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August 16, 2005: CRC's Exclusive Interview With Sean Treglia

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CRC's Exclusive Interview With Sean Treglia


What follows is CRC"s exclusive interview with Sean Treglia, the former vice president of Pew Charitable Trusts, regarding his controversial remarks during a seminar at the Annenberg School. To learn more about this controversy, read the June 2005 edition of Foundation Watch. To view Treglia’s remarks at Annenberg, go here.

Q: In your statement on the journalist training web site where your speech is posted, you seemed to back away from your remarks that have been featured n various blogs? Were any of the controversial parts of your remarks accurate?

A: I think that is the wrong question. I made some remarks that were purposefully taken out of context by a group of individuals opposed to campaign finance reform to advance their political agenda. I have maintained all along that they are at best confused in their interpretation of my remarks. By way of background, it is helpful to summarize the accusations made on the blogs, to wit: As an executive at The Pew Charitable Trusts, I led a hidden liberal conspiracy over the course of the better part of a decade that duped Congress, the President and the Supreme Court into passing and upholding the constitutionality of campaign finance reform. The conspiracy consisted of a group of eight of the nation’s largest and most prestigious foundations, included all of the mainstream media who were silent co-conspirators, and was accomplished through hidden foundation grants to phony groups and organizations. As the story goes, I then delivered a secret speech (that just happened to be taped and which was later uncovered by a blogger) in which I describe the details of the conspiracy.

Suffice it to say the allegations are fiction, not even loosely based on reality. There was no conspiracy, there was no effort to hide anything by anyone at any foundation, the mainstream media did not silently cover up foundation funding of campaign finance reform initiatives, there is no secret tape, I made no admission, and Congress, the President and the Supreme Court were not duped. The well documented facts belie such claims: The American public demanded that the broken campaign finance system be cleaned up and wisely, out of a sense of duty (and probably fearing for their own jobs), Congress listened.

Having said that, recently I watched the full tape of the speech I made that has been skillfully edited and taken out of context on some blogs. It is fair to say that reasonable people could interpret my remarks in any number of ways. I sincerely apologize that my remarks lead anyone to believe that Pew (or any other foundation) undertook a campaign to hide, deceive, or mislead. For the record let me state as plainly and as clearly as possible: Pew did not attempt to hide its involvement in campaign finance, did not fund phony groups, and did not try to skirt the law as the bloggers contend. Those who interpret my remarks as such are incorrect.

Although you would not know it from the buzz on the blogs, the point of my remarks had nothing to do with campaign finance reform. The presentation was about the long and important history of philanthropy in our nation. One of the central points of the presentation was to make the case that philanthropic organizations have played a significant but little noticed role in democracy through enriching and informing some of the important social debates of our times. I argued that foundations generally have not been involved in the politics of how issues get on the policy agenda, rather, once an issue finds its way onto the agenda, when foundations have played a role historically it has been to inform the substance of the debate. To illustrate my point, I used foundation funding of campaign finance reform initiatives as a case study, focusing in particular on Pew’s funding of a wide array of research initiatives on the topic.

Q: Did you expect that Congress would see any of the research?

A: Yes, Congress and everyone else who cared about the issue including the Federal Election Commission, scholars, the media, think-tanks, the White House, etc. We hoped the grantees would talk about their work, get it into circulation in the policy community—that was the point. For example, it was common practice for grantees to write op-eds about their research findings, promote the research reports to the media, mail the reports to policy makers at the Federal Election Commission, make presentations at conferences, appear on the nightly news discussion their findings, etc.

Q: The op-eds, promotion in the media, etc. Isn’t that part of the politics of reform?

A: It might be useful to define our terms because I understand that the word "politics” can mean different things to different people. The politics of the reform debate had its own life cycle separate and apart from what any foundation was funding. The noteworthy junctures include the public disgust with money in politics that blossomed in the early 1990’s in the wake of the Clinton White House soft money scandals. Next, Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign provided the movement with a unifying national voice. Finally, the Enron debacle followed by a host of crippling accounting scandals in the corporate sector whetted the public appetite for reform. Some may quibble with the details of my summary but generally I believe it represents a brief but accurate overview of the political forces driving campaign finance reform. Foundations had nothing to do with those forces.

While foundations had virtually nothing to do with the politics of reform, the evidence suggests that once the issue ripened and policy makers in Washington placed reform on the policy agenda, the philanthropic sector had a great deal of impact in informing the substance of the debate. And that is the story here. That is the key point I was attempting to make in the speech I made to the journalists at the conference. Foundations had an impact on the substance of one of the most important policy debates in a generation. They did so by funding a large body of research conducted by a broad cross-section of scholars and organizations whose work figured prominently in the debate on the Hill, was cited extensively by the Supreme Court upholding the law in the landmark decision of McConnell v. FEC, and continues to be relied on to inform deliberations at the FEC, in think tanks, in the media, and generally in the policy debate. My point to the journalists who attended the conference: this is good for democracy, we need informed debates, and there is no other sector in American society that can play such a role in democracy.

Q: What about your remarks saying the target audience was 535 people in Congress?

A: Look, my presentation took place at 8:30 AM on the third day of an intense conference for journalists on how to cover philanthropy. By the way, the conference is available to anyone who cares to see it online at the Western Knight Center’s Web site. If you are interested in learning more about the non-profit sector I encourage you to watch the entire three day program. The journalists in the audience represented some of the nation’s foremost media outlets. I picked up from a series of conversations with them, and from listening to their questions, that they were a skeptical group who had questions about the impact of philanthropic endeavors. In my effort to wake them up, get the crowd thinking, provoke them, at times I was probably a bit dramatic. With respect to the “535 people” statement I was simply trying to make the point that foundations do things that have policy relevance. You and I might think that is obvious but it isn’t so obvious to people outside the sector. I think it is fair to say that there is a general perception by people outside the non-profit sector that philanthropy does a lot of feel good stuff with little real relevance. The central point of my presentation that day was that foundations do things that have relevance to democracy and impact on the policy debate. As described above, the goal in funding all the research was to inform the larger policy debate and hopefully improve the campaign finance system. No one in any foundation knew whether Congress would act through legislation, the FEC would act through rule making, the President would issue executive orders, or even whether there would be voluntary changes to the system by the candidates themselves. Regardless of how the politics of the issue ripened, regardless of who acted and when, foundations were funding research designed to inform and educate the policy deliberations when policy makers took up the debate.

Q: Why in your remarks did you say that you told grantees not to mention Pew? Also, why did you say that Pew released no press releases on those grants?

A: Well, at the juncture in my presentation when I made that remark, I also said, “Hold on, I’ll come back to that statement, it is not for the reasons you might think” (in other words it was not to hide things), but unfortunately I never came back to the point to explain the statement. The simple answer to the question is, I was trying to develop an interesting man bites dog narrative to wake up the half asleep journalists. The more detailed explanation, I was trying to convey the idea that foundations can employ one or a mix of several approaches to funding research. Each approach has certain inherent advantages, disadvantages and limits in terms of impact on the policy debate. Sometimes foundations will adopt a strategy in which the grantees are front and center—they are the people who actually do the research therefore they are in the best position to talk about the findings—and the foundation generally stays in the background and assume a traditional role as funder. Other times a foundation will assume a more vocal role taking the lead and acting more like a research partner instead of simply a traditional funder. To learn the details of Pew’s strategy on reform I encourage you to read Tom Mann’s excellent description in a recent edition of Trust Magazine (a publication of The Pew Charitable Trusts). To conclude, I was trying to explain that I believed it was not Pew’s role to describe or explain the research, Pew was the funder, it was the grantees’ role to describe the research findings. As a matter of Pew policy however the foundation’s name was required to appear prominently on every report, every printed project description, every project Web site, and as a matter of law on the grantee 990’s, Pew annual reports, etc. Grantees were also required to invite the foundation to all press conferences and I spoke at many of them describing Pew’s funding strategy. I said all this in my presentation but those clips did not make it on the blogs.

Q: Did the press know what was going on?

A: If by “going on” you mean, “Did the media who covers reform know Pew was perhaps the leading funder of research on the topic?” Then I would respond by saying, it would be virtually impossible for them to miss. For example, along with all the disclosure I discuss above, Pew periodically sent out fact sheets to various journalists that outlined all the grants and projects it was funding on the issue. I think it is a foundation’s role to talk about what and who it is funding and that is what Pew did. But describing grants is very different from weighing in substantively on the policy debate. The day after reform was passed I think Jim Drinkard of USAToday had a page one story with his assessment of the winners and losers under the new law. He placed Pew in the winners column because of all the research that had been funded on the issue. I think he based his assessment in part on a fact sheet Pew had sent the media listing the various projects that were funded.

Q: Why did George Will’s column scare you?

A: Again, personally I was always uncomfortable with the idea that Pew might get dragged into the substance of the debate. Pew was a funder not a grantee. To be fair I should mention that others at Pew did not share my view on the topic.

Q: But if you wanted the press to cover your strategy, why would Will’s column scare you? He could have simply used what was covered in the press against you.

A: Pew talking about which projects it funded is very different from Pew getting drawn in and expressing its opinion about the merits of this or that research report or campaign finance proposal. In my opinion it was the grantees’ role as scholars and experts on the topic to weigh in on the merits of the research and various proposals (within certain limits proscribed by law), it was Pew’s role to talk about the people and organizations it funded. That was how I viewed it at least. To be clear, different foundation officers will have different views on this topic (and probably all the issues I discuss with you today) and I don’t think there is any correct opinion. I am simply expressing my personal views as I shared them with the journalists that day.

Q: I noticed on Pew’s website that there were no press releases regarding campaign finance reform before McCain-Feingold became law, but there were some after. Why did Pew start putting press releases on the grants it makes on campaign finance reform in late 2002? In other words, why the change in strategy?

A: I am not immediately familiar with the press releases you are talking about but I would guess they are not about the substance of particular reports or projects rather they congratulate grantees for good work, applaud reform, or discuss Pew’s role in funding the various projects, consistent with what I described above.

Q: You say you tried to avoid the political side. But some of your grants go to universities in Utah, whose Senator is Orrin Hatch who was at the time chair of Senate Judiciary Committee. Some also went to Colby College in Maine, whose Senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, might be considered swing votes. Did politics enter into it in that way?

A: With all due respect I think those particular Senators would be surprised to learn they were swing votes on reform—in fact they were not. Even if they were however, I doubt a few grants to political scientists they probably never even heard of at the time at a local university would affect their vote on the issue.

Q: Any last comments?

Thanks so much for contacting me.

http://www.capitalresearch.org/news/news.asp?ID=312&t=6

Topic(s): Sustainable Business

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