[inaudible conversations] >> we are going to get going with our next panel here. we are transitioning to the other end of pennsylvania avenue to talk about the executive authority in the oval office in the white house and what president-elect trump and president trump will be able to do with the power of the presidency, with regulatory power, with executive authority power with memorandum power which is something we'll talk about. we have four experts and reporters here. susan dudley is director of the red tory studies center at george washington university. tom national correspondent with the "washington post" and gregory cortez a correspondent for "usa today" and senior correspondent for "the daily beast."

each one of them will give a five minute or less big picture overview of what the key issues that they see around this issue with the new president coming into power and then i will have a handful of russians but i'm hoping we'll have a lot of lessons from the audience. this session goes until 3:20. the overview congress will be going on and then we left plenty of time for questions from the audience. susan dudley if you could maybe get started for us. big picture would expect to happen comes whirring and i? >> thanks for inviting me. i'm going to start by taking issue with what seung min kim said, congress is the best. >> in town. it does not come as executive branch because a lot of policy

does take place in a lot of the action is in the executive branch. that's partly because congress passed a sweeping law that delegates authority to agencies. that means agencies like the department of labor or the environmental protection agency. this means even without the support of congress presidents can achieve their policy goals through regulations. for example president obama issued far-reaching regulation related to climate change, energy, work place. president bush before him related to homeland security and other areas and president-elect trump has said he is coming to washington with a plan to make big cuts in regulations. in fact president-elect trump has said for everyone new regulation to old regulations are going to have to be eliminated.

like thomas to sing to me i am talking to the media a lot lately and i keep getting this question, can i do that so that's what i thought i would talk to bow to my five minutes. what are the ways that president-elect trump can remove regulation? unlike executive orders which presents can eliminate with the stroke of a pen a new president can write one and they can also repeal them. regulations, there is more per process. i'm going to lay out five different ways depending on the circumstances. so we will start with midnight regulations. you may not know but we are and what is known as the midnight period. going back to the 40s and probably earlier we have seen a big uptick in regulatory act 70 at the end of the so this is an administration working hard to issue regulations before january 20 at midnight.

.. the inauguration day. so, that's the first one. the second one is to regulations that have been issued over the last seven or eight months since about the end of may using

simple majorities in both houses of congress. congress can pass a resolution disapproving the revelation. it's the resolution of disapproval to land on president obama . desk he would veto it in fact he did veto five resolutions over the last few years. but when it lands on president trumps desk he will sign it and it will repeal the legislation. so that is the second using the congressional review act and i think that christina mentioned in passing. the third way there are several litigations ongoing.

how the new justice department handles the litigation and defends the litigation will definitely affect the outcome. especially since supreme court have shown some sympathy to the argument that the executive branch has been over reaching its constitutional authority, not just in this administration of previous administrations as well. so, for example, there was a department of labor will that was put on hold just before thanksgiving. the clean power plan and the epa and the corps of engineers were all rules that were on hold while they worked their way through the court and that's something that the next administration will have to deal with. now, related to that, one of the grounds for challenging them is

they are exercising control over matters that constitutionally are the purview of the state. so that brings the states into the equation. we might see them playing an important role in the administration with respect to regulation because the platform said that a proposed to shift responsibility from the environmental regulation and the federal bureaucracy to the states. so now i will come to the final way to remove regulation and that is the standard way to modify or overturn the regulation that didn't fit into any of the other categories the agency would have to go to the same notice and comment rulemaking process to put the regulation in place in the first place and that means doing a bit of a great impact analysis, the legal justification, the economic and scientific.

so do that and then put out the regulation with that background. when you get that comment, response so you might need to change the regulation as a result and there is also the review into the process takes at least a year. then at the end of the process, you have a regulation that either modified or eliminate the old one but then you have to docket saying that's why it was important and the new one that says we should overturn it and that is bound to be litigated so the final resolution of those i think would take years. gregory is the white house correspondent for the washington bureau and he's written quite a bit about the executive authority as practiced by

president obama including some kind of twist on how he practiced that so that is kind of the overview of where you see things going. >> i think it is timely and extraordinary because at this point of the transition we would be talking about the legislative agenda more than anything else. the traditional first 100 days and after all, those have also a mandate from the senate. it's more preferable than executive action because executive action can be rescinded by the future. there is reason to think president trump might not have to resolve early on accept for some of the issues that have the

pent-up demand from republicans to undo. some of that will take an act of congress and some of it can be done by congress. when he was the candidate the line was that he wanted to rescind all of the unconstitutional executive orders in the memorandum and they were signed by president obama. it's what is unconstitutional. clearly there are some executive actions that have been taken and the provisions have been struck down in the courts. i am thinking of some provisions of the immigration actions, the clean power plan. they wanted their way through the courts. the other thing he said is that he had a presidential memorandum

in the formulations with the recognition that a lot of people in congress are relatively new to this realization that not all the executive authority comes from the executive order. so, maybe talk a little bit about some of the vehicles for the terminology so you know sort of what they are and look for them in the first days of the trump administration. first is executive order and what we must think of end notes about. the numbers were up to 13,000. they instruct the branch to do some things and remain in effect until the future president rescinds them. most executive orders go on for years or decades without being rescinded by the future president. it's only a small substance of

being controversial but they can do anything from, you know, the broad policy on federal contracting, antidiscrimination and the federal government, down to the executive order earlier this year that allowed the peace corps to change its logo. and the only reason why president obama had to find the executive order is because president carter signed the order saying they can't change without the rule of the united states. so, that is one of the important things to know if you are going to rescind the executive order you have to do it by executive order. that was something that i discovered early on the. had president obama used executive action more than the predecessors and if you count the orders comes he had not.

it has gone from the level of the presidential memorandum. it had the same force and effect as the executive order as a matter of fact all these things none of them are prescribed in the constitution they are just the presidential memorandum are not numbered. they are published and sometimes they are not. they tend to be more regulatory so i would imagine for example deregulation and the idea to rescind i would expect that would come in the early days of the presidency for the presidential memorandum they tend to start regulatory actions. those are in the national security there've been 31 or 32 of those. half of them are secret we don't know what they say. the only reason we know there are 32 of them is because they were not.

they will skip a bunch of numbers and so they know that we must have issued some at some point but we don't know what they are. then there's the humble proclamation. president bush launched the war on terror with a proclamation so those are important to look out for as well. it goes from the mexico city policy that is famous and there's a whole bunch of policies. there is a set of executive actions each president comes in and we send something and then goes back to the old republican playbook of executive orders and then those that had been in effect in previous administrations.

the only thought that thoughtso leave with you is that this famous line in the atlantic that's been often repeated the press always took donald trump literally does not seriously but the voters took him seriously but not literally. i think as he transitions it is incumbent upon us as journalists to cover him both seriously and literally and it is as much attention to what he does through executive actions as to what he says we ended up changing and he sends out mixed messages but we ought to take it

literally since they are very important to keep an eye on. >> you wrote an article early on. i was hoping maybe you could give me a sense of what you see coming. >> i cover national security from the congressional perspective. we find out over and over again and keep bumping into the executive authority with the white house is doing that trumps basically what congress is doing. so, i wrote an article about the kind of authority that the white house will soon be transferring to the trump white house. all sorts of extensions of power in the national security space. so we are talking about the authority to kill overseas without a trial.

that happened during the obama administration and we are talking about the records and wiretapping. we are talking about waging war overseas without congressional authorization acongressionalautg right now with the obama administration relying on the al qaeda authorization with the use of military force, not a new one that authorizes them to fight a war against isis. so we have all sorts of expansion and not much of that has been covered or plaintiff to buy all that many sources and i think that we will start to see a lot more coverage about the same authorities. it's the vast majority of not sounding the alarm on the national security issues that

have been. congress have chosen not to pass. it could have, but it's not been able to reach an agreement on how long that will be and who would be targeted in such a war. the actors that play and whether it could be waged. right now i think a lot of people are of the belief that the war against al qaeda to include a isis can be found anywhere. the point is to say they will

now be used even further in the new administration. other powers that the white house has included things like security clearances and creating a top-secret document is an extension of the executive power over hiding information from the public that they believe to be necessary and heading for the purpose of national security. if you put them through a security background check they would have a hard time getting a security clearance because they have associations with groups in europe and the charge of domestic abuse from a decade and

a half ago. they would work right next to the president but at the end of the day if they say he doesn't pass the minimum standard required of the president of the united states could just say i'm going to override that because is it for something to be top-secret if the extension of the white house that leave that it would endanger american lives. so that's how powerful they are on the national security issues. another way the white house can use the power is to mix top secret information with unclassified information and store that in a place where it's difficult to get.

i had a place the other day about the documents related to the nuclear deal. so we are talking about the letters between the ministers and we are talking assessments and the details of the cash payments to iran in exchange for the release. things like that all these documents are in the public interest and they are unclassified but what happened is they provided mixed in with top-secret documents and they held on capitol hill and special occasion for sensitive compartmentalized information. and they get blocked out with documents from that. the public can't see the information so that's another way that the white house and the

presidency can use the power arguably for good and arguably forbade. we have seen what they believe they can do legally. and often times, it is in any way that it expands its power. when you investigate all the ways the white house is likely. >> we had an investigator for the "washington post."

you were telling me the scope of that empire re-examines what we think of the power you might be using in the white house. can you explain that a little bit? i attend events like this and most recovered money and politics but i'd been assigned to cover the transitions of presidents going back to ronald reagan. it creates a special role and opportunitiepool andopportunitin addition to the legal mechanisms greg was talking about in the memoranda of the executive orders, the executive orders and

decisions that will move through the regulatory apparatus are wonderfully visible for the press and there is now something else going on during the transition that we haven't seen before. chris mentioned a moment ago. that is the arrival in town is the president elect and a president elected is approaching the presidency and some of the traditions of the presidency not just the powers granted in the constitution and by statute and the traditions of the executive orders, but it's also approaching the traditions of this moment is the transfer of power. part of this comes because we have a president unlike anyone before who isn't just a businessman there've been presidents who've been in business of courts and the government thrives it was

written to be in the citizens democracy but this particular president has his holdings all over the world. he has shown during the transition a willingness to discuss business interests during the transition. it's an extraordinary and again in different power for the president. donald trump said he would have an announcement and explain how he is separating himself from this extraordinary business unlike that of any others that have so many entanglements with the foreign businesses and governments. we saw this just i it just in tt couple of days the different use of transition power that we have seen before, not entirely unprecedented quite extraordinary where the

president elect used his executive power to convince a company not to expand as it had intended. but we get to the extraordinary challenge that we face. if we have it president who is going to ignore it as a certain extent or not abide by some of the traditions and by the traditions i was talking about joe and jimmy carter came to town in 1976 and was one of those that lead the transition n of the domestic was the chief was in charge of assuring that if they sold any financial interest or removed from any financial interest which might intersect with the things that gregory was describing the president is likely to do, he -- as many of you know jimmy carter was in the business and moved

his holdings into the blind trust that was administered by a family attorney. he went further than that and it was carter that insisted that jimmy carter would not engage in the discussion of the peanuts policy while he was president. and because one of his most staunch backers and important constituents as the governor of georgia have been the coca-cola company, and because the federal issue which most affected code is the sugar policy, he said they found the domestic policy chief and others that dealt with the sugar busines business by ng to touch it. this is not an isolated case. lyndon johnson moved the radio stations in a blind trust. george w. bush and george h. bush also took extraordinary plans to assure the public that their actions would be in the public interest and that there

would be no infringement on the private interest or private holdings so that's not happening in this administration so far. maybe we will get a different announcement on december 15. but my thoughts would be we have a president elect is already beginning to use the power and nonorthodox ways. because it is a matter of tradition, he said correctly the walls of the conflict of interest don't govern the president said he can do what he wants. what we are relying on is a sin line of the presidential tradition going back to the beginning of the republic. if it is preached, and i'm not saying that it will be but my thought has been we have a special obligation to track the

extraordinary behavior in the executive branch of the chief executive unlike any seen before. >> i have a few questions here when you are ready to raise your hand. can you give me a brief scope of the empire around the world and then the secondary question if they constrain what they do in the u.s., is there any notion of what's going on overseas or would they be totally immune to those? >> the business holdings are vast. we do not understand them and hired away. one of the things that i would refer you to because this is one of our jobs and something my panelists know very well is the disclosure form. the president of the united

states isn't bound by the conflict of interest nor is the vice president. but he is bound by the transparency requirement, so donald trump has issued this i think this is 96 pages of very fine print. what you'll find here is 560 private partnerships. sometimes they will say llc.

they extend across to the range of human activities. some of the most obvious and the most consistent overseas. and ther if there are 18 golf cs around the world. everyone was recalled because donald trump is concerned from some of the wonderful links they developed from the scotland versus. when he met with nigel, the head of what some think is the up and coming party in the british parliament he mentioned the wind

mills so here are some asserting the interest in his first discussion. there are of course hotels all around the world and most of the hotels. they are not quite franchises. the few agreements we looked at in the profound economic state. they receive the fees that they've been able to book a coupllook at acouple of the licg agreements they get the

percentage of each sale and in some cases that also manages the hotel and so the percentage is from gift shops and other thin things. they are the towers that are being built around the world and another is discussed during the transition and built in india. there are two trump towers that are under construction and half a dozen others that are under construction. as all of us know from our own experiences and building the skyscraper is part of the government enterprise because of the permitting that is required. there is a huge role for the government.

.. >> do we have a sense of how many obama error regulations could be part of it? >> yes, the congressional review

was a bill passed in 1996. it gives congress 60 legislative days or session days to review after regulation is published to send a resolution of disapproval to the president. that 60 days as you know is 60 legislative days turns into more when a company time there at home, weekends and et cetera. so the crs has estimated its around may 30 that any regulation issued since may 30 would be subject to disapproval by congress. i should back up. so any role issued after that point that doesn't get the full 60 days in this congress, the clock starts over again in the next congress. so 15 days into the next congress it starts over against that means the new congress has another seven months or so to

decide which of the regulations to vote to disapprove. how many are there? likely were talking hundreds. at least over 100, probably over probably over 200 regulations would be subject to disapproval. how many congress would actually overturn, it's going to take time to do that. even though their expedited procedures in the senate only needs a simple majority, it still could take ten hours per regulation. certainly don't think any where close to all of the regulations, probably less than a dozen. in the night can remember your question. in his other question is, it happened once, why once, why haven't we seen a more. the one time it happened was very similar circumstances to what we are now. the ergonomics regulation published at the very end of the clinton administration.

so the new congress was able to take a look at it, they sent a resolution of disapproval it landed on george w. bush's desk and he signed it. the reason i think we didn't see being used in the transition from bush 43 to obama was because any role disapproved using this procedure the agency cannot issue anything that substantially. [inaudible] it's a sledgehammer. so imagine the obama administration and i was involved in that, i was part of the team pushing things out the door, although trust me i was really trying not to push them out the door. i suspect the regulation issued at the end of the bush administration, the obama obama team would have liked to tweak and modify but not eliminated so they could then write something else. i suspect that's why it's only been used once. >> so i have some questions will

start with katie. >> the question is what avenue takes, is there really only one legislative to be repealed or can it go through any kind that you outline and then can the general public, will be the recourse been in that situation where people were question and whether that be appropriate channel to undo regulation does that make sense? >> yes. four of the five options i mention apply a more limited circumstances. so i think these are water discharge regulations under the clean water act.

there might actually be one that would be in this window that could be overturned by congress, but i think most of them will be things in place that the epa would have to go through notice and comment role making. there really is a lot of opportunity for the public to get involved. if agencies don't take the public comment into account and final regulation, courts can overturn it and call it arbitrary and capricious. so it's important for them to talk about transparency, there is transparency in the rulemaking process and the public has an opportunity to weigh in before the decision is final. [inaudible]

chevron, it probably would not it's a court decision that said that when things are complicated there several steps to but the bottom line is courts tend to defer to agencies interpretations of their legislation. so chevron could well get involved if there are litigation over the two, say trump chose to overturn or write a new regulation which again will take more than a year to change that regulation, courts will look at that and it will be complicated. which docket do defer to. >> so we have quite a few questions, we'll go to first, you second, you second, and then i'll go over to the side of the room, and if your questions directed at one of the four panelists please directed specifically are generally address it. i need to restate the question so i'll get back in the habit of

doing the. >> can you elaborate more, assume he will state what he did before but taking control of his businesses over to his children but also talk to us about potential conflict of interest there, we were releasing that gray area where it trump said down and he was at the meeting with japanese prime minister yet his kids are running the business, a what type of conflict of interest that could present and is there anything to hold him accountable or system ricky gray area for the next four years? >> so the question was about what conflict of interest would be inherent in turning his business over to his kids. there anyway any way to work around

that? >> all of this is sort of a new world that ran in addition to the conversation you mentioned that ibaka was on the line with the president of argentina where they announced two days after the conversation where a long sold trump tower in buenos aires was moving head. she was was on the line with the japanese prime minister as well, what role her and her husband jared will play and eric trump and donald junior will play in the administration and advising the president so forth, is a really big question, we we don't really have the answers to it. to some ethics lawyers the guiding principle goes back to the now famous clause in the constitution with a funny name, which prohibits the president

from accepting gifts and favors from a foreign leader. so, if argentina's president president were to give a green light to a long stalled tower for the trump family where humanist children would benefit, is that an emollient? there's ethnic lawyers from both across the ideological perspective who think yes there is a constitutional issue here. maybe that the president is not bound by the traditional conflict of interest or give prohibitions, he have easily is bound by the constitution that could set up a constitutional crisis at some point. remember though, the ways of

which you might raise the constitutional questions are limited so there's two things i should mention there's the emollients clause which provides a very specific prohibition of certain activities by the chief executive and there's also in congress a few years ago in 2010 or 2009 passed the stock act which is focused on members of congress and conflicts of interest, it also required that the president and vice president recovered by this law. it doesn't specifically restrict, i don't think they're covered by the conflict of interest portions of it but they are required to report transactions involving equities to the office of governments within 45 days of

any transaction. so there will be one additional area of disclosure and an opportunity to watch these transactions. of course i neglected to to mention the stock portfolio of the trump organization and it is not insignificant. tens of millions of dollars in stock, and some of them in industries that could be affected by some of the regulations and executive orders were talking about today. >> lotto readers are concerned about the obama's executive actions and minorities, the first is the dock executive action for those, and second is

the third set of initiatives interpreting civil rights law. [inaudible] [inaudible] >> for the executive orders, he can resend them as quickly, he can resend them by signing something. now, the regulations and some of those they are talking about our regulations that have been issued by the department of labor, those will go through the longer process that we talked about.

did you want to add more? >> i think that's it. ted cruz had aligned during his campaign that you lived by the pen and you die by the pen, and executive actions can be rescind by future president. in president. in this case executive orders he talked about with one dealing with non- discrimination against lgbt people in federal contracting, that is something that could be rescinded. i'm not in a presumed that trump is going to do any of this. you said something stirring the campaign that he loves the lgbt people and halos the hispanic people and who knows what exactly his going to do. but one thing that president obama has done is raise the bar on these kind of things. so with with many of these executive orders presidential memorandum and other actions every time a president takes one of these, they set a new status quo. as an example of this in the

transition from president clinton to president bush were president clinton and his midnight era passes arsenic rule. in dramatic ruled the amount of arsenic allowed in the water. and bush's new epa chief came in and so their science behind it, that's not the right level, were going to rescind that. it can proceed publicly, not us going back to the status quo anti- but, that bush was trying to dramatically increase the amount of arsenic allowable in the drinking water even though the original regulation hadn't been implemented. the only protection i think that you have is that there'll be, they have to be done conspicuously. so if he signed such an executive order, you'll be very clear what he is doing and he will be changing the new status

code and there is a political cost of that. and that's not insignificant. can he do a? absolutely. >> he didn't really going to great detail on how he was going to do some of these things, to to think that he's going to be interested in when he becomes president going through more the same fine levels on executive action or do you think is going to stay with the broader things like immigration that he talked about? >> i think the only gauge that we have is based on -- so has he been a detail oriented businessman? from the reporting that's out there, he can very much micromanage issues.

but it seems to happen sporadically and without a discernible pattern. if i had to make a guess guess who focus on the big things and then something may set him off. maybe he'll be out at 530 in the morning watching a fox news segment about burning the flag and will be the most important thing to him that morning. we see that happen already. there was an ongoing national conversation about flagburning until one morning the president-elect tweeted about it so my prediction would be probably big themes. but sometime people people micromanaging on issues that we have not really thought of. >> as anybody thought about it too was talking the obama

administration has really brought more power to the presidency and national security , are there any indications that the current administration is trying to shrink things down a little bit ahead of the new administration? or do they feel comfortable with the power that they have or somewhere in between? >> the current outgoing administration, are they comfortable with where things are they trying to reign in some of their authorities a little bit before the new guy comes in? >> i think there's a philosophical way to look at that ideologically and then the legal authority perspective. during the course of the campaign the trump campaign has said it wants to in some ways move away from from nato. it wants to negotiate trade agreements, it wants to reduce

the role that americans are playing in wars overseas so from a philosophical perspective you might argue that they're going to draw back a little bit, from a legal perspective the president's authority has been increasing for years and years. i am not sure president-elect trump has thought very much about the need for a new authorization of military force, i'm not sure that it's crossed his head. i'm sure it's crust hillary clinton said, is a major theme of keynes senate career so i know they thought about it. but i've never heard president-elect trump one say that the president needs to be more constrained, that congress needs to be more involved in the conduct of war and military action. so so there's no reason for me to think that from a legal authorities perspective the president will want to reign

that in. >> just briefly with respect regulation, think were seen actually more of a reach rather than less. example of that is epa just last week issued for 30 day comment which is very short, very significant regulatory action on fuel economy of vehicles. it did that without going through the internal review process that it's done for all regulation. that's not the kind of thing i would think they would want the next president to be able to do. yet they're anxious to get it out before the end of the administration and were willing to do that and take dramatic action. >> i will go to the back in a second. but can you give the journalist in the room a little bit about the regulatory centers and what type of research you do and what resources do you have?

>> that's a great question. george washington university regulation center as part of the school of public policy and public administration, we have a weekly newsletter that said digestible the things going on in the regulatory world. email us and would and without approach on that. it's not just what were working but what all the other think tanks and academic institutions who focus like me with a laser beam on regulatory issues, we write working papers, we filed comments on individual regulations and we teach. so we love teaching our students but we also will be happy to do more things like this and talk about how regulation works.

>> with trump appointing a variety of individuals in his transition team starting to appoint or nominate his captain, there's been discussion about lack of expertise or specific expertise in different policy areas, wonder if you think that may empower people who were heading these agencies more than for example the obama administration? like a lot of the directors came from the white house, but in a trump administration to see that changing and having agencies have a stronger foothold in the maybe that may not be a strength of the white house? >> recently had a conversation with paul white with nyu

professor who studies changes of administration and the nature of cabinet. one of the things that distinguishes this transition from others is the level of preparation. so they are scrambling, it seems to find cabinet nominees. one of the questions is what about the subcabinet position? under the george w. bush white house there is a lot of emphasis, the white house played a hand on role in reviewing appointments for deputy secretaries of systems and chiefs of staff even. so that the white house would have more the idea of having the cabinet secretary and white house ability to monitor and also have consistent policy and the agency. obama obama has

continued that, one of the concerns was that this may give cabinet secretary unusual power to select the junior personnel whose appointment would normally be reviewed or initiated by the white house. >> i have no inside information so i don't know. >> will go to shannon. >> i have a follow-up question on the, [inaudible] pressure from provider groups and research groups. >> sows a puzzle of nih would be held over?

>> there are holdovers in any administration is usually a small subset. some are statutory, there are people like the fbi director who have a term that transcends partisan administrations. there usually some holdover. there's nola branch extended by appointing prominent democrats or republicans to the cabinet in the opposite party. i'm not aware of the specifics of what the policy differences might be, whether those came up. >> this is mainly a question for tom. you alluded earlier about what are the steps, are they congressional or from another branch or there could be taken to the trump administration accountable. >> the question is other stuff

that could be held accountable on the financial conflict? >> there is been a very interested in that question. went to a bunch of the lawyers and advisors who had led or worked on this area for previous transition. there is a range of responses, jimmy carter's advisor said in addition to the blind trust approach there is some which is only a halfhearted subscriber which suggests the trump empire is really too vast to consolidate quickly into a blind trust. it may not be fair to the children trump said he doesn't want to do it. so they suggested they suggested the idea of a federal monitor, somebody who

would oversee a real watchdog and have access to confidential and proprietary information and would occasionally make reports to the office of government ethics or something like that. i think eisenstadt worked with monitors before private corporate settings and thought that was unlikely even though were hearing the number of people talk about the idea. his conclusion, and also the conclusion i hear at the end of conversation with every other ethics lawyer is what it will depend on is a free and robust press. it's up to us. in some ways except for the constitutional prohibition that i mentioned earlier, this is an extralegal activity were there may not be specific legal remedies but there are remedies the public realm and in the response of public opinion to

some of these actions. >> this might be the last one we might have time for one more. >> is curious in terms of regulatory affairs how much influence, you talk about what the agency has an secretaries and things like that they get appointed but there are career politicians,. [inaudible] i'm curious how much the career civil servants. [inaudible] >> basically what level of power

to civil service have. >> i think it's a next line point about regulation. regulation does, it's developed by these agencies that are mostly career civil service people who have been working across administrations. i think they do have a lot of influence. they they develop the docket, do the analysis, and heads of agencies are reluctant to do something to propose an action that goes against the docket that has been developed. that that is not to say the career civil servants, they also might have particular goals in mind so the dockets may reflect that. i think that's_point, you have the silver sermon and it's not easy to just come in as the head of a new agency and they were gonna shake things up and do things different.

>> will go if you promise to keep your questions for 20 seconds. >> you mentioned taking trump. [inaudible] i'm thinking of the drawback to that and after people turn to him and didn't pay attention,. [inaudible] obviously there's a practical line to draw. >> i think world struggling with that. he has the ability to make news in a very visceral way. it has nothing to do with public policy at all. but but it's something everybody can relate to. so whatever else he did in the transition that day got lost amid the national conversation

in the same thing happened with the flagburning. it is an open question about whether this is intentional, whether there is a head fake going on here, that hours of the tweets in the tweet storms, i would not presume to tell any journalists not to cover those. frankly when the president of the the united states says that he wants to deport -- in violation of the first amendment, not to mention immigration close, that's something we need to pay attention to you can completely ignore it. the point. when i was making was that in contrast to a tweet, if the president signs an executive order that says flag burner should be deported, then then will be there in black and white and very legalese and will be able see what is the mechanism for doing this, something that could be challenged.