very closely. we have a fusion center out in topeka that actually does pretty good work here. but there are not many other folks helping in that regard. we're just not gathering the intelligence and that's -- i mean, we know it's coming, right? we know this is a possibility. we know this is a possibility. and one of the ways you protect yourself is you start gathering intelligence so you can prevent it from happening and take those steps that can prevent it and we're not anywhere near that. we don't have that. if we stumble across it, that's fine, but we would have to be stumbling across it. it's not deliberate. >> so i want to start thinking a little bit about the priori prioritization of these initial steps. tom, you serve on the blue ribbon commission, which i think our other panelists are aware of and certainly the most prominent effort to really call these issues together. can you talk a little bit about the framework and what the feeling was about the top priorities? >> well, you asked the question

why, is there a difference between nuclear and biological and i think there's two parts to the answer. first is awareness. people don't need to be -- people can see a mushroom cloud and know exactly the ramifications of a mushroom cloud. how do you see what we're talking about of no food or the threat to food and the aspects around the biological threats to agriculture? it's harder to visualize. but when you think about the fact that in the next 40 years we have produced more food than we did in the last 4,000 because we're going to have almost 10 billion people and it took us until 1850 to get the first billion. so 40 years producing more food than the last 4,000. one trillion dollars of our economy as the general just noted is agriculture-related. so the awareness is there.

we just -- that leads me to the second part of the answer. we need leadership. so you've got a defense component, an nsc component, and all of these siloed entities are not coordinated like they need to be. so it's easy to talk about it and it's easy to put more papers out there. it's harder to take that very eclectic array of bureaucracies and say we're going to meld them together and integrate this in a way that produces an action plan that really provides some direction. and i believe in all the experience i've had is that if you're not in the oval office or

close to the oval office, it ain't gonna happen. you've got to -- it's got to be west wing driven to elevate it above all these agencies and bring together just as joe biden is doing so admirably with the cancer moon shot today. for the first time we're coordinating. it's going to take moon shot like approach led by the vice president or somebody of that stature to make this happen. >> so to follow up on that a little more as it relates to congress. we've had mixed experience in the country the kind of czar idea. some very successful. i couldn't collapse dni into that, that was a focused effort led by the congress but when the white house tries to coordinate around one person who is not subject to congressional oversight, we've seen their tension there just on the basis of separation of powers and institutional ego.

how did that coordination happen between an executive and the legislative branch. >> my mom used to say an invitation to the party solves your grass-parking issues. meaning you invite your neighbor and you can park on their lawn. work with me, people, my mom was a brilliant woman. you have to include congress in the conversation i think you need the right committees and get them participating in that conversation. so if you had the vice president on the coordinating council for biodefense then i would recommend you bring some folks from the house and the senate and are committed to being a part of it.

congressional reform on oversight, we could have four panels lasting six days on each of this. >> there's still oversight? >> well, maybe not these days. so if there's an event, he has to appear before 159 committees, it's outrageous. so he'll spend his time running around to different subcommittees who have a little slice of jurisdiction on this, that's a horrific waste of time and i don't think it's good oversight. so i'd like to see a realainm t me ment and i'd send out the invitation and park away on the lawn. >> i will note that we have the pleasure of working with tom ca kaine with the 9/11 issues and that's their argument, too. there's 103 committees that dhs

has to report to. when you have 103 bosses you have no leadership. >> another corollary to what they both said? clearly both branches of government need to work well together. one of the advantages of the president appointing somebody to have the responsibility is at least until we get the executive branch organized. they have to get their act together as well like we just talked about so there will be a lot of benefits to doing this and we can't assume the executive branch is well organized for this particular effort. i mean, different departments have different views of what their responsibilities are and somebody has to lead that. it only happens -- i agree totally having seen -- been through a couple of wars now and siege how you try to harness all instruments of national power to bring to bear on afghanistan or iraq and the only way it really works is if somebody's in charge. somebody has to be in charge on the executive side for sure.

>> so we're focused understandably a lot on the federal questions. but if this is going to be a whole of government response, there's obviously important roles at the state and local level and i wonder if any of you are aware of those efforts and to what extent is this more of a focus closer to the problem? >> i think kansas and kansas state deserve real commendation for the leadership. they have a unique program to dedicate a national attention to the issue and really begin to put the action plan together. with research and coordination unlike anything we've opinionsed before and general myers can talk to that. but i think some states have begun to put plans together. there's a requirement each state have a plan but it isn't coordinated. it isn't understood from one state to the next.

there's very little interactive experience so again it begs for a federal framework even though there is as you say a critical roll the play as we saw with new york and pennsylvania after 9/11 and virginia and washington. so it has to emanate from someplace. i give great credit to some governors who elevated it within their states but more needs to be done to make it the national framework that will be required for a national response. >> the state of kansas, i already referred to our intelligence fusion center in topeka which i think using the word "unique" applies here because a according to the one, in the intelligence it is unique but they're the ones trying to connect the dots about what

might be coming our way in a nefariothey have fai nefarious way. we're just one university. dr. beckham knows more about this than i do but we were talking about an effort between texas a&m and kansas state funded centers to work the surveillance problems so when an outbreak occurs it gets reported quickly and you can start to come up with protocols to deal with it. that funding is in jeopardy. it's the only program of its kind out there that's been successful but it's only going to live so long. so the premise is right. i think this has to happen at the state level. it can happen, there are a lot of people that are ready for action but better coordination, appropriate funding, whatever that means, to make these things come to life is what's needed. >> any final thoughts before we open it up to questions? >> and you know we saw this right after 9/11 and we were

trying to put together pots of money to get down range and emergency responders and other things. even with the pandemic issue. what do we stockpile? where do we stockpile it? how do we get it there? the states have to be a part of that solution on two phases. one, i used to get people coming into my office -- got love them, as my mother would say -- who wanted the big command centers and had population for but they had to have everything the major urban areas had and it made no sense whatsoever and the political pressure put on the state emergency responders was pretty significant and that pressure came to congress and everybody wanted what everybody had. we don't have that much money. i'd love to send the most sophisticated technology to the lowest population county but candidly it doesn't make sense to do that. i can say that now that i'm no longer in congress. so we have to get the resources part right and, b, it was -- i

think it was last year, 2015, the homeland security committee did work and people didn't know where to go to access the materials of which they might need to be prepared. the process, they didn't know who to call, they didn't know how to go through the process. i don't care if it's radiological or therapeutics or even the stockpile of anthrax and who can get it and who can't and how do i get it to my first responders. there was no clear path of understanding of how that happened and what we found was lots of material wes had purchased along the way is now expired. the shelf life is over and we still have it. it hasn't been deployed and now what? do you have to go back and repurchase this new stuff to sit on the shelf for five years? it was expensive to go through this operation. if -- we've got to get that piece figured out soon and i think the states have to be a part of that. not every state is going to need exactly the same thing. we ought to be okay with that

and we ought to be able to work with the states to direct those dollars from the central location to get the right thing at the right place because we don't have the money to spend in every city and every koorner e the country. it's not going to happen. >> let me go back to the defense facility being built at kansas state. that replaces plum island, the level four lab. the deals with the zoonotic diseases, both that occur around the world, actual ly. we've got the funding to build it. the funding to operate it and what effort is going to be put in there is yet to be determined. and how much they're going to enable the scientists that will work there to help work on these diseases is, i think, still a little bit of a question mark. well, a big question mark, frankly. that's just another example, that's got to be part of the solution. not the only solution but part

of the solution for some of the worst diseases we could come across and we're still not clear what the direction will be after it's built. now we have a couple years to figure that out but they'll pass quickly and things have to be laid in place. we're already doing work at another level 3 lab on campus to prepare for people for working in there, but that's just one example of inconsistency and we'll build this billion dollar facility but maybe we won't fund scientists, that's an exam ration but maybe not one of this moment. >> so we have some remarkably fleet-footed microphone holders and i have about 15 minutes for thoughts, particularly questions, and if you just identify who you are that would be appreciated.

>> good morning. my name is andy mccabe, i'm the ceo of the association of american veterinary medical colleges. in recent years we've seen the resistance of anti-microbial resistance is capturing great attention at the national and international level and i wonder if you could comment on the ways that you see that as an opportunity to synergy efforts here or might it be diluting efforts? how many crises can we -- and emerging threats can we focus on at a time and what does it mean to include anti-microbial resistance in these efforts or the say, well, you know, that kind of distinguishes these things here in bio and agrodefense, if you could comment on that, that would be great.

>> can you keep the mike up? unpack the question a little bit. we understand there's a big tension between antibiotics and the potential for pathogen resistance, but if you could say a little more for the audience about that. >> so what i'm thinking about is, again, these recent efforts over the last couple years, especially at the national and international level, to focus on anti-microbial resistance. anything from the president's commission and then recently the united nations efforts on this. so there's a grange effort and mobilization to attack this issue. we've talked about how bio and agrodefense has been an issue that is below the radar, it's not capturing the attention that it needs, despite a lot of people talking about it for many years. senator, i know you've worked on this a lot in your career so is there value in attaching this to anti-microbial resistance or does it dilute this effort and

dilute attention and focus? >> i don't think there's a clear answer to that question. i think it has to be explored. . there's little doubt that technology is continuing to advance and moore's law is still in effect. as moore's law unfolds and as we understand the amazing technological advances, the real question we're going to have is can policy stay abreast? and in this context can we come up with a mechanism that accounts for this amazing technological advance? i often times say that the american people speak to their government in the 21st century. the government listens in the 20th century and responds in the 19th century and what we have to do is figure out a way for the government to stay at least within reach of the technological advancements we're making and i don't know. i don't have an answer to your

question today but it definitely requires us to analyze just whether or not it would make sense for us to do it and if we did do it, how would we do it effectively and take advantage of what technological advancements we're making? >> i expect we could get additional thoughts on our second panel. i see nodding up front. other questions? right behind you. >> i'm jim monk from the congressional research service. i appreciate the panel's work to highlight the issue, you're doing a great job of saying what's important and steps we need to go forward but in the context of the plan the bpc has done or the research at kansas state that's been highlighted, i'm wondering if you could give some more context to what's needed in the direction in light of things like the national

infrastructure protection plan, strategic partnership agreements that have flown out of hspd 7 and 9 that have been congressional actions to get the executive to take action on agroterrorism and sort of saying what is the coordination that's lacking that is trying to be set up in the national infrastructure protection plan? what is the intelligence or coordination that's lagging in the strategic partnership agreements with private entities and the states? just kind of -- asking where are those next steps because there are these plans that have been developed in the past ten years. >> any of you have a -- >> i'll take a stab. i came skeptical to this idea that the vice president should have this bio defense committee or council. i was skeptical of it at first and the more i get into it, the more i think senator daschle is

right. you have to have somebody who can peer over all of the tubes and there's great activity in one place that no one is aware of in the other place and there's really no opportunity to have that discussion in a meaningful way, it's all personality based now so if somebody knows somebody they can pick up the phone and have that conversation. and that happens. but the problem is there is no one entity that as i said can draw all of those people to the same place to force that kind of conversation and if you look at the dni model, that was exactly the same problem we were having up to 9/11. great work was happening all over the intelligence community but not one person could pull them together in a place and say we've got to do a joint effort here and if you're spending $10 on that and i have three over here, wouldn't it be better to spend $12 on the same problem and save a buck? so that i think has to happen if we're going to get any of that

and, again, some congressional action is based on the silo effect as well. this is my little lane and i'm going to take care and may sure my lane is doing exactly right. you need that command-and-control structure that forces collaboration, not because people don't want to do it but the system is not built to allow them to do it in a way i think is productive. >> so let me add to that from an airman's perspective. when i was commander of u.s. space command, i went to a meeting of the combat and commanders, the pentagon, deputy secretary of defense and asked people in the room, who thinks they're responsible for -- we called it computer network defense back in the '90s but cyber defense. who thinks they're responsible for cyber defense. everybody raised their hands and he says, "well, we've got a problem. if everybody thinks they're in charge, nobody's in charge." so i think the crux of your

question, there's been a lot of things that will enable the right things to happen but somebody has to think it's important, somebody think this is has to be a national security issue. and then it might flow from there but i think the priority is not there. my research says some people are just kind of pushing it -- they don't want to think about it. it's really hard, right? it's really hard. it's -- i don't know if it's any harder than nuclear non-proliferation but it's -- it's hard to get your arms around it. it will involve lots of entities that will involve lots of research and has to come together in some way. sharing research was not one of the strong suits of researchers to share what they're doing in general so i think it's more that, it's a priority issue, not necessarily -- and inside the executive branch, probably inside of the legislative branch a lot of people think this is

theirs and that's good but we need more cohesiveness, if we're going to get focused on the problem, shab has to be in charge somebody in the executive branch, whatever committees, primary committees on the hill, somebody has to be in charged with this and be seized with it. >> we have time for a couple more questions. >> good morning, thank you for speaking today. my name is caroline kennedy, i'm an operations coordinator with the international bio security and prevention forum. this is a u.s. government initiative, we do outreach to make sure people are sharing best practices internationally and domestically. as we do do so much outreach, i find that mr. of if scientists or public health officials have a pretty good understanding of biosecurity and some of the threats that we face. someone mentioned that we need to work on making sure that everyone is understanding and visualizing what the biological threat is and i think that's a major issue that that's lacking

in the general public. and if that's lacking in the general public, then we're not going to get that impetus to further legislation on that. so essentially my question is what do we do to better enable visualization of the biological and agricultural threat? >> that's a great question. >> a good documentary. >> i'm for that. >> a good documentary. what was the one on nuclear war? >> the day after? >> yeah, the day after. it gets people's attention and suddenly you say this isn't good, what can we do to stop this? i think a goods documentary on this would be very helpful, one that captured people's imaginations that was as factual as you can make it, not hyperbole, not too much drama but just kind of explain how this -- how things can go wrong and i don't know if that's right but -- >> i agree with general myers. i also think if i could go back to tara o'toole's comment that

we ought to take the lessons we've acquired from the experience we've had in the last 15 years, whether it's avian influenza or ebola or h1n1, there are lessons there. because we haven't had the leadership -- and this isn't meant to be a partisan issue at all -- because we haven't had the prioritization, maybe that's a better word, people haven't made the connection between natural and deliberate. and we have to do a better job at making the connection, whether it's a documentary or leadership that can speak to the issue around the country or this coordinated effort that we've talked about between congress and the administration. somebody has to make the link, the segue, between natural and deliberate and say, look, this situation, as bad as it is, could be a hundred times worse if it were a deliberate set of circumstances, that doesn't take much imagination but that

connection, i think, could be very helpful. >> i would only add if you watch all eight episodes of "declassified" on cnn. >> i was going to hit it for you, mike. >> it will give you a great idea how we should do it and i'll take ideas that you have from watching all eight episodes of "declassified." >> the hd disk set is a wonderful stocking stuffer if anybody is thinking about the holidays. [ laughter ] i think we have time for one last question. >> good morning. my name is chris lewis, i'm a veterinary consultant with booz allen hamilton and proud kansas state grad. you've talked about the national response with ebola, avian influenza, obviously it's a worldwide potential problem. how much is the international response and international

relationship development being addressed at this point? thank you. >> well, maybe i'll start by saying i think it's sort of the same set of problems we have domestically we face internationally. ironically with all the challenges we face in many parts of the word as a result of these pandemics, we don't see much more leadership internationally than we do domestically and i think -- in part i think it's a requirement that the united states step up to the plate and provide that elevated leadership and prioritization but we have to do the same thing internationally we've dondo midwestally and take those lessons learned and apply them to deliberate circumstances that could occur and will occur at some point in the future. >> i think if you look at the international position and all the things we just talked about,

how do you muster resources? how do you have a central organization that helps goetz the resources where they have to go? if you see the problems we're having, magnify them by 10 overseas. i've been in some of these international forums and you can see in some cases they're five and 10 years behind. not because they don't have the interest or effort, they just can't muster the same kind of resources and their systems are almost more diffuse than ours are in trying to deal with this problem so we're all, i think, internationally and here in the united states wrestling with the same problem, theirs just seem worse and far behind. that's where i think we can provide leadership and help on an international basis to get our resources mustered up. maybe not everybody has to show up in liberia when ebola breaks out. maybe that's not the right decision. now everybody wants to show up at the same place and commit some kind of resource, maybe that's not the right answer,

maybe we break this up like nato did with its strategic force contribution. some folks can do airplanes and some people can do signals collection. we ought to start looking at that around the globe and say we'll create our deployment opportunities based on what capabilities you bring to the table and what can happen over time is everybody's capabilities go up over time but we have to start somewhere and if i were king for a day that's what i'd try to do and that's why we're a little bit behind on that international effort for pandemic response. >> my guess is you know the answer to the question, we're not prepared internationally and the case study i would use is ebola, i'm on the defense help board, i was aware of some of the things going on in the department of defense to help and actually -- i'm on the board of a nonprofit research institute as well that was contributing to that but there was a lot of confusion, a lot of false starts.

that's probably indicative of how well prepared we are internationally for ebola and probably most food animal food plant sort of problems. i wonder with wheat blast in bangladesh, are we sure it came in the way we think it came in? are we us is septemberable in the united states? what steps are we taking to make sure that doesn't happen in our wheat crop, for instance? i don't know the answer to that question but i think that's -- these are international problems. they don't know borders. most of the bad stuff is either in this country or on the borders, a lot of the it is, anyway. this is dangerous stuff and we ought to approach it the way we approach the human diseases we worry so much about in my opinion. >> i want to ask you all to thank our first panel for framing imperative. [ applause ] i think we're going to transition to some of the

details with our expert panel. and i will just note that billowinglanbill hogueland will be moderating this panel. as many of you know, he's one of the most incredible people in this town with anything that comes with economics and budget and finance. he may tell you he started his career at usda. he may not tell you he leaves once a year to go home and help harvest the wheat. so when it comes to a.g. creds, bill 's the real deal. >> good morning, everyone. jason took away what i wanted to say at the outset. i'm the only agricultural economist here at bpc from what i know. welcome everybody, but welcome to my aggie colleagues out

there. also jason mentioned that there's a kansas influence at bpc in the form of one of our founders, being bob dole but i would point out we are influenced daily by another major kansan, that's secretary dan glickman who works with us on a lot of issues and we appreciate the influence of kansas. let me say, this second panel here is very distinguished, you have their bios so i won't go into all that. we'll focus on animal health a little bit here and probably build upon a number of the issues that came up in the previous panel. first of all, let me introduce them as we go down the line. to my immediate left is tammy beckman, she's been mentioned already by the acting president. she's the dean of the kansas state university college of veterinary medicine. bob kaylitsch is with the u.s.

center on intelligence and last but not least, aisha george, codirector of the panel that you heard about in the blue ribbon study panel. before we get into questions i have that, would each of you take just a couple minutes and tell the audience about your perspectives on the bio agrodefense landscape and -- i don't know if we can up the optimism from the first panel but on a scale from 1 to 10, 10 being the best, where would you rate the security of our food system today from potentially deadly pathogens coming into it? tammy, i'll start with you. >> sure. first of all, it's an honor to be here today. thank you so much. it's an honor to be here with my panelists. this is a particular passion of mine as it's been a large part of my clear from protecting the

food system is just incredibly important. as we sit here today the agricultural industry gives us one of the safe zest most affordable and abundant food supplies in the world. so on average, i'll give you some statistics. u.s. consumers only spend about 6.4% of their annual expenditures on food. if you compare that globally it's irrelevant in between 11% to 47% so we know we have a very robust agricultural production system and we're very thankful for that, but the very things that make it so robust also make it so very susceptible to disease introduction so we know, too, and we talked about it previously that there's probably a little bit of complacency, we haven't seen foot-and-mouth disease since 1959, we don't have african swine fever or rift valley fever, we don't have other diseases that are occurring abroad. we ask ourselves this morning how come it's so difficult to get our arms around what's

happening on the biological arena. well, these pathogens are found naturally around the globe so it's very difficult to get your arms around where they are because they're naturally occurring organisms, we see them everyday globally and we can talk about the global perspective in a few minutes. but we know going back to the comments made earler about what tara o'toole said with naturally occurring issues, we've seen that, too, in the last several years and decades. so we've had p.e d. and. a i, avian influential so we've had that to prepare. and i think there have been lessons learned and there have been things accomplished since 2001 in a great deal and we can go over those but i think there are critical gaps that exist. i'll tell you it wasn't until

2014 when ebola happened that the true meaning of one health i think came to light and that we saw some of the critical gaps we face in bio and agrodefense. as many of you might remember, there was a nurse infected with the ebola virus and she had a dog. so that bright to light the issues around one health and how close our companion animals are to people on a daily basis and just what that risk can be from interacting on a day to day basis, whether that's with our livestock or with our companion animals. we know we didn't have the countermeasures to deal with that particular outbreak, we didn't have diagnostic tests that we could use to test the dog at that time and we didn't have policies in place to show how we would handle it, quarantine. i'll call tut avma, d.o.d., those people came together and put together policies and

procedures and validate it had diagnostic test so that we had those but in that event we were very much left laid bare on how we were going to handle that case and had there been other companion animals, where would they have gone? where would they be put in quarantine? those types of things came to light so we have critical gaps that still exist. there's been a lot done since 2001, we have the national animal health laboratory network, surveillance plans, we have the fed prep plans from usda, we have business continuity plans that have been developed with our industry and sectors. all of those things have been done since 2001 and they've been coordinated with our federal government, to our states, with our industry partners and so i want to give a shoutout to those agencies that have helped coordinate that and to our private industry who's helped coordinate that as well and academia's role in all of that, too. however as i said i think we do still have a lot of gaps, we don't have a comprehensive bio

defense program. we talked about barda and that is a production of countermeasures for humans but we don't have anything on the animal side that is analogous to what barda is. . the strategic national stockpile is funded to a much greater extent than the national veterinary stockpile so we have to give some light to and we have to shed some light on the agricultural and companion animal side of the house when it comes to bio and agrodefense. and that's why we're here today. success in addressing these gaps will be dependent on a one-health concept and taking an all-of-agency, all-of-state, all-of-industry approach to addressing these things and i think we have to have some capability to incentivize this activity and incent i havization is going to come through funding. through a real leadership at the top that will encourage people to work together. there are people working together today through one health initiatives through the states and industries but we

have to bring this more into focus on a very much higher level and then we have to inc t incentivize people to work in this area. the other thing i'll say is on a global level. these diseases occur naturally. we are doing a lot on the global level through the global health security agenda, we work with our partners atoie or fao to help build capacity in the international arena and we do so through incentivizing them to work in a one health context. we do that much less in the u.s. because of the way we're funded and the medical side does one thing and the animal side does the other thing, we have to through the leadership of the avma, the industries, usda, d.o.d., we have to bring this initiative together so we are using our resources better so that we're coordinating better and leveraging resources so when we talk about barda, there's an animal side of that. when we talk about the strategic national stockpile we have funding for the national veterinary stockpile.

we have to bring these things together and have a higher level conversation on how we coordinate these events. that's all i have. >> from 1 to 10? >> oh, i knew you were going to make me put a number on it. i'll give this a 6 today. >> good. bob? >> thank you, first of all thank you for the invitation to be here and to be part of this panel. this is an area of great interest to me. i would take a similar approach to tammy's in terms of cataloging a variety of different elements of what we have but i'll start with a number because, quite frankly, you can't give a single number because as tammy appropriately put out or identify is that there's a federal component, state, local and clearly a commercial industry component. so i'll start with the commercial industry. i'll give them an 8 or 9 because why? why, because their brand and profit share depends on the ability to provide safe food to us so you can imagine if there is a circumstance where something is deliberately introduced into the food china

it is really their bacon that has to be protected in terms of how to respond to that. so in some ways it's implicitly there for the industry to do these things. from the state and local activities and i'll use iowa as an example and embellish what chairman rogers talked about in terms of the avian influenza outbreak that occurred in iowa in 2015, that single outbreak not only killed 25% or they had to cull 25% of their bird flock but cost $1.2 billion and significantly 8,500 jobs. and decreased both federal and state tax revenues. so the effects of these events, enwhen they're localized, are enormous. so states that have significant agrobusiness in their area, california, a i ay, north carolina, arkansas, whatever,

they take this seriously because it's their home turf, if you will and quite frankly their jobs and state economies dependent on it. so i'll give them a 7 or 8 on that. when i look to the federal government and for the reasons i think the previous panel said with great, i think, detail and authority more than i can offer is simply probably about a 3 or 4. why? because it's not an obvious visible priority. if you looked at the latest farm bill and asked yourself what provision was in there for food defense or agricultural security, you'd be hard pressed to find anything of that nature in that bill and is that an issue of congress? an issue of the president or executive branch? the answer is as we've heard the many silos of excellence that exist across the domain and, quite frankly, the preponderance in the bio defense area have been focused on human health

issue. so during my tenure in the white house when i served originally back therein 2002 to 2005 and 2o 2009, the issue of one health was just emerging as a concept. the idea that this has not been embraced entirely through the entirety of government is really a function, i think, as senator daschle spoke eloquently on, about leadership focusing on these areas. a general asks a question about anti-microbial resistance and where does that fit into the priority? i say it fits squarely into the food a.g. defense business because as we have found out through that experience that the preponderance of antibiotic use has been in the food agricultural business where that has put great pressure on the creation of arguably resistant strains so as companies now are voluntarily withdrawing the use of these antibiotics on wide scale, that's putting an onus on those companies to basically use

other kinds of methods to limit the growth of pathogenic bacteria that can get into the food system so it focuses on our ability to have good surveillance and how do we monitor those flock herds or herds or whatever the animal species is to ensure that they are not necessarily posing a risk to the consumers of those products so i would say that that is one area. the last thing i'll say is -- to give you low marks for the federal government, somebody mentioned hspd 9, which is defense of agricultural and food. it's one of the few hspds you don't hear much about in the bio defense world. the author of this was a fellow ksu grad, curt mann, a man of some distinction who went on to be deputy secretary of usda but that does not figure prominently in conversations happening in the halls of congress or the halls of the executive office

buildings around town it's become, primarily again, one issue of leadership. if you look at the number of things that are contained in that particular document, which is awareness and warning, great vulnerability assessment, mitigation strategies, response planning, research and development, outreach and professional development, some of these things have been said into motion and people take them seriously. people at the ground level with the muddy boots, growing the crops or managing those herds have been focused entirely on those issues day to day because that's their livelihood, that's their professional careers. but in the washington sphere inside the beltway, that certainly has had not the same sway and that does get to the point of senior leadership and focus and priority on these issues. i'm heartened to hear that the obama administration recreated the senior position in the white house for biodefense security. where is that veterinarian managing these issues?

i don't know if that person exists yet but arguably i think we're at the cusp of great opportunity here with the transition now to a new administration. the idea that the can be a central part of that whether it's the vice president or someone else who manages that portfolio it's critical it does get planked. just to highlight one thing, and, again, we talked about terrorism and i don't doubt terrorists are out there planning bad things against good people like us but i have to think we live in a very different world and i'm going to give you a little bit of a reference to something that's worth a read which is talking about the gray zone. it's the idea that competition amongst great powers or countries in the world today will exist below the level of oe vert conflict. and if you google "gray zone" you'll find scholarly military papers on if subject. it's also called hybrid warfare. this idea that you can

contribute warfare with signer that is very difficult to attribute that takes its toll on a society or country. so you can talk about cyber and information technology, it has economic input but arguably you could look at these same set of issues as it would relate to someone who would deliberately try to attack one of our gem stones of our society and this is our food and agricultural production, our critical infrastructure around that so i just offer that as an issue that, as we go forward, that has to be central to whoever takes over the reins of government both in congress and the white house. obviously in congress it's harder, you have a number of committees and jurisdiction. we talked about department of agriculture or the agricultural committee, interior department has a role in this, epa has a role in this, ahhs has a role. but you can imagine that there will be some difficulty but

difficulties can be managed with good leadership and prioritized focus on these set of issues. >> i, too, am going to join bob in issuing multiple numbers for multiple things. the reason is that we're talking about agriculture like it's a singular thing, one word for one thing and the truth of the matter is, the sector is composed of all different kinds of things. the supply chain and food and crops and farmers and industry and people involved in pharmaceuticals and all of it, all of it, it's so much and so you would have to assign -- i think you'd have to assign a number for each and every one of those elements and how they average out i don't actually know but i would also say the number we might assign today is going to change tomorrow, is different last week, last year, a few years ago, back when bob was in the white house and so forth. and i think that that's okay.

i just wish that somebody was continuing to ask that question -- where we? how do we feel about it? i think that in addition to just an enormous and extremely complex sector that we're worried about being attacked and affected naturally or intentionally, this issue of economic impact is a huge driver and a driver for everybody all the way down to the lowest level person, boots on the ground, a different type of boots on the ground, down with the farms, people are, you know, are concerned about it but they're concerned about it in terms of their livelihood. if you can't get somebody to be all excited about it because, oh, somebody's working on an agent and weaponizing it or moving it, whatever, you can get people interested in this issue just from the economic standpoint. the case in point far would be

white house studies that were done shortly after the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak in europe a number of years ago. we don't see a whole lot of national economic council studies on disease events, but we did back then. it's an important driver but, again, now we're talking about the economy and inputs into the economy and how we optimize various elements of the economy. even so, going back to what was said earlier by chairman rogers the -- we have statements from terrorists and nation state actors saying they want to attack the economy. this is one way and we can't afford to just disregard it. i think another point i would like to make is that in our attempt to address complicated problems, we take a tangle of what they are composed of and we

separate those pieces out and we say there's human disease over here, there's the cyber thing happening here and it has an interface with some things, well, we have we have a crop issue. we have a potential for attacking supply chain vulnerabilities and so forth. and we separate them. and then we say department of commerce you're in charge of this. that sounds like a department of ag thing. and that is now in dhs. so there is a dhs thing. but we separate them out and we try to address those individual strands individually. not that we are doing such a great job at that, but that is what we are trying to do. i think that leaves us separated. unnaturally leave it separated, in terms of policy, activity. it is actually a tangle where everything is touching

everything else. i think we have to be more realistic about that. i don't think it's just a matter of putting somebody in charge. although we did of course put out that recommendation. our number one recommendation is that the vice president be put in charge of all biodefense, including agro defense. i think it's a question of right minded, right educated folks. we have a political system which is wonderful. but if we want somebody to address agro defense issues, biodefense issues and so forth, we need people who actually know about those people sitting in those political appointments. we have to have people who have s a clue as to what they are doing and what they are talking about. one of the big examples of this is fema and hurricane katrina.

everyone ragged on the administrator at the time. i to this day do not rag on the administrator. he did what he was supposed to do from a political perspective. he went for a political appointment and got it. he was not the right person to be in that position at the time. what did we do after that? we said if we're going to have somebody be in charge of fema, we have to have somebody month -- who has a significant and deep emergency management background that is also political, and we wen in that direction. we have to the same thing in this arena. i think lastly, bill, and i know we need to move on, i think we mentioned what we want to do from a state and local perspective. agriculture is a state and local issue as much as it is anything else. we talk about fusion centers, the role of law enforcement and so forth. i think more than anything else with the sole exception of human

medicine, agriculture affects every state in the country. somebody has something going on with absolutely everything. not even has a nuclear weapon sitting in their state. some have some nuclear materials in their hospitals they have to get ahold of. engaging everybody requires actually understanding that. and then turning everybody on, whether it's a primary activity in their state and locality or not. so while i'm heartened to hear that the kansas fusion center is taking a look at this i am not so heartened to think the other fusion centers are not. and they should. we're talking about protecting the nation from something that could affect the entire nation and any state in the nation. so as we think about this, we have to have people who think in that manner as well and aren't so tempted to constrain it to a few states or constrain it to a

few deceases or to a few -- few diseases or to a few departments and agencies. >> we're going to leave time for questions from the audience here. and i had a number of questions. but let me -- one thing i'm going to the take away from this conversation real quickly is building upon senator daschle's comments earlier. this agency -- the coordination of a number of agencies and alphabet soup of agencies out there. you mentioned a number of them, bob. i would like to shout out the department of defense is involved in a big way and one of the successes they helped with was ebola last year. so coordination is a big issue be going forward. we'll jump over. i think we touched upon it in the previously panel. let me go to something down into the weeds a little bit here.

that is in 2014-2015, the department of agriculture had to transfer i think about a billion dollars from the corporation over to afus to the take the over bovine encephalitis, i believe, influences, at that time. tuberculosis at the time. that agency's budget doubled just because of that one issue in usda. tammy, maybe you were involved. how to you rate our dealing at that time, the federal government? got a pretty low grades here for the federal government. how did they do in that particular crisis situation? >> so i don't think i'm in a position to rate how they did. i want to comment on something you said. you said their budget doubled. so my point i want to make is that too often we're reactionary

and we're not proactive. so the fact that we're having to transition money to the an agency that has this responsibility to take care of these things is reactive and not proactive. that's kind of what we are here to talk about today. i'll tell you during the outbreak i think they handled it well. i think there was a number of things they had to step up to the plate on recently and do. these are the routine things they do on a regular basis, afus does. they redefine laboratory definitions. we have national animal health laboratory network, 57 labs are testing for avian influenza. >> it took a crisis. >> a crisis, we are too reaction area and not proactive. i will say i do believe these agencies obviously have taken all of these after action plans, put steps in place. there is a nice after action plan that talks about the things they learned during that outbreak.

preparing is always better. we're often too reactionary. i think that's why we are here today, to call more attention to talk about how we prepare on the front end so we are better ready to engage in the event there is an outbreak. having said that, you can never fully prepare for what's going to happen, correct? there could be many different variations. you could have three different foot and mouth diseases intro tuesdayeded across the u.s. we need to be prepared to detect and respond. too often we think disease by disease and don't think emerging diseases. or all of the one health approach toward disease preparedness. we talked about amr. you asked that question. what are the things that we can leverage. we should be leveraging our surveillance systems that are already out there like this.

at a&m, we were engaging veterinarians to provide information through electronic means. why couldn't we use the same system to collect data on amr, instead of different agencies funding different people, which they are, to collect that data. that doesn't make any sense, right? we have to look at this as more of an olive agency, state and federal partner, industry approach. only if we do it with academia. that's where i'm at. tenured professors. but if we come together through academia. if we come together we can address these issues. >> if i can just add just on a different note. i think the recent zika event highlights the challenge of our government responding to these kind of events you have to have congress appropriate money to do this. the fact that they were able to do an internal shift of budget, move something across, on something no doubt traumatic and

disruptive to the agency involved. it was certainly the case with hhs with zika where they had to shuffle money around until they could get appropriation. it's interesting. we have the disaster relief fund which funds fema. every year we put money into a fund that based on the presidential declaration that money can be used. it is already preappropriated. everybody knows all disasters are local. so i think politicians generally understand that the flood in north carolina today could be a tornado in kansas tomorrow. but that money is set aside for those legitimate mentals and they don't require congressional action to do it. it would only make sense to kind of highlight just something that came up in the recent campaign that was proposed to have a public health emergency response fund as a means to basically have a pot of money so that in

the case of the next zika, you don't have to do that. well, it would only make more sense to have a similar fund or same fund to be used for these veterinarian or agricultural emergencies that are significant. maybe not as costly in some ways but certainly significant. the fact is these are the kinds of things arguably the leader can say we need that could suggest in the next presidential budget that money is allocated to do those kinds of things so we shouldn't be surprised. we may be surprised, yes, two strains of fmd or not, or maybe it's another form of avian influenza. but the point here is these are the kind of anticipated emergencies that could be prepared for in a way that accommodates our democracy, in a way that lives by the constitution that we can have these funds set aside to deal

with legitimate emergencies in a time sensitive fashion that minimized the impact, economic and personal impact that these things have. >> thank you. i'm the moderator. i'm not supposed top take a position. but i concur on this particular position. but there are those things we know we are going to have to fund. maybe in the short amount of time we have left, i want to give a shout out to the kansas state biosafety level 4. i heard in the previous panel the money has been funded for the about this and construction and ongoing. we have an authorizing appropriations staff out here. tell me, once this is built, how are we going to keep it operational given budgetary restrains? i guess i will make some of my ag friends mad. should they be contributing since the impact it would have on the agriculture sector is big, don't they have a role in

funding these type of activities? >> national agro will open 2022, 23. it will be the gold standard instead of the art facility for study, diseases. having said that, funded to open 2022/2023. at this moment, we need to start looking at programmatic funding for usda and department of homeland security programs that will house in this facility. right now if you look at the funding for plum island, we're

talking about $3 or $4 million budget within the u.s.d.a. programs and dhs budget somewhere around 15 problematic and not looking to expand, as i understand it, over the next several years ag. that's a problem, when you are building a $1.25 billion facility, it should be somewhere around $15 million to be real fair and to be able to execute the program that they need to execute, within a one health environment. and to be able to be a true partner with the cdcs of the world, fdas, hhs, again, within that one health context. right now, i'm not sure of a lot of activity that's going on to build that budget over the next several years that's going to include everything from work force education and training, as we know that a lot of the plum island staff will not be transferring to manhattan. there will need to be a concerted effort to do that. as we talked to, we need to anticipate that and start to put dollars in educating the work force from the dhs side of the house, epidemiologists, and we need scientists, biological

technicians, lab technicians. we need to be educating and training this workforce that's going to go in this facility. we need to increase the budgets and getting the money appropriated so we can build the right sized scientific programs. that can be collaborative with our human health counter-parts. >> thank you. real quick. bob, if you were elected to congress or president next year, what's the one or two things you would say needs to be done quickly in this area? >> i would say that -- i would say that we really do need that leader and biodefense coordination council that we recommended. but as part of that, pulling the u.s.d.a., department of interior, department of commerce, some of these departments that we're not used to thinking about when it comes to defense related issues and

homeland security issues, pulling them in and making them true -- making them true partners in this endeavor. >> great. bob, any thoughts? you've been elected, what are you going to do? >> boy, i don't know if i want that or not. the short story is basically convene your cabinet and basically, this is a priority. this is a priority, mr. dna or mrs. dni, secretary of agriculture, secretary of homeland security, this is a priority. you all have something to contribute, you have something to do here. what you need to do is build a plan that will make our agriculture and food industry resilient. this is a partnership not with the government but with the state and local partners and commercial industry, and i would look for you to convene with your partners to come up with a plan and report back in 90 days, what are the thee or four things that i can take to congress to make sure it is part of my new

budget, consistent, sustainable budget over time to drive this as a priority for the country. >> would you like to take a shot at it? would you like to be elected? >> no, but i would agree with that, exactly. i think you need to take a look at what would be the -- i don't want to see the veterinary side of the house left out. i would concur you need that subject matter expertise there on the agriculture side. i would convene a group to reach out to the stakeholders and industry and to academia, and to the states to decide what the top two or three priorities are to shore up the agricultural defense system in this country. >> we have time here for about 15, maybe 15, 20 minutes of questions. the previous panel, please identify yourself and ask a question directed to any of the panelists up here.

question right up here on front. >> hi, kevin kane with the association for veterinary medical colleges. last week i was involved in a day long process of figuring out what is going to go into the next farm bill, the five year authorization, and it is still a little ways off. but if you could have your sort of dream authorization in that bill to kind of address some of the things you talked about today, what would that be? what would that look like? >> when it comes to the farm bill and other authorizing vehicles, i think it is important to ask the question that you just asked. make sure people are clear. i think part of this has to do with setting expectations. it has never been an expectation of the farm bill to include something to do with any national security issue. so somebody has to set that expectation, and then the congressional staff and congressional members will respond to that.

but i think specifically, there are very, very specific activities that are already ongoing that need to be authorized if they haven't been authorized already waiting around for the national animal health laboratory network to get authorized until just so recently, it is a little ridiculous. it could very well have gotten into the farm bill. i wouldn't want to say thousands of pages of that sort of thing, but somebody needs to make sure what is already happening is authorized and will allow congress to conduct the oversight it needs to. i would put that in there, and i would make sure that a national strategy, similar to what we're requiring or recommending for bio defense in general, that national strategy activity be put into the farm bill as well. particularly addressing agriculture obviously, but giving the department of agriculture a leadership role in that, along with the other major

players. i think that's really important, as with human bio defense, there are a million little strategies and plans and policies all over the place that have to be brought together and form a really good strategy. the rest of it, you start getting into pieces and parts, right, which happens with congressional legislation. i understand. but i think without the strategy, we're continuously disorganized and we need it. >> questions out here? >> question over here. >> hi, my name is dennis lee, i'm with a small company. the questions here and the last panel, i know dr. beckham talked about we're too reactive and not proactive enough. with the former panel talking about all these disparate agencies and unified command and

control. one of the questions is how do you incentivize these agencies, actors to start being proactive instead of being reactive? is there a way we can do this? do you have suggestions for how this could happen? >> if i could take an initial stab at this, first of all, you don't have to make a case to the commercial industry to be proactive. they're on top of these things, because it really does reflect their brand and their profit share. the question is, from the federal government, particularly what are the things that they can do to set in motion if you will to be prepared for the next event. you know, part of these things are very, i don't want to say not sexy, i mean, it's making sure we have a professional cadre of people out there that are trained that can do this. you know, i had a conversation before this panel started, i was talking with tammy, and identified that the number of applicants to veterinary schools

are going down. at a time when we probably need more veterinarians for a variety of reasons, small and large. that's one thing we can incentivize right there. it gets the idea of training, ensuring we have a robust career field, that allows you to draw upon people. because you can't predict the next disaster. the idea of having money set aside for these things is a significant one. >> so i would just comment by saying it comes with funding, right, you tie funding to incentivizing the out puts and holding people accountable. as far as the industries, the industry is right. they do have that sense because of their brand and commercialization obviously. the biopharmaceutical industry, how do we incentivize them for a market that doesn't exist in the u.s. today. how do we do that? how do we incentivize that.

is that working with our federal government partners to develop programs like barda to incentivize them to develop that type of counter measure that we need. the other thing i would say, just going back to the comment about veterinary colleges, we need to grow the work force that's interested in this area. we have about 1.6 applicants to the administration ratio there. i think we have to continue to get folks that are in college interested in these areas to work in, whether it is the federal government, public health. we have a lot of our graduates that go out and practice companion animal medicine. that's wonderful. that obviously as colleges, we educate for all spectrums of the profession. but we also need to open their eyes to the other opportunities out there, and global veterinary medicine, as i mentioned global agenda real estate on one health concept getting out and building abroad. these are rewarding careers, and educating the veterinary

profession and those kids that are in veterinary colleges now to those opportunities is going to be absolutely critical. i think elevating the value of that veterinarian degree, take a look at the role that they play today, the role we play in the food supply and protecting the food supply and protecting your pets and keeping them healthy. we play such an incredible role in society and getting that message out there and elevating the value of that veterinary degree is so important as we move forward in this area. >> questions out here? one back here. >> good morning, i would like to thank both of the sets of panelists. my name is kathleen giles. i'm a supervisory special agent with the fbi and weapons of mass destruction bio, sorry for that. rather than acronyms i thought i would spell it out. basically the previous questions, and then comments from the last panel, as far as

what the federal government is doing. right now, i'll say that my unit is working closely with afis, we are about to launch a class that we've written called animal plant health. it's basically joint criminal epidemiological course. it is training boots on the ground industry, local, state veterinarians, local, state law enforcement as well as federal how to work together. that means information sharing from when it happens. because if the fbi or law enforcement finds out three years later we're not going to be able to find the path to be able to involve it if it was intentional. i know in the past, our animal and our plant health experts not necessarily think anything beyond accidental or natural. so let the expert, let the fbi, let the local law enforcement think about intentional, working together, it is a great partnership. so what we're doing in december, mexico state university for the very first class, we're actually teaching this to our local wmd coordinators, local law enforcement, border patrol, anyone that has a stake in this.

so my question to this panel and the previous panel would be it is recognized. we recognize the vulnerability. we're trying to come up with a way to bridge that gap. but we don't have money to actually do this. we're working on basically we've been promised 29% of what we've asked for, and that's across the unit. and we're launching all these new initiatives, and we try to put congressional notes out so we can speak to the experts in congress and to the lawmakers. what do you suggest? how can obviously we want to be partners with you on this. how can we fund this, like tammy, you shouldn't have to have a huge investment there, and not have anyone staffing it. >> yeah. >> sorry. >> i think this is a challenge for every single topic we could possibly come up with. everybody asks the same question. and you know, i would tell you about ten years ago, members of

congress would sit in local field hearings and say united states government is broke. so you cannot come here today and say what we need is more money. now, that said, we obviously have a budget. and we have mechanisms going on. in order to increase the amount of money put in a budget item, there are a number of things that have to happen. one is that the president actually has to put it in the president's budget. if it doesn't make it over there, then that's coming over to congress for congress to respond to. the other element of this is what's happening with appropriations and authorization. if nobody on that side is asking for it either, then now you have a huge gap. so as far as the role of the fbi is concerned, you know, the bureau has to get out and say this is what we need and this is why we need it, of course, and they are. it becomes a complicated thing and we have to look at those various elements. the reason i bring it up is that it is not enough.

it is simply not enough to say we need more money. we have to take it down levels lower and lower to where we are identifying exactly how much money we need, we're communicating up on the legislative branch and the executive branch and all of the different branchs and getting to stakeholders who actually ask the same thing of the folks that are putting money in. and then the other issue has to do with public/private partnerships, and industry putting in money as well. it's not -- as much as we would like to, because we love the fbi, it is not the fbi's entire responsibility to execute some of these activities. i think we have to think smarter, and get some industry funding in as well. >> can i, first of all, thank you for making that contribution. but could i ask the three experts, had you heard about this project before?

>> yes. >> okay, good. glad to hear that. >> i would say the farm bill may be an opportunity to raise this issue as a legitimate educating, if you will, the first responder community. educating the commercial industry. it would seem to me that would be a functional area that could be part of the farm bill provision. >> it would be interesting to get the judiciary committees to weigh in on the farm bill. i'm not sure that they ever have in the past. >> mr. grassley should have some interest in that. >> any other questions out here, quickly? i see no other questions, and i know our cameras are going to shut down here in a couple of minutes, so let me first of all thank all of you, thank the panelists. just a little closer here from my perspective. first of all, it was mentioned i grew up on a farm, so i saw veterinarians long before i ever

saw a medical doctor, that's for sure. in fact, my brother saw what the vet was making and he became a vet. but a small animal veterinarian. not the direction you wanted to go. and doing a little prep for this event, i re-read sections of jared diamond's wonderful book, some of you may remember, "guns, germs and steel." and in that book, he relived the events surrounding the mandam indian's tribe from the great plains, which i think covered part of kansas and the great plains out there. and how in 1837, the tribe contracted smallpox from a steamboat that was traveling up the missouri river from st. louis, and i don't think it was intentional, per se. i think we have some bad history that there was some use of smallpox as a weapon. but in a couple of weeks, that

tribe went from 40,000 down to something like 40. there's a tremendous drop. so terrible diseases from animal related pathogens clearly has a long and quite frankly very scary history. we only hope here at the bipartisan policy center that this discussion today elevates this a little bit. i would love to see this discussed in presidential campaign, than it has been discussed and i hope we can continue to press on. thank you very much. thank you all for joining us this morning, and have a good day. [ applause ] we've got more from the road to the white house later today with the two major party candidates. donald trump will be speaking at a rally in johnstown,

pennsylvania, which you'll be able to watch live starting at 4:00 p.m. eastern on c-span. later his democratic opponent, hillary clinton, will be appearing in cleveland in advance of the world series in that city. watch her comments live at 4:30 eastern. it will be on c-span2. also, join us tonight for a look at race and justice in america. the panel of activists, both sides of the aisle discuss how the next president might handle race and justice issues. participants include author and history professor mary francis berry, director of coalitions for jeb bush presidential campaign and former aide to president bill clinton. you can see that starting tonight at 8:00 eastern on c-span. if you missed any of the presidential debate go to tablet. on our c-span.org you can watch

entire debate choosing between split screen and entire options. go to questions and answers from the debate finding the content you want quickly and easily. use our video clipping tool to create clips of favorite debate moments to share on social media. c-span.org on phone, desktop or tablet for the presidential debate. c-span where history unfolds daily. in 1979, c-span was created as a public service by america's cable television companies and is brought to you today by cable or satellite provider. george mason university recently hosted a discussion on voter anger and impact on presidential election and political process. from the harvard school of government and former nbc news reporter moderated this 1 how, 50 minute discussion.

>> good afternoon. it is a bittersweet honor to welcome everyone at this symposium honoring our friend and colleague. today's symposium, voter anger based on sue's 1996 book. in the "new york times" obituary they wrote the falling. as i quote this, think about this is what she wrote 20 years ago. "the new york times" wrote in that book she identified deep seated voter anger fueled by an uncertain economy, cultural divisions and disenchantment with government as a potent force that politicians need to understand and harness.

people hate government, she wrote, because they expect more than government can possibly deliver. particularly in this era of budget constraints. so in a sense, the book offered a preview of the current political environment. remember peter finch flinging open the window in the movie "network" and screaming i'm mad as hell and i'm not doing to take it anymore she wrote in her introduction. the question of the decade is, she continued, what happens now that that window has been opened. so again, think about that, 1996. just three weeks before she passed away last may, one of our colleagues visited with sue and marty at their georgetown town hall. they sat outside discussing the current presidential campaign. sue was unsurprised at the unfolding of events at that time. in fact, as i suspect, we'll hear today from our keynote

speaker and panelist, sue was well ahead of her time recognizing the growing anger of the public toward our government and politicians. she reminded marty and their guests that just as she correctly predicted, the nominee this year of the republican party, she also believed that the outcome of this election was not a foregone conclusion. sue tohchin came in 1998 after a distinguished career at one of the other georges in town, george washington university. in announcing her appointment, then president of george mason said tolchin is one of the very best and most respected scholars in her field. what he didn't say at the time, the president of gw had just given sue's the institute's top researcher award for the entire

university. this was but one of the many awards she received over the years including business business award, american society for public administration's award for best lead article in public administration review. sue also was a fellow in the national academy of public administration, and she was particularly proud of the fact that her work has been cited in three separate supreme court decisions. kingsley haines, the founder of school of public policy, who recreted sue to mason said ted, quote, brings the schedule of high quality academic and an outstanding teaching record together with her appreciation of the communication role needed by the civic intellectual in today's public policy arena. in many ways, sue was a pioneer. she was the first woman to be hired as a tenured full professor at the institute of

public policy here at george mason university. she was in the first group of women to be admitted to the cosmos club. and she was the first woman to be named a university professor, our highest honor for faculty at george mason university. in many ways, women's issues were one of the central themes, not only of her personal life, but also of her research, and her scholarship. sue was founder and director of the washington institute for women in politics at mount vernon college, and she was the first to offer seminars and workshops on the practical and theoretical facets of women contemplating public life as a career. and several of her books explored the role of women in politics in government. but above all, sue was a teacher. her students, and i heard this many times as her colleague over the years, were her true passion. and that really was felt by her

students who commented about this many, many times. and also, were invited to your home on many occasions at the end of the semester, and the students always appreciated that personal touch that sue gave to everybody. and certainly, the students were her passion, with the exception of her family in her life. every class she taught was a labor of love. she made a difference in so many lives. her memory not only lives on through her family and her writings, but also through the thousands of lives she touched over a long and productive career. so marty and karen, on behalf of all of sue's colleagues and students at mason, and for that matter at gw, mount vernon, drew, seton hall, brooklyn college and city college, thank you for sharing her life with all of us. she is one of those rare individuals who will continue to be a part of all of our lives and help each of us to excel at

whatever we choose to do. finally, i want to recognize one of sue's doctoral students, my colleague. there couldn't be a more fitting tribute to have one of sue's students put together a tribute to sue's work. bonny is just one example of many of how sue influenced all of our lives. bonny, thank you for all you've done to help us honor your mentor and your friend. bonny bonnie stabile, will you step forward? [ applause ] >> thank you so much to all of you for joining me here today to celebrate sue's life and legacy. it was my great honor to be her student. she was my doctoral dissertation chair. three years ago, sue received a lifetime achievement award from mount vernon college for her work in education, as an educator, with special emphasis

on women's issues. and i had the honor of introducing her at that event. and the thing that brought a tear to her eye, though, the thing that she told me was most important to her was when i spoke about how meaningful having her as my professor was. she said that, you know, of course, we could talk at great length about her many accomplishments, she was a prolific author, she was a great scholar, she won many awards, she was on tv and radio. and she influenced policy outcomes. but she said that was most meaningful and important to her was her role as an educator and the way she touched students' lives, as mark just said. anyway, thank you for being here to share this event. i think she would be very proud to have you all here, our great panelists here. i would like to introduce martin tolchin. in addition to his most important accomplishment, which was marrying sue, most of you know, had a 40-year career at "the new york times," and then

in retirement, started the hill, helped start "politico" and a senior scholar at the wilson center. some accomplishments in your own right, besides being sue's husband. welcome marty to just say a few words. [ applause ] >> i want to thank you all for coming. this event means a great deal to karen and me and our family. i also want to thank our gold-plated panel. and bonnie and mark and the seldom seen hand of jim for putting this together. a couple of months ago i was at the lunch counter of clyde's at

friendship heights, and i was paying the check, and a woman came over to me and said, aren't you marty tolchin. and i said, guilty as charged. and i asked, do i know you? and she said, well, i've been in your home twice, and i was a student of sue's. and sue, as bonnie mentioned, would have all of her students over at least once during a semester for a potluck dinner and then a class. and she continued. she said, sue tolchin changed my life. so i said, how? she said, well, until i took her courses, i had absolutely no interest in public service. but she made it seem so vital, so challenging, so fulfilling,

that i have just retired after a career at the fdic. and i want to say that as sue enhanced the lives of her students, her students and faculty and administrators here at george mason enhanced her life. she loved her colleagues. she loved the students with a passion. she was a great advocate for them. she would tell them to regard the doctoral program as an obstacle course, and not to try to be creative. she said creative will come later. now just do what the professors want you to do and you'll be fine. and then when they got their ph.d.s, she helped them public their dissertations, she helped them get jobs, and she had a great network out there that she worked with, really, to help her students.

so i just want to thank all of you, and all of her colleagues and her students for everything that they meant to sue, and for making her life as wonderful as it was. thank you. [ applause ] >> so now it's my honor to introduce our keynote speaker for today. theda skocpol. she comes to us from harvard university. she's t she, too, is a prolific author. i won't list all her many publications and awards. but a highlight of what she's

done in her long and prestigious career. she's a director of the college strategy network. she's author of the tea party and remaking of republican conservativism. so relevant to today. she served as the dean of harvard's graduate school of arts and sciences, president of american political science association and she's been elected to membership in all three major u.s. interdisciplinary honor societies. american academy of arts and sciences, philosophical society and academy of arts and sciences. her work covers comparative and american politics. her work on social policy has been very impactful in the course of the last half of the century. so it's my great honor to welcome her here as our keynote speaker here today. [ applause ] >> well, thank you very much for that great introduction. and let me say that, it's very moving to hear the recollections of susan tolchin.

it made me realize that i wish i'd had a chance to sit down with her in the last year to talk about her understandings of what's going on in american politics now, and her concerns about this election, which i share perhaps because both of us have studied grass roots popular anger empirically. i know that when donald trump first announced his candidacy, there was a virtual unanimity of academic and media pundits who said this is going nowhere. and i immediately went into a state of anxiety from which i'm hoping to emerge in three weeks, because i think like what has been reported about susan, i understood that this might be very well going quite a long ways.

and with untold consequences. i'll also say i have a great appreciation for the work she's done on gender. and the cosmos club reminds me that many years ago when i was working on ref luges, i was invited to participate in a cia sponsored panel. and somebody called at the last minute to say i would need to go in the side door if i chose to participate. i didn't have any problem talking to the cia, but i did have a problem going in the side door. so it didn't work out. all right. today i'm going to talk about this remarkable election. and i think it resonates with the theme of voter anger that i look forward to hearing our distinguished panel reflect on, which i'm sure will go way beyond anything i have to say here. i don't need to remind everybody in the room here what the high stakes in the election as a whole are. i'll skip over all the things that i share with general

audiences about all the offices that are at stake. i mean, this would be a high stakes election if intense populous movements and anger were not front and center. but the last thing on my list here, that this is an election that has turned out to be about u.s. national identity. and the ways in which generational and racial and ethnic shifts are playing out. and in this last month, front and center, women's changing role in our south and i think raw anger that has evoked among many people, who are looking at the changes that have unfolded over my lifetime, over the last 40 years or so. so i'm going to talk about the following puzzles about this election. the rise of donald trump. i'm not going to talk at all about whether he's going to win

or anything like that. that's not the point. the point is, how did he manage to win the republican presidential nomination. the nomination of one of two major parties, which even compared to the rise of ethnic nationalism in other western countries, it has captured third or fourth parties, or not one of two major parties. this is a genuine puzzle. why was that challenge in the republican party at least temporarily and perhaps for quite some time more potent than the sanders challenge, another form of populous challenge in the democratic party. and then briefly, i'll conclude with some remarks about trumpism and brexit. now, just for the sake of definition, i'm going to define trumpism as strong -- a strong man ethnic nationalist appeal. i might have hesitated to do this before the republican convention, but with that

backdrop and the message that was delivered at the convention, you know, i mean, i see no reason to hesitate any longer in characterizing trumpism in that way. now, it's also a political coalition that's made all kinds of gestures, at least, however reliable or unreliable they may be in the direction of republican policy stands and constituencies. certainly gestures toward the national rifle association, the christian right, and from time to time, commitments to reduce taxes and eliminate obama policies. now, what opens the door to this is a long-term trend toward extreme partisan and ideological polarization. and that trend is increasingly in recent decades asymmetric. that is tilted towards the

right. between the late '60s and the 1980s, the two parties sorted themselves out in the wake of the civil rights revolution that finally extended voting rights to african-americans in the south. so you could say, and i think tom mann has written about this, the political science profession was very slow to notice that the original narrative of the two parties sorting themselves out with the regional alliances changing, that that shifted of a the 1980s. and particularly after the 1990s with the newt gingrich manifestation in the republican party. and since then, really, this is a major that political scientists use to pinpoint the ideological positioning, particularly on economic and political issues of house republicans, but this is also true of what's been going on in

the electorate with a lag that follows what happens with the elites first. and with advocacy groups and social movements surrounding the two parties. you can see the house republicans have been leading the way in many ways, and they just keep moving further and further to the right. this, by the way, shatters the theological faith of the political science profession in the median voter. and the belief that some still don't want to give up. that parties will moderate and move to the center. when faced with extremes. ha! [ laughter ] just to bring some policy content into all of this, here's what a republican looked like in the 1950s. i'm an antiquer. i collected this postcard in maine. and it gives the ten reasons to reelect dwight eisenhower. look at reasons eight, nine and ten. he has increased welfare and security programs and is promoting the well-being of

americans without regimentation and centralization. he has been liberal in dealing with people. of course, conservative in dealing with their money. number ten, this would get him written out of the republican party as a communist. he has been a president for americans regardless of political affiliation, race, creed, color or economic background. so that's what it used to be. and we've come light years from that. now, how did this happen? the approximate narrative we all know. this was certainly not the candidate that republicans hoped to put forward. what they thought would be a winnable presidential election in 2016. so there were at least a dozen highly credible business or ideological conservative candidates with governing experience in the senate. former governors, sitting governors.

but from the very first moment in the summer of 2015 that he declared, trump emerged with close to a plurality, or plurality in most polls and he never gave that up during the entire ups and downs of the pre-primary and the primary process. and the last-ditch efforts mounted by people like mitt romney to try to stop the trump train after he emerged dominant in the primaries really went nowhere. in fact, i think it's an interesting thing that we might want to ponder, that it's mainly mormon politicians who have signed off. i think because they have a sense of public responsibility in the public sector. it's a variant of conservatism that's quite different from the free market and evangelical conservatism that are the other major strands.

but, now, i think if we're going to look at approximate facilitating factor, the u.s. media, which i would characterize as fragmented and economically stressed, but also with a major sector that has been developed over the last decade and a half that can drive right-wing messages through fox news and through even more through a network of right-wing talk radio. it's not so much that that complex wanted donald trump. i think they were surprised along with everybody else. but they had help to make him a media star. and he was very uncannily skillful in pressing all the buttons and using the techniques to get media attention

throughout the republican primary. there have been some empirical studies of this, including harvard, showing that he got an amazing percentage of the coverage. and those who looked into the content found it was either positive or horse race coverage for donald trump. the second most covered person was clinton. but clinton got mainly negative coverage in 2015 and 2016. and sanders got mainly positive coverage. he got a lot, too. so really, the two challengers to hillary clinton got the positive coverage. and look at the rest of them. the republican also lands -- they had trouble getting anybody to pay attention to them. the final estimate is about $2 billion of free media coverage in the republican primaries. of course, that was also a great advantage that trump was competing against so many others. and the field didn't narrow. now, we all know these things. so let me move to the deeper

trends, in that larger contest of asymmetric polarization that i think fueled popular support for trump. now, i want to be clear. i actually don't think american politics overall is driven by what voters want and feel primarily. and there's a lot of research and political science in the last decade that suggests that elected office holders and politicians don't actually do what most voters want. but it's still very important, particularly in presidential contests, particularly in primary contests, to have an aroused and determined block of voters. so i want to talk about that popular support for trump, where it came from, and i have to say that it reminds me a lot of what vanessa williamson and i heard from grass roots tea party activists when we interviewed them in arizona, virginia, and new england in 2011. many of them are the same people

who are now supporting donald trump, even though they might not use the label tea party. which is not used as much. so a number of factors, i think, have fed into popular support for trump. changing religious landscape. we need to remember that although white evangelical protestants are a declining proportion of the population, and seculars are an increasing, the white evangelicals are feeling on the defensive, and they always vote. they're very, very good citizens. they vote not just in presidential contests, but in midterms. i think sharply rising economic inequalities are part of the story here, but i'm not going to be one to suggest -- and maybe tom will disagree in the panel, i hope so -- i don't think economic suffering is what lies behind the trump phenomenon. and i'll say more about that in a bit.

the fact that we're in an era of rapid immigration, even though it's slightly slowed down, but since 1965, immigrants have been coming in in large numbers, and they are people of color. often from central america and mexico. and then finally i'm going to say a little bit about how the implosion of the republican party, splits between the elites and non-elites opened the door, created a vacuum into which an impresario could charge. so let me just offer a little bit of data on this. this is just in recent times. the fast change in religious landscapes, evangelical protestants, now about a quarter of the population. but look at where they are concentrated. they are spread out around the country. and as i said, these are christian right adherents. and they are people who vote. so they represent -- the fact that they're feeling on the losing side of the cultural

transformation that susan talked about in the 1960s, makes them available for an anti-establishment, particularly an anti-democratic party candidate. we all know that we're in an era of sharply rising economic inequality where the gains have gone to the top. that certainly creates a situation in which people across the political spectrum are resentful of the facts that incomes have declined in the middle, and all the gains are going to the top. that opens the door for certain messages, even if it doesn't drive the circumstances of particular voters who take particular stands. the economic characteristics of the trump supporters, by the way, suggests it's more complex than just saying they're suffering in this economic era. we know that non-college educated white men are disproportionately supportive of

trump. but those who support him over other gop nominees are not disproportionately affected by a foreign trade or immigration. so it's not a simple relationship. nate silver did a look at the median incomes, the national median income is $56,000, the trump voters have $72,000. higher than those, for those sanders and clinton voters. by the way, sanders voters are younger. they were actually headed for higher median incomes than clinton's voters. she is the inequality candidate actually in this contest. and all of them are lower than kasich and rubio voters. think construction contractors. or lower level white collar,

blue collar people. i go to breakfast at a working class diner in cambridge every week day. and the waitress tells me all of the blue collar guys and firemen and policemen she knows are trump people. and this is massachusetts. the girls, she said, are not. [ laughter ] and she calls them girls. i'm not being insulting here. and then most interesting finding recently reported in the atlantic, that the trump supporters are less likely to have moved from their home communities. and of course, you only need to drive around the united states to realize that once you get beyond the metro areas and into the far suburbs and into the smaller cities, and into the rural areas, you see the trump-pence signs. i think in many ways, this is people living in communities that have not yet experienced some of the changes that they're very afraid of.

and in many ways, they're seeing the changes displayed in lurid ways on the television networks that they watch, and the radio that they listen to. now, the other thing i want to point to is that by the time the trump candidacy emerges, the republican party in many ways has been hollowed out. we're reading in the newspaper all the time about the republican establishment. there are probably members of the republican party establishment here, so i don't want to be insulting, but the research that my colleagues and i have done suggests that, for example, we looked at what was happening to the budgets of the republican party committees between 2002 and 2014. compared to the budgets, the resources controlled by ultra-free market think tanks, the network of organizations tied with the koch brothers, even long-standing extra party groups like the nra and christian right organizations. and frankly, there was a huge drop in resources controlled by

the party itself moving out to these far right flankers. and we know that in economic policies during the obama years, elected office holders in the republican party and candidates almost to a man and woman adhered to ultra-free market principles, calling for free trade, reductions in social spending of all kinds. and these are actually not positions that are popular, either with most americans or with most republican based voters. so the point that i want to make here is that by the time the trump challenge emerged to elected republicans and party leaders, they had in many ways already been outflanked and pushed in directions that were quite at variance with their base. but above all, they're at variance with their base on immigration. and how to respond to immigration. i think immigration is the key issue here. both the fact that it has

increased, and that it has shifted from being from europe, from being latin america, and more recently asia. and this is what it looks like as a percent of the u.s. population over the last century. and you can see that we're not yet in a period, it's that 12.9% for 2010, about where we are now, we're not yet in a period where immigrants as a proportion of the total u.s. population are what they were a century ago. but it looks like it's headed to more and more people. and that's what those who are fearful about the changing society, and a changing culture see when they look at immigration. just to help you understand. in 2010, the largest single immigrant group was from mexico. all over the country. there's some very good research that tells us why that's true. it turns out that we've been building walls for quite a while.

it's not a new idea. and social scientists have found that the major effect of the walls was to raise the cost of a rival, not to prevent the mainly young men immigrants from coming to the united states, but to make it hard for them to go home for easter or christmas, or for grandma's funeral. and so they responded in recent decades by bringing their families to the united states, and by spreading out all over the country. so if you visit the heartland states, in the middle of the country, you're going to find large immigrant populations from central america and mexico, often holding the most difficult and low paid and least supported

jobs, with large numbers of children. and that changes the cultural fabric in ways that are easy for politicians to exploit the anger about, if they choose to do so. this is what the largest immigrant groups looked like 100 years ago. mexico was there, but it was mainly scandinavia germany, french canadians up there in maine. so we have some pretty good research that shows that trump supporters, compared to other republican identified voters and compared to other conservative identified voters, forget about the democrats here, just forget about them, are much more concerned about the growing number of newcomers from other countries as a threat to u.s. values, much more likely to see islam more than other religions as something that encourages violence, and believes that it's bad for the country for blacks, latinos and asians to perhaps become the majority of the population.

so there are some differences that set the trump voters apart on demography, males, older males, no college degrees. but the really pronounced ones are the things they're concerned about. that have to do with the impact of immigration. its reverberation with international terrorist incidents, and worries about the changing composition of american society. some of them come right out and say it. this isn't typical. but this is sort of an independent guy running for congress who temporarily put this sign up, that spelled it out. the other part of this, of course, is that republican based voters, and certainly the trump voters, and the tea partiers

before them, but probably more than just those blocks of voters, have been very angry at their party leaders, at their elected representatives in congress. throughout barack obama's presidency, we know that congressional leadership of the republican party and leading republican politicians have promised things about stopping obama, rolling back his chief initiatives, preventing him from being reelected, all of which they have been unable to deliver upon. and so in this poll that was taken in may of 2015, you can see that democratic voters and republican voters alike have a

lot of am by lances about the leaders of their parties. but look how pronounced it is among the republican identified voters. 60%, close to 60% say that their leaders are not -- mitch mcconnell and paul ryan, we're looking at you -- are not doing a good job, particularly on government spending, i.e., getting rid of obamacare, illegal immigration, and same-sex marriage. so that opens the door for a candidate who, from the start, signaled that he was angry about mexican immigration in particular. didn't make any bones about it. challenged political correctness, which i think if you listen to working class people talking, that's one of the things they like best about trump. that he says what everybody's thinking. and he doesn't worry about it. and the fact that he's challenging republican elites, along with media elites in the democratic party, is a big plus in their eyes. now, let me quickly say something about the two anti-party insurgencies that we saw in this election. you know, bernie sanders, when he first emerged, got just as