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Robert Greenstein, Executive Director, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
"Presentation at the First Conference of the International Budget Project," Washington, D.C., December 3, 1997.
It is really a pleasure to talk to all of you today, and to see people from so many places around the world. I have been asked to talk a little about how our Center here in Washington developed and any implications that might have for the kind of work that some of you do. Today the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has about 50 staff. About half of our work is on issues at the national government level and about half at the state or province level. We work on budget and tax issues at both the national level and the state level. We also work on such matters as trends in poverty, and whether it is getting more widespread or less so; trends in the gaps in income between rich and poor, whether they are getting bigger or smaller; and we work on a number of specific areas where the government gets involved in issues that affect low-income people: cash assistance, food assistance, health care, employment programs, and others.
But this wasn't always the case. We started in December 1981 with just three people. The origins of our organization were rooted in some developments in this country during 1981. At the beginning of that year, a new President, Ronald Reagan, took office. And he quickly proposed a bold program that included reductions of unprecedented depth in some programs focused on poor families, and some large tax cuts that disproportionately benefitted wealthy individuals.
Early on, his government very effectively put out material for the media and others that said that they were protecting the poor. The Reagan Administration used a phrase that it was maintaining what it called a "safety net" for what it called the "truly needy." It did have a set of social programs it was protecting from any cuts, but those were primarily programs for elderly people at all income levels, not for poor families.
But because the Reagan Administration was the main source of information for the several months in which the proposals were debated and then made into law, the presentation that poor families were being protected was largely accepted by the media and many policymakers. There was little alternative source of analysis and information on the impacts of these proposals other than some more academic analysis that wouldn't come out until one or two years later, after the decisions had been made.
The second important development that happened that year was that the government of President Reagan was able to pioneer new uses of the process through which these budget decisions were made. Most of the United States NGOs that were concerned about programs for the poor were used to the "old" budget procedures and had difficulty adapting to and understanding how the "new" procedures worked, and they were less effective as a result.
Growth in Center Work
This led to a general view that there was a gap in the NGO world. Our Center was started to help fill that gap. When we started, our initial focus was on the budget for the national government in broad terms. For example, each year when the national budget was released, we would look on the same day in which it was released, to see whether budget cuts were hitting programs for low-income people harder than other constituents. A typical piece we would put out at that point in our early years would say " 15 percent of the national budget is in programs for the poor, but those programs would bear 30 percent of the cuts in the new budget proposal - twice their share."
That was the kind of work we initially did. We also placed particular emphasis on helping other NGOs understand the new budget procedures so they could be more effective in their work on these decisions. And we worked in more depth in these very early years in one area of programs for low-income people - food assistance programs - and that was because that was my background and we knew those well.
As the years went on, we gradually began to get into other areas. In 1984, our third year, we found that while taxes had been going down for high-income people, they had been going up for working poor families - people working but earning low wages. This hadn't been a conscious policy decision by policymakers but had been an unintended effect of some of the policies they had put in place, and it was not well known that this was occurring.
We found a table that a Congressional committee had put together which showed that for a family that was at the poverty line and was working, the share of income paid in taxes had more than doubled at the same time that the taxes for the people with the highest incomes had gone down. And we put out a little report on that, and to our surprise it was covered in several hundred newspapers. So we began to work on tax issues from the standpoint of lower-income people. We also began to analyze the effects of various budget policies, not just on low-income people, but on African-Americans, Hispanics, and women, and that also got particular attention.
By the mid-1980s, our national government had developed a large budget deficit, and there was movement to try to shrink that deficit. A law was put together in Congress that would set a maximum amount of deficit the government could run in any year and would require across-the-board cuts in nearly everything if the deficit was going to be exceeded. Here we found that programs targeted on low-income groups had already been cut more than anything else. This analysis led to efforts taken by a coalition of nearly a hundred NGOs that normally didn't work together to seek an exemption for low-income programs so they would not be cut if the deficit target was exceeded. And that exemption covering virtually all major low-income benefit programs became law.
By the late 1980s we began to look at some other areas, in part because some new people with different areas of expertise had joined our staff. One new staff member, Isaac Shapiro, put together a series of reports which covered every state in the country and looked at how each state compared to other states in its treatment and its help for lower-income families. We released all these reports - all fifty, on fifty states - on the same day. The reports received massive media coverage. But we released the reports by ourselves, and six months later it was as though we hadn't issued the reports, because we did not issue them in conjunction with NGOs in the individual states. And we learned that as an organization located in the capital city, if we wanted to work on issues affecting poor families in the states, the best way to do that was in conjunction with NGOs in those states and to help them have the capacity to do more of this themselves rather than our trying to do it directly out of the capital city.
Our ability to do that was enhanced when Iris Lav came in and began to build a program for us of work on state issues. Initially we focused on helping NGOs in various states work on budget and tax issues in their states. That work was of interest to a number of those NGOs. A number of them had been doing excellent work to highlight problems facing, for example, poor children in their states, and getting sympathetic response for their work only to have the policymakers then say, "But we have no money to do anything about it." This situation led increasingly to the conclusion by many of the NGOs in the states that they needed to begin doing analysis on the budget and tax issues and the tax structures in their states. We began to work with them.
Recent Developments in Center Work
Two years ago here in the United States a very major piece of legislation became law that also shifted from the national government to the states authority over a number of key issues in low-income programs that used to be national. We, in turn, began to work on a number of the specific low-income program areas with groups in the states as well. Today, as mentioned earlier, about half of the Center's work is at the state level and about half at the national level - a major change from where we were a decade ago. We help researchers and NGOs in some states learn of things going on in other states that would be of use. In some cases, we are working with a number of NGOs in different states on a joint project. For example, today NGOs in ten states are working with our assistance to put together reports on the conditions facing working poor families in their state. The fact that there are ten groups acting in concert to generate interest in a particular issue frequently makes it easier to attract attention to the issue in each individual state.
The most recent development for our Center is that the same law that transferred authority over a number of low-income issues from the national government to the states also made very major changes - and in our view very disturbing changes - in the role and responsibility of government in this country toward people who are immigrants in our country. There are a number of fine organizations in Washington that work on immigration, but up until now those organizations did not have to respond to such questions as whether immigrants could get the same assistance as citizens if they were poor - up until now legal immigrants could get the same assistance.
So, given our expertise on budget issues and on specific low-income programs, a number of those immigration groups sought the Center's assistance in working with them to do a great deal of analysis on issues affecting immigrants in these programs. We've been fortunate to have two staff members with expertise in that area, and so that is a new area for us.
As this history may suggest, this is a 16-year story. The expansions of our work have been slow and deliberate. There have been almost as many cases where we were asked, sometimes by another NGO, sometimes by a foundation offering money, to move into another area where we said "No," because we did not feel we had the expertise to jump into that area, and we have always felt that the foundation of all of our work is the quality and the credibility of our work.
Center Guidelines for Effectiveness
We try to do something at the Center that some people, who don't know about us, say "You can't do it." We try to do analysis and to put out information that is credible and trusted and gets attention from people who disagree with us and our policy recommendations, as well as from those who agree and look for guidance to see what we're recommending.
At the same time that we attempt to do that analysis to illuminate the debate, to help other NGOs and to help inform the public and policymakers about some of the issues particularly affecting low-income people that otherwise aren't being given enough attention, we clearly do have an agenda, a mission. We are trying to move public policy in this country in ways that will reduce poverty and will lessen rather than widen the gaps between the richest and the poorest. And some people have said "Well, you can not be seen as doing credible, trusted analyses and have a point of view." We have been able to do it, but the reason is because we only work in areas we really know, and we make sure that in those areas our work is very solid and credible. We don't simply put forward pieces of information or analysis that would support where we would like to see the policy go. We try to cover all of the relevant pieces of information in our analyses.
So we have learned from this not to jump into areas we don't know, to make the foundation of all our work the credibility of our work and the accuracy of the work. We have found that the more we have built recognition and trust for the quality of our work, the more effective we are in making recommendations and advancing specific policy changes.
We also place a great deal of emphasis on how we present the work we do. From the beginning, we have seen our three primary audiences as being policymakers, the media, and the public (through the media and other NGOs). We also maintain close ties with many academics, and they are another one of our audiences, but not one of our primary audiences. This being the case, we have found that what we need to do is to present our material not as an academic would present it in an academic journal, but in simpler, more accessible form.
We find that to do this, we do most of the work of writing analyses in-house. On those occasions where we work with someone who may be in a university to produce a piece that we put out, we then work with that person to translate his or her work into a form that is accessible for people who are not academic researchers. We do this since most policymakers and their staffs aren't trained as academic researchers, nor are most of the people in other NGOs or most journalists. We work with people in universities to translate their material into a form that our audiences can understand and be engaged by.
We also have found it important to consider the timeliness of our reports. Some of them are aimed at a longer-term debate and timeliness is not that critical; others are aimed at debates and processes that are current-time sensitive. In deciding whether to do something we often consider, when does it need to be put out - can we put out something in that time frame?
We have a few reports that we do each year on the same day that an event occurs. Each year our national government puts out new figures on poverty. They get media coverage that night and the next morning. We issue a short analysis of the new data the same day the data are released so our analysis can affect the media coverage.
For all of those reasons, we have an internal process where before deciding to do any particular piece of work, we think of who is the audience for this work. There always are more possible pieces of work we can do than we have time to do, so we try to think strategically and to establish priorities. When I mentioned that our audiences are primarily policymakers, the public and other NGOs, and the media, not every piece we do is aimed at all three audiences. Some are designed for all three, some are designed for one or two of them.
Distribution
Finally, we place a lot of attention on how we distribute our work when it's done: through the mail, through faxes and increasingly these days through the Internet, which in the last couple of years we have found to expand greatly the audience that we can reach with our work. We're constantly looking for new mechanisms to reach broader audiences. We found that distribution is a place where you can never can just sit; you always have to be looking for new avenues.
One new approach this year has been that we have begun to convene about once a month telephone conference calls of editorial writers or newspapers across the country, and syndicated columnists who write in these newspapers. We will get anywhere from six to ten of them on the phone for an hour, we will send them a new analysis in advance, we will offer a ten- or twelve-minute presentation, and then they will ask us questions. Each conference call will focus on an issue on which we have worked and that is a matter of current debate. We have been finding that a substantial portion of those on the call then write editorials on the issue discussed on the conference call.
Conclusion
When we began this work in 1981 I certainly didn't expect that our Center would develop as it has or be fortunate enough to have some of the effects on policies that it did. When we began earlier in this decade to work with NGOs at the state level, I think none of us, including people at the Ford Foundation, who helped fund it, probably expected that as many of the state NGOs would develop to the point that they have in just a few years and become significant factors in the debates in their states to the extent that they have.
Now it seems to us that these trends in the United States actually may be part of a worldwide trend. NGOs have begun to take on more importance throughout the world, something shown by the presence of all of you here today. Having said that, I think we at our Center had a much easier task than almost all of you have in your countries. We have more budget information readily available to us, we have more NGOs to work with that are established than many of you do. In many cases your challenges are greater than those we face.
But by the same token, if we formed to fill a certain vacuum that was felt to be present here in 1981, the vacuums are probably greater in most of your countries. As a result, your work in your countries over time, is probably of greater importance than our work has been here in Washington, D.C. So it is our privilege at the Center to be able to work with you to help put together this conference and to look at the expectation that many of you in the years ahead could have important effects in promoting debates that could benefit tens of millions of people all across the world, many of whom are in fact poorer and in greater need than people who are poor here in the United States. So we look forward to what I hope will be a conference that you find valuable today and tomorrow. Also I have to express my admiration to all of you, not simply for traveling to Washington but for the work that you're taking on, often in tough circumstances in your countries. Thank you.