Academics offer priority list for feds

The federal government's future priorities should closely mirror its past accomplishments, according to a study of leading academics released by the Brookings Institution Thursday. Brookings' Center for Public Service surveyed more than 2,000 political scientists, sociologists, economists and historians about their thoughts on what the top 50 agenda items for the government should be during the next half century. The survey was conducted from July to October of this year. According to the survey group, which was largely, white and male and identified themselves as liberal and Democratic, the government should focus on arms control and disarmament, health care access for the poor, voting rights protection, financial security for retirees and assistance for the working poor as its top priorities for the next 50 years. Many of those same topics were identified last year in a Brookings survey of American history and government professors as the federal government's most significant accomplishments of the past 50 years. "The government has a distinguished record of success, one well worth admiring," said Paul C. Light, head of the Center for Public Service, at a forum on the survey results. "This list is built around protecting and expanding accomplishments of the past." Washington Post columnist David Broder, a forum panelist, noted that given the way the academics identified their political leanings, it was not surprising that they came up with a predictably liberal set of concerns. "This list of top five priorities sounds like the 1984 Walter Mondale [presidential] campaign platform," said Broder, who is also a professor at the University of Maryland- College Park. Light acknowledged in a summary of the report's findings that the respondents were "not remotely representative of the American public as a whole." But he argued that the survey's results still offered valuable insights about how current events can impact policy agendas. "September 11 had a clear impact on the list of priorities," Light said. For example, only 16 percent of those who filled out the survey before the terrorist attacks listed strengthening the nation's airways system as a top priority, while 37 percent of those who completed it after Sept. 11 did so. Panelist E. J. Dionne, a Brookings scholar and Washington Post columnist, agreed that the September 11 variation did yield some useful information. "Crises do shape what will rise as a priority," Dionne said. "However, certain goals are so widely seen as important, that they remain on the top of everyone's list."