Time to her book form today on what washington is wrong, the unelected officials who run thet government and their misconceptions about the American People. Many reasons of course its hard to imagine right now as we are about three weeks after the election that brought president elect trump to the brink of office, a book that might be more timely for this moment in america and indeed the turnout today for a book form suggest there widespread interest in the content of this book. Sa also i am delighted to have today as speakers, one of the authors, ginsburg and cattle who have all worked in a Political Science senior and Jennifer Bachner, a new frontier. Indeed, donald trump raises the question that has been on the american agenda for some time, which is a deep satisfaction with much of the country out that its about way the beltway. I remember this all sitting around thinking after having lived in washington where some 25 years now, the life out there may really be different and this is from a person who works at the Cato Institute as ainstituta professional is better. We are and this time the larger picture that goes along side Donald Trumps victory. The larger conception is that we have obtained a position in the Constitutional Order that is rather different than the one we started with in 1787. That is a much stronger b presidency, much stronger executive range and much stronger judiciary than was originally intended. Wh what is weaker is the classic representative institution, congress and also one could say this state play a weaker role than one would expect. So washi Washington Council and ourot authors today decided that other people havent done this so much. The authors decided to see whatt with the washington elite thought about the rest of america. As you can see from thewashingtn subtitle, it turns out that the washington elite have misconceptions about the American People and maybe even some libertarians have misconceptions about the American People. Maybe we will return to that issue. Let me begin today by saying a brief bit of administration, we will hear from our authors and professor cattle and in a roundabout one or so we will have begin to take your questions and answers on these issues. I will begin by introducing our authors and then well hear from them. Benjamin ginsberg is the David Bernstein professor of Political Science and chair of the Hopkins Center for governmental studies here in washington. His Research Interests include american politics, jewish history, Higher Education policy and societal impact of war and violence. Hes the author, coauthor or editor of 24 books, including of course what washington what washington gets wrong and the worth of work. Worth of war. Ben was referred to, you may have seen this in a Washington Post story recently as a libertarian. I dont know what is going to want to say about that today if anything. The worth of war is not the title of the libertarian book. His coauthor, Jennifer Bachner is director of the government analytics and certificate in government analytics at Johns Hopkins also along with their current book, editor of analytics policy and governance, and which was along with ben has edited and kathy hill will appear with El University press press soon. She also wrote the report predicted policing, preventing d crime with data and analytics. Very timely undertaking as these discussions go forward. As an expert on governmentngton analytics and political behavior, shes been quoted or cited in the Washington Post, wall street journal, government executive ben on federal news radio, she received a phd in government from harvard university. The floor is yours. Thank you, John Kerry Jen and i are delighted to be here today. We are very grateful to john for organizing this. Also for agreeing to serve as while i have the floor, and the Cato Institute. This is a misnamed institute. Cato was a rabblerouser. He was the donald trump. He was against free trade and the attack is by no means skip yet made the cut, head of the aristocratic faction, perhaps this could be a romney and roche as well. I really think cato needs to rethink the name of the two. Now that ive got not out of my system. Let me turn to the topic at hand. For many years, ive been annoyed at the various surveys undertaken that seem designed to show that ordinary americans dont know anything about enjoys government. The one i enjoyed most was one of those old jay leno jaywalking and counters where people asked asked were asked to name a Supreme Court justice. A large number said judge judy. First of all, this is kind of anonymous mistake, right . Because judge judy and justice ginsburg, no relation, are both small jewish women who went toho the same high school in brooklyn. They are both graduates of James Madison high school. So why shouldnt people get them confused . At any rate, one day jen and ido were chatting and one or the other of us said how come no one surveys the government to seetht what it takes about the people . No one has ever done this. Why not survey governmentt officials to find out if they know anything about the American People. So that is what we did. In general we will discuss thehe details of the survey. But basically, we were able to get responses from about 850 government officials and members of we call the policy community. I think tankers, contract areasd who are involved in the regulatory rulemaking process here in washington. So we asked them what they thought about american spirit i dont have to tell this audience, though i often tell myself that everything you learned about American Government is a little wrong. Most of what you think of that law is not written by congress and signed by the president. Constitution got this a little bit wrong. Most of what we think of as theh federal law is written by federal agencies. To a very substantial extent, these agencies operate without much guidance or direction from congress and the president. The 114th congress, the Outgoing Congress and not dead and 100 limited by numbers right. 208 teen pieces of legislation, many of which were auditory during that same period, federae agencies wrote 150,000 pages of rules and regulations. Many of which were very important and substantially rewrote federal law. The department of labor issued new rules and regulations under the authority of the act. I dont see Anyone Around here who was present when the act was not good. Sometimes i feel that i was. But you know, the one with tafthartley it . 1936. Here we are century later the department of labor issuing rules and regulations pursuant to the act. Are these rules and regulations truly went to the act . Well, no one knows. No one involved in the drafting of villages ration is still with us. And moreover, the federal Courts Agency interpretations of the law as you know. There are many principles. My son is an administrative lawyer and he tells me not to talk about these things but i know enough to know that there are several print bowls of deference and particularly the Chevron Standard or the courts generally deferred to the Agency Interpretations of the law. The department of labor is nominally based upon some out ancient standard. Multiply this by many agencies, and you have a government that is centered in the executive agency rather than the congresso or the white house. The president plays a role in rulemaking and since president reagan since the creation of all room in i read, this is a room in which everyone knows what it is. Information and regulatory assessment, which is in the omb and was created by the paperwork reduction i well, what do yo. Want . You know so many examples of this in washington. Anyway, was charged with reviewing regulatory agenda d. C. To what extent the agenda was consistent with the president s agenda. But then under clinton, the mission was expanded so that ali iraq issued directives telling telling them that the pressure to talk to him after that. They complained bitterly about when b the actions that the incoming direct or met with the outgoing director. Im tempted to name these people. Like that time a talker. I said to her, how did the meeting go . She said i thought that he was going to condemn everythingg questi that. Actually he said we would gain of changing the name of these direct days because our party suggests regulatory directives. What would you think about that . At any rate, the president does have some impact on the regulatory agenda. But this is similar to the impact that tocqueville described when he talked about the roman emperor. He said the emperor has vast power, but its reach is limited. The emperor can only intervene and a small number of areas so that for the most part the other agencies of government are in charge of everything else. And so the president issues a small number of regulatory props. I want to get the wording right. And indeed, under obama was charged with overseeing andh talkback process in which the agencies were asked to go back through those rules andise those regulation and excise those that no longer seem correct. This didnt get very far. One might have predicted that. At any rate, the president had some power here. Its like the roman emperors. Its enormous but limited in reach. Now of Course Congress has oversight powers and Congress Also have something called the Congressional Review Act so that any set of rules and regulationy for all rules and regulations have to be submitted to the Government Accountability office, submitted to gao. In the gao deems a particular set of rules and regulations as major in terms of their impact on the economy, congress has 60 days to examine the rule and pass the motion of disapproval. Well, this hasnt worked out to well either. Because such motions are subject to president ial veto. Congress says he may have heard has been quite divided in recent years. In fact, many days i dont think its a good emotion of approval for the idea that the marigold is a pretty flower. So era has only come into action one time that i know of. This is with regard to remember the ergonomics rules that were adopted just before bush came in. The ergonomics rules are presented to congress. Congress disallowed them. Thats the one and only time erh has actually worked. Otherwise its been a deadtors. Letter. Congress to hold hearings. Congress does threaten administrators. It does intervene, the political scientist called the spiral bygl management. If someone rings the bell loudly enough, congress will look into it. But again, most of the time the agencies do their thing without much intervening periods with hundreds of thousands of pages of rules and regulations. So in many respects we dont have congressional government. We dont have president ial government. We have government or the executive branch. Look, and we so we guided this book. We found a number of interesting things, which jen will present to you. Sort of an overview, we found that members of washington policy community were not representative of the americanms public. That should come as no surprise. Neither is congress. Members of the washington policy community were better educated, wealthier than the publicbut sic atlarge. Okay. But since they are and elect it, perhaps this makes more difference than is the case with congress. We asked our respondents andiont questions about their understanding of the American Public. It turned out none of them named judge judy is a member of the Supreme Court, but it turned out they were not quite on target in their understanding of american incomes, braves, going down the list. They had an odd picture of americans. M most important to us, they didnt have much regard for the abilities of ordinary americans to govern themselves. They didnt have much regard for the intelligence of ordinary americans, significance of their views and they didnt feel for the most part that the government should pay too much attention to what ordinary folks thought. In fact, they didnt think the government should pay much attention to what members of congress thought. They didnt feel the government should pay too much attention to the president. Who did the members of our samples think new anything . Well, they talk to one another. They thought people like themselves knew what was best. Maybe they do know what is bestn when i go to the physician, i dont pretend to know anything about anything. I hope they know more than i do. Sometimes am dubious and i hope they know more than i do. T when i need an attorney, i hope they know more than i do. Bu but these individuals have a relationship to me, which is important. They have a fiduciary risk in stability to try to understand what i want, what they need and to work with me to achieve those goals. If an attorney doesnt do that, they are ignoring their s fiduciary responsibility nation higher than across the street and get another one. Same with your physician. In the case of our policymakers, they dont seem to feel they have a fiduciary risk on noth stability and theres nothingry much we can do about it. So this leaves us thinking about what could possibly be done. We do have some suggestions and i think we will come back to those after jenn presents the numbers. Hi, everyone. Its been indicated we want to understand what the government thinks of the people. In fact, those are original title of the book. So we went ahead and conducted a survey of where we created a survey of about 90 questions and we sent it to about 2400 officials and received about 850 was unfazed. They obtained their Contact Information from publicly available directories and received a lot of responses from people who are sort of at the next level of policy making. They had titles like legislative aide, Program Analysts and policy analysts. The Civil Servant in our survey, we were able to compare their demographics including age, gender, income and education to those published by opm. We know at least with respect to the service is fairly representative. So a number of interesting findings emerged from our survey and give you a nice overview of. So we asked a lot of officials in our survey about the circumstances of averageout thel americans. We were interested in whether they know about the racial composition of america, despite the different age groups and indicators like the homeownership rate and the Educational Attainment ofag average americans. In many cases are officials didnt do as well or at least not as well as we hope they wouldve done. For example, we found 80 of respondents thought the th homeownership rate was lower than reality. We think the fact that officials have these misconceptions aboutt circumstances of american is pretty problematic. At least from a policymaking perspective. Little policies would align with the circumstances of america. We also last officials about the policy preferences of americans and we found that again there were some misconceptions. So here we see a lot of the officials in our survey think the average american holds a very different policy opinion than they do. As all talk about more in a moment, this turns out not to be the case. You can see here for example about 72 of officials think the average american holds a different opinion with respect to policies that aid the poor and 67 think the average american holds a different opinion with respect to policies related to the environment. Igad, as ill talk about soon, ill show you in fact theres a lot of our Common Ground between government officials in the average american than they thin. There is. We also ask officials about whether average americans know anything about policy areas. Whether they know a great deal about these issues are whether they know very little about the issues. As you can see here, officials clearly think americans dont know much about policies. That is true even for policies. You would think affect their daily lives like Social Security like and childcare. For example, you can see here about a 72 of government officials think the public knows little or nothing about programs aimed at helping the poor andin more than 60 think the public likewise notes almost nothing about childcare. Across all of these issues come to you see a various percentage of official think that average americans know anything about these issues. Ces so when you take these pieces disdai together, we find officials have quite a fair amount of disdain for the average american and we think that one way this manifests itself is in theirse sense of what we call false fals uniqueness. False uniqueness means that officials perceive themselves to be far more different than the American People than they are in reality. The grass that you can see here shows the extent to which government officials overestimate policy differences with the average american. The red bars show you the number of policy issues where there is actual disagreement and the blue bars show you the number ofnt policy issues where there is perceive disagreement. You can see of course the higher a blue bars are clustered on the righthand side of the screen. We can see, for example, 22 of officials think that they disagree with the average american on policy issues. When in reality, 3 disagree on ive issues. Overall, we see a 76 of officials think that they disagree the average american and former policy issues and the numbers only 12 . The key take away of course i