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.