that means we have 37 more on marriage. we have all the other issues that we outlined. and the one thing that we know would be a mistake would be to start thinking just about changing the legal rules and getting the formal legal equality. if we do that we will falter and then we will have a great wind behind it now and will not succeed. so the bottom line is get to work, and that does mean political in your personal life. >> did you have a comment? that segues nicely into my statement. what are your thoughts on how the impact of this decision, the impact of the decision will have on the discussions around the race and class and sexism in this country? >> fools rush in i guess.

i would hope that the lgbt community would recognize me to continuing that progress is the key to the progress we've made so far which is engagement and political engagement. and what also recognize that both the supreme court and elsewhere around the country we have systematically than limiting what was a limited democracy to begin with and making true self-government harder and harder and would recognize if our political progress and progress on race and gender and a series of other things are intimately tied up in making this really into a self functioning democracy again i recognize that commonality is political. >> i would say that we need to recognize issues of race, class, sex is some are lgbt issues and we have an investment not only in cases like this one, but

comprehensive immigration reform in access to health care. all of these are lgbt issues because people look like the rest of the country. we shouldn't get so into our silo that we forget that. >> there's something about being a minority and you know you will always be a minority. as a lesbian woman, very few women are and the important and constructive thing for me in this case as a plaintiff was recognizing how much struggle and how hard it is to be different all the time. but in my ability to understand and to be compassionate was greatly increased by this struggle. and i think that we were standing on martin luther king's shoulders and rosa parks and cesar chavez and so many others had tried so hard to make that point that it's not okay for me

to be treated differently than anybody else in this work group. if you could grasp all the civil rights movements over the decades that we are just a thought on this line and now lesbian, gay, transgendered people brought their days in court and said we don't want to be treated differently anymore just like all these other people saying i don't want to be treated differently either. >> we are going to open up to a few moments of question and the answer so if you have a question, just raise your hand and eni to become -- amy and rob in the back have microphones. >> can you hear me? okay. very interesting panel. my question is about the legal process once a case can down from the supreme court because i

had perhaps the uninformed thought that it would only apply to the two named plaintiffs couples. was there any question about that and if so, how did the circuit handle at? and also, or any of you surprised or should i have been surprised it happened so quickly after the supreme court decision? >> you're technically right the only person who can benefit from the judgment in the case are the plaintiffs'. if the case wasn't a class-action, technically those people are the only ones that have the benefit. except it's issued a much broader order. i'm not sure you actually have the power to do that. but that never stood in his way before. [laughter] but whether he had the power to do it or not, nobody objected

until the time to fight file the notice of appeal ran and since that ran that is a final judgment in his order is final. the effect of the supreme court decision of course was to say the case ended in district court. if the case had been legitimately had peeled you perhaps could have objected the scope of the order but since there was nobody that had the power to appeal once the government did i think that is entirely right. i think i was a little surprised how fast the circuit went but the governor and the attorney general who were bound by the order said they didn't want to stay back of the district court so it made sense once the supreme court said this case ended in the district court and the party is bound by yet and said they didn't want to say.

>> thanks for your work. what do you think [inaudible] will there be any areas of the federal recognition of the partners and second do you think california will go away most other states have gone when they allowed marriage which was to eliminate domestic partnerships and operate everyone to marriage? >> starting with the second part first right now we have marriage and a registered domestic partnership available to same-sex couples so couples can choose to do either one. each of those has more less the same consequences under the state law but may have different consequences under the federal

law for the purpose of federal benefits. it's not yet been tested in very many contexts whether the federal government will be providing registered to domestic partners with any sort of federal benefits. most of the statutes dhaka in terms of spouses or married couples but there are some exceptions. there is a provision in the social security act that says basically a couple will be recognized as married if they are married and the state where they live or if they have the right of succession under state law. so it could be that in some circumstances like that where the federal statute has particular language that there will be some federal regulation for domestic partners. >> another question? >> i was wondering if there are

any plans to be moving to ohio or nebraska. >> we don't plan to be plaintiffs in any other legal cases ever. [laughter] so probably i think i am answering your question we aren't going to fall into this that we were describing earlier. >> be careful when you're traveling. >> i am making the note because this is the legal advice. >> we prefer flying. >> i would like to thank all of you for your presentations on your work and i would also like to suggest something sandy touched on which is the educational experience of being

able to tell other people that you are married. you mentioned it at the rental car counter but. we were in the window in 2008 and i have found that the difference of being able to say to someone that's my husband, we are married, their response and their understanding of who we are and how we behave and how they need to be paid to us changes when we do that and they suddenly realize many times that they don't care, that there is no issue and they say find. it's almost like being at the grown-ups table because grown-ups get married and to you very is the single most important decision one does make as an adult so to be denied that ability to make that decision o course is a great disservice and

it is a humiliating situation. so for us to be able to make that important decision to be legally married is the revalidating and i think people who experience that have somewhat of a similar feeling that it is a very profound experience to make the decision to be able to propose to somebody and have it the real and get married and have it be real. so far we are loving the difference. >> thank you so much. we heard earlier about the current administration setting up some benefits for couples who are married in one state and move to a state that doesn't recognize that marriage. if it is up to the administration to set those benefits, can the next one undo that?

>> it depends. on immigration is by statute does the that performs the marriage so i don't think a subsequent administration can try to stop recognizing couples who come in and get state in recognized in a state. and i also think as a practical matter when you start doing when you unwind recognition may be precisely the kind of administrative nightmare that people at times suggested getting rid of doma. so i think that it would have to be harder ideologically set on doing it in order to want to attempt that. i think it would be a bad situation some cases in addition they are determined by the administrative rules and have to go through the whole process to reverse it and i just think it is pretty unlikely that a future

even republican administration would have much of an appetite to try that. >> it is a little unclear to me how this problem with doma works. what happens if you have kids and need food stamps and you are on the program or something like that any state that doesn't have marriage equality? are they going to be able to withhold these federal benefits from you? >> if the federal statute says the federal government recognizes your relationship if you are married in a state that mary's same-sex couples then i know i don't think the state can start treating you for federal purposes as if he were not married. but it's really going to be

program by program. >> if you go as i mentioned before there are specific faq's about the state and federal programs and this is another area we are awaiting guidance from the administration and they will do as much as they can to make sure couples are treated equally to the fullest extent allowed. >> another question over here. >> is there any precedent regarding standing to challenge legislation that isn't necessarily the savory from these decisions that you are concerned about moving forward? >> the issue we like to take is a broad view as we can possibly take. in the way i read there is no standing decision in the case. everybody agreed there was a legitimate case or controversy. the way that i read that

question in the perry case is the fault of the elected officials refused to defend the state law and the state does not appoint someone that has some responsibility back to the state to defend it, then you cannot go into federal court. know that doesn't concern me terribly. >> is that it for the questioned? yes. >> i will speak loudly. what impact if any is obama coming out in favor of lgbt gay marriage during the case on the political impact of the decision and the ultimate legal impact of the decision? >> well, the president's decision that he was going to

support marriage for same-sex couples that he thought was unconstitutional to deny federal recognition resulted in the government changing sides of the doma case. i think there's an enormous advantage when you go to the supreme court to have the solicitor general on your side saying yes we think this is unconstitutional. i think it changes the calculus and all of the federal courts where that was up but i think there would be the least of it. it's no accident that at the same e. election where barack obama won the second term the voters of minnesota became the first to reject the amendment for same-sex couples and voters in maine, maryland and washington state all voted to have marriage for same-sex couples. so we went beyond state legislatures began modestly into the popular votes. and i think the president was a major help in making that happen. and i think the importance of it just cannot be underestimated.

>> i think what he did, sort of going through the micro, she talked about how long it took him and how long he got there to not be supportive and he referenced his own kids and he said that they had talked to him and they said you're not on the same page we are on it. you have to be more like us and i thought that was instructive to the country and the parents and the people that this is what happens. you do change over time if you let yourself. and then on the level i think as a world leader you can see world leaders changing the way they are running their countries. and it's happening since he did that. it's happening today. it's happening because he is a world leader and he's also a dad and those things are also powerful and profound. and they all look to him as our country leader and father and

feel proud and they say i'm not going to be behind barack obama. i'm going to be a leader, too so he is a remarkable leader. >> okay so this is going to close our program this evening. i want to remind everyone there is a reception on the second floor. all of the great works the panel have done and all of you in the room have been a part of. with the number of operational elevators with a room size filled with great folks like yourself but please be patient with us. [applause]

>> thank you for coming. it's not just the security forces that have been doing battle with supporters of the muslim brotherhood today in the streets of cairo. the associated press reports local residents opposed to today's protest by the brotherhood took up arms and set up checkpoints throughout the capitol and clashes erupted as the police fired tear gas at least 17 people have been killed in the latest fighting and tens of thousands of muslim brotherhood backers to to the streets tuesday across egypt on this morning's washington journal we got an update on the violence in egypt and the response. >> josh rogan joins on the call from "newsweek" daily beast. good morning mr. rogan.

>> caller: good morning. >> what is your sense of the aid issue at this point and to rollin to your answer how much are we talking about. what does it mean to the country of egypt and what kind of leverage does it represent to the u.s.? >> sure. it is committed to giving egypt about $1.3 billion in direct economic and other support for the civilian government. the military aid has been going on for years. as a result of the peace deal that president carter struck between israel and egypt, and it has become a political football on this the date over how much pressure we put on the government to abide by things like respect for human rights, the rule of law, refraining from violence and all these other things that now seem given the

violence this weekend. there is a lot of pressure on the administration to suspend the aid and there's a few important things we should note. the military aid has already been given the egyptian military largely so there is not another on the pending obama administration until april of 2014. moreover, it's important to note that the countries have pledged over $13 million, we are talking about saudi arabia and kuwait to the new egyptian government, more than ten times of the u.s. annual aid so it isn't clear that the employee of the eight would actually have such a dramatic effect on the egyptian military. because they would make a wholesale change and have their approach in their actions in this very critical time for them. and so the obama administration has been very clear they are not interested in using it as political leverage and this issue has come up several times

since the revolution. the position really has been changed so we shouldn't be expecting that they are going to change their mind and suspend any time soon. >> described the pressure in congress that you mentioned. how deep is it and held sevier and heavy is that pressure and who is it coming from? >> what's interesting is the pressure for the conditions can first when the morsi government was elected and the congress past several restrictions that would have required the obama administration to cut off the aid of the morsi government had several the front things in their area of political and economic mobilization. of course morsi government didn't do any of those things. the obama administration to years in a row, once john kerry and once hillary clinton waived those.

then what happened is there were several people in congress, most prominent among them, senator patrick leahy, the chairman of the state and foreign operations appropriations committee in the senate but also marco rubio, john mccain and some others who came up with various ideas on how to increase restrictions. those ideas have been debated for a very long time and none of those have been tasked yet but we can expect they will be in the round of appropriations bills pitting of course the aid restrictions and the administration can always claim they must give the aid based on the national security concerns. so there is always a limit to what the congress can force the administration to do. and in the end of the administration really wants to give the e egyptian military the aid and they will find a way to do it. >> i want to read you a quote of the washington journal this morning and get you to elaborate if you can. there is a possibility of civil

war from one senior u.s. official on intelligence and there's a dangerous possibility that egypt goes the way of syria. >> there are some similarities and some areas where this is not the same as syria. we should remember there's a lot of foreign influence right now much like in syria you have countries like saudi arabia, the united emirates and kuwait lining up with the military and the interim government. but you have countries like turkey winding up with the muslim brotherhood. right now i wouldn't say that it has reached that point but it's not on that scale. we haven't seen the levels of atrocity in egypt that we have seen in syria. let's hope it doesn't get to that stage. i think that is what everyone is trying to avoid. >> what will you be looking at in the next couple of hours and

days? >> in egypt we are looking for signs that the military is going to decide that however much violence and persecution conducted is enough and that it's pulling back and will allow for some states and some healing with a few days so that we can hopefully get to the point both sides would consider moving to some sort of discussion that might lead to some sort of negotiation. in the end here there is very little but washington or any other foreign country can do to force the egyptian military and the interim government to stop it sort of campaign of violence against civilians. but the egyptian government at some point will decide that they have done their job and it's time to return to the relative

calm and move on to the next stage which is some sort of a political process that may lead to some sort of a reconciliation. >> josh rogin senior correspondent for newsweek daily beast thanks for your time and insight this morning. >> of course. >> reaction from across the region the iraqi foreign minister met yesterday with u.s. secretary of state john kerry. the foreign minister reiterated that iraq was a dependable h violence in egypt and expressing his concern that it may spread to the region. here is some of what he had to say. >> we live in a region [inaudible] the terrible defense that have happened yesterday in the jet. we have the ongoing -- in egypt. we have the ongoing investigations for months.

neither the government or the demonstrators have used such a level of violence. [inaudible] second, it is reliable and dependable. >> in washington congress continues on their august recess. the president on vacation in martha's vineyard. from boston the republican national committee a short while ago approving a resolution blocking to tv networks from hosting the republican presidential primary debate. the vote affirms the chairman is threat against cnn and nbc unless the networks dropped their plans to air programs about possible democratic presidential contender hillary clinton. the vote at the summer committee meeting in boston was unanimous. and part of the statement that the rnc part of that resolution

read the rnc shall, quote, endeavor we were right in my view to fully fund the military since 9/11 but what we did is we deprived the state department and the u.s. agency of international development of funds. and there is other results. an enormous gap between the size and power of the pentagon and the size and power of the state department are illustrated with little like samples from bob gates, who was an outstanding defense for president bush and obama. he gave a brilliant speech years ago. secretary gates, we have more military personnel and carrier battle group, the united states navy than we have american diplomats all over the world.

here is another if that doesn't convince you. we have more members of the armed forces marching bands of the navy, air force, army, marines. true fact, than american diplomats. last year president obama signed a memo calling for deferred action for certain undocumented young people who came to the u.s. as children and have pursued education or military service.

in your leader the center for american progress yesterday hosted a panel discussion looking at the result, success and challenges of that initiative and how it will impact the u.s. immigration system. this program is an hour and 20 minutes. >> hello, everybody and thank you for coming. my name is phil let and i may senior policy analyst for immigration here at the center for american progress. we are glad to be hosting this even on the first anniversary of the dever action for childhood are rivals directive. actually just one year ago today, we began accepting applications for daca since he announced the directive three months earlier in june of 2015. daca represents a new usage of the executive authority and prosecutorial discretion to prioritize who the u.s. immigration enforcement focuses on, mainly criminals rather than in this case young authorized immigrants. people who grew up in this country and our american in

every way but their papers. daca gives eligible immigrants a work authorization, but unlike the legislative efforts such as the dream act, daca can't actually get permanent legal status. and it is at best a temporary fix to a larger problem of a broken immigration system. and the lack of a pathway to legal status for unauthorized immigrants. just over 1.7 million people are estimated to be eligible for daca with just over 900,000 of them eligible to apply immediately. and given the uncertainty in the first few months of the program, remember it began during the presidential reelection when there was the possibility that if elected, mitt romney what end daca and resend the directive. it's remarkable how many people have applied. ..

today's event is both about trying to see what can be done to remedy these challenges and also looking to the future we'll want to know how we can improve outreach around daca can. we also want to know what daca can can teach for the

it would be many times as as daca and would share many pit pals. more importantly the today's event is only beginning after conversation. we'll snead to more about best practices r practices for service providers or government officials or why disparities continue persist among different groups when it comes to application rates and acceptance rates. we hope the event will spur further inquiry into the subject. we'll begin with an overview with new research by tom wong, head of an interdisciplinary team who has been analyzing daca data. we have a great panel to respond to the findings. professor wong is assistant of political science at university of california ad san diego. he is a leader in statistical model predict how members of congress might vote, or will vote considering how he has done

so far on immigration reform. when it comes to issues of undocumented young people, this is issue that is very personal tos tom, he himself was an undocumented immigrant once. like so many others tom's parents brought him here at a young age and stayed here when it expired. tom is very active in advocacy around daca with the san diego dream team. please welcome me in dr. wong. [applause] >> you know what? i'm not going to risk spilling that water. that would be my last talk here. okay, well, thank you, phil, for those warm remarks and thank you all for coming here today. there is a lot to go through in the report so we'll jump right into it.

so as phil mentioned this is the product of the work of an interdisciplinary team. so this includes political scientists sociologists, those with experience in immigrant political participation, civic engagement and demography. so, it is no surprise that daca elicits mixed emotions on the part of undocumented youth in particular because for many we hear that daca is simply not enough and i hope that is something we can get into in the discussion today, but i want to start with a few quotes that sort of illustrate the mixed emotions around daca which segues into the mixed findings we get when we evaluate the first year of the existence of daca. so here we have a few different quotes from a new innovative survey, actually administeredded by undocumented youth, undocumented grad students in

southern california about the civic engagement of undocumented youth. so as it relates to daca here we see one person say, i feel free in the u.s. now. i'm no longer living in fear. another, i was able to get part-time jobs and start saving money for tuition. driver licenses, building credit, those are some practical benefits of daca. one more person, it has motivated me to continue organizing. so again, this sort of resonates with the theme that daca is not enough. that the end goal here is a path to citizenship. but, here is another response. i am grateful for the opportunities that i have through daca, but i'm still scared for my parents. daca does not protect them, my entire family and i'm still in fear of losing them. so again, these mixed emotions around daca actually reflect findings about mixed results one year into the implement attention of daca. some main research questions that we pursue in our report, is daca performing evenly across

the country? are any particular groups being left behind? these could be national origins groups, men versus women, et cetera. what impact have community-based organizations have had? one focus of our report is to identify things that may be useful for service providers on the ground. lastly, has restrictive state level discrimination policies like sb-1070 stymied daca? how do we answer these questions? through numbers. if there were an academic presentation i would throw out some equations to stroke my academic ego, but, suffice it to say, we are using data obtained from a freedom of information act request. phil mentioned the overall numbers thus far. they do a great job in reporting summary statistics about daca but in order to answer some questions that we're interested in, we need better data. we have 465, 509 individual

level records from applicants, from august to march 22nd, 2013. and so, quickly the national portrait, i won't spend too much time on it. this is based on the last release of daca information from uscis but things still are, for the most part true. over half a million applicants. over 400,000 approved. 99 of applications with final decisions have been approved. so one of the numbers have been thrown out is, 75% approval rate. so if we think about the case review status of daca applications, we have approved, we have denied, we have pending. so if we throw pending into the mix and think about approvals, in light of pending applications, then the approval rate is about 75%. but if we think about those applications with final decisions, meaning approved or

denied, we're talking about 99%. the most recent release out today, changes this number a bit. so that is 98.3% approval rate for those with final decisions and 1.7% of applications with final decisions have been denied. and we'll talk more about the national origins view in a second. but here, daca applicants are overwhelmingly latin american. okay. so, i do apologize because this is in part stroking my academic ego. it is throwing a bunch of numbers and stuff at you but this stuff is actually meaningful. so one of the first questions that we address, is daca performing evenly across the country? and the answer is no. so when we look at the implementation rate, or, the actual number of applications that have been received in a state relative to what we expect, we can begin to identify where daca is underperforming

and whether or not that underperformance is statistically significant, meaning it is not random. the main takeaway here there are 13 states that are underperforming when it comes to daca. california, texas, florida, arizona, nevada, massachusetts, and there's a printout of the power point presentation. so you will have this slide. there is some commonalities across these states. all southern border states are included in this table. these states tend to have the largest numbers of daca-eligible youth. these states also tend to have the largest foreign-born populations, have larger asian population, relative to other states, and have almost twice as much hispanic latinos in the states relative to other states. so this is about identifying where new or bolstered outreach related to daca is needed. so i was able to rerun this analysis this morning so instead

of face timing with my three-year-old triplet boys this morning which i deeply regret now, because the slide didn't make it in, but it is okay, phil, so i did rerun the analysis based on the updated numbers released today. this table remains unchanged. the 13 states are the same. there is one new addition though and that's the district of columbia. so in the past report d.c. was actually, sort of performing as we would expect but now it is underperforming and that difference is statistically significant. so, that was about identifying where newer, bolstered daca outreach may be needed this. is about identifying to whom the outreach should be targeted. here we're talking about whether or not daca is reaching all groups evenly. and so here another table that you have in the printout but

here's the main takeaway. when we take the individual level records from the foia data, sort all of those individuals into their country of birth or region of origin, and then we begin to evaluate what we severe sus what we expect, we can then identify particular national origin groups or particular regions that are underrepresented in the sample. and so here what we see is that applicants born in mexico are actually doing very well in the daca process. they are actually overrepresented in the pool of daca applicants. those from central america, asia and europe on the other hand are underrepresented in the pool of applicants so far and for these three groups this underrepresentation is also statistically significant. so just a reminder here i'm going through sort of the top

line findings and this discussion hopefully will unpack some of the receipts why. okay. so we can move beyond national origins and this is where i do apologize because this should have been removed because this is all about stroking academic ego but this is just a multivariant regression analysis. this is a way to take all of the data, analyze the data while controlling for other factors. now, underrepresentation is one thing and new or bolstered outreach to those particular national origin groups can correct that underrepresentation but are all groups experiencing daca sort of equally? well another way we can address that question it look at denials. so when we think about approvals versus denials, we can ask ourselves, are any particular groups disproportionately being denied? so this may be one of the most pivotal questions not just from

the sort of policy point of view but also for service providers on the ground. and so this table here, answers that question, controlling for the age of the applicant, the sex of the applicant and where that applicant is from. so the main takeaways here, there may be strong reasons to suspect that mexican-born applicants may be discriminated against in the daca process. when we think about things like sb-1070, alabama's hp-56, et cetera, there is clear focus. it is not about white european undocumented immigrants for the most part. we think about sheriff arpaio and we think about tent city and who is in there. there is clear racial and ethnic direction of those policies. we can think perhaps mexican-born applicants are more likely to be denied in the daca process. now, they also form the largest bulk of applicants. and so lots of mexican-born

applicants maybe which would expect a lost denials, or a higher rate of denials relative to other groups. that's not what we see. mexican-born applicants are the least likely out of all groups to be denied. so what we can do, is evaluate denial rates for other groups relative to mexican-born applicants since they represent the lowest rate of denials. so when we mush all groups together then we can sort of say, this sort of nice little statistic. all other daca applicants are 1.8 times more likely to be denied than mexican-born applicants and this result is statistically significant. we want to unpack this a little bit so this is where the multivariant analysis comes in. so in one of the models here we actually take each of those national origin groupings and compare denial rates to the denial rate for mexican-born

applicants. here what we see is the following. south americans are doing okay. their denial rates are on par with mexican-born applicants. central americans, asians, and europeans are about 1.8 times some that average of 1.8 times more likely to be denied than mexican born applicants. the most staggering number is that the other category, which is comprised mostly of african-born daca am pants, they are seven times more likely to be denied than a mexican-born applicant. this again is about identifying to whom daca outreach should be targeted. if we see disproportionately higher denial rates for central americans, asians, europeans and extreme end for the other category, mostly african-born applicants, maybe this can provide some sort of insight for service providers to design new

outreach programs. i will skip this. okay. so, we can also think about denials, not just by sort of, you know, group being racial and ethnic group or country of birth or region of origin. we can also think about male versus female and age structure of daca applicants. and here, what we see here is that in general all else equal, men, even though they have fewer daca applications in than women, are 1.4 times more likely to be denied. so that is the general finding. when we sort of throw this information into the multivariant model, what we can do is actually identify a particular sort of kinds of men and particular kinds of women. in particular we can look at a 31-year-old male and compare denial rates for that particular individual to a 23-year-old male. we picked 23 years old because that is the average age of a

denied applicant. so what we see 31-year-old males are 4.3 times more likely to be denied than 23-year-old males. and so this combines the findings for sex and age. that males are more likely to be denied and that older applicants are also more likely to be denied. and the finding for females, a 31-year-old female is 3.7 times more likely to be denied than a 23-year-old female. this graph kind of shows the denial rates and how they increase with age for males and for females. so we're also interested in potential facilitating factors for daca. so what is happening on the ground that leads to increased daca applications? and so the first thing that we looked at, are those immigrant serving organizations. those non-profits that serve immigrant communities and one cut of the data shows an

undeniable positive relationship, meaning more immigrant-serving organizations means more daca applications. so you can think of the daca clinics, daca workshops, everything that these organizations are doing. also we have new daca iphone apps that help individuals sort of determine whether or not they are eligible for daca. all of these things, combine to improve the overall implementation after the program. but, when we cut the data a different way, the results are less clear. and so we can think about the overall number of daca applications and we want to see more of them but we can also think about the different implementation rates across states of daca. and so what this is, looking at, well, how many applicants have been in the state relative to how many there are? because when that number reaches 100%, that means everybody who is eligible has been up toed by

daca. so when we sort of look at different metrics of immigrant serving organizations and different outcomes like implementation rates we see less clear results. these are three different ways we look at whether or not the density of immigrant serving organizations actually has an impact on implementation rates and all of these results are statistically insignificant. now we can remove outlyers there new york and come california, because they have a large number about immigrant-serving organizations but the results are unchanged. more immigrant-serving organizations, more daca applications. more immigrant serving applications does not translate into higher implementation rates. to save time, for those policies designed to drive undocumented immigrants out of the country or

underground to self-deport, 1070, they are not having any sort of impact whatsoever on daca. they are not driving undocumented youth away from the country to the point where they are not even here to apply. there is absolutely no relationship. for the kris kobachs of the world, sorry, what you're doing is not having an effect on dacaca. here, main conclusions because i think i run past my time. daca is not performing evenly across the country. 13 states plus the districts of columbia are places where we identified underperforming and where this underperformance is statistically significant. central americans, asians, europeans and others are statistic i significantly more likely to be denied than our reference group which is mexican-born applicants because mexican-born applicants again are the least likely to be denied. males are 1.4 times more likely to be denied than females and we see this result also intersect with age.

so older applicants are statistically significantly more likely to be denied than younger applicants and while immigrant-serving organizations are having a measurable effect the results that we sort of find are unclear. lastly, this is the general sort of take away. a lot has been done with daca so far but a lot of work remains. [applause] >> all right. thank you so much, tom. let me introduce the great panel we have to discuss really interesting findings. in addition to tom, next to him we have roberto gonzalez, assistant professor of education at harvard university.

erica andula found irof drm and finally audrey singer, senior fellow in the metropolitan policy program in brookings. erica, turning from the data to a more personal narrative, as somebody received daca, what has it meant to you and the dreamer community as a whole? >> yeah, so, i think being a dreamer, not only advocate is little different than overall population of dreamers but to me i think it was more than a personal benefit. it was a win. so many years of advocacy. some years trying to come out of the shadows and doing all those things to put a face to the undocumented community. it was really a win for us but also i guess on a personal level, and you know, having a family that has been targeted by

arpaio, and anything else in arizona, you know, having a mother that wasn't able to work because of a raid that she was in when arpaio was doing his things. it was very, i guess it impacted me so much i was able to get a job and able to contribute a lot more to the household. and but again, some of the quotes that you showed, it was just interesting to me that the same day that i was able to get an offer for a job, the exact same day, i come home and then immigration knocked on my door, right? they tried to take my mother and my brother. and so, it kind of just shows that, it is important to have this. sort of like a step forward but at the same time for us we can't focus on the wins we have on a personal level because we have a lot more wins to fight, a lot more battles, that we need to get through so our families are

not in the same position because i'm not okay with just having a job. i need to have my family with me, to make sure that i am, as happy as i can be. >> okay. audrey, hard to follow that up but i do want to ask, since you worked with much of the same foia data you've also been interviewing service providers and applicants so what jumps out from you about the data. >> sure. tom and i have been playing around with the data in different ways so i have some, i developed a like a profile of the people who have applied for daca so far, and, so, it's a, we've got about 87% of all accepted applications in this data set. they're not estimates. they're real, they represent real people and it allows to know more about this population and characteristics of this population. but we don't yet know much about the people who have not applied.

by definition this is an elusive population. so, the data that we have provides a window into this daca, or dream group. and the portrait is still emerging because the program is ongoing. applications are still being accepted, and adjudicated. this is just a snapshot in time. more than half of those estimated immediately eligible have applied. the success is very high, as tom pointed out already. nearly equal numbers about young men and women, have applied. women are slightly older. they come from nearly every country in the world by my down, there is 192 countries represented but the vast majority are 75% are from mexico. central americans make up another 10% of the total, with el salavador and honduras and guatemala being three largest

groups. south americans make up 7% of the total. peru, bra sir, colombia and ecuador in that order. four largest groups, asians, comprise about 4% of the total. south korea ranks fifth in all applications so it stands out from a lot of other asian groups but philippines, india, and pakistan are the next three largest groups and notably china is not on the list of the top 25 and the top 25 include any country with more than 1,000 applications. and am can't and europeans make up make up 1% each. poland and nigeria are the largest groups there. they also live in every state and washington, d.c. 28% are in california. another 18% in texas. and along with new york and illinois, those four states have more than half of all daca applicants.

and, the most, some of the most interesting things about this group have to do with their age and a large share are teenagers, high school age. a time when we're all making important transitions into adulthood, drivers licenses, graduating from high school. applying for jobs. perhaps, applying for college or joining the military. these applicants are very -- relatively young. more than a third or 36% were 18 or younger when they applied. only 24% were 24 years of age or older. in the middle, 19-23-year-olds, largest group, 40%. so, they're relatively young and they were young when they arrived. two thirds of them were 10 years of age or younger. one-third of them were five years old or younger. so this is a very, a group that's been in the u.s. for a

long time. the majority have been in the united states for a decade or more. and that's important given their age obviously. they have spent a good portion of their life in the united states, by definition. and, another thing about youth. i think erica's comments really point to this, is because many of them came here as young people they're likely to be in, once they get daca, they are likely to have a very different status from other people in their household. younger, older, siblings, including and including parents and other adults. so this is, this is, the big discussion that's also brewing now about how to, how to handle this. i don't know if you want me to talk about the other stuff now. >> we can get into later. >> i'll tell you, a couple of, i've been interviewing organizations that are

implementing, helping people apply for daca and there are three main things that i've been hearing and i will talk about them more, i mean when we have a fuller discussion because i don't want to take up too much time but i've gotten a lot of insights into the pace and trend of applications, what we're seeing seeing in terms after tapering of daca applications. what makes a case easy? what makes a case hard. insides to the population that is not applying, that is not being served either. and the third thing that, it has been really enlightening is that, the staff at these non-profits who are running clinics and providing legal service, many of them are lawyers, are very much defining the methods of documenting and undocumented status. and so, this is a very important thing that is happening organically in different places. people are strategizing,

perhaps, with groups that they're associated with. but, this is a really important part of the process as we think about a larger legalization program and the meaning of documenting continuing residence in the united states. >> great. all right. roberto, i know you've been putting together one of the most wide-ranging surveys of undocumented youth, both those eligible and those applied. tell us about the survey and what you found. . .

between cash and professional degree. today my colleague veronica and i in collaboration with the immigration policy center and the center for the study of immigrant integration believe some preliminary finding someone to briefly share those findings with you all. what we are focusing on is roughly 1400, i guess 1402 survey respondents already received dachka. we are finding strong evidence

that recipients are benefiting from increased access to the american dream so for example 61% of those young people reported they have a new job since then, 61% have driver's licenses, 54% have a bank account, 38% have a credit card. but as we all know, daca's benefit the temple area and and partial. daca recipients want us further social integration. a real american and want to be american. an overwhelming number of respondents, 94% of them said if given a chance to receive citizenship they would, they would apply for citizenship. there's another side to the story. tom alluded to it and said it

erika andiola. immigrant communities have witnessed the shrinking of rights, an increase in enforcement efforts such that some 1100 people would they have been deported over the last several years and that undoubtedly had an affect. nearly 50%, of every two of our respondents, report that they worry all the time for most of the time that a family member or friend will be deported. two thirds of them know somebody who has been deported. 14% of them have a parent or sibling who has been deported and 50% know a friend, neighbor, co-worker or someone else in their life has been deported. daca recipients don't live in a vacuum. they are part of families and

communities and their fates are tied to what happened to the parents or neighbors and so forth. overwhelmingly respondents indicated their families would benefit from immigration reform so these numbers are staggering. 86% said their mother would benefit from immigration reform. 75% report their father would benefit from immigration reform. 62% reported a sibling would benefit from the immigration reform and 60% said another family member would benefit from immigration reform. the story here is one of important although partial access to the american dream, but we still have a lot of work to do. >> tom, let me wait you in on what you just heard. >> there is so much.

in terms of roberto gonzalez's survey this is one step from a research perspective. in terms of how we can integrate daca and how it performed in its first year and what undocumented use are doing with daca the next step is research integrating this entire process with the broader immigration reform debate to figure out what ought -- undocumented use are doing with their daca status. this is something we prefer to be counterfactual and causal inference. this is what if legalization happen? all of those questions and answers mentioned in the survey are incredibly telling and lead to urgency and need for immigration reform, but something a lot of undocumented you if i talk to share this motivation to use their daca

status to prove something, to prove to whoever is out there that they are full the american, every sense of the word except in paper and they can actually use this status to succeeds and to succeed beyond expectation and that is something i get from roberto gonzalez's comments. using daca and a new status undocumented you have, as evidence why we need a broader pact to citizenship, and informed policy, these are heartbreaking stories. i only meant you today but i follow the youtube video, these things dramatize and humanize the undocumented experience.

stories like yours, i am not afraid to say they evoke emotions in me and you are all looking at me because these are things that in the twenty-first century, in 2013 our immigration policies should not be geared towards separating families, separating american families, we need to team up because we can do a lot with this data so painted a profile, identifying and needs is a research opportunity moving forward especially when it comes to program evaluation, comparing out reach strategies of organizations identifying best practices. it does represent the precursor to a broader utilization program and getting this right means potentially getting it right for eleven million others. >> that segways nicely.

let's take a deeper dig in citing the profile and organizations thome let's start with the profile. i am struck by the differences in what groups are applying and denying so what are the obstacles that are keeping people in different communities from fully accessing daca? >> i will take a stab at it. i think what i am hearing and reading from other people is there are a couple key things. one is a lot of people don't realize they qualify for daca even though the criteria, we often find them, people don't necessarily take that in and think they're going to do that. that is one thing. other people especially if they are young men not realize they

are undocumented and some parents, once they start going through these moments like applying for things like a driver's license, they understand that so that is another thing. accost of applying is $465 and if you are young, not working or working in low-wage job and your parents are too, may take awhile to scrape together the money to apply so i think that is another thing and the final thing which may be the biggest is people don't feel like they have the requisite documentation strategy to prove they have been continuously president in the

united states, the requirement is you had the presence since june 15th, 2007. the older you are the harder it is to show that on a regular basis. that may be why we are seeing this popularization screw young -- bcu young. >> no mistake those who got at the scene early with the and dreamers and for those who haven't applied and the late in applying, for those who have been out of school for any number of years, those who are growing older, having responsibilities in their households and communities, it

is a much tougher efforts to provide all the documentation necessary. >> i would add part of the evidenciary requirements are about continuous residency but there's also the very basic sort of requirement in establishing certain nationality, where were you born, the you have a birth certificate, are you a u.s. citizen or a national of another country who was done to -- documented in the united states, so part of the survey is the survey room, the set of daca related questions, not having a birth certificate and one reason they have not applied for daca so when we look at the numbers and see the knowledge from mexican born applicants are statistically significantly lower but there is a good reason

for it and that has to do with the work of the mexican consulate. i was able to speak with folks for not this but the panel. we are talking about across the country increasing staff and increased hours and increase the acceptability, specifically for those daca eligible youth who say i am putting my application together and the need my birth certificate and there is an effort among the mexican government to try to facilitate that process on line to get making a birth certificate and a flying identity documents much easier. i have not heard the same for other consulates. >> i am not an expert but i would say i do applications and

drive and what i have noticed is sometimes people in the community going to a lawyer or don't know about free services and so combining those two leaves people, not even trying to apply because we don't think of applying for anything on immigration without being tested with a lawyer or in the committee with a lot of no patios and so that is the big one as well. they think oh my god, i did know there was free ways of doing this. i went to a lawyer charging a thousand dollar prophesies so there is a lot of really -- applied bose for $455. >> the good sense of the overall

mexican immigrant applicant might be more likely to have applied. what is going on in the asian and particularly african communities, seeing such low numbers? >> when the first bits of the cage in information were being released, pretty high up on that list. in another area where it was the latest pocket of chinese nationals and chinese diaspora there is a sense among immigrants in the l a area that more out reach needed to be conducted in mandarin or cantonese to target chinese daca eligible youth. they got that sense because korean ethnic media was doing a great job. and language media does, not

just informing people about daca and basic requirements for it but also providing testimonials of undocumented youth going through the daca process. let's not forget the best recruiters for daca are documented youth who have gone through the process and can speak to the process so early on in another batch that i received, it was not the geography of chinese applicants in the l a area but very clear under representation and what that meant was the advocacy organization in that area reaching out to chinese ethnic media to try to replicate the same model spanish-language media has innovated. let's talk about daca and the requirement and talk to people who have gone through the process. korean language media and chinese language media tried to do that, but numbers do not show it as very successful so far.

in terms of african born applicants i have nothing to say except speculation which is one african born applicant in terms of language diversity, i think of asian language diversity and it is pretty complex. of we think of the african continent the language diversity is exponentially more diverse, when we think of language specific outreach strategies, culturally specific and sensitive outrage strategies i have not heard of many organizations specifically focused on african audrey singer -- daca applicants. for those who put them together will be leaders as far as i can tell. >> i want to echo some of the things that tom wong has said.

a lot of this is speculation because we're talking to different people at different points of time and it has not been very systematic. tom is right that the outreach that has happened or not happened to different groups is one of the determining factors on the type of our region this idea of having testimonials and success stories play a bigger role, very important. and i think also when you look at the approval rates by country of origin and region of origin there is another necessary lyle from the caribbean and its seems the outreach and coordination and information flow, several different languages and lots of countries and clustering of

these groups in the country. they are a small group, but another opportunity for greater out reach. >> this is a good segway to talk about immigrant serving organizations, non-profit and advocacy groups. we certainly know the need of emigrant integration but what i am hearing is up mix of we know advocacy is doing good work and more organization means more application but talk about the role they are playing and the challenges they are facing. >> statistically correct. i can tell you when we started doing the our region arizona with the arizona coalition, we were able to get, only trying to

serve 200 people because we did not have as much capacity and the fact that we still than entire auditorium at the school, there were hundreds and hundreds of people that were trying to applied but we found not a lot of folks ended up applying because they brought in documentation that they had, they brought whatever they could. many of them didn't necessarily have -- some people, pieces they didn't have yet so it served a challenge because we do create specific drives and have people come to the drive and out of that we don't have anybody that is applying because they do go back home and then i forgot i have that there or i did not

know i happen to have a birth certificate or passport so it is a challenge a new do follow up with them but many times they won't tell you that and still trying to raise the money and so on and so forth so there is a lot of specific outreach but again, i can only say more from the latino community because we do not have a big population of the asian community or any others that there are a lot of programs being developed, partnering with other organizations, arizona is moving first but the national call -- we phoned the dream, right now like you mentioned before, putting out apps and videos and anything we can to reach people through social media but again

always looking for how to serve other publications and how people applied and that is common to get the information with them. >> going back to the level where we look at all of the immigrants serving on profits there is a wide distribution in terms of the experience these organizations have but when we look specifically at europe's founding we want to make sure these organizations were around prior to the announcement of daca, not after the announcement of daca. but we see overwhelmingly 91% of all of the 2100 organizations in our sample were around since before daca and the founding of these organizations is 2,003 and these organizations have been around ten years. with that sort of ten year cut off period it misses 1986, this

is the last large-scale utilization program in the united states and so when we think of specifically looking at these non-profit organizations and out reach strategies we begin to isolate different characteristics of these organizations so we can think of how long they have been around and their experience and institutional memory when it comes to similar legalization programs in the past and further distinguish between resources and capacity and when we think of resources it can be relationships with other organizations in the community to find a place to have a workshop for a clinic and so on and so forth so when we think of the different organizations we can cut the mall been a lot of ways and expect that how we cut them up may lead to different outcomes, some more positive and others less positive. but there is another thing.

a lot of organizations are densely packed together especially in places like los angeles and new york. something that i heard is that there is not a lot of cooperation between organizations to cooperate on daca related services and working with lot of organizations with what of different interests i have learned very well how difficult it is to bring different groups together who may share those objectives so down the road toward nation, more coordination may be something that does improve daca's limitations. >> the capacity and resources issue is a major one. this is something that developed over the last year to the announcement was a little over a year ago stopping off and trying to figure out this population has been a real challenge that

we have not seen capering of applications so the question is how to reach people that are harder to reach weather geographically or national origin groups or language group other than spanish basically and one of the important things is a lot of the people who have come through the application process have had some ties to other institutions and organizations. there has been a lot of recruitment through schools and higher ed programs so there are people that are trying to to work through other organizations in order to you know, reach people who they may not

otherwise reach. i think there are as we continue, it is going to be harder and harder to reach people. >> very shortly, i don't know if i have any specific comments that have been set but if we look at this from even more altitude, up a couple things stand out. over the last several years as congress has been unable to pass a sort of immigration reform, what we have seen is states and counties taking upon themselves to pass their own sort of immigration reform and what we have seen across the country is kind of uneven geography of immigration policy and practice. what we have also seen to overlay on top of that is

immigrants are moving to different, what scholars call new destination areas spread across the united states, and finally, there is also an uneven distribution of kind of local level infrastructure when it comes to immigrants serving organizations and the capacity to respond to the needs of in the grim young people and their families. >> this is a good segue into a final question before we go to the audience. putting on your policymaker had for daca going forward the blueprint for a larger legalization program, what recommendations do you have for policymakers, service providers at whatever level does that introduce? >> the first to identify unmet needs which our report begins to do, if not the final word but begins to do that, daca out

reach is needed because that is the first step for service providers and even local engagement teams to think about places strategically where they should be, people who they are targeting to come up not only with language appropriate events but also language appropriate informational materials to distribute and so i think that is one sort of critical thing as it relates to daca. this policy recommendation, pass immigration reform is the path to simmons -- citizenship and that means on top of daca with won't talk about it, we won't talk about how to implement a much larger and more difficult task. >> i would second tom wong's, and especially his second one. in the noontime i think we

certainly have found out costs is a huge barrier. i said this a few months ago. we need to be talking about are flat family fee. several family, having to come up with money, $465,000 for one child but if they have three or four children and on top of that have to pay lawyers fees, a flat family fee would help to move a lot more young people through the pipeline. second, daca has done a really good job providing multiple educational pathways, ged programs for example. what we are seeing across the country is in a lot of places, in new york, you recently responded to this, there are not enough in a lot of these programs, some of these programs although there is an opportunity available they are underfund and so we need to provide more

resources into these alternative education programs. 3, talking about immigration reform for a while, we're close this year and let's hope we move this past the goal line but in the meantime young people and their families have to carry out their everyday lives. how do we think about integrating them into the community at a broader level through internships, apprentice ships, opportunities to legally engage in day to day life of their community. and finally as we talk about issues of the enforcement and deportation and families being separated many of the young people going through daca transitioning into adulthood with very strong mental and emotional health how do we think about mobilizing the mental health community to address some of these important needs?

>> to repeat what i have, in terms of implementation, it would be very important to try to figure out ways in different states. looking at the data shown before, one of the reasons a lot of older folks are not necessarily apply as much, has a lot to do with having a ged, being influenced, easy to apply, and it is a go, but all of these definitely, community members trying to figure out where to get these and also because there is not as much out read to do that, it is a challenge. in terms of immigration reform, keep pushing documented or however you want to call it, but

we are still very targeted. i don't have a driver's license. have documented, and we only have five month to see what will happen next year. we are going to keep pushing not only congress but the president to stop deportation. for us it is not black and white, not immigration patterns that are not, it is about there is no other way in congress, we will search for something bigger in terms of daca so people that are not necessarily dreamers, people didn't believe we could do it with dreamers and we pushed and proved wrong and we were able to do this so there is a way to push congress

longer-term, no question. but at the same time we also have urgency. reality is that comes through congress and the president, i am going to push for it any way i can. >> to add to the comments my fellow panelists have made, i would say that if daca has been tough for a broader legalization program if this does exist, when we do extend legalization to many more people in this country, it is important to take note of what has happened already, has been keeping up with the application process, the fact that they have made decisions, 75% of the mall ready and it is the rolling process, everyday people are submitting,

every day being adjudicated, that is important to note because it will wrap up in the future. and the reason why that is important, qualitatively important in the lives of people, the number one reason people are applying for daca is to get work authorization and the longer the gap between applying and getting the card harder it makes having documented status because you really want to receive the benefits, the full benefits. i think we have a lot to learn from organizations that are providing assistance to people who are applying because they hold the key to what this process is going to look like and they know on the ground what works and what doesn't work. i think that is a big door we have to walk through.

>> one thing i forgot to mention is u.s. c s has been great in terms of fighting data, updates they give about the national view and the other data they have given. to the extent that we can help as researchers make daca work better we need better data. with what has happened recently with the data analysis this is the age of big data and u.s. c s has a wealth of data that can help us identify how to make this process better. so if u.s. c s can be more forthcoming with data we can do a better job. in the absence of that, those service providers can also provide for us a wealth of information. thinking about the intake surveys these organizations do, there can be very specific

questions related to not just the applicant but to the applicant nose so we can map out the network of where those who have not been served by daca are. that is the network analysis and sampling, those organizations in the office of cooperation can be the focal point for the data necessary to help improve the program down the road. i say this because i know of some of the organization, ground working on daca are here. >> why don't we take some questions from the audience? please say your name and your organization. >> thank you for the panel and taking my question. it is more of a policy question because i am not privy to whether the president can do this. as someone mentioned earlier a lot of daca people feel this is

not enough and congress needs to improve or immigration reform once and for all. my question is from a policy perspective can the president just like he was pressured into authorizing daca last year, can he extends it to be parents of the dreamers or in other words what are the limits to what he can or cannot do while congress decides whether or not they will pass immigration reform this year? thank you. >> this is my thinking. we have been able, a lot of immigrant you organizations, we have been able for deportation with something called a memo or control discretion, let's call it, basically questions to deport someone or not depending on whether it is high priority

or low priorities of being able to lot of cases just like i did with my mom, deportation one by one, takes a lot of pressure and people who call immigration to this thing so i am thinking now that we will see some thinking through this like what if this doesn't happen, we will stay without anything because people will be deported, is daca is the same thing we tried, the first group for the dreamer and so now we have other ways to do it and lawyers looking for action but we also think we can expand something which to our discretion is granted to our parents and older siblings the same way. >> what i would say is something that can be done is to stop

deportation. i also want to say from my perspective the book is not closed on 2013 for immigration reform. the house is coming back next month and it looks like there is increasing pressure on house republicans as more are coming forward and supporting immigration reform. we have a really good chance this year to push forward some really important legislation that includes up half way. to me, that is the most important thing many people are thinking it can still be done. >> thank you to the panelists for this event. i am with the national latina institute for reproductive health and immigrant latinas we work with in texas and florida and the midwest were excited when the program was announced. for the first time they fill

their contributions were being recognized and debris invited to participate in society. a few weeks later the u.s. department of health and human services interred -- a final rule which noted unlike others with different action daca recipients are not present for affordable health care programs effectively shutting them out of the affordable care act and medicaid initiative impacts women and children and so unfortunately despite the tremendous benefits of daca there's a lot of disappointment. looking forward to getting health insurance for the first time, being able to pay into the system so there's a lot of talk about integration and i wonder if you could speak to how the shortcomings in terms of the daca program in terms of integration and the impact that has had on these communities because we know some of these had an impact on immigration

reform debate and health care and daca have been buried in the senate bill for immigration reform. thanks. >> i want to take a fresh stab in thinking about this. in addition to the survey i mentioned by wrapping of the ten year study, followed 150 young adults in los angeles since 2003. i started out project with some kind of broad sociological questions about educational attainment, jobs, civic and political participation, one thing i found overwhelmingly that i didn't expect was almost to the person of those young people that i talk to, young adults who had come to the u.s. before the age of 12, run up here, a lot of young people we're talking about, almost to the person they describe mental

and physical manifestations of stress, chronic headaches, chronic toothaches, trouble sleeping, trouble getting out of bed, eating problems, thoughts of suicide, a real intense problems and i think that this segment of the population that is also economically challenged doesn't have access to health care that have enormous needs is something that needs to be changed. >> i would just bad part of immigration reform has been around access for undocumented immigrants and this is an uphill climb. what roberto gonzalez's findings suggest and the moral imperative of serving this community, the health needs of this community, we see how access is a bargaining chip and here's an

example. in 2006 with the senate bill barbara boxer introduced an amendment say we can produce a state impact fund where we can take money from the applications people will be paying for path to citizenship and distribute that to the states to cover the costs of health services for example. there was a republican alternative introduced that beat out doctors' proposal and the alternative that beat out the proposal, instead of taking those moneys away that increase overall cost for this path to citizenship. at the end of the day if we are talking about undocumented youth, impact in terms of health and if they go to the lower income category, access to health may be unattainable, maybe their but may be unattainable based on the high cost of its own in the senate bill this go around that language was excluded.

barbara boxer's office was considering that amendment before shutting the door on the senate bill. in the house the affordable care act is a rallying cry against all things obama in the house with the 40th or 50th -- policywhy is it is an uphill climb. >> great time for one more question. back there. >> thank you. my name is marjorie and i have two hats. i am a professor arizona university doing research on immigration policy and here i met the national science foundation directing a scientist program. i say that in case people are looking for funding want to talk to me. one of the things i am finding is worth i am doing on

prosecutorial discretion is the number of people who are not eligible for prosecutorial discretion because the 1996 laws are felonies. i am speculating but it is only speculation that part of the reason the denial rate has been so low is they have done a good job putting up on the web site what makes you eligible or not eligible or applying if you have that d u i and the agent, nonprofits are working with people saying you are not going to get it. people are nervous enough about it. i assume there are hard conversations where advocates are saying you won't qualify,

finding research and how you responded to the opponents who are saying everybody is getting it. and the edges of the tory thing. the earlier process is leading out people. and the second point is in the data we have do you have other information on education, occupation, anything else that gets you, it is just a qualitative power. >> your henge -- your hunches of the same as mine. raja have a bigger perspective on it and it does seem to be the

slam-dunk going through and people who think they may not qualify holding back. what i do have in the bookings paper, there is the table of the top countries of birth and you can see the share of all applicants that were approved and so there you can see some of the lowest approval rates from non spanish-speaking countries, jamaica at 40%, this is not like all jamaican applicants, all of those were adjudicated. there is something about people flying solo on this that brings down their success rate. >> just to add to that point,

the sociologists on our team have tried to interpret findings related to the denial rate for men versus women and how that increases with age. it fits neatly within the sociological phenomenon of criminality among men. and right within the age frame too. this isn't to say this is the large pool of criminal males in the sample of daca applicants. talking about tenths of percentages here but because there is a disproportionate number of males who are denied that increases with age the sociologists on our team point to the sociological realities of criminality in the united states, scanning the prison population and more males than females and this sweet spot in terms of age.

>> the other thing in my study, i followed a number of these young men and women who would have been deported if caught based on prior crimes and the issue for a lot of them is they have been living their lives for some time now hidden from law-enforcement and doing what they can to avoid. i suspect the lot of these young people haven't applied. in terms of your data question, we hope to get 5,000, pretty confident we can get 5,000 by the end of our run by probably this fall. i certainly support tom's call for a greater level of data but in the meantime we're getting some pretty good aggregate level

data on some of these important questions. i would be happy to talk to you more about that. >> that is a good place to leave it, really out of time. i want to thank our panel's and reiterate what we said at the beginning that this is only the start of a conversation and thank all our panelists who pointed out all we need to know whether the trends we highlighted today, applications and approvals continue, what actually happens to people going forward that get daca or those that don't blake roberto gonzalez is trying to do. join me in giving our panelists a round of applause. [applause] >> the associated press reports this afternoon 37 people are reported dead in new clashes across egypt to. this includes skirmishes between muslim brotherhood supporters

and residents opposed to their process. the residents pelted protesters with rocks and glass bottles, the two sides fired on one another sparking running street battles. tens of thousands have taken to the streets in demonstrations organized by supporters of the ousted islamist president, on wednesday as the crisis in egypt got underway arab media scholar and author adel iskander talked about the crisis. >> the events of last night and today which for those of you following egypt closely you will be well aware of the fact that two journalists have been killed, one of whom works for sky news and another works for cameramen and reporter for gulf news, you eat based newspaper. the circumstances behind their

killing are not entirely clear although nevertheless it at beast lives up to the performance of the morsi where there were two killings during that period and they arrested numerous journalists so in a few short weeks or in a couple of months the egyptian media environment has suffered significant setbacks but i would argue that the setbacks that are immediately identifiable, loss of life as much as we tend to morn and focus on this, the greatest and gravest fallback has largely been a loss of any commitment to the journalistic practice as an important condition for the transition

towards democratic governance. today, we are at the point where media content precipitates the collision course, a political collision course between various parties. all this to say most programming on egyptian media today is comprised of opinion with sprinklings of news. on either side. it is of very unfortunate circumstance. nevertheless i think it is a product of 60 years of false messaging and false news programming and the absence, historically, journalists are the most reputable, veteran journalists in egypt were often opinion writers and the equivalent of syndicated columnists even if you review the word in egypt, until probably the beginnings of the 2000s it would typically imply

one of the writers in egypt who stopped reporting back when they were in the early 20s. at the end of the day egyptian media was anchored on the opinion, opinionated content. today we are back to this opinionated content of the arguably the significant difference is the impositions are no longer from the hierarchical tears at the top. that applies to the stage media. i can't imagine state broadcasting has reached a level of liberty from its own structural entrenchment that you could criticize the military on channel one openly. we haven't seen, there were a couple circumstances in the past couple weeks where journalists were taken off the air war there

seems to be a suspicious interruption of programming when something that was deemed critical was being aired. there is that component but that is far less substantial than what i described earlier. i can't find a proper word for it. maybe someone else -- in the present i should mention in the presence of someone who taught journalism in egypt for many years so i can try to find the word that is self-sufficient without fear of authority. that is the most problematic aspect. moving forward. >> just within the last few minutes senators john mccain and lindsey graham issued a statement on egypt reading club that we condemn all acts engine segment of violence against

civilians including those supporters of former president mohamed morsi committed against christians and other egyptian. at the same time we cannot be complete in the mass slaughter of civilians, it is neither in long-term national interests nor consistent with our values and laws to provide assistance at this time to egypt's interim government and military. and the politics continues, republican national committee meeting, approved a resolution blocking two tv networks hosting gop presidential debate, the vote of firms the previous threat against cnn and nbc must the network dropped plans to air programs about possible democratic presidential contender hillary clinton. the vote at the meeting in boston was unanimous and the resolution they passed read in part the r n c shall endeavor to bring more order to the primary

debate and ensure a reasonable number of debates, moderators and partners are chosen and other issues pertaining to the general nature of such debate are addressed. we will let you know about some programming coming up on the c-span networks. coming up later today on c-span, robert draper who wrote a national geographic magazine cover story about muammar gadhafi's 43 -- 42 year rule of libya and the future of the country as a democracy coming up at 7:05 eastern on c-span. here on c-span2 booktv in prime time continues tonight with author and columnist melanie phillips, the author of nine books including her latest, guardian angel, memoir of her personal and professional life as a journalist in the u.k. in depth on booktv on later today, minnesota senator chic club which are --amy klobuchar will

be the keynote speaker and the first democratic hopeful to visit eyewall for a possible 2016 presidential campaign. more about tonight's program with jennifer jacobs. >> c-span radio covering that event in iowa called the wing dings. tell us about this event? she is speaking their but honoring hillary clinton. out is that going to work? >> they give a word to hillary clinton. it is a gathering of county democrats up north in the basin city area where it they get together and give an award to a democrat and she is coming simply to help campaign for our democratic congressman who is running for the senate and she has also spoken at the national convention in north carolina. i've seen her here a couple times. interesting she is coming back but normally just to work with

bruce bailey. >> does any klobuchar had any interest or is there talk about her possibly form an interest in running for president in 2016? >> yes. when we asked her in north carolina she brushed off questions about running for president. and promoting a generic female for president and 80 klobuchar was one thatamy klobuchar was one that the president's name dropped so if hillary clinton does not run she is on the list. >> reminder you can see senator klobuchar's comments live from iowa at 7:00 on c-span, c-span radio and c-span.org. earlier this week the national press club freedom committee examined the role of government public affairs offices and whether they help or hinder government transparency,

journalist and former government affairs officials join the conversation and agreed trust and good communication between them are crucial to get information to the public in a timely manner. sean donnelly is committee chairman who moderates this discussion. >> welcome to the national press club. for this evening's discussion of whether or not a federal public affairs officers have become a hindrance more and help, press freedom and open government or if you like, our shorter title, tax for slacks. line name is john donnelly, reporter with congressional quarterly and roll call and chairman of the national press club press freedom committee which is sponsoring tonight's event with the young members committee. you can find out more about the national press club and membership therein at press.org. we are the leading organization in the world for journalists.

tonight's event is being broadcast on that site. it will be archived later. is also being broadcast on c-span2 right now. if you are following us on twitter the handle this@press theclubtv and the hash club is open government. .. >> i would like to make a few

comments just to set the stage for tonight event. our discussion tonight is about the growing and, some say, harmful role played by public affairs offices in the federal government. the complaints that we hear from reporters are about widespread requirements that paos, public affairs officers, must be present during interviews, that questions be written in advance, and that only certain people can be made available to say certain things. and what is arguably most chilling to the flow of information to the public our federal rules at the pentagon that require employees to only speak to reporters through official public affairs channels. now, the courts have actually sided with these rules. they have found that government employees don't have an unbridled first amendment right to free speech. when they are talking about official public information. there was a 2006 supreme court

ruling that was a no decision, 5-4, that was the ruling. legally speaking to a nonlawyer anyway, doesn't appear that these rules are going anywhere. now, sometimes, as i mentioned in the pentagon, it's a hard and fast requirement and there's implied disciplinary results. if you're an employee who talk to reporters off-line. but in many agencies the rules merely encourage but don't require. but no matter which way it happens, the message seems to be that it's not good for your career to talk to a reporter off-line, even if the subject isn't classified or proprietary. a couple weeks ago we had a former nsa official turned whistleblower thomas drake here at a press club luncheon, and he said that when federal employees are seeking to obtain or renew security clearances and they're interviewed by investigators,

one of the questions they are asked, at least some of the time come is whether the employee has ever had unauthorized contact with a reporter. not unauthorized conduct involving classified or proprietary information, but any unauthorized contact. to a lot of that -- to a lot of us that was disturbing because i'm merely asking that question in that context they are sending the message, intentional or not, that speaking to the press off-line is a big and could even make you a security risk. now obviously, the bradley manning and edward snowden leaks have raised the temperature on this issue considerably, particularly in the security agency. the known leaks message was made in a really hard-core way in a june 2012 defense department document about a so-called insider threat program and it was updated recently by the news and it said, quote, hammer this fact home.

leaking as tantamount to aiding the enemies of the united states, closed quote. now, if i was equally applied it would be a lot of senior administration officials in this administration and previous ones that would be a lot of trouble. of course, it's not equally applied. the net effect of all this, the real deterrent to people speaking with the press outside of official channels, and let's face it, speaking to people outside of official channels sometimes has to happen, often has to happen for the truth that comes out. now, having said all that let me be clear about a couple of things. we reporters appreciate public affairs officers when they help, and they very, very often do. and i love anyone who wants to do away with these officers. even if they did want it, it ain't going to happen. so that's not on the table for discussion you, just like the rules governing what the government employees can say and can't say. their contacts with reporters, it's probably not going

anywhere. most reporters understand the job of public affairs, to make sure that an agency point of view is expressed coherently and the road voices are not confused with official policy. now, the pentagon, and i'm going to turn and introduce our panel in one second, but my last thought here is the pentagon has an interesting item in what they called their statement of principles about relations with the media. and it says that public affairs officers should, quote, act as liaisons but should not interfere with the reporting process. that sounds like a great summary to me of where we should end up. of course, everyone here would probably agree with that. the rub comes in defining what constitutes interference. and i hope we get some answers here tonight. so here's how it's going to work. i'm going to introduce our panel, and then i'm going to get each of them a few minutes to weigh in with their overall take on the issue. and then we'll have some q&a time among ourselves up here, and then we will open up to you

in the audience. so now let's go ahead and meet our panel. working this way down, carolyn carlson, a former associated press reporter and assistant professor of communication at kennesaw state university near atlanta, and the author of two surveys on relationship between public affairs staff and the press. you can tell it's about some of the surveys this eating. next is kathryn foxhall, a freelance reporter and a member of the press club press freedom committee who is extensively researched this issue. then comes linda petersen, managing editor of the valley journals of salt lake, the freedom of information share for the society of professional journalists, and the president of the utah foundation for open government. to my left and you're right, tony fratto, managing partner at hamilton place strategies, a strategic communications and

crisis management consultancy. tony is also in on their contributor on the cnbc business news network, and he was firmly deputy assistant to president george w. bush and principal deputy press secretary. and john verrico, president-elect of the national association of government communicators. so starting with carolyn, let's hear what you have to say, just give us your overview of the subject. >> i'm going to tell you about a couple surveys i've conducted this year and the previous year. that are relevant to the topic we're discussing tonight. first, i surveyed reporters who cover federal agencies here in washington. i've got 146 respondents within margin of error of about 7%. then i surveyed current and former members of the national association of government communicators, about 154 responses for a margin of error of about 4.3%. i'm going to throw some numbers at you but i want to quantify the situation.

my questions focus on the interviewing process. first, i want to talk about preapproval and routing. 98% of public affairs officers believe that they have a better idea than reporters about who in their agencies would be the best person to give an interview on a given topic. three quarters of journalists report they have to get approval from paos before they can interview an agency employee. and seven out of 10 reporters say that their requests for interviews are forwarded to paos for selective routing to whoever the pao suggests. so that's the interviewing process. about half the reporter said that agencies will outright prohibit them from interviewing altogether at least some of the time. 18% says it happens most of the time. two-thirds of the paos say

they feel justified in refusing to grant interviews when the agency security threatened or when it might reveal damaging information. three-fourths of paos know that journalists tried to go around them to contact staff members directly. nine out of 10, however, say that their staff members know and will refer the reporters to the paos when they been contacted directly. and, of course, more than half of the reporters say that they do try to go around and circumvent the public affairs officers, at least some of the time. as force the issue of trust, the majority of paos say there are no reporters that they trust enough to contact the staff directly without going through the public affairs office. only about a third said that the reporters that he would give free rein to contact staff without going through the public affairs office. and according to my open-ended

comments, most of the times these were longtime reporters. in contrast, there were 40%, or 39 actually, 39.6 i think, of the paos said there were specific report that they prohibit the staff from talking to altogether. due to problems with their stories in the past. so they banned certain reporters. 40% said they were specific reporters that they banned. in fact, 14% said it was an old media outlet that they would ban their staff members from talking to because of problems with their stories in the past. on the issue of monitoring, two-thirds of paos feel it is necessary to supervise and otherwise monitor interviews with members of the agency staff. 85% of reporters said that they get monitored at least some of the time. the way it rakes down is a third said some the time, a third said most of the time, and 16% said

all of the time they get monitored. three force of paos feel that monitoring the interviews is a good way to make sure that their agency staff is quoted correctly in the story. and about 40% of paos said that they used their case notes to monitor the dispute misquotes. however, only 17% said they tried to require reporters to review their quotes within before publication. fully three-fourths of paos said they did not require prepublication review. so i asked them attitude questions, and reporters view of pao control is pretty clear. seven out of 10 reporters agree with the statement, i consider a government agency controls over who i interview to be a form of censorship. 85% of journalists agree with

the statement that the public is not getting the information it needs because of barriers agencies are imposing on journalists reporting practices. pao attitudes are also clear. two-thirds of paos believe that controlling media coverage of an agency is a very important part of protecting the agencies reputation. and virtually all, i think it was 98%, agree that their job is to make sure that accurate, positive information from the agency is conveyed to the public. so that is where the issue stands as far as reporters in washington and public affairs officers. >> thank you. kathryn? >> good evening. not so long ago some reporters walked the halls of agencies and in unique critically needed

graduate schools. they talk to you and got to know staff. got stories, perspectives, and education fluidly. just like this was the united states, or something. but over the last 20 years, leaders have created this surge of blocking reporters from communicating to staff and less they are tracked and more monitored by the public affairs officers. the public relation controllers. it is massive, pernicious, censorship that's now a cultural norm. no matter what they know, employees are prohibited from ever communicating with us without guard working at the behest of the bosses and the political structure. it's people in power stopping the flow of information to the

public, according to their own ideas and desires. how can the united states prohibit people from speaking without reporting to the authorities? journalists, why are we so buffaloed? this is not some and violent way of life. it's just a mean power grab that officials started pouring resources into relatively recently. the impact is drastic. i estimate that for many specialized reporters, at least, communication with staff is down 90%. never doubt the rotting debilitating effect of silencing people. the gravediggers at arlington cemetery knew about the jumbled graves for years. janitors at penn state knew about the child abuse for years.

so, what i'll don't we know now? or one thing, in public fda says congress has not given the agency all it requested for monitoring the skyrocketing pharmaceutical imports. 40% of drugs now come from overseas. we urgently need reporters talking to you fda people in policy jobs and in the front line inspection job away from the sensors. regularly, not just don't dig investigations. does the import situation keep fda staff people up at night? are we in predisaster mode waiting for bodies to show before we get serious, or not? what would staff say away from the guard?

if something because it always is. it is unethical and inhumane to kill or can find information gathering. with millions of people silent in thousands of public and private workplaces of various moral persuasions, reporters cannot help that our skill and hard work are making up for this. the ethical burden is now right on journalism. -- journalists. we can fight his own we can be the integral partner in integrating it for the future. a warning about compromises. in our weakened state, some reporters say i will go through the pao controls if they will just let me through without the delay, the monitoring, the outright blockages that have become so stunningly aggressive.

but that the sellout of free speech. we will be passing on sterilized stories, muddling public understanding while limiting power to an agency or a political administration. and we, ourselves, the reporters, won't see the difference. finally a question. why don't we instead have tracking and monitoring of all the communications of all the agency leadership? thank you. >> linda? >> kathryn and caroline have both done a good job of portraying what it's like at the federal level, but i want to toggle a bit more than that. many of you may come in the frustration of a job here in washington, d.c., thought maybe i should give it up here in d.c. and i should go do some little backwoods community where i

won't have to go to office, where i can just sit down and chew the fat with the mayor. well, i'm here today to tell you there is no community anymore. these policies, these ways of doing business after have not just trickled but have poured down from the federal level to the state level, to the smallest communities in our country. my papers cover eight committees, suburb of salt lake city with population anywhere from 10,000, to 100,000 people, and we deal with this on a regular basis. we can understand that at the federal level there can be the reasoning of national security that can be the reason of national policy. but in a small committee of 10,000 people they can get ridiculous. this spring, i called a small committee park and rec person to find out the ti helocal easter egg hunt.

he told me he couldn't tell me because he had been instructed not to speak to the press. fortunately, i went and found that the time for those many hundreds of parents and kids he wanted to show. we get to this point all the time and the smaller communities, most of the time the news we cover is not earth shattering but it's a day-to-day lives that would've. the impact of the storm drain project researchers about because last year you pumped out a foot of water from your basement, or the road repair you want to know that becaus becaus, it seems like you've been driving on the wrong road with the orange cones for ever. and these are the things that they're obstructing us to find out about. we're running into the same situation in our neck of the woods where they want the pao to fit in with the engineer as they talk about what road base and death and things like that.

truthfully i don't think the pao would have the first clue is the engineer screwed up and sent backwards. many times we because we cover ththe state in state and entailo more than the cio. i had a pao not too long ago, well, it was a while ago, it was closer to 9/11, we were doing a story on a water tank, a 500 million-gallon water tank in this rural community. and asked for the address and he told me he couldn't give me the address because of homeland security concerns. well, i don't know about you but i really don't think a suburb of salt lake city in utah is a primary target for al qaeda. but he wouldn't give it to me. what we did was, we got in the car and we drove out to approximate where we knew it was. it's a little hard to hide a

500 million-gallon tank, and we wrote down the address and we published it. nothing happened. al qaeda must have a way down on that to-do list because we in suburban salt lake city are just fine with our water. these are the kind of things that we are dealing with. we do have great cios we work with to understand that they are truly there to facilitate the flow of information, not to control it, not to divert it, just to let it happen. we all know the old adage that knowledge is power, but in the 21st century, in 2013, anybody who is a teenager knows that information is power. and that's what we are speaking. we are not speaking generally to expose great conspiracies although of course when you do when that happens. there were no weapons of mass destruction ever found in iraq. i don't know if the government

is still looking, but we're still waiting. on our local level there may be instances of nepotism but most of the time it's the day in day out things such want to know about the what's happening with your kids in schools? what's happening with the city council. iv or are they not going to raise your property taxes? paos to get in the middle of that ms. understand what the process is about. first of all, nobody ever elected the pao. no pao has yet as a formal vote on a city state or federal business. so why does the government think that the public wants to hear everything that happened from the pao when it's an issue that you're concerned about you want to know from your councilman why did you vote that way? not from a second or third party saying this is why he voted that way, or she voted that way. some reporters like to say, well, that's just the way it is,

or they say, well, i'm a good reporter, i just get around to but that's not the point. first of all, there aren't that many good reporters left and the ones coming out of school are as -- a fearful generation. they are very, very happy to do what they are told, and they are very happy to ask permission, which is a very scary process. i find that time and again i everything and i fire them. because to my level if they come to work and it's my level they say, but if i ask the mayor that it will make you mad, but, but, at the pao said it was a good story. and my response is right, there's the door, okay? but we can't just sit still and wait for somebody else to stand up to this. this is as kathleen pointed out the united states of america. our mandate is to report the truth, not with the pao tells us

is the truth. not even with the pao thinks it's the truth. the truth as we can find it whether it is the time of an easter egg hunt or a national policy. it's america, the land of the free, the land of the free press, and the people that we serve, the people that we are a conduit for, the public of the united states of american has a right to this information. thank you. >> thank you. tony? >> funny, whenever we have these discussions, and the actual happen a lot, you look at them in one of the ways. one we just heard, right, public affairs officers are pretty much obstacles and ill-informed boobs, and reporters are universally good and have the interest of the public at heart.

or it's the opposite, right? reporters aren't evil scoundrels looking to embarrass public officials and make mockery of policy process but anyone can stand behind the people for an end up in our public affairs officers. my experience in 20 years of this, it's pretty much a normal bell curve distribution of talent, among both public affairs officers and reporters, which means that among both reporters and public affairs officers, some are really not very good. some are excellent. the vast majority are average above average. the one to really below average tend to get out of the business on either side. so that's what you see and that's one reason why there are lots of rules. there's undoubtedly a lot of, there are obstacles to really good relationships. some of which you just heard but

let me look at it from sort of both sides on this, and i'll start with just a list of some the obstacles on the official site, on the press officer side and then some on the media side and the talk about some of the problems that i hope we get into some of these, the discussion all of it more when we get into questions. but on the official site, we talked about trust and hope to get to talk more about trust. trust, one reason trust has eroded is it's a really simple thing, the use of e-mail. technology is great and efficient but reporters can, reporters and press officers don't actually talk very much. so much so much over the know, nuance goes away. when you have to talk to someone you can develop trust.

it's not quite the same. we have some bad traditions and press shops, which is that you can earn your stripe by keeping our reporters but some people think like this is good, if you can lay the wood to a reporter, that this is a mark of being tough with the media. awful tradition but it is i can take it exist. there some degree of ignorance on the part of a lot of press officer a lot of press officers do not understand how important it is for them to really master the issues, policy making process, people are working with, the day-to-day news coverage is really going on. you wor have to work really hart it to be good at it.

and there's still there on the official site and among press officers about dealing with what may or may not be bad news. if you talk to any, in my profession today we are advising people. everyone will tell you, every professional will tell you put that any that is on your own terms. get it out, push it out, talk about it, explain it, don't let it in disjointed ways. but the courage to do that is really lacking. on the media side, there's also ignorance. there's some terrific reporters out there. more and more of them with knowledge and experience are exiting the business. it is really, really rare to find really good reporters with the length of time on a beat it takes to master that beat. this was before went to the white house, i was at the treasury department for five and half years dealing with really

complex economic issues. the reporters were brilliant. the reporters today are so young and older reporters are very expensive for news organizations. exiting the business, really, really young, inexperienced reporters on the information side. the news is so fast, right? the speed of delivering news today, it results in a published first -- you can publish, you can corrected and updated 10 to 20 mins later. you have the whole day to actually allow a news story to achieve some level of balanced reporting. that's the world we are in. it changes the nature of how we deal with reporters. what is news? biggest be a time when there was news and there was a penny. opinion was found on the

editorial page or the op-ed page. now have blogs, we have news analysis, wit we've reporters wo on and offer opinion, commentary on television but right straight news for the news page. there are reporters who tweak their opinion, but also write straight news stories, right? and so you talk about reporters not allowed to have opinions, of course everyone has an opinion but we see it more now, right? so it's a little bit different. the blog makes it more difficult, for more news analysis. there's great value but it also leads you to question and wonder where, you know, that use of reporters are if they stray from the straight news reporting. bad traditions on the reporters i also. too many times i've gotten that phone call at 4:30 p.m. for a story that has already been

written, looking for the administrative response to the story. the administration, what that really means is that we need your quote to put in the last rest of the story so i can hit the publish button. we can go back and look at how many times there is a quote from tony fratto, the last graph of a story. is probably because i got a call at 4:30 p.m. saying we are about to publish and it's an awful way to develop trust between reporters and public officials and public affairs officers. and, finally, complex makes for a much better story. like notice, if we're in the middle of the policymaking process and treasury has a view on, because the liberating policy and how it has a different view, and what makes for a great story is reporting that difference of you.

and what happens is it's never reported as just the liberation or experts trying to determine what's the best policy. it's reporters as a dispute between treasury and hud, and the inevitable search for a winner and loser in that. there must be a loser for every winner when policy is finally decided, right? it's not healthy for the policymaking process, if you don't get your way 100% to be labeled in the press the loser. not really good for having internal policy debate. so when there is trust, and i've got so much experience with really terrific reporters where there's no, great trust, where we can have great discussion policy, it really works really, really well. never turn down in my eight

years, especially five and have your saturation never turned down an interview. never kept a reporter from talking to an official. that's about as, siphon reporters ask for in the room while we debate policy, that's pretty open. and i agree relationships with reporters but it can be done well, but the rules are there for a reason. not rules on reporters, rules on staff. and too big rules. or reasons. one is that there's an asymmetry in talent. if john donnelly, with his decades of experience talks to deputy assistant secretary at treasury who has never in his life spoken to her reporter before, there is an asymmetry in town. one is really, really good at his craft, and the other one is in. might not even know the rules

outsourcing, new, doesn't know how to talk to reporters. doesn't know what the conditions are in talking to a reporter. he can be helped by a good professional public affairs officer. the other is the asymmetry in knowledge. a lot of public officials work in high spirit they don't know what's happening in other parts of government. they don't know what was said yesterday by sometimes even the secretary of the department. they don't know what other stuff this reporter has been reporting on. that official can be helped by talking to public affairs office and getting some guidance about what is the story, what is the reporter really after, why is, why does he want to talk to you? you can help that along. so those are two great reasons,

a press officer can help within. and just to final thoughts, is, i said the rules are for staff. they are not for reporter. i've never imposed rules on reporters. i do, i have always in the past had rules with staff, and we can get him to explain why, more about what i think that makes sense but it's not, i've never taken it out on a reporter for calling, going around me and calling. the job of reporter is to try to find information and to ask questions and to develop sources. is crucial to the job at i've never blamed her reporter for doing his job, and i've many times defended a reporter for making those phone calls. that's the reporters job. it's my job to please my own house and to make sure that my

officials are doing what they need to do. and second, for press officers, they have an obligation to know their subject area, the master it, to educate reporters, always, to develop trust relationships with reporters, to prepare and train their officials to be very good communicators, not to limit information but to be good communicators, to make up for that decade start at the reporter might have on them, and to help reporters develop useful sources. and i underline that because it's really, really important for a reporter to have useful sources. that doesn't mean that i'm not going to be in the room and that you know, it's open-door all the time. but is really, really important for reporters to have good professional relationships with

policy officials. there's a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it, so i believe there and wait until we get to questions. >> thank you. john? >> thank you. i want to start off by saying that i think the concept of this is a little misleading. because really we have the same mission and the singl same goaln mind on the public affairs side as well as on the media side. we both want to communicate information to the public. so we really are working toward the same goal. and the government, i'll go on record and say, the government needs the media to help us in this process. because your readers trust them to be a trusted translator. they are looking to get things

explained to them in ways that they can understand. your readers trust you to provide that information in an unbiased manner. and you have, because your devoted readers, or watchers, or whatever, listeners as the case may be, because of that you can reach sectors of the public that we may not be able to directly target ourselves, which is pretty much everybody. the government has websites, social media and all the other ways we communicate with the public but we really do need to work well with media in order to get our information out. so weird several people talk about trust relationships, and i think trusted relationships are really the core here. just like everyone has said, the trusted relationships goes both ways. you need to be able to trust that we are giving you the complete and accurate information. and at the same time, we need to trust that you will take that information and you're going to

use it correctly and in good faith and within a context with which it was intended. i have been in this field 32 years, and you're supposed to gasp in disbelief of that. oh, you're too young for that. [laughter] but i've been doing this for 32 years and then the thousands and thousands of reporters that i've worked with, i can count on one hand, four times, when a reporter has intentionally misused the information that i provided. intentionally. there's always mistakes. there's always stories that come out and they are negative in tone, because that's the way the story was. but as far as actually intentionally taking information and using it in an improper manner, i can count only four times with the thousands of thousands of reporters. that tells me in general i can trust them. what i'm hoping is that you have

all felt over the same 32 years that i'm also trustworthy. and i've strived to work towards that. i think the great majority of public affairs officers do strive for that goal. i'll tell you now, and with some side conversations earlier, the landscape of journalism has changed in the past several decades. when i first started years ago, there were more specialized jobs. there were more the reporters. not just dedicated to the government beat by dedicated to specific subject matter. i was talking to folks from environmental riders association earlier, and there are very few folks that have been on the beat writing those kinds of stories, environmental stories in that particular case, for decades. back when i used to work for the maryland department of environment i use to work with ken weaver all the time he had been riding environmental stories for decades. he understood the technical

issues. he understood the historical context of the environmental issues in the state of maryland. sometimes even better than the scientists and engineers and folks that i was working with. over the decades, the landscape has changed and we are seeing fewer, and it's more expensive to keep the seasoned reporters and these dedicate reporters, so we are seeing fewer is -- to report that her dedicated. and that means that you guys, you reporters have to run around and cover a variety of different topics, and you don't have the time to spend to learn the details. you give enough detail if you need to restore but there's always so much that you can do when you're a general assignment. there's an hth in fact now that has to be built in. this is where the public affairs officer comes in, is we help in the translation to provide the

historical context to provide the technical context, and explain it to you as best as we can. these are the important things to understand is as we've watched landscape change, there is a lower factor of trust of working with reporters who don't necessarily have the background, or who don't have the time to do the research other than what they can put we do on google. so back when i worked with the folks like tim weaver's of the world, i could trust him to call my scientists directly and talk at a very knowledgeable level. when new reporters came in your general assignment fall, they did have the understanding of the environmental context. they couldn't do that as well, and so i needed to be there to kind of help to be that translated the over the 32 years of my career i worked at federal level, i've worked at state level and also in the military.

and over those years, the -- i'll get to that. i lost that additional point. but what is basically happened is that our job, and my job, has been, has changed more to do more of that facilitation than i used to do in the past. help you find information you need, explain the complex information like a sitcom and more importantly, find the subject matter expert who can explain things to you. tony, you mentioned working in hives committed so to a lot of our subject matter experts are

micro-focused. and the point i was going to say about 30 years, in most becker i've worked with scientists, engineers and cops come in and speak in plain language. and so they may be experts in their field but they may not know how, what it is a day in the lab on the street, whatever, affects the larger policy, or how something might be elected outside of the lab. that's the context that you are looking for, because most of the time a reporter doesn't want to know that geewhiz science that's happening in the land. they want to know how this was going to affect things in the real world. so the other part of this, too, is subject matter experts, the government officials are frequently afraid to talk to the press but it's not because of the dark consequences of possibly getting in trouble, but they have heard reports and it seemed reports over the years of

misquote. they took out of context, become a story wrong. or a perfectly well-balanced story comes out, but it wasn't a positive story. so that to them is a nightmare. will they put them a program. no, they did and why did they talk to that guy? he's on the opposition. well, that's your job is to get that fair and balanced story. so the government officials don't really recognize the fact that a balanced story is as good as we are going to get. and again, that's our job. i have to tell you as public affairs officers, believe it or not you may think we're the bad guys but we are normally abdicating on your behalf internally. we're the ones who are convincing the officials they should talk to you. we're the ones who are helping to get a subject matter expert

to the scientists and engineers, the cops comfortable with being able to get out and get in front of a microphone or get in front of a channel and actually talk to folks. we helped to keep the subject matter experts focused. we helped to provide the context. we follow up on images to give the information that's going to add to your understanding of the story. and we ensure that when you walk out of the office or when you hang up the phone you have every bit of information that you need to write a complete story. that is our goal. now, another thing you're probably not going to believe, and i come from a two d. background. i was active duty navy, and then was in the reserves for 15 years. by the military public affairs folks are trained to the max, max and disclosure, minimum delay. and i always worked under that.

a lot of people do, not just in duty but they take a tour and a lot of agencies, at the federal level, state level and local the number you want to get as much information as they possibly can with a minimum amount of delay. where do the delays come from? delays come in because before information goes out with got to make sure it doesn't violate one of four things. there are four caveats. one is, it's security. obviously, we don't want to reveal information that's going to violate security. and just for your understanding, security and damaging information are not necessarily the same thing. carolyn and i had a discussion about the in whatever entities question that we should probably have broken out into two, possibly two separate questions. this damaging information has nothing to do with it. damaging to your reputation is nothing to do with whether or not your damaging security. so security is the first concern. the second is accuracy. we want to make sure what you

did is correct. the third is politics and also includes privacy. when i say that, the government just by nature of what we do has access to a lot of private information. we get business sensitive information from industry. we get personal identify information from people who are applying for services. there are all sorts of things with those kinds of things coming to put and it is government policy not to release the names of the injured before the their next of kin are notified. and things like that. and then the final thing is propriety and that's the nature that we are not out there absolutely insulting the public. so those are the four things that were looking at when were screening information before we give it to you. we're making sure that meets all those criteria. and that's the important step is happening behind the scene. i'll tell you now, again, trust is mutual.

we need to be able to trust each other. you need to understand where we are. we need understand where you are. i'll ask you if we get to the vice thing, can probably get to that later but i'll say now, don't hide your agenda. when you give us a call, tell us what you really riding the tell us what the story is really about. i had a reporter called up and asked me a question about standards for technology. okay, why did you want to know about the standards in x-ray technology? welcome he was writing about standards of x-ray technology. he was writing about how they're fighting industry. he was using that as an example. because in our interaction he finally opened up and told me what he was was writing it i was able to give them an enormous story on standards and how they are applied, and how they are set. instead of just michael focusing on the initial question, which was writing about the x-ray.

so tell us what you'r what you y writing about and we can help you better. and don't automatically assume that the government is evil and we are hiding stuff. because that is not the case. journalists have a code of ethics. trust but verify, but also not to violate the truth. just as welcome the government public affairs folks, believe it or not we have a code of ethics, and that code of ethics from the national association of government communiqués compiled a what we believe, that truth is in viable and sacred, that providing public information is an essential civil service, and the public at large, and each citizen therein has a right to equal, full, understandable and timely facts about the government. and i'll tell you no now that at the federal, state, local government level, public affairs officers take this to heart and really do strive to uphold the spirit of those ethics. >> thank you. thank youall.

so, is there anything that was said on this side that you didn't get a chance to include in your comments quick or is there anything you want to talk in terms of, talk about perhaps starting with a discussion commissions lik like you did a pretty thorough job of going over how media and public affairs officers interact, but is there anything you want to add either of you in terms of, for example, what i think is the core of the debate, which is the requirement in the agency's that officials only talk to reporters through the public affairs office. >> yeah, i think, well, two things. one is that some comment about its censorship or restricting freedom, and if there isn't some line drawn to look, i will never excuse the bad practices, of

particularly poor public affairs officers. there's a lot of them out there. you know, for some of the work by reporters either -- but unless, we're not going to have the reporter in the room when policy deliberations are taking place, and i wouldn't expect it. so somewhere there's going to be a line drawn. so when it is and is not appropriate to be communicating with reporters. when is the time, how much? there are reasonable standards for that i think, and but where they are on any particular issue will be a matter, often comes some negotiations. but i think so that's clear. you can call it censorship when a press officer is in the room.

you know, probably a little bit hyperbolic for what a good press officer, you know, might be trying to do. like i said, i think there are ways for professionals to do it the right way. i think we could do a lot better job of teaching how to do it the right way. i think we ought to be teaching how to do it, you know, have to do and an appropriate and respectful way. look, i have a reputation for really liking reporters, which i don't know if that's a good reputation or not. but a great relationship with reporters but unlike reporters. i respect that have to and i think they are a good way to work that way. >> as you all were talking, i was thinking to myself, we shouldn't have got such laudable public affairs people of your. we should have some really crappy ones so we could point to their way, because these guys do

it right. [laughter] tony, you said that reporters shouldn't be punished for going around the press office. what about government employees speakers yes, they should be punished. [laughter] you know, here's the way i look at it. special treasury department where, you know, john mentioned that there is a lot of staff, believe it or not, tell reporters, like you don't understand the like a really, really, really don't want to talk to you. i'm trying to talk them into talking to you. they don't want to. and so there's a real reluctance and distrust of a lot of officials to talking to reporters. so that's one thing. we really are often in the

corner of the reporters to try to get the blessed, helping these officials understand that they can talk to you can trust this reporter, you can talk to them, it's okay. and they just feel like they're going to be screwed, they will be embarrassed and will be a quote in the paper that will hurt them. what do they get out of it? what's good for the out of it? so often i'm an advocate, i've been t advocate for reporters. that's when. the second part is that if you're talking, and, if you're talking to reporters all the time, you know, you are known as a person talks to reporters all the time. that's not what a great for your reputation. so when it is the leaks of some piece of news that maybe its damage or whatever, where is the first place to look? the guy who talks to reporters

outside. >> [inaudible] >> so it's not necessarily great for your reputation. i had some guys who didn't want to be embarrassed if they could talk to reporter and it would call me in the room and say, i'm going to call him back you silently listening to reporters don't know this, right? you thought you were talking to someone without someone listing but they wanted someone there to help listen to the conversation, you know, they can be helped along in the. >> if i can add, they want a witness to the fact that -- there are definite people who don't want to talk to a reporter. but then they're also people who might want to talk to reporters. and so my question remains, do you agree, do you do agree with the rules that are on the books

at the pentagon, for example, essay that those people, if they talk to reporters outside of official challenge should be subject to disciplinary action? >> i think in the national, i think the national security come in national security agencies, i think it is a different standard than in other agencies. i think that different standards sometimes you're dealing with you know, market sensitive information. not going to have an open book on market sensitive information. and so from the, i think it should be subject to some form of discipline. i do think there are different standards with different obligations than the level information that you have, absolutely. >> john, did you want to add anything? >> what i basically saying was it really depends on what the state and had damaging

information can be. on target damaging to things like national security. i would like to elaborate on a couple of things. and it was said i earlier that a good reporter will go around the pao, and that's assuming that if you worked to repeal and you work through channels and you're not good reporter. i don't think that's the case. i think what defines a good reporter does the ultimate quality of the accuracy and the balance of the final peace. and so, when you go through official channels or go around the official channels has nothing to do whether or not you're good reporter but it just depends on, really what it comes down to is how well do you trust your source and who you're looking at for your source. >> i would disagree with that, because i think that obviously could reporters worked with public affairs people, but if a reporter is stymied via public affairs person, a good reporter will go around the public affairs person and will try to

find information and a network of don't you a great? >> well, we suspect you're going to do that. and that's not good reporter versus bad reporter but if it had reporter would be somebody who skips the no and walks away. but what i'm saying is that when you said, so instead come a good reporter goes around the pao, that's not -- >> only when necessary. >> that's a whole different type of thing. we really expect are going to try to do that. but again, i see much less of the stymieing that you're referring to speak why would you go around when speed is exactly. >> i'm going to use an example. those of you who are in this area in the '90s when history was first discovered, it's a microbe economic is an al-jadida. it can grow to be benign but it is one of these odd little microbes that can actually change its physical form. and they can do that into

twitter to stage is complete or not and can do it at will. which makes all bit of a scary thing. so what happened was when pfiesteria feels it needs to do something or needs a new trick, like i need vegetable, or whatever. we get a craving. they get a craving. i've got a sweet tooth, i need something. they change their chemical composition and they will release a chemical in the water which triggers fish to get sensitive. and in those fish were released a chemical and that's the trigger chemical for the micro. it's all scary kind of weird stuff but what happens is this can become a flesh eater. and so now we were winding up with hundreds of thousands of fish washing up on the shore with big open nasty source on them. the commercial fishermen in maryland were catching the fish with big open source on them which they couldn't sell, and so people were in a panic about

what the heck was going on with fish. .. so what was happening the fisheries were getting sick and they were in jesting this microbe in this play so it was a scary thing. it took the public affairs folks to help translate batting get the scientists on track and say get your head out of the lab and put this and real-world context what does this mean to people? can they eat the fish? that was the first thing they wanted to know can they catch

this and can it become a disease? that is the example i wanted to give and how pao can really make a big difference. >> thank you. i think we spent a good time on the side of the table so i want to revisit you all. you you are still bare congo write? i want to give you a chance just throwing it out there to whoever wants to comment. you have heard a lot now. rather than me throw a question to you for starters i want to give you a chance is there something you have heard that you want to particularly address? >> first of all i agree with you john,. >> which john? >> i agree with you john and tony and the other john the paos we were dealing with i'm suspecting we would have very few problems but what statistics of carolyn's surveys aside from the whole bell curve is that more and more of the paos are exhibiting the problems that we

are dealing with. i disagree tony that reporters are not punished for going around or not abiding by the rules. many paos have rules for reporters not just for staffers, and if you disobey the rules there is a consequence. there is a blackballing that happens to some reporters. there is a hierarchy of wheat will get the emperor mission or we will hold conferences with these reporters. we will send out press releases to these news outlets and not these. there is definitely a punishment factor. that is why i think so many reporters have been silent for so long. if i make waves, if i protest this there's going to be a consequence. another thing that concerns me is this idea so many government people being afraid or unwilling

to talk to us. i think there has to be an understanding among government all the way from the top to the bottom. the name public servant as a civil servant still mean something. we are their bosses. they need to be trained to be okay with talking to us. they would rather talk to one reporter surely then 100 people from the local area who are concerned about x subject that data out that are calling them or e-mailing them. so i think this idea that there are so many government people who can't talk to us, can't you talk to your boss. it's just a given. there is no organization where an employee goes oh i can't tell the boss what i'm doing. he scares me or she scares me. so i think there needs to be a training of government people to

at least some basic level to say because you work for the government that is an expectation that you may need to talk to the public and whether it's the public in the form of a reporter or the public in terms of joe q. citizen calls or e-mails that is what you have got to do for us. >> kathryn. >> i think one very basic thing that's not being addressed is the fact that on a routine, on a very frequent almost routine basis when we do talk to people away from the quote surveillance the story is very different and things come out sometimes massive critical things that are not going to come out when the person is being quote watched by their agency. they are in effect being watched by their bosses and the entire

political administration. it is almost a routine fact of life and the surveillance stops that from coming out. also the thing about not putting rules on reporter's, that is kind of a distinction without a difference. if you stop everybody in the agency from talking without the surveillance, then you have stopped that communication and silencing people is just one of the most extraordinarily serious things that can happen in any situation or society. >> i just wanted to remind you that almost 40% of paos said that they do punish reporters who write stories they don't want and prohibit their staff from talking to them so it's not

something that isn't happening. it's happening quite a bit. that is almost half. that's a lot. two-thirds of paos are monitoring interviews so this is not an insignificant problem. >> if i could just add to that, i might have said it wrong when i said it. i wasn't saying that you know that rules on reporters don't happen. i was saying they ought not to happen. that is not the way i operate with reporters. i don't control reporters. reporters work for other people. they don't work for me so except for sort of standard rules in a press conference and normal sourcing rules that we agree to, agree on a sourcing that we hold each other to the outsourcing. and i think those rules are sort

of mutually binding and beneficial. and then also on the accompanying officials to reporters, you can call a surveillance or whatever and i can tell you my view it ought to be 100%. i would not see it as a bad thing and i don't see it as necessarily chilling of information. there seems to be a presumption that if a reporter is asking a question they are entitled to all the information that an official has to give. that is an extraordinary presumption, that all of the information is spoken to reporters. that has never been a tradition of government at all. there is going to be some judgment involved and some information is not appropriate for dissemination at at the

moment they reporter happens to be asking the question. that's not nefarious. it's not censorship. it's not anti-democratic or a violation of any of the amendments to the constitution. it's just some matter of common sense in the middle of a deliberative discussion or sometimes an official doesn't actually know whether it's appropriate to default some information because it may be actually illegal for him to divulge certain information if it's a national security issue. so the presumption that it's open come on any time a reporter asked the question is just an extraordinary presumption. >> don't you think that the presence of the public affairs officer in an interview need someone to potentially varnish what they are saying or not say something that is appropriate

for them to say or that is critical to get out there? does it have any effect? >> yeah absolutely. it can definitely have some effect. >> by the way you did not misspeak earlier when you said that you did not think there should be retribution. you didn't say it doesn't happen. i heard you. you said it right to. >> i was going to say more often than not having the pao in the room ensures that some information does get out. sometimes when officials are speaking they will go off on a tangent or kind of stick to one point he never actually get around to completely answering the question. so more times than not, you will see public affairs folks going oh you forgot to mention this and don't forget that. those kinds of things too and the other part that tony was talking about where sometimes information is not releasable and that's really critical during a crisis situation. you don't know the cause of

things and most of the time when there is some sort of a crisis almost the first questions that come out to the reporters are less about the incident at hand and more about who is to blame for this, and we don't know that and we are not going to know that and we are not going to point fingers and we are not going to speculate. that's the critical thing and keep in mind when i mentioned before things i would like to revise our don't hide your agenda and don't assume we are hiding something but also don't ask us to speculate. we are only going to be able to give you the facts. >> any of you all want to make additional points? in particular i'd like you to address this question and the point they are making that they can't just allow any government official to talk to anybody at any time, but that there is a need to control in the interest of accuracy who talks.

do you think that's legitimate? >> i think it's painted with too broad a brush. generally, the government is airing extremely or on the side of caution. and so, many government officials who would be just fine talking to us to give us information, we are not talking necessarily about a sensitive subject or a crisis. we are talking about the day in and day out workings. like i said it's sort of in case , and it does have this effect of shutting the conversation down of shutting the understanding of the information down because you are too much worried about what if. >> can i add one thing? in a lot of agencies, depending

on the kinds of work they do the policy is pretty broad and again it depends on the agency and the kind of work they do but i know many of the places where i have worked over the years the policy was if a reporter approaches you in the field about what it is you are working on and what you are doing you can talk to them about it. tell them about it within the parameters of your expertise and your job and what you know. but, don't talk to them about how this affects policy. if you are a road repair guy and you can talk about the road repair you are doing. what does this mean to the states road repair budget? don't comment on that because it's not your expertise. that is what we tell folks. go ahead and talk to reporters. if you sit there and go i have to call my tao first back it's really uncomfortable so a lot of times depending on the work that's going on and the kind of information, a lot of times they talk to a reporter. you need to let us know right

away so we can track it. the biggest thing is that the boss doesn't want to find out something has happened by reading it in the newspaper. >> for the public affairs officers if any here are watching, more than ever before i think i mean you just have -- most of the bad quote unquote bad stories i have ever dealt with are usually because there wasn't good communication between the public affairs officer in the reporter and the porter who didn't have enough knowledge to write whatever the story is, now that is not always the case. i have dealt with reporters to knew a lot more about some issues than i did and so that forced me to have to get a lot smarter on things. but reporters are dealing with really complicated issues.

a lot of different things, a lot of time pressure to write. you cannot let a reporter write a story based on not great information. you have to really really work hard with reporters and you need to do it when the news isn't happening. you should overwhelm reporters with access and education and i mean just help them. the very best reporters i have ever dealt with came into my office and said, can you help me understand this? and i spend a lot of time just talking and trying to help understand. not when they are writing a story. help me understand this and i talked to this person and talk to them because they wanted to climb up the learning curve on an issue. i have so much respect for reporters who wanted to really

take the time to work hard at it but is a public affairs officer you have an obligation to do it. you cannot just point out after the story has been written and say that reporter didn't know what he was talking about. it's your job to make sure the reporter knows what he's talking about. it's her job to make sure that information and incomplete information is getting out in a public place. and no reporter wants to put that information out. ill-informed information. >> those relationships are so critical. >> can i just get a show of hands at how many people want to ask a question so i have an idea of? we should probably get started on that i think. please come up to the microphone and if you will state your name and affiliation that is appreciated but not required. >> hi i am celia wexler with the union of concerned scientists and we often hear from scientists who want to talk to

reporters that they are too afraid and some of you have gotten a report grading the media policies but for some of those media policies we actually had to do foia request to even get a copy of the policies however on our web site dcs usa.org, we have logged all those agency media policies so if you're in a position where debut aren't talking to a pao is nice as these two gentlemen you might be able to refer to those agency media policies. i do have one question where the panelists and probably bored the reporter's side. do you ever rejected non-profits often those folks -- i used to be a journalist and became a nonprofit advocate. they have a point of view but they often know a heck of a lot about agencies and no a lot of people at agencies are people who used to work at agencies who sometimes we can be matchmakers and i wonder if you ever did

that? >> i certainly do and i continue to. let me say at the outset let's try to keep our responses brief and i apologize that i haven't left too much time for questions. any of you want to talk about dealing with a nonprofit? >> i think there's one technique you are a allowed to talk to people sometimes. we are not, sad to say. >> working with non-profits and working with a friday is important to all of us and medications. later on we can chat about some examples of where we have actually gone to the non-profits especially the non-profits who are on the opposing side of an issue and brought them in and sat them down and went out with a consolidated message and sat down with reporters to explain that a technical detailed issues and got both sides all out at the same time.

i think it's a very critical thing to do. >> yes, maam. >> i'm sue darcey. i'm a reporter with a newsletter that covers medical devices of the agency had to deal with is dutch i have watched in the past five years as agencies have shut down to reporters and so i have a couple of questions for you all and maybe you know the answer and maybe not. i'm now at the point where i can even build a relationship with a source there because the press office doesn't allow any reporter to talk directly, have been interviewed, only on rare occasions. how can we make this process work that are? that's one for the question i had. another one i have is what is it that these agencies are doing with slides that they have agency staff show at meetings at public meetings. i have now been to three or four of them, these big public meetings and slide presentations are shown. it immediately the day of the

meeting u.s. for them and they tell you we have to clear the slides first. is that censorship? >> that's just stupidity frankly. [laughter] if you are showing slides in any kind of public space, honestly i would say it's stupidity. if you are trying to get information out why would you not want to make it available? >> i was told by the current press officer in my division at the fta that i should contact her two weeks before the meeting so that she can relate to all the staffers within the slide presentations at the meeting that they have to give it to the public and they can't sit on it and hold it for a week or two because by then the story is dead. i can't write my story without the slide presentation. >> i just want to know that the bush of ministries and apparently was more open. [laughter] [inaudible]

>> the bush administration when he got angry there were a lot of leakers at one particular agency and it might've been the ad department or the epa. he told them that they had to shut down and warned all the staff all answers must come from the press officer. you can no longer have staff directly talking to reporters and i swear to god i believe that is what has happened at fta because everybody i try to talk to at a public meeting at the fta is frightened of me. they go oh no my boss will fire me. >> fda is one of the agencies i looked at when i was doing research for this and as far as i can tell they are not one of the ones that bans contact between officials. no, no, no in their official policy. this is the point i'm making. regardless of what it says in a official policy. >> i can't speak for fda and i don't know what their practices are but i will say though that there is absolutely no question they deal with very sensitive

information. if a staffer at the fta would indicate to you for example that a drug is or a medical device is not ready or is going to be having no problem getting approved. [inaudible] >> so that i can write about it in my newsletter that goes out to medical device makers. >> we need to move onto the next person. >> my name is joe davis and i've been covering the environments for 35 years. right now i'm with the society of environmental journalists and i have seen this issue develop over a long time. it strikes me that the argument i heard 20 and 30 years ago about we need a press officer there so nobody gets misquote it is somewhat obsolete in these days of digital recorders. if we want a fair witness we should both flip our machines on and get about our business.

here is the question. airing the run-up to the second iraq war the bush two administration, some portion of it comcast was very frustrated with the efforts of the international arms control people who are trying to inspect what was going on and on the ground in iraq and every time they tried to interview a nuclear scientist there was a government minder there. our government and was very upset about this and i even found a link and i don't have it with me, got a statement by a government spokesman. this is ipso facto evidence that they are trying to hide something. and on the basis of that, we went to war and it turned out they didn't have the nuclear weapons program to speak of. socom cut the question is if our government once was justified in not trusting the iraqi regime because of minders why should

the american people not be justified and not trusting the government that can't let its own scientist talk about science with a minder present? >> well, yeah. >> that's the question. >> thank you. >> well con cut look. i'm not going to relive all of the press operations at that time and i was in the treasury department at the time so i wasn't in that debate. i don't know what the practices were and whether scientist could talk to them or not. i'm not going to -- >> it's really a question of trust. i have heard this so many times here and maybe the paos and reporters should just be drinking together more. i don't know.

[laughter] .. >> as an employee you probably know, when treasury employ, she had an e-mail, so to get to my question though, one frustration

i found is in covering the government is a lot of tao's, i'amassing this in the context f the principles, that their political appointees and the only background or qualification for the job and this is true for the obama demonstration, and the bush administration is they worked on the campaign. should that be allowed? >> look, i think you want to try to find talent where you can and try to match it up for those jobs. there is, a public affairs officers aren't elected to the isa do work for the people who are elected and they are answerable to them. in the cases where they are political, that was a political appointee. i don't think you can change the whole structure of government that way. i would encourage any administration to try to find the best talent for these jobs because i think there critically

important. on e-mail thing, i'll tell you a story. i did get into a fight with bloomberg at one point when i was in, actionable us at the white house. they started this policy that drives me crazy. i think it's awful but there are times when you're in a meeting and bloomberg reporter would e-mail and they say, i going to ask for response was i would be in a meeting and they started publishing, said in e-mailed response and i get very angry with them. i was never afraid to talk reporters and i said, first of all, why don't you write said in response to an e-mail question, you know? [laughter] which they never would do. but then i said, look, when you publish it looks like i'm afraid to talk to you. and so you're noting it was an e-mailed thing and it affects my reputation.

i'm happy to talk to any point but if you want a timely response, i may have to enough you and you shouldn't embarrass me for e-mailing you. and they said it's our policy, we have no choice. i said good, here's the way it works. ap and reuters, if the enemy during the meeting i'm going to answer them. but if your reporters want to wade into the meeting is over and i can get to my desk and picked up the phone and call you back, that's fine. you just get the news been. they change their policy. >> we have less than two minutes left. i apologize to people who will not be able to ask their questions. this will have to be the last. >> i came in out of curiosity. i was arrested twice by the utah highway patrol. they said was an open meeting.

i the history of freedom of information and i would say if that's the case, i don't think the mainstream media, and you're part of the, do anything to talk about the treatment of the media had no information may be withheld or how freedom of information is being denied. but also retired by the department of interior. i was a member of the government communicate and people way back when. when i was hired i was told we are hiring you from the outside because most of the people only know how to say no. we want a marketeer. so i went to understand your business, i understand controlling. reports have to be controlled but i would say p5 owes are also becoming to politically motivated and espousing more of a political wreck agenda as opposed to disseminate information that should be available publicly. [applause] >> thank you very much or that question.

[laughter] >> thank you all for being here. actually, you know, i find this conversation very heartening because i note a lot of commonality, despite the differences, and you know, i think that with a little more professionalism and a little more to negation these things can get better. so thank you all very much for joining us. we are adjourned. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> we were right in my view to fully fund the military before 9/11 but we did was we deprived the state department and the u.s. agency international development of funds, and it is as a result an enormous gap between the size of our of the pentagon and the size and power of the state department.

i'll illustrate with two little examples from bob gates it was an outstanding secretary of defense to president bush and president obama. he gave a brilliant speech a couple years ago, and here are two of the nuggets. secretary gates, we have more military personnel in one carrier battle group, the united states navy. more military personnel on one carrier battle group that we have american diplomats all over the world. here's another, if that doesn't convince you. we have more members of the armed forces marching bands of the navy, air force, army, marines -- true fact -- vent american diplomats. >> this weekend, nicholas burns on history of u.s. diplomatic efforts in the mideast and his call for return to diplomacy saturday morning at 10 eastern on c-span2's booktv, how would you define the american dream? on c-span3's american history

tv, why change the story when the truth is more exciting? true tales of the founding fathers sunday at noon eastern. >> the american enterprise institute held a discussion yesterday looking at the 2008 financial crisis. j. richards, a fellow at institute for faith, work and economics outlined his book which proposes that washington insiders and activists laid the foundation for the economic crisis. after his remarks, several financial experts give an analysis of mr. richards work. >> thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for coming. please have a seat, finish conversations and wrap up. we're going to get started right now. i appreciate everyone for coming to aei today for discussion of

the book "infiltratred." this is an event of the culture of competition initiative here at aei which is what my job is here. the culture of competition we try to discuss the virtues competition brings in politics, in civic life, mostly in economics. it's something of a defense of capitalism as the pursuit of profit in the context of free and open competition which these days means to be contrast to the pursuit of profit in the context of government manage the economy, something occasionally called cronyism these days. a couple housekeeping notes. there will be a dessert reception following this at about 1:30. there will be question period and i reminded him when the question gets to you, wait for the microphone and please try to make a brief and the question. and also please take this moment to check that your cell phones

are silenced or turned off. the book we are discussing today is "infiltratred," how to stop insiders and activists were exploiting the financial crisis that control our lives and our fortunes. it is, what is it, the third book, or more -- >> at least the third. >> at least the third book, that's right. i know people have at least six kids and they're not sure. at least the third book by jay richards, senior fellow at the discovery institute where he directs the center on wealth poverty and world. is also a visiting fellow at the institute for faith, work and economics. he has written a few books, an award-winning book that came out in '09 during the financial crisis, or thereabouts called money, greed and god, why

capitalism is a solution and not the problem. but again we're talking his latest book, "infiltratred." he will speak in the middle of comments from our painless. we have more collaborative is at the cato institute, but during the financial crisis is at the center banking committee. i do not if it means if he blames -- if he bears any of the plane or not. wayne abernathy is that the american bankers assocation. he was there during the crisis. so who knows? we've got quite a lot of blame to go around on this panel. previously he was treasury assistant secretary, and before that mr. abernathy was on the senate banking committee. you guys have your full bios in the paper that you can pick up on the front desk. but let's get started now so we can have questions later and let's welcome jay richards. [applause] >> thanks so much, tim. thanks especially to the

american enterprise institute, the debut event in d.c. the book just came out last week and i'm really pleased to be at aei because the subject of the book. the book tells a lot about ground and it's an attempt to give it a narrative description of the factors and the people involved in developing the policies that led to the financial crisis and then what happened as result of the crisis. and i argue that well-meaning people with good intentions abdicated a bigger set of policies that led to very bad consequences. and some of those people actually use bad consequent as a pretense to increase their own power. and social about two chapters in a book that's about the financial crisis per se because it's a bit more forward-looking. there are not a lot of heroes in my book. in fact, there's a lot of villains but i see a lot of well-meaning but deeply misguided individuals that play key role. and as i was with him a script i realize this is kind of depressing not having any

heroes. this is just a basic principle of narrative nonfiction. fortunately, i have a couple of heroes that i found as i was doing research for the book in edward and peter wallison here at aei. many of you heard peter speaker just a few months ago actually about his own book on financial crisis, but he was one of 10 members of the financial crisis inquiry commission, official commission set up to study the causes of the financial crisis and then issue a report. he exercised rare moral courage by writing a one man 99 page sent to the majority report. so he dissented from six democrats and three republicans. and i think that peter, by far, had the better of the argument, add up the numbers, just basic data has worn him out. i get interested in the sub jake though because as tim said i wrote this book money greed and

god back in 2009, subtitle wide capitalism is the solution enough problem. you can see why that title would be a problem in may 2009, right? i turn in in 2007, the publisher says let's hold onto this. 2008 is presidential election year, it will get swamped with books about missing birth certificate, things like that. so they held it over to 2009 which meant the financial crisis happened between the time i finished the book in the time it came out. so i spent a great deal of my time talking about the financial crisis and what caused the reason is because for many come in fact i think the conventional wisdom of the crisis is the result of unfettered competition. it was result of capital is in run amok. cowboys on wall street, the usual suspects. to avoid embarrassing myself i spent a lot of time reading

about the financial crisis and i very quickly realized that the real story in a much more interesting of competition story was sort of behind the scenes and beneath the surface, but was not being told. in fact, this one question, have you just consider any mind why was it that within two weeks so far as i can tell the events of the timbre of 2008, the kind of apogee, this conventional wisdom about the crisis, the cause of the crisis had been set in concrete it wasn't until january 2010 that the commission was even set up to study because. how likely is it that say newsweek's going to know what causes on september 17? doesn't seem probable. i think that's part of the story. in fact, the way in which the media was massaged and fed the story i think many of them were willing but it don't think any of them were necessary militias.

the basic data about spent any time on because we're at aei, but i think sort of a smoking gun is the because of the financial crisis, if you isolate the key frail as opposed to the constant. people say greed caused the financial crisis. it's like saying gravity caused a plane crash, right? greed, discree discrete ever. you get a lot of people in a room in anywhere and you can have some greed involved. that's a constant. so must we believe that some a lot of people got together and commercial investment banks and said, say in 2005 and said, let's concentrate our greed in the mortgage market and mortgage-backed securities. not commodities, just let's focus it there. then it would be a very well. but, in fact, there's no evidence, though i do think is evidence to kind of implicit. there's no evidence i think that greed was in was in 2008 and

editing in 1998. i think the way you can see that is the numbers that were first asked me at about 25 million, later we estimate as 2,727,000,000 is the number of risky or nontraditional loans in the system at the time of the crisis in 2008. so that's about half of all the lowest in the system at the time or in this nontraditional or risky category. i have broken it out and you can get the gory details of this from peter wallison specific notice the red, fannie or freddie held about 12 million of those loans. so almost half. then there were another 5 million or so held by fha and the federal home loan bank and the va, and about 2.2 million held by banks operating under the community reinvestment act and hud programs that implement it affordable housing goals. this is why i think peter wallison is right to say that it

was affordable housing, well-meaning, but imposed across department of the federal government. there were about 25 of these programs openly in place had the unfortunate effect so that change the market incentive that you. fannie mae in 2000 was under a mandate from congress of having a quote in the number of loans that is headed by. just imagine in your heads what did congress require that fannie mae by? what percentage of loans if they buy on the secondary market, that is that they bought from loan originators had to be in this risky category? 50%. in 2000. so the federal government created a market for very risky loans which create incentives so that banks and a normal market situation under normal sort of competition, banks are not going to give out loans that have good reason to think will not be paid

back. you can assume -- people don't normally give loans that they think are going to be paid back. change the incentive and you get a completely different picture. so i really think that the affordable housing goals was to support staff of fed policy an account of implicit too big to fail mentality among many large institutions is the best account of the financial crisis as opposed to going into mere factors. as i said, that's just a couple chapters of the book and i tried to, i tried to tell the story of peter wallison and his triumph that trigger with a financial crisis. having studied it, it has begun makes me think -- makes me sick to my stomach to as peter said, and i quote in the book, a whitewash. sorter predetermined conclusions at the beginning and they found

him what they planned to find them which is again wall street greed and some republicans who did deregulate some things that caused the crisis and that was their report. the book is primarily about what i'm going to call full spectrum cronyism. him mention cronyism a minute ago. tiffany's four, mercantilism, corporatism. but we imagine that a large corporation in cahoots and colluding with federal government and particular federal regulars and there's a whole lot of that going on. i think to understand the full story you need full spectrum cronyism and if you cannot infer the role of corporate world, at least i would say some financial institution in the federal government, but also the nonprofit sector. and it's in the corporate and nonprofit sector that i think the household names are lacking. most people heard about legislators, the key players in the crisis like chris dodd and

barney frank. chris dodd and 40 -- barney frank serve 30 years, chris dodd was on the senate banking committee and chaired it for a while and barney frank was in the house financial service committee. so 30 years. they were both avid and vocal advocates of affordable housing bill. and, in fact, in about 2003, the george w. bush of administration proposed an agency that oversees and get control of fannie and freddie. they were worried about. earning frank blocked that. he said, these institutions done anything wrong with them and if we do this we will get less affordable housing so blocky. he very quickly when the crisis happened shifted the blame to republicans and the regulars and things like that but both of these guys were strong advocates of the policies they think the evidence shows resulted in a financial crisis. and then the bill that was passed and signed into law in 2010 is named after them.

dodd-frank. i would say suggest there's more to the story. dodd-frank is officially called the wall street reform and consumer protection act. bills and cars are never called the government exploitation of our and ignorance, right? act of 2010. you know, government reform of really bad government policies act. it's always some wall street reform. we were told while she was the primary problem. we are all consumers. we all want to be protected. that sounds great. the problem is, is as a doctor in the book, the bill actually, first of all doesn't identify the problem for the cause of the problem correctly. and it ends up institutionalizing certain policies that were previously just implicit, like too big to fail. most people have heard of dodd-frank. most people have not written a

many of the consumer and housing activists in the background that worked tireless through the use concert history in the 1980s and 1990s first to encourage private banks to give loans to low income at risk borrowers. now, some of us i don't think was a problem. i think the man i showed you here, smart guy, davidson college graduate, masters degrees, yale and princeton started editing community banking and helping build up the press in places like raleigh north your line and jerome north carolina but he very quickly got in trouble for policy and housing activism. so over the years he built up about nine or so different organizations under the monitor itself help. some are nonprofit, some not-for-profit and some for profit. and so i think lady kidal and sort of negotiating the connection of these private banks and risky loans to fannie

mae and freddie mac. if he were to ask someone, asked a banker in the 1980s what the primal and he or she would've told you will, it's a loan that fannie will buy from us and then has very strict requirements, down payment, you know, credit history, visible means of income, kind of crazy things like that that somehow fell out. so by 2007 you could get a loan, a ninja loan, no income, no job or assets. something happened in the intervening years and he played a partner i'm not saying he was a kilo figure but if you think he was a very prominent stand-in for the nonprofit sector that most people ignore. one little detail about his self-help in 1998 the ford foundation gave self-help a $50 million loan, grant. this is a nonprofit north carolina. if not in the nonprofit sector you may not know that the huge

amount of money, $50 million. overhead was an additional $1.8 million. what was this grant for? martinique have been going around privately encouraging banks, encouraging banks to give up certain loans to give out a few these risky loans. they said we can only give up so many of these. you are doing to your committee been but we can't sell these to fannie and freddie. so it's too risky. he went to the ford foundation's and they ponied up $50 million. and what was that grant for? let me -- sorry about that. let me give you a quote. this is still on the ford foundation website as a can of a couple of days ago. this may go down in the next few days. memorize it. self-help concentrate on special targeted products designed to expand homeownership opportunities for people to require lower down payment and

more flexible underwriting standards and have difficulty meeting conventional lending standards because of inadequate savings or credit that probably didn't sound ominous when it was written in 1998 but, of course, it sounds very ominous now. what essentially happened is that he offered to self-help with this 50 million-dollar grant by those can risky loans to private banks. if you make more of those grants, they will make more of these risky loans. he would by those and by surpassing them through self-help and securitizing them he would provide a credit enhancement which then fannie mae was willing to buy. now at the same time the ford foundation funded professor jeffrey of north carolina, a friend, to do a study, three-year study to see what the result of this was but it was to see if for instance, low, low income and high risk borrowers

were good for their loans. no one would be surprised to know that's exactly what this done. you might wonder why did he do a study like that? they did a study because there were people at the time wanted to make the north carolina model a national model. and so that was really important some sort of academic study. so they got it. ford foundation ponied up again and supported it after the five year cycle was over. very few people know this story. i think it's very important piece of the puzzle. and what exactly happened so that the prime loan could be defined by fannie and then in the 2000s they could suddenly be wanting to buy 50% of the loan as high risk alone. that's a crucial component. i talk a lot about it. by the way, the national exercise of self-help started in 2002. it started out in north carolina, concerned self-help

now has a large 10 or 11 story building here in washington, d.c. just about three blocks north of the white house. very nice building as a self-help. i think right now the occupied one of the stories and then rent out the others. the national kind of lobbying arm is called the center for responsible lending. who is opposed to responding to a responsible lending? that's got to be a good thing. this is the result of a california savings and loan banker, later billionaire named herbert sandler who called eakes and said i want you to make this a national operation but if you do i will help fund. in 2002 they started the center for responsible lending, and opened up an office in washington, d.c. who are herbert and marion sandler? raise your hands if you've heard these names before? of you if you. this is a highly non-representative sample in this room, i issue.

i ask that question several other towns and people the lime talking about. they were parodied on setting. herb sandler called the president of nbc after that and got -- was interesting about them is that they were co-ceos of world savings bank, the holding bank for 40 years, california-based savings and loan and they were pioneers of something called the option arm. it's an adjustable-rate mortgage. so unlike your fixed-rate mortgage that most of us have an adjustable-rate to the type of lung in which you started usually at a lower interest rate that been recess after one year or five years or in the case of the sandler loans, after 10 years. what's interesting about their loans is they weren't just adjustable-rate. they were option. what option it was a for the borrower, you have an option for kenya's about how much are going to be. you can pay the full amount and

chip away at the principal plus interest. you can adjust the interest or you can pay less than the interest. you can do this for kenya's. so in other words, you could for 10 years get deeper and deeper and deeper into debt. and telephony there's a time when this might seem like a rational calculation. if you're flipping homes is something that most of these homes came with prepayment penalties so they were not available for people going to buy, renovate and then sell. well, what happened to this company? in 2006, herb and marion sandler who had already had successes in place to take over after they retired, and about a two-week period suddenly sold their entire company for almost $45 billion to wachovia bank in north carolina. you may recognize wachovia because that's the bank that went belly up in 2008 at the height of the financial crisis. not do exclusively but in part due to the massive portfolio option a.r.m. they got from the

sandler's. that would be just the kind of a little tail in the financial news, but the sandler's have been very important philanthropists for progressive causes for years before they sold recovery. that's not scandalous august the i wouldn't have written the book considers liberals that youtube liberal causes. what's interesting though and i tell one story in particular in the book that the sandler's, they give you many great causes. american gas association and things like that but they also have an uncanny way of orienting and calibrating their for-profit interest and the nonprofit interest. for instance, for many years they funded a corn in california and the assignment of a corn we now know because of some activists defected was to go after the sandler's leading competition in california. for unsavory lending practices.

the bank with wells fargo, so they specifically paid a not-for-profit group to badger the key competition and to attack the competition for giving of unsavory loans. after they sold thei the compann 2006, they were able to infuse their foundation with a lot more money. it's now one of the top 30 foundation but if you look at 2004, along with george soros and peter lewis, of progressive insurance, they were number three donors the left wing and progressive causes, things like moveon.org. nobody seems have heard about them. what they also did is they continued to fund heavily self-help and the center for responsible lending, and set up a media company called propublica with a $10 million initial grant. propublica has got a really, really clever business model. where the dude is a fund research journalism. everybody knows and journalism

has troubles funding, expensive research project. propublica has reported that go out and spend the money and do the hard work for the research, and then they approached outfits like "the new york times" or npr or "usa today" to partner with them on these stories, sort of bring it to fruition but if you are "the new york times" and someone brings you the results of six months of investigative journalism, that's very well written, you're likely to do it. in fact, i think it landed -- landed up pulitzer or two. as i said that started in 2006, herb sandler has been the chairman of the board of the company since it started. if you just look at propublica, look at the stores and say i would have the reported the financial crisis, they have done literally dozens and dozens, in the hundreds of stories having to do with the financial crisis, all of which i would call sort of sandler source of interest. they of course don't point any fingers to large donors.

the same thing happened with another prominent pbs documentary series, frontline. along with the macarthur foundation, sandler heavily funded frontline over the last few years but if you look at frontline coverage of the financial crisis in the last five years, again, you see a whole lot of sandler stories of interest. i'm not saying they were specifically paid off. i'm just saying it's a very clever way in which a willing media outlets, and i think he funded it and used to sort of tell the party line. they pick up a few chapters in the book because i think they're very important. elizabeth warren start out as a small player in the book and then got to be a big player right after the elections in november. most people don't know, elizabeth -- the story that she had cherokee ancestry, but she was a harvard law professor. what most people don't know is

that consumer financial protection bureau, which i'll talk about in a minute, was the brainchild of elizabeth warren. in 2007. very few people know how is this one was treated in her scholarship by her academic college but she been accused of academic fraud in one case but she been accused of complete illiteracy with regard to economics. ..

this identifies the cause of the problem and then actually creates things that make the problem worse in the long term. there's this implicit too big to fail assumption that you can see some very large financial institutions of fannie mae and freddie mac. lehman brothers for instance, a large new york investment bank, dick folde spent up to the lead up not preparing for bankruptcy. and part of the reason is because he prepared for bankruptcy they might let that happen. instead he's hoping to get the bear stearns deal. bear stearns he'd gotten in march. he didn't want to teach to sort of communicate the idea of a bailout so he let lehman brothers go bankrupt on september 15th, 2008. and of course the rest is history. that is too big to fail. before it was an implicit assumption and now it is a sort

of regulatory policy. we now have under dodd-frank systemically important financial institutions. that is a bureaucratic jargon for too big to be allowed to fail. certain institutions depending upon their size and assets are doug systemically important financial institutions. all of the provisions aren't bad but simply doing that reinforces this idea of too big to fail. the other thing i am the most concerned with and i will mention very briefly the consumer financial protection bureau. it sounds very nice. it's very humble. but it's not to like? it's about protecting consumers. it's up here across the street from the executive office building and i predict it will outgrow its space in a few years. the consumer financial protection bureau is a sovereign entity unlike any that has existed before.

it's not the control of commerce even the fed chairman and the board don't have a lot of control over it the president appoints a single director for five-year term for the presidential term and they have very wide discretion interpreting and enforcing various financial regulations and basically have jurisdiction over everything in the financial sector from investment banking and mortgage banking all the way down to the pawnshop in alabama. they have some kind of control over that and i've got the chilling reports from the ceos that have been investigated and it is truly chilling and i personally think however well-meaning this might have been this is a very dangerous organization and its structure is very dangerous. that's why i think the story is worth telling because i think this is one chapter in what i will call soft tierney. i don't think the thing with

which those in the free economy have to deal in the 21st century is stalinist russia. nobody seems at least it's in power once the government to own private property. it just doesn't happen. we've got the unions against you, the private citizens against you and private entities that are overly controlled by the government. you get the best of both worlds, total control and to blame the private sector when you get a problem. and that is a dangerous form of creeping soft tyranny that alexis de tocqueville predicted on what he called the country's tyrannies that does not these crowley and kill but it prevents existence. it's not coercive leave violent but it simply shapes and governs

it. frederick one said he thought we do not value freedom until that has been lost. i certainly hope he was wrong. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you, jay. we have responses from two experts here so we are going to start with wayne abernathy of the american bankers association. >> thank you very much. it's a privilege to be on this panel and to be able to read the book and to read it ahead of time before it is out of print so i can think of it. first i need to say that my comments are my own. they don't represent the views of the american association. i am on my own ticket in my present today. i brought with me a copy of the monetary history of the united states come 1867 to 1960 by milton friedman, and jacobson

schwartz. in many important ways of this is a landmark book especially because of chapters seven through nine. those chapters begin the reputation of what until then had been done yearly undisputed narrative of what had caused the great depression. because of their historical accuracy and sound reasoning friedman and schwartz demonstrated that federal reserve monetary policy dramatically constricting the money supply is what started the great depression and kept it going for years after that. and now generally speaking everybody recognizes that in current -- and putting the federal reserve. friedman and schwartz opened the door to serious rethinking and correcting of the record of the depression that this causes.

they started the new - 50 well. unfortunately, it took almost 30 years from the depths of the depression for their but to come out. it cannot in 1963. fortunately the challenge to the official narrative of the recent recession and the financial panic isn't taking that long. in the 2010, bill cizik published his book in the net book explains panic policies by panicked policy makers turned what would have been a normal economic downturn into a financial run for the exit and we saw that in 2008. john ellis's book the financial crisis in the market your was published this year and a net but he emphasizes how interfering market distorted government policy lays the groundwork for the crisis and has been making things worse

since then. peter wallace in published his first book on the recession and the crisis with the title bad history where is policy this is a collection of essays, of the many essays peter road that demonstrates the peter before, during as well as after the recession had been writing and fighting the official . wouldn't it have been great if someone in 1930 writing about antiquing and challenging the official narrative at that time? like understand peter is working on his second book of the subject and we will see that when it comes out. there are others and will be others if we believe as i do that eventually the truth comes out. today we discussed richard's book "infiltrated" demonstrating the truth will come out and the effort is growing in strength and is ever more appealing. one of the things i really like about jay's book is that it's

very readable and it's a but you can take to the beach and sit and enjoy rather than i'm supposed to read this but it's tough to read -- this is a very enjoyable, interesting book to read as well as well researched. the story told by jay and quote kill infiltrated" is longer than he mentioned. a story long before the recession and continues afterwards and it is a bigger story. a story that is bigger than his book. its core message though it is well eliminated by the recent events and their aftermath through his book, richard demonstrates something that transcends what i believe is well displayed by the recent and continuing national economic trauma and understand its continuing. if you don't believe the economy is traumatized then you must live in the d.c. area. if you get out of d.c., you will discover people were still traumatized in their economic conditions. they think things are getting

better a little bit but they are still going through the affect. and of the lessons that we should take away with us today is brought up very well in this book and i refer to the human wreckage caused when some people are able to harness the coercive force of government to impose the personal notions of benevolence on the rest of us. roger writing in 2011 in the new criterium warned that such efforts at government enforced benevolence far, quote, intoxicating, addictive, expensive, and ultimately ruinous. richards offers several well described examples illustrating the truth of the observations. because of my own experiences, i'm john to the case of the community reinvestment act. working on the stuff of the senate banking committee in the 1980's and 1990's, i noticed how

the sea are a provided no additive value to get banks to lend to their own communities for the purpose of the act. because banks were already doing that in 1987 and they've been doing it ever since. where else is the bank going to lend if not in its own community? where it has a special knowledge and competitive advantage. what alarms me is how it was put to other uses. for example, cra became a lever employed by some banks for competitive advantage over others. advantage that they hadn't earned in the marketplace. one bank in particular and i need not mention the name of cigarettes of lead bullion up other banks and using cra as a means of keeping the competing bids for those particular banks at bay and out of competition. cra protest by community activists and organizers can slow down the acquisition

efforts by raising assertions that banks are ignoring their own markets cut assertions that are almost never proved but always carefully investigated by the regulators slowing everything down. the bank discovered the strategy of entering into billions of dollars of financial arrangements with community groups before announcing an acquisition plan to be added to no surprise those groups later wrote and testified in support of the bank's merger effort. the cra supporters got the joke in 1999 they came across the wonderful colloquy in the congressional record. i was there and i heard the colloquy but i found it again and i know it's their somewhere. in 1999 and senator phil gramm and others were pursuing legislation to stop the expansion of the cra, senators john edwards and barbara boxer

held a colloquy with two senators engaged in the conversation for the official record and a neighbor talking and praising about this particular bank in the record. miami company supports the community reinvestment act both in spirit and fact. we have gone way beyond its requirements. we have had fun doing it and we have made a business out of it. indeed, they did. a news article in may, 2008 explained how, quoting from the article she noted the series of what new england calls wicked smart moves, well-publicized deeds pave the way to the growth of the unprotected acquisition. terrie wrote in the article the

help it avoid delays that bump up the deals between the banks accused of noncompliance. some people today complained of some banks being too big. but cra felt this bank grow. a valuable lesson for policy makers and for the people they would governor. the more discretion than you get to government, the more you create the opportunity for abuse of that discretion for private gain the more you create the opportunity for abusive discretion for private gain. europe and the 18th-century was lousy as a practice. our forebears fought to ease the debt and sought the revolution to get out of its grip. was thrown into the harbor in boston was in protest of the partnership between the british crown and a privately owned british east india company.

bea where the public-private partnerships. they explained because some private public mortgage partnerships went bad. for the partners and for all of us in the dust and debris it reminds me of the warning that says when you enter into a partnership with the devil, you are always the junior partner. [laughter] and i will conclude with of the words of the new york city democrat congressman burt cochrane delivered 112 years ago almost to the day in the 15th of july. he said that the government only is good, that government only is great. that government is just which neither has favorites more victims. that should be our government.

thank you. [applause] i thanked him for the information and jay for what is a great book and i should also -- i'm not sure if i should think wayne but i'm going to under the staff in 2001 i'm not sure whether he there's response to devotee for me having spent the last ten years fighting these efforts i do want to emphasize this is an enjoyable book and i have to read lots of things on a regular basis i would rather not and this isn't one of them. this is something i enjoy reading and i want to emphasize very accessible and straightforward you don't need a ph.d. to follow the narrative. he does a tremendous job breaking down the complex things and it's very straightforward. i can see this book is forming the center of the discussion in the undergraduate course discussion consumer finance so this is where the book really

succeeds while so many others fail. i had to read a tremendous amount of books in the crisis certainly more than i wanted to and they generally follow the two types. they are the best seller accounts and these are fast paced stories of people doing bad things and they tend to be the scholarly account that some of for a theoretical framework for understanding the forces behind the crisis but they have strengths and weaknesses. the one thing jay has done is found a balance between the two. one is what the consumer lending that talks about the crisis but goes beyond the crisis. you have the consumer trends and regulation and these discussions to me are always -- mabey

unfortunately will always be relevant, but go beyond the crisis and presented in a manner that is very, very accessible. the other part of the book is again along the lines of bad people doing bad things. i love the size as jay does as well they are done and motivated by sometimes very good intentions and that is something important to keep in mind but jay doesn't focus on the usual suspects some of you have read something like two big to fail you aren't going to get repetition. there are no pages about the bridge game were taking bets against the housing market and there is little discussion about wall street. some might see that as a criticism but i see it as the strength. it's important to keep in mind that by september of 2008 we have been in a recession for the year already. the temporal evidence seems to

suggest to the reaction of wall street was more a reflection of the crisis than a cause of the crisis. i would go so far to say that the usual session with wall street has reduced the public understanding of the crisis cuses this blame where it think belongs in washington. he also reminds us that washington is a reflection of the goals and agendas that originate very often outside the beltway. for instance mentioned the agenda of herbert maryland sandler, the founders of goldman west and their agenda to use giving to harass the mortgage industry. jay touches upon this. let me emphasize my experience in financial regulations and that it is often far more about competitors trying to stifle competition but it is about protecting consumers. i would emphasize during my seven years on the banking

committee staff the battles were very rarely about the taxpayer and the economy. they really were about the bank's like wall street trying to stick it to the commercial banks and that is 85, 95% of what goes on in the kennedy and of how we protect the taxpayer. very little of that unfortunately. one of the results of the crisis and in my opinion one of the results of dodd-frank would be increased concentration in the financial-services industry. wayne mentioned how it has facilitated some of that. i really want to emphasize i hear that described as an unintended consequence of dodd-frank. i think quite frankly is quite a consequence. what i see this trying to achieve is what i would call the fannie mae stifel of the financial markets. essentially what the model is is we are going to bestow market power and too big to fail status on certain entities and then once we have essentially given you those monopoly profits, the

government is going to come back and demand the kick back some of those profits of the constituencies. let's keep in mind a perfectly or near perfect market doesn't offer rent which the government can redistribute. i should say the formalized this back in the 70's and it is one of the better descriptions i think of the how the government works in practice. jay talks at length the center for responsible lending and gives you a lot of detail and a lot of discussion by their activities. but i will say during my time on the banking committee i was lobbied pretty regularly. i still talk pretty much mit and the westport is a personally i get along with them and disagree on a number of things. i do want to emphasize that -- and i think jay makes the point that it is kind of a symbol of other groups. they are certainly not the only. they are probably the best organized and the most articulate, that they are certainly far from being alone.

i will also emphasize and i think this is a credit to a lot of the research into the books like me having spent ten years dealing with many of these groups. jay digs up the number of stories i have not heard so it is nice to read a book and learn a few things and have it repeated back to me. i do want to emphasize that jay's story is 100% consistent with my experience on the banking committee lobby with these groups. to add a little bit to the story, we often get presented the recent crisis was a big subprimal crisis first time ever but the fact is we had the boom and bust in the sub primm market in the 1990's. most of these were state chartered finance companies that were not depositories. when the asian crisis hit interest rates went up and many institutions went out of business. what we immediately saw on the banking committee and in congress was a member of groups the decide that in the aftermath of the best fannie and freddie should get the subprimal.

i want to be clear i was lobbied on numerous occasions in 2002 ll and to push fannie and freddie into sub prime. i certainly was not alone. i will give credit to these organizations they were very up front and there was the letter that was read that was very common so these were not things being hit at a time. again i see many of these efforts behind this efp and dodd-frank to recreate this model. there is a fair amount of importance in a philosophical discussion and jay's book. at the heart of much of this is a rejection of competition and an avenue for protecting and benefiting consumers. as i mentioned the model he was really trying to create monopolies while, a government monopoly style finance. i will give you one example of this as well.

section 1205 creates a government subsidized version of the pilons and showing congress has a good sense of humor the title that low-cost alternatives to pay their loans i'm fairly certain they will not be low cost for the taxpayer or the border were involved. of course paid a and subprimal are only part of the war on the risk-based pricing which is the notion that higher risk borrowers have high year interest rates and so the agenda of the consumer for the protection bureau will be to reduce the risk-based pricing in my opinion to take us back to the average price with a prudent subsidize the and prudent and it is a very explicit agenda of this agency. again, jay is a very good discussion and is very accessible. he also discusses a lot of the academic research out there. let me emphasize there is a tremendous number of studies that look at payday lending and

installments and consumer lending and show a tremendous out of benefit and these are object of scholars, very well known in academia and solid evidence. sadly despite the claims we hear of it being evidence based they pretty much ignore all of the academic evidence contrary to their own opinions the pretty much reached to begin this efp plays a starring role in jay's clich and emphasizes why we should be concerned about this. and he talks about as well the back story. and let me really emphasize, you know, many of the organizations discussed in the book really do take advantage of the crisis and we are very much behind the scenes creating the csb. this wasn't something that appeared out of holocaust. i want to emphasize i work in a think tank and i usually reluctant to ever question anybody's motives or funding sources. i generally take the perspective you should judge policies on their merit and of course i

believe dodd-frank fails on its merits despite a letter from the efforts to get it in place. but that said i think of that story given in this book what really does illuminate the campaign we have seen to create this efp to eliminate the lending alternatives were for the borrowers and so i find that sort of back story to be of interest even if again i think our first approach should always be what is the argument and how we address the argument on the merits and so on the spirit of balance let me wrap up with a few minor criticisms of books. i noted earlier at the beginning of the goal sort of scholarly journalistic nature of the book that i see as the plus and the downside is i think the organization can be a little disruptive. you are flipping pages as if you are reading a book on the beach and then all of a sudden there's a philosophy of consumer finance. it's actually quite interesting and it's well done but there's a sort of by want to get back and find out what this person is going to do next.

so again, the flow the trying to achieve them at the same time i think this it could have been done differently but i will commend him for being the only book i've read that has tried to achieve both of those things in one book. there's also -- i recognize i like to think every book in the world is written for me but i guess in some ways it is not. and so, if you are familiar with consumer finance pherae the screen to be about one-third of the book that you can quickly flip through and get to maybe the more of the stories. i also want to emphasize this is less a story about the financial crisis then there is certain elements of it and certain responses to. my opinion is the financial crisis was the result of at least a dozen different harmful policies that interacted. some of these are mentioned. for instance, and this is where night as agreed with some of my friends. i think monetary policy was a very big player and there is a little bit of mention in that that we have a page may be that

mentions that and that's appropriate. but there's also a number of other things that are not discussed. i would emphasize if you're interested consumer finance this book should be the top of the reading list. if you're trying to get your head of the financial crisis i would say i think jay's book is a useful addition to other books you should add as well and again it's also a good discussion of the consumer finance provisions of dodd-frank but i would emphasize while in my opinion there are harmful positions it is a massive bill with 16 titles and 800 some pages so if you're looking for an interview with dodd-frank this is a good place to start but you have to look at a lot of other places as well. let me emphasize by saying it is really will be searched accessible book, consumer finance that i think really gives you the economics and the politics. just as important this isn't a rearview mirror approach.

yes it is how we got here but there is a road map to go forward and the issues of concern that are pointed out and so the organizations have disappeared but they have been replaced we formed, the staff is and just gone away. they have reorganized and so there is an effort to politicize the consumer finance which to me was a big contributor of the financial crisis and so i would say in my worry about the consumer finance agencies that we will manage to do for all other forms of consumer finance with the government has done to the mortgage market. thank you. [applause] >> i want everyone to take a minute and think of what your question might be because we are going to get to first gear been duped two quick things. it just sort of quickly respond to this as quickly as you can and i will have a question for everybody and then move to the audience. >> thanks so much to marchand wayne. i wish i had known you were earlier because i didn't have a lot access to focus on the

banking committee at the relevant times a that was just terrific. a couple random thoughts. he mentioned the market panic and i think the kind of conventional wisdom is that mark panicked because the government allowed lehman brothers to go bankrupt. i don't think that's right. you are talking counterfactual but think what is happening at the time. as i said a ceo with lehman brothers spent the year not preparing for bankruptcy and the reason is because the government had already negotiated the deal, not a direct bailout of the kind of soft landing for bear stearns said it is about one-tenth of the size of lehman brothers and so it stood to reason the government is going to step in their that hank paulson said i don't want to communicate this that everybody's going to get bailed out. if you are a market player looking at this, you realize there is no principle involved in determining which companies are built of and which aren't.

it's just simply flipping coins? what's happening? so that level of uncertainty was bound to lead to panic and if things had been handled according to the bankruptcy law already on the books we might not have that in canada and the would require regulators and legislators and politicians to restrain themselves and there is a very good book on this by a professor at penn state named david steele called the new financial deal and that is the kind of scholarly book that you want. university of pennsylvania law. yes, thank you. there's a couple more books out like this but it was a very good scholarly treatment of dodd-frank published just of a year writing afterwards. mark is exactly right. i'm glad you noticed the book is an attempt to combine both arguments and analysis in a philosophical reflection. it's very hard to resist doing that. with the realization that there

have been a lot of books written on these subjects and on the financial crisis and i wanted one that was redouble. it focuses on five guys you've never heard of and it doesn't give you a whole lot of argument. then you have a lot of other mls books by many good ones here in washington. so what i decided to do to just took the difference is too combine these things. if you are just starting and want to dig deeper, go to steal's clich and peter wallace, for those that are truly not faint of heart, his book is about 550 pages long, but you will get the story in detail. another thing mark said it's right i do primarily emphasize affordable housing policies as a link in the crisis. i don't think it's the only

thing and i think the policy and too big to fail mentality had something to do that but what i was interested in is i don't know the policy or too big to fail would have created these risky loans in the market but for this kind of missing link with affordable housing. you hear about the cra but there's all these policies in place. finally, i think it was marked that said what we are seeing is the new gse, the government sponsored enterprises that fannie mae and freddie mac and there are others that are younger smaller siblings. the government sponsored enterprises are not a government owned. they are actually posting a profit at the moment. and i think there is a reason for that. the government sponsored enterprise i suspect will be something like the systemically important financial institutions and now there are systemically important mom financial

institutions which cover everything else obviously. it ends up being things like a large internet companies. so what we are seeing is the kind of ratification of things that were implicit policies before put into place by law. so i think there is a lot still ahead of us. >> if the financial crisis and the housing collapse had to do with fannie mae bodying of these loans and then the taxpayers bailing out and the was the boundaries of it then we could talk it up to the government intervention. but banks fail and many of them are still run today. and also there were people that bought up these mortgage securities. it wasn't just the government. a lot of people of investors, big banks thought that these are good investments. i want to know what sort of with

the private sector especially banks and wall street, and then also separate from the private sector unfortunately, but the markets themselves. so actually we will start this way. >> i usually approach this from the point earlier about people respond to incentives and certainly different people are going to be of differently to the wrong incentives and so i think that we set up a system where banks made bad decisions partly based on the incentives they face. fannie and freddie made bad decisions on the incentives they faced. i would not because the usual talking points to a sort of excuse fannie and freddie is the decline in the market share 2005, 2006. i think that is completely wrong because fannie and freddie during that time bought about 40% of the private-label mortgage backed securities. when the double the purchase and said market it doubled. so again i also want to

emphasize that we do not have the free market. there is also a sort of comparison between fannie and freddie and the banks. i think the competition between the banks and fannie and freddie is less accurate than the collaboration between fannie and freddie and the banks. let's remember that the end of the fannie and freddie were vehicles for the banks that dump their losses on to the taxpayer. countrywide at one point was the third of the business and of course, you know the largest banks were not subject to the market discipline. we do not have a market in banking in america so again i think we need to deal with that too big to fail across-the-board. you also have to keep in mind and this is the fourth time or so that we have bailed out city. it's important in my opinion you have got to have failure, you have to have a way for weeding out the bad business practices, corruption, incompetence, any of these things are going to be weeded out the system and these continued bailouts keep the bad

business cultures around so it's incredibly important in my opinion that we have these institutions go away. so, again, i think it's -- i think it's counterproductive to separate out the banks from fannie and freddie has something different. it is a difference of degree. >> speaking for wayne and not for the american association, how much blame do they take? >> i think will hold reason the crisis focused on this particular housing area and not another area and a lot things we talked about, the risks that were in the market system had been incredibly camouflaged and disguised by a whole host of different types of government policies and programs. and yet remember, these are very large investments. we are not talking about even although loans. we are talking the average mortgage loan is 100,000,

$200,000 involved a large part of the economy. and most of the people investing in the mortgage area that thought that they were going into the low risk investments they were chasing low or non-risk investments. they are going into the very high risk areas because of the comment camouflage of what was going on. and when the reality of the risk started to assert themselves and chaos in sudan that was added to by the government. the government panicked. by the fall of 2008, the banking industry had pretty much written down their losses. they were still in the game making of loans and then the treasury department called the head of the - largest financial and institutions some of which were banks and some of which were not into the treasury had said i've got $700 billion i have to find out what to do it. they just got monday and decided i'm not going to use it for it is supposed to buy the bad loans and i discovered i can't do

that. so now i'm going to invest in banks. very interesting i talked about a month ago chris dodd and barney frank wrote an op-ed piece in the politico where they said -- the first time i've seen policy makers that at this frankly, as we all knew most of the banks that were pulled into that meeting were there to camouflage the few that actually needed the money. but from that claim, when they took that money, nobody in the investing world knew what the rules were any more. and so, all of the investors went to the sidelines until they could figure out what the investment rules were going to be. >> i should say and i do say in the but i think the rating agencies played a role in this and this is where i agree with of the majority of the financial crisis inquiry commission. they call them that the central cogs in the wheel of the financial destruction. a lot of people think that is because, you know, standard and poor's and moody's are corrupt or something like that. but i guess it's possible.

i don't see any evidence of that. i think in general you want to assume ignorance before malice and all the accused if you can prove it. what's funny is there was an underlying assumption that was held by mortgage brokers and bankers and home buyers and builders and rating agencies the housing market at least nationwide would just keep going up. you might get a drop in one or two isolated places but it's not going to suddenly collapse and given the opposite direction as a result of that door the collateralized debt obligations to get a little detail but here is a sort of basic idea is the cbo's you divide up the assets according to their risk and so the high risk things have a high rate of return but they will cause you trouble and the low rate of return as for the low risk stuff. what happens is these are kendal

ready geographically diversified. if you have a thousand loans from around the country. but now what if we take a bunch of the mittal trenches and take those from a thousand different collateralized debt obligations and you have sort of radical geographical diversity and by doing that were able to get many of these bonds that were sort of made up of the triple be rated stuff rated as aaa. so now you have a complete scrambling of the information signal with respect to risk in the market but it's amazing how much you can explain of the rating agency by the false assumption about, you know, the sort of national uptick and also that incentives because of the way the rating agencies are paid. they are paid by the people creating the bond rather than the ones buying into the bond to be that more than a little

screwy, wright? it doesn't make sense. you want to do that the of their way and that is how it was. if you are wondering how that arrangement came about was the result of government regulation because the pensions and the retirement funds didn't, you know, unions didn't like paying these fees to get this research done and so it got moved to the people reading the bond you have that incentive, scramble of information. it is no surprise that we had disasters as a result. >> we are ready to take questions. we've got a microphone going around. please raise your hand. we have time for a few questions so let's make them quit. the microphone will come to you. please identify yourself and ask a question. we will start in the back. >> obviously the book touches upon the issue of who do we blame for this kind of thing? what i like about your book is

brought cronyism into the dimension of baptist which is too often denied and we spent so much time that we forget and in your but i also think it correctly identified it as more dominant than the bootleg and that is something again i think that we forget. the rhetoric is more important than the economic power. i think that we believe that as idea people but then when we get into the political will is all economics, - economics and that suggests the question that i think we should all add to the panel to what extent is our tendency is a movement to be be overly critical of the crony capitalism, libertarian, populism and what have we running the risk of throwing the navy of with the bathwater and reflecting the of ideological causes of the problems we are in and for focusing on the economic

players in the game. >> i'm going to translate fred wasn't talking about theology there. it is a story about -- to make it very brief who benefits from the altar wall for making the county would be the bootleg obviously that who is out there making the public argument it might be the baptist minister. >> i refer to the boot leg in the early edition and i think it might have gotten edited out before it can to the publication. but my view is of this. most people say people outside of the beltway. 99% of those people are interested in economic questions for moral reasons. the interested in inequality, poverty. they think it is unjust if they take so much of their money. all those things and being moral concerns and they are rooted in the intervention and the moral intervention will trump say statistical arguments or

economic arguments any time. but i think it is very important that we get a hold of this balad and intuitively compelling moral argument for these things and to do that, we have to take on what the challenges are to these things. i think the thing that we have to give people who are deeply oriented by their concerns is a bit of prudence. prudence is the intellectual virtue of seeing the world as it is and then acting accordingly. as opposed to seeing the world as you would like to be acting accordingly. and it is our job to connect people's legitimate intuitions with that bit of economics that consists in looking at the immediate and the longer effect of any anthropology. that is economic reasoning. you don't have to have a kurson macroto be able to do that. but you still have to connect your moral intuition to that

economic reasoning if you don't want the actions to actually lead to the destructive consequences. >> another question since we have the microphone in the back. you, ma'am. >> i work in the stock market and i really enjoyed your presentation. over the years i have heard dozens of presentations about the financial crisis. i never get tired of it. it's fascinating. but as we go back to about 2008 when this was really hot one thing i remember is hearing the guys like barney frank and even people from brookings and some sort of middle-of-the-road people come as you mentioned the community reinvestment act has nothing to do with cra. wrong, wrong. and i assume was that a lot eight or were they speaking technically? can you explain that to me?

>> let me start with that explanation because it is a long complicated explanation to give the short hand, if you look at the numbers, the amount of loans that banks have on their books were not very great and they tended to perform pretty well. that's because banks got rid of their bad stuff. a day within to hold it under the books but even with that, the biggest part of what they do is change the mentality with which a banker approaches a loan it changes the risk evaluation on the part of banking and basically says don't worry about the ability to repaid. don't worry about past credit history. those are all kind of things that make it difficult for some people to get loans. so when you broke that relationship and not just broke it for the bank but for the

regulators, the regulators would then come and look at all and say why are you engaging? well i'm reaching out to the underserved population and then the regulators would go easy on them and you were encouraged to make loans that otherwise wouldn't need the underwriting standards. so it's what cra did to the regulatory approach to the sound underwriting. and particularly manifested itself because those are the biggest consumer loans the lead banks make. >> a couple comments. first i would say i wouldn't put it in my top five but i would put it in light of 20 debate i think there were lots of things behind the crisis. one of the points that you always here is why licht was passed in 1997 if it was so bad we didn't things go bad right away and of course that ignores that i think cra for a long time was largely irrelevant up until you got until the 90's and the regulations from about 77 until about 95 it was a process

driven. it wasn't an outcome driven regulation. starting at about 99, 95 rather you really move to more of a quota system and it's important to keep in mind you have a boston federal study the was done in '92, '93, that really provided i think the intellectual argument that well it is all race. it's not that risk in its race. the point j meeks in the book and i have this from my own experience negotiating there are a number of people who sincerely believe that despite a number of academic articles that we tell you the cost of living on the cost of housing that pretty much all the difference 95% of the friends and home ownership rates disappear. it was a very earnest and sincere belief that you wouldn't be lowering the credit he would simply be eliminating racism. i think ultimately people had

these conversations with my friends on the left and they believe that is all they were doing and then you got the boston fed and many others to publish papers saying if you look at things like utility payments or rent payments then you did see an erosion of underwriting that people sincerely believe they were not taking additional risk that is absolutely what they were doing. >> let's get a question over here. and please introduce yourself and try to make a quick question. >> chris with the financial services committee. one thing we haven't discussed with some of our friends on the left to continue to comment on is the notion that predatory lending was one of the main causes and the crisis to the unique product. the small set of people became more main street and then that was the trigger that caused the wave of defaults and economic

problems that led to more the fault, that this started with predatory lending. can you comment on that? >> i do talk about that. the reason i didn't mention it here is because i can't quite figure out what predatory lending is and how it is distinguished from other lending. we can understand bank fraud where some broker misrepresented the terms of the loan but that is illegal. predatory bird in this up being sort of a stick to beat the banking sector with. the center for responsible lending they used this word continually that it was simply the result of predatory lending and i give you one example of why not even those that use it quite know how the word as defined. as i mentioned one of the ki founders and self-help ask yourself best to the confess what would you call the loan and

that allows people without giving evidence of their actual employment, that is something that they bragged about, of the loan in which they can get deeper and deeper into debt for ten years before it reset at a higher interest rate? and if they paid off earlier they would pay a pre-panel he delete -- prepayment penalty. they never accused them of predatory lending. martin is a man of principle and he does oppose prepayment penalty but it's very interesting that that if you're going to call something a predatory home loan that would seem to be it. when you want in a home loan is for it to be a win-win so the bank makes a good loan, they earn a profit and the home owner builds up equity and eventually owns the home and is able to get in before they have the money to pay for it. that is a win win a. of these options loans they shouldn't be illegal but they

were generally bad idea and if i was going to call the mortgage loan predatory that would be where i would point it but i don't think the word has any specific means other than rhetorical and emotional. so it's not very useful if you are wanting to explain stuff. >> if i could just make a quick note referring to the point in jay's but in the late nineties chairman phil gramm sent a letter to the banking regulators because the banking regulators for starting to enforce predatory lending and said okay what is your definition of the predatory lending. we went to the fdic and to the fed and we went to the nots and they said we have no definition. the plant was how can you enforce something if you don't know what is. so far as i know they haven't come up with a definition yet. >> since leyna mentioned that we are seeing the same thing with the word abusive by thus efp. to be done on the boston fed a

little bit i guess i will say something nice one of the economists and his work is on line on the boston website, a tremendous amount of really good academic work, rebutting a lot of the sort of loans causing the crisis and i will end by saying what sort of convinces me that the bad loans in the crisis narrative is wrong is that the inflection point in the house crisis preceded the defaults. unless there were a star trek style backward in time the price declines caused defaults rather than the faults cause the price declines. >> i want to ask a follow-up. we can say predatory loans don't have this. if they are exploiting in the title so sometimes putting somebody in a situation where you know better than they do this might be good but that is something that i would call more. i think the student loans where they are borrowing this with a pay off later it might count as predatory so can't we say do we

really think there aren't predatory loans with banks or some lenders aren't exploiting making loans. they think it will hurt many of their customers about either the ability to securitized or some other reason we will end of being profitable. >> if we define predatory that way, almost certainly i would agree on a mortgage broker dealing with somebody and i have a pretty good idea of their ability to pay with a fairly high degree of certainty what their job is they shouldn't get into this loan it's not meant to be good for them but it's when to be good for me and my commission and i do it any way, that is immoral. the question is how we have all if they can't sort of here in and say okay did you intend to do this and very often when you hear predatory loans what is being referred to is you always get a sad story of someone that took out a loan and then got

into trouble with that. but just because a person got into the loan if it doesn't mean the lender meant for that to happen or knew it was going to happen and so that is where it has to be in place is the sort of explicit documented disclosure and things like that. >> i think that the morality is important and what they like to talk about is when he ran bp they said this is not good for our clients and we are not going to do them. i will note to the economist in mechem the ultimate sort of discipline has to be on the investor. the argument that i have never understood on the predatory side is how is this profitable if we are over a long period of time? people figured out who you are, reputation matters. for instance the brokers mentioned there was a time in the early 90's where the broker loans and wholesale retail didn't priced differently. that changed to investors figured it out and i think the problem in the marketplace is

you have a number of very large investors like fannie and freddie who simply didn't care about the economic return and i will end by saying i sat across the table as a snack or staffer on the committee has the them ceo of freddie mac and he said please give me cover to stop making these loans. >> i don't want to defend bad banking practices. but this is separate from other types of financial firms. banks are longer-term businesses. you can't get a charter quickly and banks are not here today gone tomorrow generally speaking. banks that succeed succeed because they develop long-term customers. they want to for a customer for life starting in your teenage years and so forth going on to be a businessman getting your customers' bad product isn't the way to get there. the banks that are trying to get into the business quickly and get a lot of business by giving bad underwriting, those are the 400 banks that failed during the last several years.

the ones that were cutting the corners and underwriting and those types of banks should get out of the business. and you want a market system that fails the kind of institutions that don't get into good consumer practices. but banking as an industry benefits from the consumer practices. >> right here, sir. >> with the department of justice. jay, if the baptists were out of touch with reality, and created this huge government centralized mess, what should have been our free market soared at the to -- sort of argument to the percentage of marginal buyers to become a part of acquiring capital and going from the lower working class poor into the

ownership? >> my view is if i am a banker and i look across the landscape i have a lot of competition and i know there is a subset of the population just because the credit records got a couple of bombs but they never assess them and they will be good for worse. -- borrowers. there is a natural incentive and some of these were taking place already. the thing that should have been set at the time is that congress in particular confused correlation with causation. we know from social science studies that the homeownership correlates with pretty much any good metric you are less likely to commit crime and all these things if you are to own a home and some people say let's increase that for people

including low-income people and then all of those positive virtues will accrue. this is the confusion of the correlation because the thing about the normal market the way that you would acquire a home or home loan you would have to do certain things. you would have to exercise certain commercial virtues and save money, delayed ratification so you save up for 20% of your loan and then go through this difficult process to get the loan and now you have scan in the game that costs a lot since you are much less likely to default on it and maintain those virtues. change that so it changes completely. there is a point of both buying and lending and the basic market incentive of the bank make it, you know, once it is easier to acquire a home without the skin in the game so you can get a good financial history with or without a down payment.

.. [applause] >> robert draper wrote a "national geographic" story about gadhafi's rule of libya

and the future as a democracy. he joined us on "washington journal" tonight at 7 p.m. eastern. >> she was very proud of her husband. there's no question about that, and she supported all his decisions, but, again, she was a private person, so it was fine for her husband to be in politics, go to washington, and, you know, be in the senate and congress, but she didn't want a part of it, but supported his decision to do it all of the time, and she was very much a supporter in the impeachment.

i mean, i know there was other sings that were attributed to her she wished, you know, she could be back home where they belonged and things of that nature, but she, obviously, believed her husband would be acquitted and proud of it when he was. she knew that would happen. she just knew it. >> the encore presentation of the original series "first ladies" continues tonight at nine eastern on c-span. >> the alliance for health reform held a discussion on capitol hill on the public health care system and whether it can handle a manmade or natural disaster. officials from the american public health association and state government talked about the consequences of budget cuts and if federal governments are prepared for future disasters, and lessons learned from recent disasters like hurricane sandy. >> good afternoon. i'm ed howard with the alliance

for health reform, and i want to welcome you on behalf of senator rockefeller, senator blunt, our board of directors to this program on how well america is prepared to deal with both natural and manmade disasters. i should say up top that this is not an intellectual exercise, and i want to illustrate that by stealing a sentence from a letter written by a panelist today from the centers of disease control and prevention. a couple years ago, transmitting the nation's first national strategic plan for public health preparedness and response, dr. kahn chronicled what were then recent major disasters, and this is the verbatim quote. "in the last five years alone, national and global health security have been threatened by incidents including hurricane that --

katrina, pandemics, contamination of food, the deepwater horizon oil spill, the haiti earthquake, and following the cholera upbrat and tsunami and subsequent radiation release." that's a breathtaking listing for five years. today, we'll speculate on what the next five years will bring and examine how well prepared we are to deal with that list. weast preifed to have as a partner today in sponsoring the briefing, the robert wood foundation helping americans enjoy healthier lives and get the care they need for 40 years now, and we're very lucky to have with us to co-moderate the program, dr. john lumpkin, senior vice president of the foundation and director of the health care group, and i note

before joining the foundation, he directed the illinois department of public health for 12 years so he brings a great deal of experience and expertise to today's discussion. john? >> great. thank you for -- okay, now i'm on. thank you, all, for coming. this is a very critical topic. from my viewpoint at state of illinois, i was actually to charge with participating in the response to a number of disasters, some of which many of the people outside illinois may not have been familiar with, but there was major flooding in 1993, and i became quite interested in that because my background before public health was an emergency medicine, and as someone who's been involved in doing disaster planning, i brought that as part of what we

did in public health, but i can tell you that is a really challenging task, and what is critical, and common place now is there's a molecular biology lab. up until then, we grew cultures in the lab, see what they may show in a day or two, and trying to track an jut break of disease was really challenging. from a molecular biology lab, you can do finger printing, something that was really important. i had a conversation with the bureau of the budget, and the governor's office when i did the annual budget, and they said, yeah, that's a great idea. next, and the following year, we had the same conversation. then we had september 11th. in 2001, we rapidly set up a molecular biology lab. fortunately, because we have thousands of samples sent into

the lab because they were concerned this was going to be anthrax. now, that could be the end of the story. we increased our preparedness, but in 2002, there was an event that occurred in the small town outside springfield, illinois where a bunch of people come to the music festival, and they came down with e. coli0 # # 157, and we had the capability to do the finger printing to enable us to trace the individuals sick and scattered across the country to this one particular site in one particular type of food. in 2002, when west nile hit the state, the fact we had a molecular biology lab responded to the outbreak and run thousands of tests of people who thought they may have been infected with this disease. this is why we, at the robert wood johnson foundation feel

this particular issue of preparedness is important. it's not just about responding to the major disasters that make the news, but that preparedness is also about making sure that our public health system is ready to deal with the small disasters, the small events with an impact on how healthy people are and how they live their lives so we're pleased to be co-sponsors of this event and recognize what we are talking about has an impact on everyone's lives as part of beefing up the public health system at the same time as beefing up the ability of this country to respond to major catastrophic events. >> great, thanks very much, john. let me just do a little housekeeping here. you have written materials in your packets including bigraphical information about each of the speakers. powerpoint presentation, hard copies, if we have them, and if

you're watching on c-span or watching the web cast of our briefing on our website, if you have access to a computer, you cannot only watch along as the presentations are given, but have access to the same powerpoint presentations and background materials that folks in the room have. they'll be a transcript of the briefing available in a couple days on the alliance website at allhealth.org, and in this room, i want you to know, of course, there is a green question card in your packets. you can write a question once we get to the q&a session, and you can also go to one of the microphones set up in the room where you can ask the question in your own voice.

if you're part of the twitter-verse, you can take part using the hash tag tag @peppert, i believe it is? it's on the bottom of the screens. one last note, we'll have a good discussion about the preparedness of the public health system, and i don't want you to think that we are not aware that there is another part of the responsive system that we don't have time to cover with any detail today, and that is the preparedness of the health care system, hospitals, nursing homes, other entities all have a part to play in being able to respond to the kind of disasters we would be talking about. there's an assistant secretary for preparedness that has responsibility for other programs that are useful in this

regard, and we hope to turn our attention to that at some future point. let us get to the program. we have a terrific panel lined up for you, and then we'll turn to your questions, and we're going to start with dr. georges benjamin, executive director of the american health association representing our country's public health professionals. he's a board certified internist, running apha for more than a dozen year, and before that, he headed maryland's department of mental and health hygiene, familiar with public health and the role in dealing with different types of disasters at many levels, and we're happy to have you back on our panel, dr. benjamin. >> well, thank you very much for having me here today. i'm going to start by just pointing out our new -- >> microphone, please.

>> there we go. can you hear me now? all right. i want to start by talking about our new reality. the fact that we're clearly in a dangerous world with dangerous people, both with and without state sponsorship. the technology that we have today, very, v. different than technology we had 20-30 years ago, very rapid scientific advancement, and a lot of people with knowledge of lethal organisms. also to point out the nature. we often say that nature is the first terrorist just because the enormous impact that nature can have both in creating infectious diseases as well as extreme weather events. globalization is both a blessing and curse, the fact there's rapid movement and infectious diseases. we talk about being a plane ride away from something really bad. we are a plane ride away from infectious foods, a plane ride

away or, should say an e-mail away from communication of very dangerous information that should be out of the hands of people that are very dangerous, so we are certainly in a very, very challenging world today, and as i think you've heard from both our earlier speakers here about the fact that we still have significant threats around. just reminding you we have a food born outbreak. we had the recent epidemic showing us a lot about our need to really refine our vaccination programs as well as some of the challenges we've had around the infrastructure for public health. the fertilizer explosion tells us a lot about what can happen even in fundamentally rural america that every part of our community needs to be prepared, and, of course, the annual run

of tornadoes that we continue to have through the midwest each and every year. that can devastate whole communities. the importance of this is that public health is a central role in all of these things, and, of course, i point out even that the boston bombings. what many people don't know, of course, is that the central role of the health department in terms of responding because of the boston public health commission that oversees the emergency management function in the city, and, of course, they were herald for their fine work in responding to the emergency, but i remind you they did good work in a staged event, and things worked as they should work, but that shows you what importance of preparedness. if you talked to folks, they tell you that training and prepareddedness and resources clearly made the difference in

their response. i say that because public health needs a range of capacities, and these are the capacities public health needs to have. this is kind of a snapshot of that. we kind of need to know when a new disease enters a community, measure it, do surveillance, track what it does, track the health threats. there's a range of capacities the public health system needs to have, and that's each and every community, not a selected number of communities, not just the big cities, but each and every community needs to have these capabilities. also, i want to point out that a prepared community is one of resilience, and so i'm going to use, for the sake of discussion today, the definition of resilience that we'll use in a national security strategy, but functionally, that basically means the ability of community to get back on its feet to be able to respond quickly when you

have something bad happen or you have changing conditions, and then recovery is very important, and if you think about the various disasters that we've had over the last 10, 15 year, and you think about the capacity of the various communities to recover, that tells you a lot about the internal capacity of communities. all communities have strengths, but communities are different, and i think the goal we have is to make sure all our communities have the resilience necessary for them to adapt to and recover very quickly from a disaster. we know that too many americans don't take their individual preparedness seriously. they are under prepared. there's been a lot of surveys. this is an example of a survey done last year that basically says half of the individuals, having done some of the simple things necessary to be prepared, and that's a significant problem that we need to begin to

address, and i know the american public health association working with the public to try to address some of these, but we call our get ready campaign, a campaign designed to build resilience. our goal is to try to make sure that every american can protect themselves, their families, and their communities from serious preventable health threats. we've done that by creating a series of resources to try to allow communities to become prepared. we have gotten very engaged in the social media world so that we have blogs and e-mails and twitter activity. we have had events. we have a calendar and dog calendar, all kinds of things remind people that it's important to get prepared and try to engage them in very, very active ways to try to improve their health, both for their

families and of their community. i'm going to leave you with one final note because we're all in this amazing time of trying to ensure that we get universal access to health care for all americans. i need to point out that even when we achieve a well-functioning health care system of the highest quality that provides that care at an optimal cost, we don't have that yet, but working to do that, and even when we achieve that, and even when every american and if every american gets the platinum level health plan. those not familiar with the aca, that's the highest level plan, the one we all want, if we can afford it, each one of us had that and a little plastic card to go along with it, we would still need a robust public health system that is prepared to address that.

it's very important to understand that most of what we do in medical care is not done by -- preparedness is not done by the health care delivery system. a lot of this stuff is done by the public health system, and i think when you hear from the other speakers, they will talk a lot more about that in greater detail than i can this morning. with that, i thank you, and, ed, i'll turn it back over to you. >> thank you, georges. we're going to turn now to dr. ali kahn, from whom i stole a sentence moments ago. he directs the office of public health preparedness and response at the centers for disease control and prevention. note the duality of purpose, prepareddedness and response. he was a primary force behind cdc's by yo terrorist preparedness program, directed its response to the 2001 anthrax

attacks, which some of you may recall actually shut down this very building, the hart senate office building at the time. he's an internist and a pediatrician, and we're very pleased to have you with us today. >> press it and wait for a moment. don't press it gone. [laughter] now. technology. there you go. >> good afternoon, everybody. thank you, ed, very much for the generous introduction. i have the wonderful responsibility and amazing honor to support the health security efforts to ensure americans are safe 24/7 from all public health threats, no matter what the nature, foreign, domestic,

bioterrorism, chemical terrorism, natural disasters, pandemics, large spills, or the routine public health threats of every day that you read in your paper. now, what was very clear, thank you, georges, from your initial presentation, is that while public health events are clearly local and state events, there are physical, political, and economic ramifications of the events that require national response. that's why increasingly over the last couple years, we have been talking about public health in the context of ensuring this nation's health security. our secretary sebelius at cdc this week, and throughout the course of the conversation with her, she mentioned we have to think of cdc and the public health functions broadly as part of the insurance for the national security all together. now, as part of our activity, let's see if this piece of technology works.

there we go. oh, there you go. not that i need these. like, can i tell you in one slide what we do? couple things. we're responsible for establishing national strategy and policy, make sure for national health security, make sure we're driving innovation and continuous improvement in our public health programs. we're very fortunate to have about 1.3 billion dollars to help fund the activities, not just at cdc, but with the state and local health department, and we run critical operations that many of you are likely aware of, the emergency operation center. this is the public health fusion center for the nation, and as we talk with our national and other domestic partners, we've had the stockpile. this is almost a $4 billion

stockpile of materials that we hold in trusts for americans for any large public health threat to make sure we get life saving medications and materials to americans when they need them after a public health threat, and, finally, we also run the regulatory select agent program here in the united states that regulates 300 labs that have the most dangerous pathogens in the world. now, the crown jewel of our program, without a doubt, is our state and local preparedness program. we put out approximately 600 to 700 million dollars a year still to our state and local health departments to prepare them for all public health threats, and this is a reflection of the reality of public health, and i think why doctor benjamin proceeded me is because public health doesn't happen at cdc, but at your state and local level, and that's where the

initial detection occurs, the initial response occurs, and we have to make sure our communities are ready for public health threats and can respond to them when they occur. over the last couple years, we structured the prearedness program of capabilities consistent with the national prepareddedness goal, and what this slide, i presented to you shows, how we support the 15 capabilities at the state and local level. now, these funds go out, not just to the 50 states, couple large cities and territories, but out essentially to 1200 public health departments across the united states. at the end of the day, it gets quite diffuse, but you see from the slides that about a fifth of the dollars go out for core epidemiology, disease investigation, disease monitoring work, and the same thing is true for laboratory activities, and then the next big chunk for community preparedness, and that's how

dollars are used in your communities. now, what i'd like to do is make that a little bit less abstract. i'm missing that slide. there you go. i want it less abstract. i talk about capabilities and moneys to capabilities, but how does it translate spue your community and all you have to do is open up the newspaper to understand what public health is doing in your communities and what the resources are doing in the communities to help with disease tracking and emergency operation systems, communication efforts so the outbreak, for example, which i believe were up to about 550, 560 odd cases, we're activated in response to that, and those same set of capabilities help with all sorts of other food foodborn outbreak, and there's an alert to all state and local health

departments and clinicians about a solution of call see yum that was not sterile, and there's an alert to get that off the market to ensure the patients were not infused with the contaminated call see yum carbonate. many of you know the story of the outbreak of 657 cases that occurred, and these were preparedness -- multiple resources brought to play to respond to this outbreak including activities that we had epidemiology to invest gait the outbreak and make sure we had tracking systems, to make sure we could set up an emergency operation system, have relationships with law enforcement for people to track down people who we couldn't otherwise track down saying, excuse me, go see your clinician to see whether or not you have been infected with the contaminated steroids. the west nile outbreak, we were very fortunate to help colleagues in texas, and last

year, there were about 5,000 or 6,000 cases of west nile, and they occurred -- anybody from dallas? no takers. lucky for you. a third of the cases last year occurred in dallas, and we were able to use public health preparedness resources to help with mosquito spraying and abatement efforts. for example there, same thing, the boston marathon and how we, in conjunction with the partners in the hospital preparedness program, got the community ready for that bombing, and other such events, could go on with sandy, influ ensai a, but just examples that this is not abstract, but what's going on in your communities every day i to -- every day to make sure you are protected from public health threats. this is to give you a reality of the situation of what's happened to public health funding within your state and local health departments over the last

decade, and maybe ripping off of your comment, i would like to have platinum level public health for all americans if we can arrange that moving forward. there's been over 40% decline in funding for public health preparedness and response activities within your communities. let me end with the two slides, always trying to improve the program. there's a few things we'd like to do. one is to continue to ensure global health security efforts. as you heard, pathogens don't need passports; right? they are crossing borders, and once upon a time, we said, you know, i have a couple uniformed officers here from the public health service, you know, we used to be lucky when the incubation period to get someplace was shorter than the time to get here, so if you were on a ship, and you were coming here to the united states, we pretty much knew that you had yellow fever on that ship and quarantined the ship. well, nowadays, you take a

plane, anywhere within 24 hours, that's shorter incubation period for the deadliest diseases in the world. you walk into the port already infected, ready to go in a new place, so we have to think globally about protecting americans. how do we improve surveillance efforts? improve disease monitoring activities in the united states? how do we take advantage of the number of the efforts around electronic health records, looking at other sources of information such as animals. we need to do a better job with that. one of the key things that i've noticed iny experience with disasters, so pretty much all of these disasters you heard about at the beginning of the presentation, i had some opportunity to prarp in them, 20 years, we had sally fever outbreaks over my lifetime, and what's clear to me is how we are judged as a society during the response is how do we respond to the needs of the most as a as ae near --

vulnerable people in our communities. we have to get it right. the vulnerable populations, be they children or people with other disabilities, they can't be annexes to the plans but growth to think about responding to make sure we meet their needs. how do we improve the efficiency of the programs, and then, finally, the effort with the robert wood johnson foundation is how do we improve the measurement of preparedness activities? ..

there's a lot of continued challenges that public health preparedness activities and health security ensuring the the nation's health security. infectious diseases all i have to do is age seven, eight and nine everyone knows what i'm talking about. we are always just at the cusp of another pandemic. i try to be careful to remind people that fear is not a public health measure or public health strategy. but i think knowledge is a public health strategy to recognize how small disease light sars in a small community can of a sudden go global given the right circumstances. modified versions of microbes, do-it-yourself microbiology makes it increasingly likely to be devolving terrorist threats from car bombs to backpack bombs to bombs that come in printer

cartridges, terrorists or always a rethinking their strategies and we need to be always evolving our strategy is to be ready. obviously the continuing economic crisis and what that has done to public health preparedness funding and then climate disruption of fact and what that can mean for natural disasters in the united states. >> thank you. thank you very much, dr. khan. a comprehensive and useful picture for what's going on we are going to turn to rosanne prats, the director of emergency preparedness for the louisiana department of health and hospitals that puts it smack in the middle of coordinating among federal, state and local agencies that are dealing with and preparing for the disasters. she has a background in health administration rules and was

around during the katrina days in louisiana and has been with the department for more than 20 years. we are pleased to have you with us today. >> make sure i've got this right. >> can you hear me? all right good afternoon. i think i was one of the last panelists to be picked up on this very distinguished panel. usually i never had a loss for words. from the operations perspective if you told me, you know, that the problem is katrina, read the, gustav, ike, the mississippi oil spill, recently tropical storm isaac. some of the concerns we have is how can we evacuate have the

coast line in a 38 hour period i know who to go to and how long it is going to take. how many will be evacuated or not, how many can help themselves, how many will be the state's assistance, how many of those will need federal assistance? i can tell you. and even less night. all of a sudden i found myself not coming up with words and anxious about what i would say to u.s. policy makers and by fire that we are asking for your help to advocate for the dollars to be returned because of the things that i know, in terms of operations. and i can tell you just from the american red cross has a 23 sq. feet per person that wouldn't come up with capacity numbers for rebuilding that has been

increasing as recommendations are made through groups such as yourself. we should have various things for children so that capacity is now increasing to about 52 square foot per person. what does that mean in terms of operations? that means the number of buildings you had before the capacity is now just lower. so you could it 300 people in a building using the american red cross standards now you might have to find to buildings to fit the same number of people. so, the things that you advocate for will definitely have an impact on our operations. so, in terms of issues from the planning perspective, the grants that we have, the hpp grant has

allowed us to watergate and with each other and sit in the same room of public health hospitals, the military department of emergency management so that you can really again try to figure out of what if. you start to figure out where your partners are coming from and what is behind them in terms of resources. from the response perspective for the operations perspective, we do know that the states will be asking for assistance when it comes to the dema teams or other types of federal assistance to states typically ask for. they will do training so that they can come to the states that help work and play alongside the state and local partners. we do ask the hospitals to surge up in terms of planning. but at the same time the stafford act doesn't allow for the reimbursement when it comes

to response. there's still some issues in terms of disconnect that still has to occur. the advance the planning and we have become crisper and organized in terms of how we are going to approach the response but again there are still some things that we know we need to address when it comes to the response itself and how we will help with medical reimbursement with the that is through fema or the hhs so they can help with some of those response efforts. we say that you are only as good as your last disaster as a different monster. you can only compare katrina to sandy. they are different. so the populations are different. your vulnerabilities are different. if we could get out bootstraps

for everybody, perhaps the burden on the state or government both local, state or federal wouldn't be as demanding. but we will always have some form of double citizens'. the definitions from used to be just ada challenge in terms of being blind or in the wheelchair are now broadening because of all of the grants that we have. you increase the number of vulnerable citizens which are now more of, you know, children, pediatrics, i mean if you can kind of tell just with the range of grants that we have. most of the grants will identify other types of vulnerable citizens. and during the storm when you have a large shelter going on you try in that environment to hook them up to the various types of social programs that

are out there that don't necessarily all connect up. so and 18 year old young lady that might be pregnant might have a social program that you can connect them to but not the same team to the -- same thing for an 18-year-old young man. so those are some differences and disconnect when it comes to social programs. and again on the changing landscape, what will be obamacare if you bring when it comes to response. a different insurance payments i'm sure there might be some vulnerable citizens in that arena as well. and i think if we have some think-tank discussions of the policy level as to how we can leverage the dollars so that we can all be more responsive than our own communities i think that would be best for this industry both public health, the emergency preparedness and the response community along with

the hpp industry as well. >> just so we know what we are talking about, hpp is the health system hospital preparedness program. >> yes. >> very good. thanks very much, rosanne. her finally now to jack herrmann who is a senior adviser and chief public health preparedness in the county and city health officials, nato. one of the principal duties there is to strengthen the preparedness and response capabilities and local health departments. the deep background and mental health aspects of disasters and a licensed mental health counselor in new york. so,. with the special expertise we are very pleased to have you join us. >> i want to think the alliance and the robert wood foundation for today's briefing. and i would like to start my

remarks more from a personal nature. august and september represent a very poignant and bittersweet months for me and my professional career. four weeks from now, we will be celebrating, not really celebrating with happiness, but celebrating as a milestone the anniversary of 9/11. i vividly remember being deployed that morning to new york city from my home in rochester new york. and as i came upon the landscape of new york city, i saw the billowing smoke in the air and then entered in lower manhattan and drove over water and debris from the world trade center towers that had collapsed only hours before. and was volunteering as a american red cross and working with the new york city department of mental health and hygiene to take care of the needs of the families affected by one of the world's most

tragic act of terrorism. a couple years later in 2003, i responded again to new york city. i happened to be there that day for the red cross disaster training when the blackout occurred. in the early hours of the blackout, there was a psychological and cost -- angst because people thought it might be another act of terrorism. over the course of them might, spent time with the red cross staff and volunteers deploying disaster reaction teams across the city to over 85 years and eight hours. and finally, in just a couple weeks, august 29th will mark the eighth anniversary of hurricane katrina a storm that caused almost 1500 deaths and displaced 1.5 million people. and many of you already know the tragic story that came out of the devastating disaster.

these events and many others that have occurred since then to use and overplayed phrase to a village to respond to. and a critical mel village in the department. i'm representing the national association of county and city health officials a nonprofit national organization that's the voice of our nation 2800 local health departments. we attempt to be a leader, a partner and catalyst for the local health department so they can ensure the conditions in their communities to promote health and equity, combat disease and improve the quality and the length of life and protect the overall health of those that live there. a lot of people really don't know what their local health department does. i'm going to switch -- here we go. to a map here and try to articulate year that local health departments are county,

city, metropolitan district and tribal governmentally agencies. the report to the mayors, city council, said the board of health or the county commissions. some local health departments are units of the state government. some are locally controlled, and others share that authority between the state and local government. and as i said earlier, every day local health departments work to promote health and the well-being for all the people in those local communities. if you look at the demographics of the 2800 local health departments across the industry, the majority of those, well over 60%, covered jurisdictions that are small. under 50,000 population. the minority of our health department, about 5% of the local health departments serve the large metropolitan area. but they cover almost half of the nation's population. these are urban centers like l.a., new york, chicago and d.c..

as i of tried to emphasize in my earlier remarks, all disasters strike locally and the local health departments are a critical part of the community's first response to disease outbreaks, emergencies and acts of terrorism. over the past year local public health has engaged in the response to and recover from many major events, which some of my co panelists have talked about. both manmade and naturally occurring. hurricane ike sandy that ravaged the midlantic in the east coast, the boston marathon bombing and the fertilizer plant explosion in west texas are examples of those yet and the list of activities that you see in the slide represent the capabilities that local public health brings to bear the radio disasters. those are the capabilities that dr. khan l. planned earlier and that are represented in the cbc public health prepared miscue devotees national standards for

state and planning documents. many of the challenges in response to that event, local health departments experience both their fair share of challenges even though we see those as largely successful defense, they still were challenging to the local health departments. the new york city department of mental health and hygiene have to court made a variety of services and some of the hardest-hit areas of the storm, hiking up a high-rise apartment buildings in the effort to reach out of all mobile populations making sure they have food, water and the licensing medication. supporting shelters for displaced persons and working alongside hospitals that needed to evacuate before ordering the storm. in new jersey the health department's partner with state and federal agencies to provide emergency services to residents and the activate the local medical reserve units and other volunteers to take care of the

health and welfare of those infected by the storms. and if you haven't seen the robert wood johnson video highlighting that correct efforts of the new jersey state and local health departments, go to their web site and take a look. a really is a well on video. many lessons were learned from hurricane sandy. one of the most important for health department is the need to ensure coordination with partners ahead of time so that no one or no community goes unassisted. another lesson learned was the importance of understanding the influential role but the social media can play in a disaster and how the local health departments need to be able to the anticipate and meet the expectations of the people in the community during the response. the boston marathon bombing in april of this year and fall to the health department and the medical reserve corps coming out in full force. in fact they had spent many months planning to participate

in that marathon and they were already on the scene of the world renowned event. nearly 200 boston health department personnel for on-site overseeing medical activities and trading runners with injuries and health problems in medical tents along the marathon route. and when the bombing occurred, they were able to respond within seconds, contributing life-saving measures to those who were injured. and officials in boston cited the joint hospital, public health, public safety training and exercises that they had been conducting over the years as critical to the success of that day. and then finally in west texas with a fertilizer plant explosion in this past april. the maclennan public health department worked with the waco office of emergency management to respond to that event. they also activated their local mrc unit in the aftermath of the

disaster and assisted in the coronation of the mental health case management with local mental health authorities. they also described longstanding partnerships between the health department, local hospitals, steve local agencies and emergency management with creating the mutual trust and the decor that greatly contributed to the success of that public health response. public health preparedness and response is not just limited to large scale disasters. local health departments perform critical roles and other health-related incidents that occurred over this past year. and as we talked about this, some of those this morning of a fumble meningitis outbreak in october, 2010, where the health departments for conducting contact tracing, vaccination tracking, and with a local boots on the ground, doing the investigation in 23 states that led back to the source of the outbreak that killed almost 50 people and required scores more

to seek a life-saving medical treatment. health departments and the impact of state were also responsible for contacting health care facilities that receive products from the compound pharmacy to ensure that those facilities stop using these products that potentially could have second or killed many more. some of you may have heard about hepatitis a outbreak sent colacello -- in tulsa tebeau was from unsanitary conditions and procedures used in a local dentist office. an investigation screening and massive multi jurisdictional testing campaigns are executed by tulsa. the health department had to set up free testing clinics for the 7,000 patients who may have been exposed. and there were over 70 confirmed cases of hepatitis and three hiv cases. though this could have potentially lead to more cases

of hiv and hepatitis, it did not were it not for the efforts of the local health department. other infectious disease of bricks over throughout the country this year in sheboygan wisconsin there was a outbreak requiring the local health department to activate the incident command system and conduct a large scale tv monitoring campaign in the sheboygan school system. and also work with the county's purchasing agent to find an apartment to isolate an individual who was diagnosed with multi drug-resistant tuberculosis. previous and current investments and preparedness largely contributed to the sheboygan public health department of being ready to handle the outbreak. the exorcising along with the health department partners help them better understand the role and follow the icf principals in the partnership and also help

them work together seamlessly and amplify the key public health messages that had to go out around this incident to the public. and then finally, many of you no doubt have about the recent outbreak across the country. it's affected 19 states and resulted in almost 550 cases of death, i'm sorry, 550 cases to date and the hospitalization of 34 individuals. along with the state and federal partners were responsible for helping to trace and identify the source of the parasite back to the prepackage soudet mix. local health departments continue to conduct investigations and interviews today with suspected patient treated so that take away of these events is that preparedness is not a static process. and yet a process the requires ongoing planning, training and

exercises in the sustained capability to protect the nation's health and welfare. preparedness happens before an event occurs, not during. a local fire department doesn't sit back and wait for a fire and then decide to go out and buy a fire truck to respond to that fire. when you think about it though, that is exactly what we do during a disaster. think back to the big federal funds that went out the door after 9/11, hurricane katrina, h1 in one, and most recently the superstore sandina. investments in public health paribas need to be made in advance if we expect a successful response. the defense says the prepared muskett abilities of local health departments today that they use to respond exists because of the investment of dollars, the investment of time and resources, personnel provided at all levels of government, local, state, tribal, territorial, federal as

well as from the non-profit and private sectors. it's the critical health program including those in preparedness better cut. the ability to sustain the capabilities and capacities for the local health departments response diminishes. let's look a little bit about what the health department's support the public health missions including public health preparedness. the chart illustrates the sources for the local health departments and you can see that federal funding makes up about 20% of the health department's overall budget. the remainder coming from the fee-for-service and state and local tax assessment on the mechanisms. however, almost 60% of local health departments rely exclusively on federal funding to support the prepared this activities. four of the nation's largest cities receive direct federal funding for public help prepare the best route the ctc public health emergency preparedness grant program and the hospital preparedness program. while the rest of the local

health departments rely on an allocation of these grants that pass through the state health department. it's also important to point out that fema's grant program as separate from those previously mentioned public health programs, but it's not duplicative. this program ensures that the first responder agencies leaves fi year and ems have the resources they need to respond to disasters large and small so that take away message here is when any federal grant program is cut, it has significant and sometimes dangerous impact on the programs that rely on those funds. a survey conducted in the latter part of 2011 fell almost 60% cut or eliminated one program airing as a result of the federal funding cuts. in that same year almost a quarter of the local health department had to reduce or even many the preparedness program because of the funding cuts.

, just quickly and out of time that this next slide shows that since 2008, we have lost almost 44 rebels and jobs in the local public health workforce and those jobs represent real activity in the local health departments. these are the people who are there to prepare for the disaster, respond for the disaster, conduct immunization clinics and will potentially be used in the event that the community needed to distribute and dispense lifesaving medical countermeasures in the aftermath of disaster. dr. khan has talked about a significant cuts that have been seen in the public health emergency preparedness funding, the cdc grande and hospital preparedness grant. the hospital preparedness grant

is in further jeopardy of the president and the senate have proposed 114 million-dollar cut in fiscal year 14. and remember, those hpp funds largely support the public health departments come hospitals and health care coalitions to prepare and plan for disasters. just to draw your attention again, these cuts have created significant and real impact on the local health departments as i have been mentioning. and this slide talks about health departments and wisconsin and kentucky and frederick county maryland who have had to either shorter their immunization clinics where lay off staff who largely would be the people that they would rely on to either prepare or create the plans for the disaster or actually respond to the disasters. so, finally our take away and recommendations.

it undoubtedly, the u.s. public health system is more secure than was prior to the events of september 11th and d and x attacks because the government and public taxes have supported critical public health preparedness programs. we have built a strong and vibrant national preparedness capability that begins and ends up local level and we need to sustain those investments. the local public health community acknowledges the need for science based measures to prove the key to devotees and showed a return on investment to congress and the people. and some can say that successful response in some of the events i talked about is what this two and return on such investments. and we have to remember that a state of preparedness is not an end state. it is a process putative preparedness funding has tangible and real-life consequences for your constituents in the communities been usurped. the support of training and exercise and through public health grant programs i mentioned keep communities agile

for the response and resilience to the recovery and investment and lhd provide the staff necessary to support the long-term recovery and the continued support and investment in the development of critical public of capabilities and capacity of the local, state, regional level that ultimately builds a nation prepared and protected. >> agreed. thank you very much, jack. let me ask one question to clarify something. if you go back to jack's slide on the job losses over time, in your notes talked about 4300 jobs being lost -- i'm sorry, and in 2012. but also 4,000 positions being created so that there was a small net loss. is the 43,900 a net loss? ..

>> in which case we ask you to identify yourself and keep the question as brief as you possibly can. there's also green question cards in your packets, and you can write the question out. if you hold it up, someone from the staff snatches it from your fingers and brings it forward. i also encourage the members of the panel, and, of course,

dr. lumpkin, the co-moderator, to join in at any point in the dialogue that you feel the need to. you, sir, have the first question in this sequence. >> thank you, al miliken, in the recent months, is there changes, additions, new partnerships taking place with volunteers, particularly, those affiliated with religious communities? >> >> can i address that? >> please. >> so working with faith based organizations and other organizations in a community has long been the practice in local health departments because they recognize they cannot do it alone. for many years, there's efforts and attempts to link with a variety partners like faith based organizations. looking throughout the country, they reach into the populations

to red cross, teams, disaster health teams. i would say it is common practice to reach into those organizations and ensure that they are there, the communities are there to help out during disaster. >> in any way, are they replacing any of the lost jobs? >> you know -- >> professionals? >> i think, you know, that's -- it's a touchy subject. there are some possessions in health departments that just because of hr law, you know, can't use volunteers, but speaking directly with health departments because of the attrition seen over the years, they had to rely on medical reserve cores and other volunteer assets in the community to conduct preparedness outreach campaigns to do health fairs on behalf of

the health department. >> so to put this in perspective, one of the things that impressed me is the disaster sites seen at the role of volunteers. the american red cross, for instance, is the one organization that's slated by congress to be actively participating in disasters, but when i went down to the relief efforts related to katrina, it was the southern baptists serving meals, and they did that all up and down the east and west coast. in the recovery period, the men nights have an incredible system of putting homes back together. what other cuts happen, and one of the staff who came to the foundation came from a health department in new hampshire is they had office staff involved in doing contact tracing for diseases of sexually transmitted diseases, including hiv, so if that outbreak that happened in

texas had occurred in new hampshire, they wouldn't have had the staff. that's not something that volunteers can do. it takes training and public health. what happens is when those individuals get laid off, and this happened to me in my agency when i was back in illinois. when they get laid off, they are hired by the private sector, and if those jobs are then created again, or if there's some back fill, it's very difficult to public health agencies to hire people with those kinds of skills, those public health skills which are very hard to hire. it does create a lasting deficit in the ability of the public health system to respond. >> very good. >> i got a question for dr. kha enrings. you dkhan. you mentioned the prarpedness index cdc put together, and i wonder if you could elaborate on what purpose that's going to serve, when it's going to be available, and what elements are

going to be included? >> lumpkin serve z as chair at the index, and i'll start and hand it to john. this is conceived to be a state-by-state comprehensive index preparedness with 150-odd measures in health that are publicly available, and the index process is designed to drive within the communities, provide evidence, and actionable things our communities can do to prepare their preparedness and drive the science. we're big on accountability, and we have to measure preparedness in our communities. we got a lot better over the last couple years, and we want to continue to improve those measures of preparedness. this is an effort shepherd by

the associate state and territorial health departments, and dr. lumpkin, as i said, serves as chair of the governance group because of many partners coming together and doing this. it's not cdc alone. john? >> yeah, let me also say one of the reasons this index, and the process that has been initiated by the centers for disease control and our foundation is happen to have had the opportunity to participate in that process is that states, you know, believe that preparedness is actually part of their, you know, part of their charge also, but it's really challenging to figure out where are you going to spend your next dollar if you're going to increase prepareness? how do you know whether or not what you've done has increased

preparedness, and if you are trying to do work, how do you do quality improvement within preparedness, and so this index is designed to be used by cdc, but not to review grants or how well the state is doing on the grant from the cdc or the grant from office of the assistant secretary for prepareness and response. it is a tool for states to use working with local communities, local health departments to assess the level of preparedness and use planning and quality improvement. the first numbers will be coming out in october. it will not be designed to rank or compare states. again, it's going to be able to help them measure in an initial one, and then over time, how their work in preparedness is progressing. >> terrific. >> hi, my question --

>> identify yourself. >> i'm a reporter with cq. you touchedded a little bit on issues with the stafford act, can you elaborate more on the issue of reimbursements? >> sure. that's whenever there's a natural disaster, there's a stafford act kick in which pretty much is the fema rules for what is reimworsed or what does not. usually, you have that reimbursement of flow against non-stafford act issues which is more of you have a company at fault, like the bp oil spill, they say, okay, bp has to make it whole. they would be the company that would pay for damages, and i'm not trying to really compare them, but they usually have to have a funding stream so that you can get various things reimburressed. >> was that an issue with hurricane katrina at all?

the reimbursement? >> yes, ma'am. >> okay, thank you. >> john? >> if i could add, there's things worth looking at in the stafford act. it says the federal government only pays for bringing a -- whether it's hospital or a community back to where it was before the incident occurred. that is understandable. if you is a house, and there's a 20-year-old furnace, you don't want the saturday act to replace the furnace, window, and roof if they are not damaged. one of the peculiarities are if you remember from super storm sandy, the nyu hospital closed down in lower manhattan, and it closed down because when the storm came, they had their generators, moved # the generators up to the higher floors, but they had kept the fuel down at the lower floors

because it was safer. when the water flooded, the sensors recognized that as a fuel spill and cut off generators, and they lost power. the generators were operating -- now they are going to rebuild it. stafford act did not provide resources when they rebuilt the hospital to move the fuel from the basement up to the higher floors. there are some, i think, some instances where there needs to be more common sense in some of the provisions because sometimes it's very hard set in the way the policy was developed is very clear to understand, but sometimes there are unintended consequences. >> and dr. lumpkin is right. there's subtleties to it too when it comes to patient care. if you're a hospital and just absorbed all the people that started to evacuate to shelter so they don't meet admit

criteria. if they met that criteria, they'd get, you know, medicare, medicaid, third party reimbursement, but anything else, just sheltering, the hospital could not claim any of those costs through the stafford act. in fact, there's no other means for them to claim any of those sheltering costs. i'm not sure hhs has that money, and, you know, we have reports, antedotal at this point, no full study as to -- if hospitals would continue to shelter in surge, what would -- you know, we know their operational costs go up through the roof 50%, so if you have a neurosurgeon today, you can pay him during normal business, but during a storm, they are going to start decompressing the facilities. they might start helping with the sheltering operations, but, you know, the hospital still has to pay those operating costs, and there's nowhere to claim some of those costs, so if you

just take it from, you know, from a storm environment, that's, like, three to five days, you might lose some funds, but what happens if you have a pandemic flu? for instance, you're out for months, five weeks to monthings, what happens to those types of surge costs? i'm not sure there's really a solution for the public health issues that might come up related to surging. >> okay. yes, go right ahead. >> okay, i'm with the senate committee on small business and entrepreneurship with senator mary landruie as the chair. the question is, what kinds of preparedness techniques or preparedness are you getting ready for when it comes to small businesses because, as we know,

a lot of times people are at work when these disasters occur, so what is happening in terms of keeping employees safe, or even when say from an actual disaster, but if it were to occur at the workplace? >> that's a great question. the quick answer is not enough, but what local departments are doing is finding ways to partner with businesses, small and large, in the community to help them understand how to develop a continue newty of operations plan so that in the face of disaster, they'll be able to take care of their employees and be able to carry out business, which is important to the economy of those communities and raise issues like, what would happen in a disaster, say, like, a flu pandemic where many of these individuals would have to be out of work because they are sick or taking care of sick family member, and that business has to be shut down, and in

small communities, all business is vital, and so those are the types of issues that health departments bring to the table with businesses to help them work through how is your business and how are your employees prepared to handle a disaster if it strikes them? dr. khan? >> that's a thoughtful question. i heard the number of 40% of businesses close after disasters, so, clearly, this is a real impact on small businesses. you heard about some of the efforts at the local and state health departments, national efforts, and fema does work as part of the critical infrastructure work to try to help business think about continue newty of operations, protect the workers, and in the -- always it's important, i think, try to mention prevention which is supply chains, you know, sorts of elements, and if we try to understand what's going on in communities quickly about outbreaks, there's

information available to businesses to understand what is the impact on their business. i spent two, three months in singapore helping them respond to the sars outbreak, and some of you may know, you know, cafe pacific, large airlines almost out of business because no one wanted to go to southeast asia anymore. there's global impacts of these outbreaks and significant economic impacts. >> one other thing. >> yeah, georges? >> let me also add that think of small community providers, small businesses, because we often are concerned about the hospitals, but the truth of the matter is that while they're a challenge, any time the big disasters occur, all these small community based providers have all the same challenges losing infrastructure, and the capacity, the health care capacity for this nation is really in the outpatient setting, not the hospital, so

that's a big capacity that we lose, and that's particularly true for people in vulnerable population, substance abuse, mental health providers, and primary health care providers. >> if i can, we have a question that relates to the supply chain that dr. khan was talking about, but it gets us back to hospitals. give us your thoughts, the questioner asks, about relying on the as a -- as avulnerabilities they have in ins, gowns, and other necessities that keep a hospital running in time of a natural disaster. if it's a problem, what in the world could you do about it? >> it's a planning issue for communities. one of the things that we were doing really right before 9/11 was looking at the -- that exact

question of supply chain in the state of maryland, and what we discovered was every hospital had a wonderful plan, and they all relied on the same provider for vital resources. [laughter] and so what's happened is, and in many communities as ems planners are looking at that, they are challenging the supply chain to make sure that there are both backup suppliers, and that redundancy in the system working with hospitals and hospital associations, and i know that's an issue for the assistant secretary for preparedness, and they have very much aware of that as an issue that needs to be continued to resolved. >> and that really ties into o comment that jack and a number of the other speakers made that preparedness is not a destination. it's a journey. every time you do a disaster

drill, you work through this, you begin to ask questions and solve problems, and when you drill again, there's other problems. the first disaster drill i ever worked for was when i was at the university of chicago in the emergency department, and we scheduled the drill at nine o'clock, and we're sitting down in the er, and nine o'clock came and went, 9:15 came and went, and, finally, 9:30, the operator called us in the emergency department to tell us there was this mock drill. well, turns out that the operator was given a call up list in the emergency department was all the way down at the bottom. you wouldn't have known that until you've gone through a drill or gone through a disaster. i'm on the board of a hospital that discovered things related to our power supply after hurricane sandy -- sorry, super storm sandy, and so we are having to make changes. this is a process, and every time we go through it, the

system gets better, and that's the reason we say it's a journey, and the hospitals are required to have disaster plans, required to train and drill on those on an annual basis at a minimum, and through those, they deal with issues when they say, well, what about the others? i think that describes the importance of ongoing preparedness. >> i couldn't agree more. that question really gets to the heart of the issue that you can't do preparedness in isolation. i'm always reminded during certain responses when nursing homes plan to evacuate each other, and then -- they had not spoken to each other, and they were going to send patients to each other. that's the response plan. this is due to the wonderful work at the hospital with the preparedness program, the work done by the local and state health departments, talking about community preparedness,

you have to integrate the plans and look cohe'sively at what you do for the community. you, individually, have a role to play to protect yourself, your family, and protect your communities. >> yes, if you go back to your slide showing that half the folks who were surveyed didn't have that kind of a plan, it gives you someceps of the dimensions of that part of the problem. yes, go ahead. >> hi, i'm danielle representing an organization called amplify, and towards this idea or piggy backing off the idea of preparedness, the question remits to the exchange of data and receiving data when networks are down in disasters. i'm talking about the black box issue. a lot of the exchange of data is reliant upon broadband or towers that could be affected in the emergency disaster, and i was curious about efforts to, you know, go about that to try to eliminate issues that aride from this.

>> well, let me start by saying it would be nice to have that problem because our biggest problem is still the lack of having all the information in a data system anywhere, and building a robust electronic medical records system, but when you do build that, you have to build redundancy you talked about, and i think that's important. this is not -- there's not a proof of concept here. after katrina, it was very clear that those who had electronic medical records that the ability to reconstruct patients' medication lists and medical problems and things were enhanced. we did see that, again, lesson learned from katrina, superstorm sandy, hospitals in new york, again, with a robust system, and

new york city's health department put in place a fairly robust medical record system, and they were also able to very rapidly reconstruct that information, but it does rely on not just having the place -- the information in one place, but having a robust, hardened backup system and maybe two for that data and a capacity to rapidly reintegrate the networks when they have those disasters and plans to do so. >> anybody else? okay, go ahead. >> thank you. i'm with the organization called the secure id coalition. my question piggy backs off of your question. when we talk about electronic health records and having data benefits when and how people are treated in an emergency situation, and there's a story in texas last year when there was a demonstration at the cdc and the american medical association did about having

smart cards on people which has key information on them, like, allergic to pencil landruie, diabetics, and there was a group that had the first group, i think, a normal population like we would be now without any information, and the second population had the cards with the information on them, you know, secured readers encrypted all that stuff, so dangerous in a regular setting, and i wonder if you heard of that? >> i participated in that exercise so i'm familiar with it. you know, i think a couple things. anything we can do to better prepare the public to tell us what health, health care, medical conditions they have, what kinds of medications they have, other kinds of illnesses that ultimately are going to make them vulnerable in the aftermath of disaster is an important thing to have, or it's important information to have, but it's not the only thing, and it's not a panacea. first, you have to get people to

remember to take the card with them when they run out of the house, and then you have to make sure that the sites they are going to show up in have the ability to read that card, and then the third thing is you have to have the staff that know how to interpret that data and understand that data so that they can protect that patient's health, but it is an important mechanism, could be an important mechanism in saving lives and ensuring that people get the right help when they need it. >> jack, was there any resistance to that initiative on the basis of privacy concerns? >> interesting. you know, the ama did a series of surveys and public engagements, and that, while it was an issue that was raised, it wasn't one that was enough to say, we can't look at this as an option. clearly, people will always be concerned about where their private information is going, and as we have experienced over

the last number of months with releases of information in people wondering how much access the government has, information op them too, it will always be a concern, but the overarching message is we have to look at what's in the best interest of the people, and in this case, we know that many people come to sheetedders during a storm having a number of medical illnesses. many of them only know, well, i take a white pill before i go to bed, a purple pill in the morning. they don't know the name or dos sage of the medication, so anything we can have access to to help them better treat that individual i think is warranted. >> thank you. >> we got a question that maybe you can take an initial crack at. in past disasters, many people did not evacuate when told they could not bring pets with them.

what steps are taken to ensure the safety of animals in future disasters? what do you do about dogs in lose? -- louisiana. >> well, if i died, i want to come back as a pet because there's a lot of stuff, you know, you'd be provided and well taken care of, but that is true. during katrina there were instances of people attached to their pets, and they would get separated or could not bring the pet with them. we do have some very robust plans when it's evacuation of coach busses, and along with that there's other types of vehicles to put the pets on those vehicles, usually tagging along behind the coach bus, so people have different types of pets, not only little dogs, but they can be large animals, and there's other people on the bus, and, of course, the people with vulnerable issues don't want to

have the pets on the bus with them so you get into all kinds of operational, logistical operations, and, of course, not just big dogs, but you got snakes, and some people put the snakes in a, you know, what -- just a bag, a plastic bag, stick it in there, and something comes crawling out, and you might have people with gerbils, and it's not a very good situation. [laughter] yes, we have cages, pet cages, we have the vet community and the volunteer community that truly becomes very engaged with trying to assist with this type of evacuation so we got not only general shelters, but pet shelters along with it and people can go visit their pets,

help take care of their pets because they know what their pet likes to do or not like to do, and they calm down as well, and just while i have your attention, the larger evacuation is not just the human evacweigh, but the evacuation of cattle, so you would not expect that just in talking with health and medical, but planning alongside your partners, i didn't realize this, but every time you see water get into the eyes of cattle, they go blind. did you know that? okay. so i guess i taught you something today. you have an evacuation, and we need lots of -- we have to emac. i don't know if you know that word, but it's a state-to-state contract of getting assistance from other states. we emac cowboys and their horses to come down and help with an evacuation of cattle, so we have all kinds of evacuation lanes that go on between human movement, pet movement, cattle

movement, hospital movement, nursing home movement, and the state is right in the middle of your local communities and all these needs, and they are just sometimes overwhelms, so, again, we advocate we need grant dollars to help us with planning. >> jack, what about the snakes? [laughter] >> i've not seen many a snake in my travels. you know, we chuckle about this, but, really, pet prepared #ness is very, very serious, and, in fact, the reluctance of people to leave their pets does create threats to injury and death. health departments talk about what hay are doing with working with the community to prepare how they might evacwait with the pets and what plans they have in the event of disasters in the community, and organizations like the american red cross work

with national and local organizations, veterinarians to increase prepare pet preparedness, and medical reserves are looking for veterinarians and other animal specialists to work alongside other health care professionals to be able to respond to pet needs during disasters. >> nip else want to through in a pet comment? okay. several questions people submitted by card that would like to get our panel's response to. as we've seen this person write over the past several years, climate disasters, natural ones, have been incurring more frequently and with greater severity leading to infectious disease outbreaks or technological catastrophes. what steps, if any, are cdc and

nato taking, to address the ramifications of climate change at the state and local level, which means if you want to chime in on that, i'd like to hear that, or georges as well. >> i guess from an operation standpoint, natural disasters, we have approximately 30 state declared disasters a year. usually, that means the state leans forward to notify all the local or we call parrish departments to start being ready whether to respond, whether it's flooding, tornadoes, ect.. what are we doing? we have a lot of frequent -- we call it the live lab, you know, no longer just trying to plan. we're actively engagedded trying to be in response, and we do eat up a lot of funding for that, so i guess that's just another plug for, yes, we are seeing that natural -- that increase of

disasters, and that is requiring the states and the locals to start ramping up at least 30 times a year. >> and how about nationally? >> so the american public health association has been working very diligently since about 1999 with cdc to do a series of things. number one, first of all, just bring aware awareness to public health practitioners. number two, to try to strengthen their skills in building capacity in the communities to do two things: number one, adoption, figuring out how to adapt their communities and to be involved in the mitigation aspects of it. what's that mean? number one, you know, one of the challenges we have with all the very severe climate eventings is

one, we -- rebuild in the same places, not changing how we build, not putting up sea walls when they need to be up. one of the lessoned learned, i think, from katrina we saw and heard john talk about in new york is hospitals are moving the generators from the basements is where we used to put them, and putting them in other places including on higher floors. you do learn lessons with that, and john talked about the fuel lesson, but we have a lot of older city, and a lot of the older cities still have wires in the air and those are vulnerable to trees falling on them, disrupting power lines, and i think getting public health at the table so that they are part of the discussion so we're often thinking about public health being now at the table for hurricanes and tornadoes, but also think about extreme weather

events, things that are too cold. there's a lot of extreme weather events when things get snow, ice, ect., in places that were not designed to get snow and ice. the housing is not built for very cold weather, and the same things happen in places that are getting very hot weather for prolonged period of time, and those places are much more at risk for heat-related injury. particularly, you know, long heat, high humidity for three or four days, so building those plans so that you can address, educating communities, water to drink, identifying where vulnerable populations are so that when the power is out, you get to the people and get them plugged into some place that's either cooler or they can get medical needs met or dependent on equipment or these kinds of things getting them there.

all those kinds of things that have to happen, they have a very strong public health role in doing that, but as jack said, this happens at the local community level, and it requires people, training, skill, and expertise to make that happen. >> okay. we have time for just a few more questions. one from a congressional staffer asks what's done to ensure that populations with language barriers are aware of the services that are available during a disaster? jack? >> if i could take that, you know, this is -- we talk about all the important issues that go into disaster preparedness, and, you know, certainly, this is one of those that ranks right up there. when an individual is here and the primary language is not english, it presents a

vulnerability for them, especially in a predominantly english-speaking society where there may not be services to translate those important educational materials and other education into different languages of those that -- that those individuals speak in those communities. let me call out one who did an amazing job with this. they have found a way to work with partners to translate many of their disaster prepareddedness materials into multiple languages that reflect their community, but they first needed to go out and find out what languages people spoke in those communities. they had to work with the leaders of the communities whether they were religious or otherwise to help translate those materials and educate communities about what to do in times of disaster, what services would be available to them and how they could take care of

themselves and protect the family members. >> let me add the get ready campaign we have. we have fact sheets and 50 languages. this campaign is very much designed for the community individuals getting ready, and so we are working hard to get everything we have in multiple languages. i can't tell you everything is in. i don't think we have everything in 50 languages, but we have 50 different languages for the various facts that we have. >> let me just ask as we deal with the last questions that you fill out the blue evaluation forms that you'll find in your packet, and so we can respond to your wishes and needs in future programs >> and for the panel, the questioner asks that ewe

speak to social media and how state and local health departments use social media for preparedness and response. jack, you're the leadoff hitter. >> all right. social media is -- has just exploded on the disaster preparedness front, and i think i had one of the fortunate opportunities to be in the red cross national headquarters disaster operation center dure hurricane sandy, and part of the job was to work on monitoring social media and better understanding what were the public health and mental health challenges that individuals were experiencing in writing over social media technology, and we were flooded with thousands upon thousands and millions upon millions of tweets and facebook posts and other things of people talking about the disaster and experiences they went through at

the time, and it was a lesson that somehow we have to do better at being able to monitor social media and quickly respond to the needs and expectations of those individuals and communities. it creates quite a demand on public health in effort to better understand how the community is using social media technology to communicate what their needs are and more importantly an outlet for situational awareness as to what's happening in the communities during times of disaster. >> and i can tell you that nationally at apha, our twitter account, we have a quarter million people on our social media activity, and the twitter for apha get ready, and when something happens, we're always putting out information dise r

-- so people can have a conversation about the event. >> we embraced social media for a number of purposes. classically, people think of it as a way to share information. we have the third largest government twitter feed, but it's a way to listen to the communities, and we do monitor social media aggressively, and we're about to put out a project that'll be available to our communities called project dragonfire to understand what's going on in the community quick reimbursements and take action based on other federal agencies, but in today's day and age, this is a wonderful way to get targeted information out to the communities. >> great. >> we were at the point to call on dr. lumpkin for a closing remark or duo. >> great, well, thank you, again, for the panel for coming and all of you for listening and asking really probing and important questions. i think, perhaps, the most

critical take away is that if you think about being in a place where you have state or local governments who is going to be responsible for helping your community recover from disaster, you don't want the individuals to be exchanging business cards at the site of the disaster. you want to know that they've been talking to each other. you also heard that it's equally as important for people to know and to think about this because the time to think about a disaster is not when the hurricane is bearing down on your house, but you want to think about the escape routs before that. all of that means that these mechanisms need to be in place and tested, and people need to be reminded. many years ago, when i was back in the state government, we handed out pills for iodine because if, you know, if there's a disaster, people should take iodine to protect your thyroid.

how many of those people know where the pills are today? this process of ongoing preampedness of making the system reminding people is what will enable us to have the best outcome so the people of this country cannot only survive, but survive in a way that will enable them to quickly we cover and return to their normal ways of life. >> great, thank you very much, john. let me just say, a, don't forget about the evaluations; be, i want to call attention to aaron buchanan on the staff who is finishing up an internship at george washington university and who did the bulk of the work on this briefing as an exercise that was both academic and real world. thank you very much, aaron. something that -- [applause] yes, absolutely.

something john can't do, and that is to thank the robert wood johnson for its involvement in the shaping and the support and the co-sponsorship of this briefing, and let me reiterate john's thanks to the panelists and ask you to help us thank them for an extremely useful, enriched discussion on a very tough topic. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> we were right in my view to

fully fund the military since 9/11, but we deprived the state department and u.s. agency of international development of funds, and there is, as a result, an enormous gap between the size and power of the pentagon and the size and power safety department. i'll show that with two little examples from bob gates, who was an outstanding secretary of defense for president bush and president obama, gave a brilliant speech a couple years ago, and here are two of the nuggets. secretary gates, we have more military personnel in one carrier battle group, united states navy, more military personnel in one carrier battle group, than we have american diplomats all over the world. he's another. we have more members of the arm forces marching bands than american diplomats. >> this weekend, the history of diplomatic efforts and return

for diplomacy saturday morning at ten eastern. on booktv, how would you define the american dream? lawrence traces the dream from the great depression through the 21st century saturday at 7:30. on c-span3's american history tv, why change the story when the truth is more exciting? that's "true tales of the founding fathers" sunday at noon eastern. >> the group, code pink, protested yesterday for the unmanned vehicles.

the outburst came during remarks on the army's future and how drones will be a part of it. this is about 20 minutes. >> i'd now like to bring to the stage the next speaker who faces challenges of a different sort. as most of you know, g8's responsible for matching army's resources with its plans and strategies, and given the events of the past several years, he must be reminded time and again of the ancient chinese curse, may you live in interesting times. prior to assuming this in 2012, he served as the army's assistant chief of staff, and he had numerous commands like commanding general, united states army, aviation center of excellence, aviation brigade,

and later chief of staff of the 4th infantry mechanized in operation iraqi freedom, and italian command in the 10th division, a 1978 graduate from west point, a graduate of the army command and general staff college and a 1998 graduate of the united states naval war college. he's been kind enough to consent to answer some questions at the end of the talk, so we have some microphones set up so be thinking about what you'd like to ask the general about. please welcome lieutenant general barclay. [applause] >> fist of all, he said i was willing to take some questions. notice, he said "take," didn't say i would answer questions, but i'll do the best, again, at

the end of this. thank you for having me out today. i mean, this is my first time to come to one of these, but it gives me the opportunity to give you some of the things we're thinking about at the army level, and where we are going to go. as i start speaking today, we have to remember kind of where we've been the last ten or 12 years, and that really sets the stage for what we want to do in the future. you know, if you look at the past ten or 12 years, the war fight we've been in, unmanned systems both air and ground, have really come to life and have developed at a pace that i dare say that many folks would have thought unimaginable back in the late 1990s as we were trying to get our arms around where we were going to go with the unmanned system technology. as we look back on what we've accomplished, i will tell you

that we have an even bigger challenge in the future, and that's to leverage all the knowledge that we learned and put it against where we want to go and lay out the road map. when i was down, we developed a uas road map, and i was really focusing on the unmannedded systems because of the job at rutger, and that's when it came to light to me that even though we were dealing with a day-to-day war and trying to develop and field and bring capabilities to the war fighter, we didn't really have a plan for what we were going to do further out into the future and how we were going to continue to integrate and develop systems and improve the capabilities of those war fighters. in the unmanned systems, at the uas level, you see over the last ten to 12 years, we've worked at three levels, the company level, kind of the raven was the uav

that kind of drove us down those lines, and we've gotten great success, great utilization from that, and it's provided a significant amount of information to those with a company level commanders, in the areas of route clearance, counter ied, and base security. at the brigade level, as we were coming in today, talking about the shadow, happenedded to be at fort hood feeling there, bringing those first ones in, and using them, and then taking those in, the first unit to take them into iraq, the shadow platforms, and later on, we can see what it's done, but it's continued to move forward. now we are leading the shadow with a unmanned team. it was now integrated with the other manned systems. at the division level. we have the gray eagle platform, working on reconnaissance, isr attacks, and, of course, man

teaming. in the future, we are looking to do this on the airside, again, focusing on the group to tie in, we have the raven, puma, and other areas we are looking at is the future microair vehicles, putting these things, the small ones, the microair vehicles that are much smaller, giving you a different capability other than just doing an orbit above you, but able to maneuver, hover, and get in small, tight places and look at those, but, again, it's got to be transportable by an individual and also at the same time, as he said, introducing me, has to be affordable. at the brigade level with shadow, we continue to do the data link, and we're looking to get that billing in fy14 which is still on track, and it's a gray eagle division level, looking at the ground control station on track for fy15

fielding, and we're also looking at, as we started fielding gray eagle looking at the miiisr con fig -- configurations, moving them into the exploitation battalions, and the gray eagles, fielding them, looking to do integration of those sensors and processers under those platforms as we field those systems. on the ugs side, grown side, that probably is not gotten as much attention as the airside. i mean, it's nice and, you know, everyone likes to talk about those aviation systems that fly overhead, launch, throw by hand, and control, but it's really where the work has been done and a lot of great work done is on the ground side. they have proven themselves in the last ten years on the battlefield whether it's the eod

arena, end route clearance, i mean, it has been the game changer when it comes to protecting soldiers and taking care of them. the company battalion level, there's individual transportable, a lot of these are systems that have scouts, and they've been focused on, again, as i said, eod, and then at the brigade vehicle transportable, thal lones, -- talon, and we talk about autonomous mobility applique systems, and it was interesting that the previous speak or talked about autonomy using a term that was "supervised" autonomy. again, i thought it was interesting, and this is something we looked at to be truly autonomous, i mean, that's

something in the future we're looking at where you program mission sets, and it can go out and do the things that it needs to do without being tethered or looking through a screen, but send it out and conduct a mission set. that, to me, autonomous, and this is something that i think is a challenge for this body is we look to the future to develop those things about autonomy and what that means to the different users. the things we look at on the ground site, of course, is the common robotic system, and part of that, you know, working that with the marine corp now as joint programs to consolidate efforts, which at the end of the day, helps us save dollars when we get several services going after this. we are also looking at the squad multipurpose equipment transport, and, again, that's one of the things that the awe topmy comes into play as you are trying to develop something that

will give the lowest level of the squad some capability to move around the battlefield and carry the stuff that it needs. also provide power and network extension. then, of course, the microone-manned systems, those, again, as we try to define what they mean both on the airside and the ground side, just what we're looking for, hog, what do we want it to do? is it pocket -- can you put it in your pocket? does it come with a backpack that, you know, con tapes it? those are the things we are trying to work at. at the brigading above, we are looking -- note, again, i say semiautonomous and automated convoy operations. again, it's an area we are trying to define and look at what is awe autonomous, semiautonomous, and that's that mean to us, and where do we want to go with it, and how does it provide us capabilities as we move into the future. all of this that i've just talked about that we've done in the past and how we are trying

to link it to the future is dependent upon the resources that we will have available as an army moving forward. as i'm taking a look at the -- our modernization road map of the future for the army, there's some of the things that i have to consider as we are looking at what we want to get after. first off, we have to be able to provide an affordable, modernized force both that a manned and unmanned and that can team together. as we do this, what we are looking to accomplish is to improve not only what it brings to the soldiers, but also those systems, the protection, persistence, endurance, and autonomy, and, again, there comes the word "autonomy," how we define that, and how we want to get after that and just at what level with which systems, the degree that we want to accomplish the autonomy or semiautonomous aspects. what we are doing is we also

have to identify the cost and capability thresholds. the cost and capability thresholds are truly interesting because they committee with each other. you know, cost defines where we are going, and it also helps us define just what capability level we need or can afford to get after in the next few years. all the while we do this, we want to improve effectiveness and efficiency so what we look at in improving effectiveness and efficiency are commonty, interoperatability, and popularity. those are the three key things we have to focus on as we look to become more effective and efficient when it comes to unmanned systems. while we are doing this, we know that, as i said, a lot of those group systems, you know, most of them -- just about all of them were cut, it's important that we leverage the commercial technology, the funds that you

put into research and development, and how that assists us as we try to make decisions and move forward. gradually, we introduce the systems because as we're moving forward and developing the capabilities, it becomes more autonomous. you know, there's always the fear of, will it work? there's not a man in the loop? can it do the job? is it fail safe? as we look at this, we got to be able to develop those definitions and parameters that will drive us to move to that truly autonomous top of operation. finally, as we look to the future, some of the things we also have to look at are cost perspective, a contractor logistic support, and as you know in the past, not just in the unmanned systems, but in the manned systems, we went with the cls to provide us the maintenance for different types

of systems, both manned and unmanned, but as we move to the future, again, looking at costs, we have to be very cautious about how we go into this, and that's where industry's going to have to help us as we look at managing the costs, whether it's done through contractor logistics or go back and look at how we develop the military organic capability to do that maintenance. those are things as we look into the future that we try to look forward to and put our arms around and develop. now, of course, as we move forward, we all know that we have challenges in the unmanned systems arena. i don't know if you were -- have noticed, but it was announced several weeks ago, again, where we sold off some of our frequencies to industry. well, we all know that the bandwidth and frequencies are