Video Transcript - Dr. Susan Offutt, ERS Administrator, 1996-2006

Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Economic Research Service 

Now that I’ve been away from the agency four years, and worked for 
Congress, I have almost an outsider’s perspective on its work. 
What I find is that ERS is one of the few places in government that 
doesn’t take, how shall I say, a supply-side view, which is, "we have 
programs and we want to deliver them to you." People aren’t in the 
market for federal programs, they have problems that they want to solve. 
So the question of how people make decisions, what they need to make 
decisions, to allocate resources, is the strength of ERS. It tells the 
government something it doesn’t already know.  Everybody knows what they 
want to do, and they know what they think the effect will be, but they 
cannot see the unintended consequences, they cannot understand the 
complexity of the environment that people, a household or a farm business 
exists in, and ERS fills that gap in a way that many if not most executive 
agencies cannot, and certainly, and I work for the Congress, that lack 
of perspective on the problems that Americans face is a handicap to doing 
good policy work.