Our nation faces many challenges and elites and public servants in political and policy-making networks play a critical role in addressing those challenges. Your participation in this survey will provide important insight into how civil servants, journalists, lobbyists, advocates and other political elites and public servants understand the key problems facing the United States. Political elites and public servants play central roles in shaping policy discussions, evaluating and advocating for policy alternatives, setting agendas, and implementing policy. 

Building on their work fielding large scale surveys of congressional staffers in 2017 and 2019, study team members Furnas and LaPira view Congress as an institution necessarily embedded within a larger ecosystem of political and policy information production and dissemination. In recognition of the critical role that the wider network of civil servants, journalists, advocates and lobbyists play in policymaking, the study team has begun this expansive survey project.