though we are less rich than we were six months ago, and even though we feel less secure than we did six months, more Americans now see us as being on the right track than before.

There are paradoxes here. There are reasons, for example, to mistrust government after September 11th, to ask, as we journalists have been asking, why we didn't know more, why the government didn't act. I think this new confidence is, in part, a hope, maybe a hope that will be nurtured by some of these studies. Former Defense Secretary Bill Cohen, when he was a senator, offered an aphorism that I think explains those numbers: "Government is the enemy until you need a friend, and when you have real enemies, it's harder to make government the central enemy."

In terms of the right track-wrong track number, my friend, David Winston, a Republican pollster, suggests that this change reflects a feeling on the part of Americans that even though they feel poorer and even though they feel less secure, they're actually quite proud of the way their country responded to these events. They're proud of the firefighters and the police and the rescue workers. They're proud of the spontaneous generosity of the country.

And so you have these two things, a new sense of solidarity and community on the one hand, and a wish, at least, that government might become more effective. And so when Paul re-does this survey in a year or five years time, one of the questions that I will want to ask him to explore is whether this large change that we have seen in the few months after September 11th endures, and does it change our attitude toward government and our expectations of government, and our belief in government's possibility.

Thank you.

MR. LIGHT: David, did you want to—okay.

Well, let me respond to three things, and then we'll open it up for questions. September 11th did a lot to public opinion and I think did affect the opinions in this survey. There's a mix of continuity and change there, that it's interesting to me that the numbers who said do things like strengthen the air system, and so forth, increased, along with where we expect increases in terms of response to terrorism. But you also see this desire for America to get its act together on things like health care for low income Americans. That respondents would somehow see that as a post-September 11th somehow suggests that we also need to tend to our own bases. So there's this continuity and change theme that runs through this, that, yeah, you know, we need to fight this war on terrorism, we need to strengthen homeland defense, but let's not forget what makes America great, which is the right to vote, for example, or the long effort to reduce workplace discrimination.

So you see this mix of pride and also awareness that we haven't done enough here for certain publics, and also since we need to get moving on the war on terrorism. And we see in our data, pre and post-September 11th, on public opinion, that the surge in confidence in government is very much a conditional surge, that government has to meet these expectations. It's not a naïve or patriotic surge. It is a very nuanced surge that says we want the government, we expect the federal government to step in, and we also want the federal government to succeed.

Government's very much on the line right now in terms of public attitude, in a way that is troubling from the standpoint of the lack of investments over the last 20 years, in things like improving government performance and strengthening the public service. So the American public is watching government now in a way that they haven't in the past. We did some survey work. They're watching the charitable sector. A very high percentage of Americans, nearly 60 percent, perhaps, are paying close attention to the Red Cross and the United Way, the problems of the Red Cross and the United Way. That's a very high attendance to that particular issue.

Second issue, on the economists and sociologists. To a certain extent, the survey, being long as it was, we kind of inflicted it on academics, David, because they have that leisure time. The survey—we expected probably it took an hour to an hour and a half, or two hours. We got complaints from respondents about the length of the survey. I didn't have beloved graduate students, or I should say I didn't have graduate students who beloved me. But it is a biased sample.

I would say that when you control this sample and you separate out the conservatives, moderates, and liberals, that there is agreement at the top and bottom of the rankings, as you'd expect. We saw that same agreement among conservatives and liberals in the look back at history, that when you get to the top and bottom of the distribution, where you have very large percentages who are saying, yes, we should reduce nuclear arms, there you do get a situation where conservatives, moderates and liberals would be expected to agree generally, and that pumping more conservatives into the sample would probably not change the rankings at the very top. It would change the rating. But in terms of the top three or four items and the bottom three or four items, I would argue that having a more balanced sample that would look like America would not change the very top of the rankings, though there would be lots of movements in the middle there. And when you look at economists in this sample, the economists are very much—well, not very much. They're much closer to the American public in their thinking, than the sociologists. The sociologists worried about everything. When we asked them about what was important and where does the federal government have a large responsibility, the sociologists were really at one end and the economists were at the other. I don't know who you'd like to spend time with. I spend time with sociologists and economists, and I like the political scientists, again. But that's a self-bias.

I do think there's some point to be made in what we do with this crisis beyond fighting the war and beyond strengthening homeland defense. I think the notion of a Marshall Plan for the Third World of the kind that Senator Lieberman was talking about a few weeks ago, is an ennobling kind of act. It is true that the American public did oppose the Marshall Plan. George Marshall, when he received the Nobel Peace Prize for that work, remarked that he felt that his campaign to educate the American public on the need for the Marshall Plan was the most important thing he had done, that he believed that he had changed public attitudes toward our role in the international community. And perhaps that's what's needed here as we emerge from the long shadow cast by September 11th, an ennobling kind of act that expresses our concern for the rest of the international community, perhaps through foreign aid, perhaps through a rebuilding program, perhaps through the kind of program that Gene Sperling is working on here on universal education. Who knows?

Let's see what questions are on your mind. We'll take a few minutes of questions, and then we'll adjourn this conversation. Any questions? Daniel Schorr?

MR. DANIEL SCHORR: You'll take questions. Will you also accept a comment?

MR. LIGHT: Comments are fine.

MR. SCHORR: Okay. First of all, in passing, on the Marshall Plan, I'm old enough to have remembered the battle over the Marshall Plan. And one thing that must be said about it is it was not only a matter of General Marshall educating the American public. What they did was, very cleverly, to sell this as a way of beating the Soviets. During that time, we were approaching a crucial election in Italy, into which the CIA poured a lot of money—but that's another story.

What the Americans were told was that if we did not pour money into reviving Western Europe, starting with Italy, we would lose the election in Italy and we would lose Western Europe to the Soviets. A slight exaggeration there, but that kind of thing works. And I mention now only because, alas, we don't have that simplicity of one antagonist out there who provides the rationale for us to do what we ought to be doing anyway.

The other thing I simply wanted to mention is somewhere hidden in the priorities that were chosen by your panel was something I had not quite expected to see. And that was a certain communitarianism, a certain unselfishness. I find it remarkable, for example, that if you asked people who are approaching becoming elderly Americans and worried about their own health security, that they will say health security for low income Americans, way up at two, and when you talk about providing increased health care access for older Americans, down to six.

And there are other small evidences, it would seem to me, of that. And I don't know if it is one of the outcomes of 9/11, or whether it was something that was beginning to happen anyway. But there is a suggestion here that Americans, when voting, or at least their academics when voting, are not necessarily voting for their own selfish interests, and I find that interesting.

MR. DIONNE: You know, it's funny on that last point, Dan, it's a good way to look at the data. I looked at it also the other way. I noted how high promoting financial security and retirement was as a priority, and I noted that 46 percent of this sample has tenure, suggesting that you have a fair number of people who are approaching retirement. So I suspect that you have a healthy mixture here of communitarian instincts and self-interest kind of working together.

On the Marshall Plan, that's a very helpful history. And I think the issue there is whether the threat of terrorism and the need to change circumstances on the ground in other countries in order to forestall or prevent the rise of terrorism becomes a comparable argument for this sort of Marshall Plan. I think it is very striking that we have had two opportunities in Afghanistan. The first time, we took a pass and said, after the Soviets left, they should sort this out themselves.

We're not taking that view now, and that's a bipartisan position now. The President doesn't call it nation building, but it is an effort of that sort. And so I think it does suggest that some of the rationale behind the Marshall Plan may be invoked again. And I think, in both cases, it's not a gimmick. I think there was truth to the danger of communism in Western Europe, and there's certainly truth to the danger of terrorism in impoverished countries around the world, but especially in that region.

MR. LIGHT: A question here.

Q: Al Milliken, Washington Independent Writers.

It does appear to me that this self-described group of white-male, liberal democrats is showing signs of selfishness, and I'm questioning their liberal self-description. It seems they are very concerned about security, particularly for themselves, but not necessarily for those farther away from them. And I'm particularly concerned—you know, freedom doesn't seem to be a priority for them, as well as such concerns as human rights and humanitarian relief. I see that was part of the survey, but it doesn't seem to be a priority.

MR. LIGHT: I think the attitudes on two particular questions here are reflected by a sense of failure in the past. On the issue of promoting and defending democracy, that, really, when you look at the appendix and see what the respondents were asked to rate was the Vietnam War and the Korean War. And to a certain extent that was reflected in the sense that that was a failed policy.

Same for humanitarian aid abroad. I think there's a general sense among these respondents that we haven't done well with that and we may need to coalesce public opinion around a new campaign to say that humanitarian aid abroad is, in fact, in the United States' interest and in the self-interest of its citizenry.

Other questions? Yes, sir.

Q: Miles Benson with Newhouse Newspapers.

I'm a little curious about the dog that didn't bark in this list of priorities and what you think of its absence. There doesn't seem to be any—there are parts of it that lean in this direction. But missing from it, I think, is any suggestion that the role of government to raise living standards for society generally. The obvious concerns for promoting home ownership touch on this and raising conditions for the poor.

But why would that general sense of raising the living standards for the society in general, the middle class included, be absent? And does it signal a belief that that's not the business of government, on the one hand, or that things are about as good as we can reasonably expect them to be for this society?

MR. LIGHT: The survey itself is about what government has done; you know, what's on the statute books, where has government put its energy in the past. So when respondents say it is not a major priority of government to expand home ownership, or it should not be a major priority of the federal government to help veterans readjust to civilian life, they're not saying that the federal government should stop, because we gave respondents the option of saying, to begin with, should we continue or not continue?

So they're saying go ahead and continue some of these efforts, but don't put much more into it. We're doing enough; we've built enough roads, or we're building enough roads, or we're doing enough by way of expanding home ownership. But we didn't ask explicitly about sort of the broad, encompassing goals. We were looking at sort of these 50 activities, these endeavors that the federal government is currently engaged in.

And you see some evidence of a desire for lifting all boats. But the federal government doesn't really do that as kind of a general endeavor right now. When we got to the end of the survey, we allowed respondents—we said to respondents, is there anything missing from this list? The number one item missing from their list was the war on terrorism. So before September 11th, three percent of our respondents mentioned spontaneously—I think it was three percent—the war on terrorism. After September 11th, 15 percent of respondents spontaneously mentioned the war on terrorism. But this issue just doesn't come up in that way.

MR. DIONNE: I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, Paul. One, I think there's some effect that this survey was done at the end of a long period of prosperity. And the second is that if you think of government's complicated role in a market economy, in holding up living standards that involve something from the Federal Reserve, something on fiscal policy, something on spending in certain particular areas, there's no particular act of Congress that could be encapsulated on that list that would represent the collection of activities that the government engages in to lift the economy up or, in the eyes of critics of government, perhaps push it down.

And so, I think it was hard to express that general concern through the list of specific endeavors, because it was rooted in legislation kind of bundled together.

MR. LIGHT: But, you know, scholars have an ongoing debate about whether you should ask about individual statutes like the Patriot Act or Medicare, Americans with Disability Act, or whether you should ask about endeavors, packages of issues, or whether you should ask about broad goals. I mean, Humphrey Hawkins is in this list. And Humphrey Hawkins and the 1946 Employment Act both said, you know, we should set, as a national goal, a full employment economy. And this just doesn't show up here.

So you may be on to something here in terms of our methodology; you may be on to something in terms of a general sense that we're a society that is Balkanized, and we have a set of respondents who've got tenure, and perhaps they're just not worried about that.

David, did you have a comment? Okay. Other questions? Mike Armacost.

MR. ARMACOST: I was struck by the fact that among the ten federal failures, the second biggest failure, according to the survey, is increased market competition. But I think most people would look back on the last 25 years and say deregulation of trucking, airlines, telecommunications, financial markets has been one of the things that differentiated the U.S. from Japan and Western Europe in the growth of the last ten years. So I wondered if this isn't a reflection of the inattention of some of the academics to, at least, what I would regard as one of the important accomplishments during recent years.

And the striking thing on the ten lowest priorities to me from Brookings, where we pay attention to the quality of government and the performance of government, was the 40th priority was improve government performance. I would have thought political scientists would have some interest in the institutions of government and how well they perform.

I'd be intrigued by your comment on that, Paul.

MR. LIGHT: Well, they're just wrong. [Laughter.] You know, I look in these surveys and I keep asking these questions, and I don't know how to form a question that would get respondents to say that improving government performance should be the number one priority of government. You know, we're kind of a lonely force out there. I think that embedded in some of these answers, both in this survey and in the general public survey on government performance, is the notion that it can't be done, that Americans can't get their heads around the idea that government can somehow improve, even though when you ask them about individual agencies and when you ask them about individual situations, they think that government's doing pretty well. There were a set of surveys released this week on customer satisfaction towards government, which suggests that customer satisfaction towards individual agencies of the federal government now exceeds customer satisfaction towards the private sector.

It's kind of the "I love my bureaucrat/I hate bureaucracy" theme. But we can also say that efforts to improve government performance have not been particularly successful over the last 20 years, and we have a litany of examples of it. Our recent survey of federal employees themselves where we asked, "Has your organization been reinvented in the past five years," we got 75 percent of federal employees who said, yes, their organization had been reinvented. Fifty percent or so of those who said their organization had been reinvented also said that the reinvention had made their jobs either somewhat of much more difficult to do.

Now, I asked one of the reinventors about this and his response was, "Well, we never said that reinvention was going to make your jobs easier," you know. And so maybe that survey just didn't pick it up.

I don't know how to explain the other issue.

MR. BRODER: Well, Paul, would it be too unkind to point out that a lot of the people in this survey are themselves government employees. And for them, the idea of improving the efficiency of government might very well entail some change in their own lifestyles.

MR. LIGHT: I'm not sure that I'd make that leap, but it could be that as academics who are constantly being pounded by student evaluations, they may be discounting how much of a need for performance there is. I'm not sure they're making the leap to the fact that their government—I mean, there's a mix of private and public universities here. I have not seen too many public university faculty who think of themselves as public employees. There are of a kind, but it is an ivory tower of a sort.

What do you think out there at the University of Maryland?

MR. BRODER: I get a paycheck from the State of Maryland now.

MR. LIGHT: So do you see yourself as a government employee?

MR. BRODER: I am a government employee. [Laughter.]

MR. LIGHT: And damn proud of it, I hope.

MR. DIONNE: Could I just say, on Mike's question, I have noticed that too. And I think this is a relatively or quite liberal group. And I'm wondering if the answer on that reflects an attitude not toward whether this was successful or a failure, but whether increasing market competition is always a good idea and that there may be an ideological factor working there as well as simply a judgment factor about whether this was a success or a failure. Because related to that, I was struck at the top ten federal failures being expanding foreign markets for U.S. goods. Now, wherever you stand on trade, on the trade issue, it doesn't seem that that is a failure. You may have other critiques of the free trade system, but that wouldn't be one of them. And so, again, when I saw that, I was wondering, was that a description of what happened, or was it an attitude toward what happened? And I think there may be a mixing here of attitude and perception of reality.

MR. LIGHT: There's another way of assembling priorities here, which is to look at the old survey of what government did in the past and say that government's priority should really be the programs where past respondents said the problem that was to be solved was important, that the effort to solve it was difficult, and the federal government generally failed. You could say that those are really the most important things for the federal government to do. And you can go back to that list and say, well, on that list, for example, is health care, access for low income Americans, an important, difficult problem to solve that the federal government didn't do very well on. And that's another way of setting priorities in this effort.

Way in the back of the room.

Q: —Clark, Washington writer.

I was wondering if you could extrapolate ahead a little bit on what's going to happen in Washington. Because after September 11th, the liberals have had to acknowledge the need for more defense and security spending, but the conservatives have had to acknowledge the need for more spending on lots of things which may endanger the tax cutting. And I was just wondering if you all wanted to project ahead.

MR. BRODER: I think this Congress is likely to try to duck that question next year, but I don't think they can do it in '03. Duck it because I don't think that most Democrats want to frame the issue in the '02 election around which party supported tax cuts and which party opposed tax cuts. But given the trends in spending, both on protection against terrorism and the inevitable costs of our normal government, I don't think that the long-term tax cuts are going to be affordable, unless we're willing tolerate much higher deficits than the current political climate would suggest.

But I think that's an '03 issue more than an '02 issue, if they can figure out some way to sort of pump their way past it for next November's election.

MR. DIONNE: I agree with that, although I do think that the potential size of the deficit and the potential size of new spending required by this crisis will create a terrible problem for the President in creating a budget next year. And I think the nature of his budget may begin to call forth among some of the more liberal Democrats, or maybe one should say adventurous Democrats, because some of the deficit hawks are actually conservatives, like Charlie Stenholm, may call forth this tax debate a little early, even though I agree totally with David that most politicians would like to avoid raising taxes before an election.

MR. LIGHT: You know, I think two answers. One is that, metaphorically, the big debate this fall to me was over whether the baggage and passenger screeners would be federal employees. I thought that went on a long time. The House Republicans stayed with their position on that for a long time, and the Senate stayed with its position. That's the debate that's going on, really, and it gets framed that way in terms of whether we should have federal employees or contractors. That's a big issue of government performance.

I think the second issue to me is that George Bush has become a much more serious president in the wake of September 11th, and I think he's going to be under pressure to deliver a much more serious agenda. He cannot just be the war President. At some point, the American public is going to look at him and say, "What policies do you advocate beyond homeland defense?" And he'll be measured by the seriousness with which the American public now take him.

That's one of the very interesting changes over time. I think the expectations of Bush as a leader have changed dramatically, and that's going to help frame his presidency in '03 and '04, I think.

Let's take one more question and then adjourn. At the very back of the room.

Q: My name is Patricia Mead. I'm from the National Academy of Engineering.

I'm just interested to know why it is that when you chose the profile of individuals to participate in your survey, you left out scientists and technologists, considering that a lot of the items on your list really are related to science and technology ability and development over the next 50 years.

MR. LIGHT: We talked about engineers, we talked about scientists. We felt that in terms of answering all of the questions that it would be better to go with people who have an expertise in policy history, public policy, generally. So we just made that decision. It'd be an interesting survey to do, to break out a piece of this and have scientists and engineers review the 15 or so items, or 20 items, with which we'd expect them to have some familiarity. And lord knows that many of our respondents didn't have familiarity with some of the endeavors. We felt that basically by choosing these four sub-samples that we'd get a breadth of knowledge of the endeavors that would give us some purchase on the questions at hand.

MR. DIONNE: And I'd say that you also excluded journalists, which I'm very glad of, because otherwise we'd be up here today making fun of the journalists' answers the way we were making fun of the poor academics. [Laughter.] And I can't resist defending the academics in two respects. We've said all of the reasons why they are detached, but it's possible that their detachment gives them an exceptionally clear view of the problem. And since I was trained in sociology, I just want to say that sociologists see lots of problems out there because they are rooted in all parts of our society, and not simply their narrow little corner.

[Laughter.]

MR. LIGHT: Well, that's a very useful insight. It's been a joy talking with you today and releasing this report. It's available at www.Brookings.edu, as is a streaming video of the event, as well as will be a transcript tomorrow, I believe.

Thank you very much for coming.