We have a cspan audience, Live Streaming soap wonderful to have everybody joining us for what they think wilwethink will be at conversation. Im excited about the people weve gathered and the ideas we are going to be discussing. Welcome to the committee for responsible budget for thostherf you who do not know if they Nonpartisan Organization the board of directors or people many of whom are with us today who have run all the bigbudget institutions in washington so the federal reserve, the treasury department, omb, the Budget Committees comes of a. To try to have a realistic understanding of the budget improvements are going to be needed to improve the fiscal situation in the country and to trick yo to have in a bipartisan way it kind of understanding of how hard it is to make these traces but there are so many reasons they are necessary to keep moving the ball forward. With that said i will say it is a rough time for the budget policy this country. Nobody should be under the impression that the Fiscal Health of the country is good. It is not. Our debt relative to the economy is twice what its been on average. We are on track to bother us to be 10 trillion over the next ten years but in light of the legislation it is trillions and trillions more and i would argue that we are at the point because the economy is strong right now but that the point we are not making hard choices and we are not paying for things were acknowledging the budgetary tradeoffs and the result is the deficit is going to hit the trillion dollars next year. Weve only had that happen once before when we were in a very dangerous recession this is a time of prosperity and if things stay on track the way they do right now it could be up to 2 trillion, so suffice it to say that fiscal outcomes are very worrying. It is how we budget in this country that is so problematic. They are Government Shutdowns and default. That is not how a great nation or economy runs itself. It is not how the process is supposed to work. Luckily one of the things we try to do because when the deck is this bad and the partisanship is this bad theres a lot of things to be discouraged about that one of the things we try to do is focus on different solutions. Theres been so much work in this space of budget process that has been coming up with real answers to improve it. Ive been working with my colleagues Stuart Butler and paul poster on how to come up with ideas. Stewart went a whole round table on the process and the first panel to hear from today is a Remarkable Group called convergence brings together stakeholders from all different areas cut the kind of people who would normally be tossing food across the table at each other and fighting. And they are on many topics of the process to bring together people and Work Together for months and months to build trust, come up with shared values and principles it is an important part of the standing where we have in common it unites us than divides us even in the budget process and come up with solutions. The. There are more that we will be hearing in the second panel where my colleagues will come up with ideas to share with the group as well. It doesnt do enough to complain or identify why the problems matter so much fo but coming up with solutions is critical. Let me take a couple of minutes to talk about the budget process and where we are. One of the things i already find most remarkable is that we run this country without a budget, really regularly. No business would ever be permitted to operate that way and we surely are in a situation where its normal now that we dont have a budget place so that should be the starting point everybody realizes it recognizes the budget process of the United States is broken. There are so many things that are problematic not just that we budget jumping from one crisis to the next, but theres very little transparency in the budget. One of the things we have seen and they improve the fiscal situation situation and a lot ot comes from the entire citizenship understanding what the goal is, what the policy goals are and what you are trying to accomplish and they have to rally behind. We have little transparency people dont actually know which budget means what. The president put out a budget thats dead on arrival and the senate is doing one but somehow nothing ever passes and we are shutting the government down. There is no transparency to understand whats going on let alone the complicated things like budget baselines and how we do the counting so we need there to be more transparency and accountability so when we fail to pass budgets is an understandinthere is anunderstat responsibility lies and more intense for the deadlines and getting the funding them and also having other outcomes. There are so many gimmicks and how the budget i budget and makr head spin. We just published a paper available for anyone to pick up today. We have a great team that uncovered a different gimmicks and put it together. The problem is they are worried this will be used for ill. I do not want any Congressional Staff to bring us back to their members. This is not a howto manual, so we are trusting you these are the gimmicks we dont want to see used in the budget process. That just shows that the process has broken down at this point. Whenever you put rules in place, the subsequent years are smart. People figure out how to break them, but weve gotten to the point that they are very broken. Too many gimmicks. The budget doesnt focus on the longterm at all. Its where the problems are fiscally. It used to be the longterm. It is the medium term and getting closer every day the baby boomers are retiring and we continue not to have a growth or fiscal plan in the country but we dont budge budget and a lonm thoughtful manner so we put in place and that is true in policy as well but it is obamacare or tax cuts, you put in place a big policy and within a minute, they have a repeal to it so there is no continuity, no durability for the policies or the budget situation. That doesnt work. We are slow moving but also he wants longterm object if ways to pursue them. Finally then i would say the outcomes. The budget leads us to very poor outcomes and that is where we are on the fiscal front so you want to figure out how to change the rules and process to potentially nudge people to come out with Better Outcomes that would be desirable in all of this. So, its completely lock, not that they were thoughtful and planned this fall but completely lucky that we are getting our first annual budget process event and for those of you that come to the annual dinner you know im not good with things that are tangible. We host a dinner that approximately is held every seven years. [laughter] this is an annual budget process event youre going to start giving regularly. And so, this turned out to be great. The recommendations that have come out turned out to be perfect because we know with this new Commission Getting started in the budget bill that just passed its probably one of the only things thats going to be moving in congress this year. Its not going to be big for getting things done that it might be one of those things that sneaks up on you as people learn about the budget process they will realize how broken it is and there will be ideas that come forward and it may be something that gets moving. So it is an Incredible Opportunity and different ways to think about the kind of reform they may look at. It may just be incremental, and i shouldnt say just because some can be impressive but how do you put forth automatic resolutions so we dont have the Government Shutdown and joint budget resolution is looking at how to bring the white house and congress into the decision. There may be steps that are changed and a lot of improvements made on how we do the accounting and the budget concept and make things more transparent and enforce things anyway thats harder to get around, that would be an incredible step forward. We may look at a very big dramatic budget overhaul, something the organization looked at for years to take what we did in 1974 and replace it with a new Budget System where you start possibly with agreeing on the outcomes and get more people involved in the beginning of this multiyear budgets in place that are more durable. Theres a lot of ideas so we will see how much the system can bear that at times its hard to be optimistic that anything difficult is going to get done i think the benefit of changing how we budget is the stats dont seem so hard when you are making them, but they have a ripple effect. Its hard to figure out the revenues and spending but also so that resources are being fought in a way of achieving the goals of. We have huge challenges that could be opportunities in the country that come from trade and open borders and globalization that come from technology and Artificial Intelligence and all the things happening to pave the change faster than we have ever seen in the world. Those can be great opportunities but to make them work we have to have a government that can partner to turn those into opportunities for they are not disruptive to the economy and overall system in a way that is too hard to handle. So to bite off an even bigger piece, this really matters. The way that we budget affects how we are going to perform for decades to come. They can be a notch if people want to see those changes and we can tell you working with members on the hill there are people that want to see improvement in a system that tht allows us to flow through. I will turn you over to the first panel will be able introduce everybody you talk about the great work of the panel. I was lucky to work through them in the process not only was it hard working on all the pieces but it also did something we needed to be getting more of which is build up trust between the stakeholders to come with aa lot of opinions and i if you listen to what their ideas and objectives are the result of shared values so im excited to introduce them to come upon the stage and talk about the process and outcome. And thanks to everybody for joining us. [applause] well done everyone we are delighted you are here today. I am the president of convergence, the National Organization that works to create consensus solutions on the national consequence and actually she probably explained it better than i could i want to say she hit the high points what we have been successful at doing is gathering people with different perspectives on multiple issues to find Common Ground with people that have the collective knowledge and influence and information that if they reach a we reach an agrn really move forward, so in addition to this remarkable project led by suzanne, she will introduce the panelists and they also work in other areas may be of interest to you in the k12 education, health care, economic mobility and incarceration. We are really pleased to have hosted and organized and convened this process on this Critical National issue. I want to start by thanking the u. S. Foundation for their generous support and for helping to guide us. Its been invaluable to the process of moving the project forward. I also want to thank the foundation for helping us reach a conclusion on this project. You will hear that this group, this remarkably Diverse Group, and ive been caught already saying never before such a Diverse Group agreed on anything. But they have come together for a series of proposals to help fix the federal budget process and hope to vastly improve how the government needs to function to create a budgets every year. I think what makes the group unique is not just its political diversity, but also the fact that these are not just the normal budget wants i wants to t they are people representing real interest for affected by the dysfunction in the budget and the budget process and while they dont agree much on the merits of what it ought to look like, they are all in agreement that the budget process needs to be fixed and thats where theyve come together and powerfully to present ideas in a very timely way. The other thing that i think makes this report uniquely valuable is that we had to work really hard. It wasnt so easy to build trust, but there were real differences and concerns about whether we would create budget process reforms that might tilt one way or another to those that are concerned about the levels of spending or those that dont feel we are bringing us int into this within the needs of some concern about too much revenue, too little revenue, whatever the first if it was hard to make sure we have a process that would stay fair to all points of view and i think weve done that very successfully. And as its been mentioned already, we think this report provides a great starting point for the new joint select committee on the budget appropriations process for the e congress is setting up. Again, i think its important to know that benefit people in the group think we put out a report that is going to just be adopted in whole cloth by the congress s as a starting point and we think of the ideas presented here and the principles that underlie them are honored that we would have a good chance of having a budget process reform that can achieve widespread bipartisan support. So again i think the group does view this as a starting point and the other thing that should be obvious is no matter what else can we create, congress may have the ability to avoid it so itll take some cooperation in terms of changing its norms and how it operates to be successful but we think that this could become a beachhead across party lines and congress itself. On a personal note, i realized just last week that four years ago last month i took my first job on capitol hill for the Senate Budget committee. I worked for the share name and he worked with the ranking minority leader and for me, it was an amazing time in the process had just begun but there was so much earnestness on both sides to Work Together in such a tremendous participation in the bipartisan committee. I know a lot of people get impatient with those that are a little older calling up the house in the days of the past but h worked together on a budgt then. There was the chairman of the Appropriations Committee. They would function at the level that they did years ago and so i think underlining people can work across differences and we hope that this will be a model for others. Let me close by thanking all participants and we will welcome you later but we have a lot of participants at the table here with us today. I want to thank in particular the panelists for their appearance today and i want to recognize especially susan who is our leader and project director and others on the team, mike, pat field, the facilitat facilitator. Let me turn it over to introduce the panel. [applause] i would also like to say thank you to the initiative for supporting not just the efforts of the convergence of further long interest in the invested budget process reform and for helping make an event like this to come to pass. And thank you all for being he here. When we started this budget we didnt know where we would end up in the budget process even back then. Especially the people that we were focusing on for this dialogue. There is a little bit more than an hour to talk about the project. I want to give you a little bit of background on the via more than im going to turn the conversation over to my colleagues about the work that weve accomplished on federal Relations Administration and the association for the american universities and the executive director of the coalition for Health Funding and neil bradley is the executive Vice President at the u. S. Chamber of commerce. We are happy to take your questions. A little bit of background, the convergence project. The Diverse Group should be able to get behind him is a two and a half years we started making phone calls not quite sure who would respond when we picked up the phone. We talked to many of the suspects and on the hill with budget experience and a number of academics some of whom you will hear in the next panel that the group we wanted to hear, was a lobbyist and Government Affairs officials who work on the frontline for the battle every day. Slowly we started collecting their stories and add 20 we thought we were doing pretty good that we were up to 40, 60 and by the end we topped out at 100 individuals that we talked about the budget process with. Our initial conversations usually started like this, dont know much about the budget process or wha by which we havek about it come on in and see where it ends up. Usually the conversations in one hour and 15 minute sounded like theres a lot more at stake than i first thought. It is energy and the desire to make the situation better. And that was enough for us to get started. From those interviews county identified two dozen people to join the dialogue. The group is made up of leaders and organizations with broad influence on the hill along with a handful of other experts with deep experience in the budget process. The meetings were designed not to talk about how to fix it but stability level of trust among those who didnt necessarily know each other going in and certainly did think they had anything in common with anybody in the room. The stakeholder told us that one of the meetings one of the things she looked forward to is who she would sit next to because she was pretty sure that it wasnt random. There they were months after months delving into the process figuring out which way to turn to how far tfrom how far to go o find agreement. They listed the problems in the process that we heard in the interviews and that they were not alone in the frustration it served as the bedrock for what was to come. They are passionate in their desire for the government to work well. Making pretty good process and we were watching what was going on because when you join the convergence project, you are committed from abt 18 months or two years and as we watched the Budget Committees were doing we were a little afraid or lunch was going to b