Look for us at the Annapolis Book festival in two weeks later from the campus of the university of Southern California for the 19th year but tv will be live from the Los Angeles Times festival of books. For more information about the book fairs and festivals into what previous festival coverage click on the book fairs tab on her website. Good afternoon welcome to the cato institute. I am Vice President and publisher here and i had look forward to some time to our book for him today on what washington gets wrong the unelected officials who actually run the government and the misconceptions about the American People there as many reasons for that of course its hard to imagine right now as we are about three weeks out to the election that president elect donald trump to the brink of office a book that might be more timely for this moment in america and indeed of the turnout for our book for him form suggest there is widespread interest in the content of this book have to say also i am delighted to have today as speakers both of them longtime friends of mine. We have all worked in the political sign science area. Indeed donald trump raises the question and a question that has been on the american agenda for some time which is a deep satisfaction of much of the country that is outside the beltway. I remember one time and it may been this fall sitting around thinking after having lived in washington for about 25 years now the light out there may really be different and this is from person who works at the cato institute. Indeed we are in this time there is a larger picture the larger conception is that we have attained a position in the Constitutional Order that i think is rather different than the one we started with in 1787 that is we have a much stronger presidency and executive branch in a much stronger judiciary than was the classic representation. What exactly they thought about the rest of america. As you can see from the subtitle it turns out that the washington elite had misconceptions about the American People. And maybe even others. We will maybe we return to the issue. Let me begin today by saying brief bit of administration. We will hear from the authors in common are around about one or so we will begin to take your questions and answers on these issues. I will begin by introducing the authors and then we will hear from them. Benjamin ginsberg is a here in washington. His Research Interests include american politics jewish history and prior policy. And the impact of war and violence. He is the coauthor of editor of 24 books including of course what washington gets wrong and the worth of more. I should say also been was referred to and you may have seen us this in a Washington Post story recently as a libertarian i dont know if thats what he will want to say about that today. The work of work is not the title of the book. His coauthor jennifer bochner Jennifer Bachner also along with our current book she is editor politics and government. Which goes along with bed and it will appeal with the preston. She wrote the report productive policing. A very timely undertaking as the discussions go forward. As an expert on government intellects she has been quoted or cited in the Washington Post, wall street journal government executives and on federal news radio. She received a phd in government from Harvard University so ben and jennifer the floor is yours. Incorporation you john. We are the lighted to be here today we are very grateful to john for organizing this and also for don to dodd to agreed to serve as a presenter. While i have the floor i will grant for a moment about the cato institute. This is a misnamed institute. He was the donald trump of rome. He was against free trade and he attacked his enemies the have of the faction for romney and bush as well. I think they need to rethink the name of the institute. Now that ive gotten out of my system let me turn to the topic at hand. For many years i had been annoyed at the various surveys undertaken that seem designed to show that ordinary americans dont know anything about government. The one i enjoyed most was one of those jaywalking encounters where people ask today is Supreme Court justice. And the large number said judge judy. First of all, this is an honest mistake. Because they both went to the same high school in brooklyn. They are both graduates of James Madison high school so white it shouldnt people get them confused. At any rate. One day jen and i were chatting one of us said holcomb and no one no one surveys the government to see what it thinks about the people. Why not serve a Government Official to see if they know anything about the American People. So thats what we did. Jen will discuss the details of the survey. But basically we were able to get responses from about 850 Government Officials and members of what we call the policy community the people who are as a group involved in the rulemaking process here in washington. So we ask them what they thought about americans. Now, i dont have to tell this audience though i often find myself say to students that everything you learned about American Government is a little rug. Most of what you think of as a law is not written by congress and signed by the president. The constitution has a little bit wrong. Most of what we think of as a federal law is written by a federal agencies into a very substantial extent these agencies operate without much guidance or direction from congress and the president. The Outgoing Congress enacted let me get my numbers right here. 218 pieces of legislation. Many of which were auditory during that same time federal agencies wrote hundred 50,000 pages of rules and regulations. Many of which were very important. They substantially rewrote federal law. For the example the department of labor issued new rules and regulations under the authority of the task highway act. I dont see Anyone Around here who is present when the tafthartley act was presented. Here we are nearly a century later the department of labor is still issuing rules and regulations pursuant to the act. Our these rules and regulations truly pursuant to the act. No one involved in the drafting of that legislation is still with us. And moreover the federal courts defer to Agency Interpretations of the law as you know. There are many principles of deference. He tells me not to talk about these things because i dont know what im talking about i know enough to know that there are several principles of deference. They generally defer so for all intensive purse fixes the department of labor is writing new law nominally based so multiply this by many agencies writing many rules and you have a government that is centered in the executive agency. Rather than the congress or the white house. Now of course the president plays a role in rulemaking and since president reagan and since the creation of a libra im sure everyone knows what a libra is. The regulatory assessment which is there. It was created by the paperwork reduction act. There are so many examples of this in washington. A libra was charged with the regulatory agendas to see what extent but then the mission was expanded so that it issued regulatory directives to the agencies telling them what the president president wanted in their agenda. And then under president bush the republicans have complained bitterly about the actions but i remember when the incoming director met with the outgoing director who at that time top for us. How did the meeting go. It was an interesting meeting. I thought he was going to condemn everything i did but actually he just had one question. He said we were thinking of changing the names of these directives to regulatory props. Our party is against regulatory directive. What you think about that. The president does have some impact on the regulatory agenda but this impact is similar to the impact that they described when they talked about the roman emperor. He said the emperor has vast power but his reach is limited. The emperor can only intervene in a small number of areas so 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 and indeed under obama casts was charged with overseeing a look back process in which the agencies were asked to go back through their rules and regulations and exercise those that no longer seemed current. The city get very far. One might have predicted that. At any rate the president has some power here but its like the roman emperors. Its enormous but limited in reach. They also have something called the questionable review act. So that any piece of regulation or all rules and regulations have to be submitted to the office if it deems a particular set of rules and regulations is major in terms of their impact on the Economy Congress has 60 days to examine the role and pass emotion of disapproval. This hasnt worked out too well either. The only time because of such motions are subject to president ial veto and congress as you may have heard has been quite divided in recent years in fact on many days i dont think you could get a motion of approval to the idea that its a pretty foul flour. It has only come into action one time that i know. This is with the ear economic rule that were adopted just before bush came in. The rule was presented to Congress Congress disallowed them. I think that someone thats the one and only time they have actually worked. Otherwise its been a dead letter. Congress does hold hearings they do threaten administrators it does intervene. But the political scientist call this fire alarm management. Most of the time the agencies do their thing without anyone intervene. They had hundreds of thousands of pages of rules and regulations. In many respects we dont have congressional government we dont have president ial government we have a government by the executive branch. So, we had decided this is where we would look. And we found a number of interesting things. Which jen will present to you. Just as an overview we found that members of the washington policy members of the washington policy community were whiter better educated since they are unelected perhaps this makes more difference. We ask our respondents some questions about their understanding of the American Public. It turned out none of them named judge judy of the Supreme Court but they were not white on target in understanding of the incomes, the race going down the list they have an odd picture of americans and most important to us they didnt have much regard for the abilities of ordinary americans they didnt have much regard for the ordinary americans that were the 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. They didnt feel the government should pay too much attention who did the members of our sample think you anything. They talk to one another. They thought people like themselves knew what was best. Now, maybe they did know whats best. And when i go to the physician i dont pretend to know anything about that. And i hope they know more than i do. I hope they know more than i do. Im sure my accountant doesnt know more than i do. But these individuals have a relationship to me which is important. As a fiduciary responsibility to try to understand what i want when i need to work with me to achieve those goals. If an attorney doesnt do that they are ignoring the responsibility and you should fire them and go across the street. But in the case of our policy makers they dont feel like they have a responsibility and theres nothing much we can do about it. It leaves us thinking about what could possibly be done. And we do have some suggestions we will come back to this after jen prevents presents the numbers. It has been indicated we want to understand what the government thinks of the people and in fact that was the original title of the book. So we went ahead and conducted the survey where we created a survey of about 90 questions and sent it to 2400 officials and received about 850 responses. We obtained their Contact Information from publicly available directories and we received a lot of responses from people who were at the midlevel of policymaking. Program analysts. For the Civil Servants we were able to compare their demographics including age, gender and education to those published. We know that with respect is fairly representative. A number of interesting findings emerged from our survey has been and in give you a nice overview of. We ask a lot of officials about the circumstances interested in whether they knew in indicators like the homeownership and the average americans. In many cases the officials didnt do so well. For example we found that 80 of respondents that the homeownership rate was lower in than is in reality. And we think the fact that officials have these misconceptions about the circumstances of americans is pretty problematic youd hope that they would align with the real circumstances of america. We also asked officials about the policy preferences of americans and we found that again there were some pretty serious misconceptions so here we see that a lot of the officials in our survey think that the average american holds a very different policy opinion and then they do. And i will talk about more in a moment. You can see here for example that about 72 of officials think the average american holds a different opinion with respect and 67 think the average american holds a different opinion with respect to policies related to the environment. And again as i will talk about soon i will show you that in fact there is a lot more Common Ground between Government Officials in the average american than he think there is. We also asked officials about whether average americans know anything about policy areas whether they know a great deal about these issues or whether they know very little about these issues. And as you can see here officials clearly think that americans dont know very much about policies and that is true even for the policies you would think that they affect the deer daily lives. For example you can see here that about 72 percent of Government Officials think the public knows little or nothing about those. They thought they know almost nothing about child care. And across all of these issues you can see that a very small percentage thinks that average americans know anything. When you take these pieces together. We find they have a quite a fair amount of disdain for the average americans and we think that one might this manifest itself is in the sense of what we call false uniqueness. They perceive themselves to be far more different from the American People than they are in reality. The graft that you can see here shows the extent to which Government Officials over sme the red bars so you the number of policy issues will. You can see of course that the higher blue bars are clustered on the righthand side of the screen. We can see example that 22 percent of officials think that they disagree with the average american on the size policy issues. In reality only 3 disagree on five issues. 76 of Government Officials think that they disagree with the average american on for mark policy issues when that number is only 12 . The key take away of course is that there is a lot of Common Ground. The average americans than officials perceive them to be. Also in their attitudes and opinions. And also going into the false uniqueness. They strongly believe that they should do what they think is best when crafting policy. Rather than follow the well of the people. And of course the should be concerning from a government responsiveness perspective. Here on the table we see each policy area that thinks the government should follow Public Opinion and give equal consideration to Public Opinion and what it thinks is best or simply do what it things is best. With respect to policies that aid the court for example only 12 of officials think that they should follow Public Opinion and in other areas like Social Security and welfare the numbers are 80 and 13 . So clearly the officials in our survey see themselves as clear trustees rather than delegates. Interestingly we did find some variations among the officials. We surveyed congressional staffers and members of the policy community. And here you can see that these groups turn out quite differently when you asked them about how much they interact with the public and the extent to which they receive feedback from the public. Clearly the staffers have the most interaction with the public. And this was owing to the incentive of numbers. We think it speaks to the need of them have more interaction between Civil Servants. We think would help bridge the divide. So first we think the Government Officials should spend some time outside of dc. For example, there are Civil Servants who been in their position for many years and perhaps it would be worthwhile for them to spend a rotation outside of dc. We also think that Government Agencies should be spread out across the country. We are not talking about small outpost here. But we think the real policy making should be decentralized. A great example of this. They had set set up offices around the country and this is so that patent examiners can work closely with the inventors. We also think there should be some changes in the mens