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Working
with Policy Makers in an Effective Manner ELLEN NISSENBAUM: Many of you have heard in the last couple of days about the kind of research and analysis work that the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities does, but some of you may not know that we do a substantial amount of direct work with policy makers or legislators, both with the Federal Congress and with the executive branch. Half of the Center’s work is on the national level and about half is at the State level. I concentrate on the national work. We're a somewhat unique institution in Washington because of the combination of the research work and the work we do with elected officials. We're really neither a traditional kind of a think tank, which writes long reports and doesn't work with policymakers to try to inform the policy making decision process, nor a lobbying group. When I try to describe what we do in shorthand, I will often say that we're a public policy organisation that blends rigorous research with work with legislators and their staff. I'll frequently reference how much work we do with staff, even though I know that for some of you, your government systems or your parliaments don't have extensive staff. But working with staff is an important part of the work that we do. The goal of the Center's work with elected officials and policy makers is to inform the public policy process about ways to reduce domestic poverty and to narrow the very wide gaps in income between rich and poor, and increasingly between the rich and the middle class, in the United States. One could say, in a very broad way, that the way we do that is by providing policy makers with concise, accessible and timely non-partisan analyses of low income issues and legislative proposals so that the policy makers can make informed, responsible policy decisions as the process goes forward. I wanted to just mention some guidelines on how we work with policy makers and then I was going to give six or seven specific kinds of examples of what we do. In the United States, but particularly in Washington, there have been two typical kinds of influence with policy makers: one is through campaign contributions. For example, if Mark is a member of Congress from South Dakota, I would give Mark money for his campaign. So money "buys" access, in the most frank description. The other traditional source of influence is that Indira is the senator from New York and I come in to represent a membership group or a business that's located in her state. That is, I represent Indira's constituents and I represent people that have probably voted for her, and that traditionally gets you access. Well the Center has neither source of traditional influence, yet we do a significant amount of work with policy makers, with legislators and with staff. How is that possible, and why do we have any access? Why does our work seem to have some impact? I could say that it's because we have information, but a lot of people in our context have information, so that's really not the full story. Rather, it's really the strategic and timely formulation of analysis, as well as the credible presentation and the careful and creative dissemination of information. We've got a marriage at the Center between good research and effective communication. What are some of the characteristics of this combination? One is to be timely. We are constantly re-assessing, on a weekly and in some cases a daily basis, what issues are coming up, what are the niches where the Center recognises a vacuum for information, evaluation or critique, and what’s the time frame. One of the things that the Center has intentionally done is to structure itself in such a way that when the need arises we can respond rapidly. Responding rapidly can be demanding on Center staff, but it's also when, I think, we do some of our most effective work. Let me mention two examples of rapid response. Bear in mind that the Center has been around since 1981, so we didn't do this in 1981, but over the years we've built our capacity and our expertise to respond quickly and accurately. When the President's budget comes out in the morning of the first Monday in February, we often will have an analysis completed by the afternoon, primarily aimed at the media and policy makers, but especially for the media. That way, the next day’s stories about the budget are much more informed and objective, and also bring to the forefront concerns about the impact on poor people. Another example of rapid analysis is that every September or October, our government releases poverty and income distribution data for the year before. We again do a same-day analysis for the press. Even though our responses are often rapid, we always aim to make sure they are accurate and reliable. We have a ground rule at the Center that I have always appreciated in the fifteen years I've been there: we only work, both in terms of doing analysis and work with policy makers, on the issues where we've developed in-house expertise. This ground rule is a critical component of our credibility, both with the media and with policy makers, because they know then that we know what we're talking about, and that's essential. Let me now discuss accessibility — which really means that we try to present information that policymakers would want, can understand and would be able to use again in a timely manner. Accessible means not just how an analysis is written; it also means we're not giving out a 30 page paper two days before a bill is raised in a committee or a bill is considered on the floor. Accessible means that one of the major functions of the Center, referring back to the marriage concept, is that we often are translators. We translate technical budget information for a general public audience. Not only are we translating it, but we are constantly thinking about what are the most important points to bring forward and highlight. One of the ways, by the way, that we've been learning and changing our techniques so that our analyses are more useful for Members of Congress and with the press, is to use more visuals. We use more charts, we use more graphs, we use more visual ways of presenting information. This, I think, has been helpful. The Center’s work is independent, and let me spend one minute on this. I know for different people in different contexts "independence" has a different meaning and the way one establishes one's independence can be done in different ways. For us it starts by ensuring that our work and our research isn't influenced by any of the funding sources. We made a decision long ago at the Center, that we would not take any funding from any source that might even have the appearance of influencing our analysis or recommendations because we never wanted the press or anybody else to question our motives for writing what we do. Also, we certainly didn't want to have any restrictions on our ability to criticise the policies of the government. So we don’t take government funding. We are strictly non-partisan in the work we do with Members of Congress and in the materials that we provide to them. We're also non-ideological, so that a conservative member might not agree with our reports, but hopefully he or she wouldn't find the information tilted as that would render it less credible or less objective. Again, since we've not giving people money and I'm not Indira's constituent, I think that is a very important part of constantly ensuring that we have maintained our integrity and our credibility with policy makers, which helps build our access and our impact. There's a motto that a "good government" group in Washington came up with that I often find useful and that is when you work with elected officials, you have no permanent friends and no permanent enemies. It is important to see that today's allies may be someone we disagree with tomorrow, but then the next day we may be back with them. To maintain the credibility of our policy work, we have to be willing to criticise the policies of our friends, meaning people who really care about poverty issues. At best, not only are we willing to criticise "allies," we also go out of our way to seek and find opportunities to work with unusual allies, or what we would sometimes say are "strange bedfellows" among other organizations and in Congress. Right before I left, I was working with one of the most conservative Republicans from Oklahoma on an issue about defense spending, where we had a common analysis about some problems in a proposal. The best example, I think, about having to be willing to criticise the policies of those you might typically agree with, knowing that it's a risk and knowing that in fact you do pay a price, occurred in the early 1990s. There had been significant concerns raised by rioting in Los Angeles and there was a sense that the Congress needed to adopt an urban aid package. That became, as often is the case when there is major legislation, a vehicle for tax cuts. The tax cut package put forward as part of the urban aid legislation was authored by the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, a very powerful individual in the Democratic Party, somebody we worked with on numerous issues. Nevertheless, we prepared an analysis of his particular tax proposal that focussed on the substantial loss of revenue and the inequitable distribution of the benefits of that tax cut. The Senator’s office called us. They were disturbed, and endeavoured to persuade us we were wrong, but I think we gained in the long run with the press and others for being willing to analyse proposals as objectively as possible, regardless of whose proposal we were assessing. I think it was best put when a journalist described us, a couple of years ago, as a "truth squad" on the issues we examine. Lastly, we try to be practical. I think one always has to be careful when working with policy makers of trying to develop policy recommendations that are feasible, that are practical, that have some chance of developing broad support. Otherwise, I think you can spend a lot of time formulating recommendations that aren't going to go anywhere. Let me now turn to some of the specific ways we work with Congress. Even though Members of Congress will often have anywhere from five to fifteen staff members working on issues, this staff is frequently overwhelmed. In the course of a day they're responsible for five, six, or seven major issues. In many cases staff tend to be young or they may not have much experience in the issue. In essence we sometimes find ourselves serving as "staff" to Members of Congress and as "staff" to their staff. We constantly provide technical support, answer questions, supply data. Somebody will call up and say, what does this bill mean for my state? To the degree we can provide localised or state impact information, which isn't often, we try to do that. We are often asked by a Member of Congress or their staff for our evaluation of legislation, or if we could recommend some modifications to change and improve it. Committee work: Again in our system we rely very heavily on committees although this too can vary. (For example, when Newt Gingrich was the Leader or Speaker of the House of Representatives, he did a lot of work outside the committee context and did much more work within the leadership structure. Generally, though, our system relies very heavily on committee work.) How do we work with committees? We help them plan hearings on issues. We also may help them as they prepare committee reports on an issue. If there is legislation before a committee, we often asked to recommend amendments or critique amendments that are going to be considered. Recently, for example, there have been important hearings on social security, which is our universal social insurance retirement programme. For some of those hearings, we've been asked to help prepare background materials for some Members of Congress. Traditionally staff will give a Member of Congress a two or three page overview memo to prepare them for the hearing. We may be asked by a Member of Congress or the staff, what question should I ask this witness, what information should I try to get. Part of this work often involves helping Members of Congress secure more information. Specifically, we often try to obtain more detailed information about the impact of particular programs or policies on poor people. We also testify at Congressional hearings. We often testify as an expert: Iris often testifies on tax policy, Isaac has testified on the minimum wage, we've testified on a variety of issues. I want to be very honest about that, though. There are some hearings that are important and have impact and may get press attention. Other times we testify and it is a waste of time. So testifying and committee work, I don't want to say it's all critical. Generally it is, but we recognise the limits. There is an important function we do here. By the way, we sometimes will be called and asked to testify on a particular issue on which our expertise is limited. So sometimes what we do is to help members and committee staff and chairmen of committees identify other experts that can come in and that can speak in ways that are understandable to members, that can make effective presentations to legislators. I think that's an important function we serve again, as a kind of bridge capacity. Let me expand on the notion of our "bridge" functions. One frequent activity, and Isaac has done quite a bit of this, is we are very much in touch with a lot of academic researchers around the country on various issues: on tax policy, on health policy, on the minimum wage, on a variety of things. Very often these academic researchers will write reports and the reports will never be read by an elected official. They are too long, they are too complicated, they don't necessarily reach a conclusion. One of the things we do that's most important is not necessarily promoting or providing our own work, but is helping to bring to the attention of policy makers very important research, again related to budget or poverty issues, in a way where we translate it. We might even take someone else’s report, summarise it in three or four pages, highlight what the conclusions are, and then make it relevant to whatever the policy debate is at that time. So I think serving as a bridge between elected officials and the research world, in terms of budget and poverty, is one of the more important things we do. That then goes back to the point about where we really are translators. Sometimes you're even translating things that you wouldn't think would necessarily need to be translated. Right before I left, the Congressional Budget Office had put out a very important cost impact statement on this defence bill that I just spoke about — where we were working with a conservative Republican — but the analysis by the Congressional Budget Office turned out to be unusually complicated. What did we do? Well the day before I left we put out a three or four page summary and analysis of the Congressional Budget Office report. So we often find ourselves summarising and translating other work. Of course we have a very high standard for the research work and the other work that we will do that for. Back on social security, there is a core group of members right now in one of our two houses of our legislature that has organised themselves as a team to brief other Members of Congress, a team to provide information, a team that responds to various issues and developments. We sometimes will help elected officials organise themselves in this manner to inform each other on some of the issues and choices. I'm not going to go into dissemination in detail but let me make one point. We have increasingly added briefings to the normal approaches to dissemination like faxes and E-mails and mailings. We're doing more briefings for staff, where they get a chance to ask questions, where they get a chance to give feedback, where they get a chance to really talk, in some ways, to each other. So we have an emphasis on briefing staff, and when we can, briefing Members of Congress. Again we may not be the ones to do the briefing. Two weeks before I left I had arranged for two experts to come in and brief various women Members of Congress on the importance of social security to women. We arranged it, it was our idea to put it together. We prepared the materials, but we brought in outside experts who were experts specifically on social security in women. Last two points. One of the other important ways we work is to get our information to the media. The media is obviously a critical source of influence. This is true not just of the national press. We have, over the years, particularly developed our capacity to work with State and local and regional media. Members of Congress pay attention to what their papers back home - in the areas they represent- are saying. The media helps shape the policy makers' view of issues. We also know that, quite frankly, when there's an important budget issue or poverty issue or tax issue that we think policymakers are not paying significant attention to, a media story is sometimes a way to address that gap. So we sometimes say that we use the media to put an issue on policymakers’ radar screens. We are both pro-active and reactive in our work with the media. We answer questions, we provide analyses, but increasingly we'll do things like arrange background briefings about reports or on an issue. In the last year or two we've developed something we found to be successful, which is we will invite editorial writers, people who write editorials for newspapers, on a conference call for about an hour, to discuss an upcoming issue. We also distribute our information to a number of syndicated columnists. I want to mention one final thing. A lot of you have talked about not really having government data, or not having the kind of data that you want. One of the things we've done, which is a small, but important, part of our work, is that sometimes we will encourage policymakers to spend government money to support research and data collection. For example, in 1996 the United States ended a 60 year entitlement of basic income security to poor families. Every year one of the things the Center has done is to underscore the importance of funding the Department of Health and Human Services to do monitoring, evaluation and different studies of the replacement program. So, if there isn't the kind of data we think needs to exist, particularly on poverty information or poverty programmes, we will often work with policy makers to secure the funding for government to do the kind of careful studies that we know, down the road, will be an important part of our work. QUESTION: There's a dilemma that has been posed. Suppose in a state like ours where we have an extreme right-wing government and a legislator approaches you for information about the new scheme that was included in the budget. If you provide this information, this amounts to kind of giving a certificate of approval to the right-wing government, which is literally trying to curtail the rights of the people. If you criticise the scheme, you will be seen as the group which always criticises, so what would you do? Will you help the legislator of such a government, by giving them information and thereby making them much more stronger and more likely to get re-elected again. Or, do you withhold information? NISSENBAUM: If a Member of Congress calls for information we will always answer that question, regardless of the Member’s party or point of view. I think that's a critical component of our credibility and our integrity. We generally believe that whatever reports we prepare we have to distribute to all 535 Members of Congress. I will tell you one other quick thing, which occurred right before I started at the Center. Back in the early 1980s, as you know, the United States was doing substantial budget cutting. Senator Dole, who later ran for President, called one day and spoke to our Director and said, I have been informed by our Budget Committee that in the Agriculture Committee I must cut the food stamp program (I think he said by about $2 billion over three years) as part of our deficit reduction package. (Food stamps is the principal programme of nutrition assistance for the poor in the United States, and the director of our Center, by the way, had administered the food stamp programme in the previous administration.) So Senator Dole called us and said, you have a choice, you can come in and help me design that $2 billion in cuts, which I must make and which will pass. You can come in and help design it in a way that tries to mitigate the damage for the poor, maybe you can find some administrative savings, maybe you can find some fraud savings, or you can stand back and let others advise me how to do it. If we go that route, the people you want to protect may not be protected as well as if you will advise me on how to do it. We went in and helped the Senator design his package. We believed it would be irresponsible to reject this invitation, to stand back and criticise and maintain our distance. That we had an obligation — the cuts were going to happen, one way or the other — to help craft the cuts so that the poorest families would be protected as much as possible. QUESTION: With regard to the legislature, if they represent parties other than the people, then probably it's more difficult to put our cause into their mission. Because if they represent parties presumably they have missions from the parties, not from the people, so I doubt if we can influence them on the way they make decisions, like Mr Dole, for example. Then secondly, when you use experts, do you have to pay for their services? NISSENBAUM: Well, let me give you an example. We manage to do the budget work without a lot of formally trained economists, but the social security issue, which is the single most debated domestic issue right now in our country, has now transformed partly into an argument about debt reduction, and we were asked to testify about the impact of the President's plan on debt. We felt that we didn't have the expertise on that and that there were other economists in Washington that had this expertise and shared our general perspective, and that we could help arrange for them to come in and testify. We had to persuade one economist that it was worth his time, that it was going to be an important piece of testimony, that it was going to get attention, and that it actually was a higher priority than something else he otherwise would do. You can't always do that. To be honest with you, in the case about the social security briefing for women, the expert was a professor at Boston College and she did not have money to fly down, and in that case the Center paid for the flight. That’s not our normal policy, but sometimes it’s necessary. By the way, it's not just that they know more than we know. It's not just the method, it's the messenger. They have to be able to communicate articulately, they have to understand how to talk to policy makers. This particular expert was the best of both worlds. She blended expertise in the subject with terrific communication skills. So in that case since the only way to get her down was to pay for it, we paid for it. We didn’t, however, have to pay for her time. Normally when we connect experts with policymakers, we do not pay for their services. We only pay for their services when we engage them to write a paper or report for us that we then publish. QUESTION: The third question relates to the media. We have problems in drawing interest from the best person in the media, from the editor for example. It is difficult to get his attention to our cause, it's more difficult than getting the attention of junior members of the media, so how do you approach this one? Should you go with the accessible junior reporters or try to reach the often inaccessible senior writer? NISSENBAUM: I don't think there's any one technique that always works. I think, quite frankly, part of the answer is gradually building relationships with the right people over time, so that they come to view you as essential technical support. That just as much as you might call them to urge them to run an editorial on a particular issue, they know that they can call you for background information. Just as we're a source of technical support to policymakers, we're equally a source of technical support to the media. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Whether we have a good, strong working relationship or not, we have developed very extensive media lists: we have a list of the major reporters and editorial writers, for example, who cover budget issues. No matter what we do, whether they return our phone calls or not, we will always send them our analyses. QUESTION: I want to make an illustration about our country, actually, because our legislature is not a really powerful body in Indonesia. There's no power to criticise the government, actually they are just a kind of rubber stamp. But the problem is to collect accurate reliable data from many sources in Indonesia. In the United States, I know the census bureau is reliable, but in Indonesia there are a lot of sources that can claim their data is very accurate, but there must be a doubt about that. I have worked with the ruling party in Indonesia, and what we do with the legislature is to try and make a personal approach to each person, not really an institutional approach, but really try to persuade each person, to try to give our research result to them. But the problem is that in the process of the legislature passing the bill, we don't have any public hearings in Indonesia. So it's impossible for people to go to the legislative body and give them ideas or analyses. Generally we don't have any public hearings, so what I want to say is maybe we need to find another kind of technique, like a personal approach. But the problem is how can we convince them if we don't have any reliable data, even though every single governmental agency has a research and development body or department. Most of them are just kind of cosmetic, they do the research, but the results they just put under the table. This is the problem, so I need your suggestions on what can we do in a situation like that? Thank you. NISSENBAUM: I find one of the places where we are most effective is when I have government data that shows the impact of terminating a benefit, or a government analysis about how the benefits of a tax cut would be distributed. Then I have a much stronger tool because the government is not going to argue against its own source of data. But there is one other thing to say, and that is information can be powerful in good ways and bad ways. Many of you know the United States’ Heritage Foundation. They have a very conservative perspective. They put out a report in the fall that showed that social security was a bad deal for minorities, that minorities did not receive a good rate of return. The Heritage report was gaining attention in the press. Some Members of Congress asked about it. Sometimes the most important thing we do is an analysis of other data where we find significant flaws in the methodology, a problem in the model, or a misleading conclusion because the numbers they used were inadequate, or they interpreted them in a misleading way. Sometimes what we do is not only serve as a truth squad on our issues, but as a truth squad about other groups putting out information. In this case, we issued a major report showing that the Heritage report rested on a series of analytical errors and misuses of data. |
