In an era where viral trends and financial phenomena often captivate the public’s attention, few have been as polarizing as Dogecoin (DOGE). This cryptocurrency, which began as a meme, has evolved into a serious contender in the digital currency market, sparking discussions regarding its utility and intentions. In a recent episode of “The Ezra Klein Show,” viewers were introduced to the notion of the Department of Government Efficiency, a concept that on the surface seems laudable, but raises questions about what true efficiency entails and who benefits from it. As claims circulate regarding both Dogecoin’s impact on efficiency in governance and its ultimate ambitions, it’s essential to sift through the noise and separate fact from fiction. In this blog post, we will delve into the assertions made in the discussed episode and provide a thorough fact check, illuminating the true goals of DOGE and how they interface with broader societal implications.

Find a fact check of this transcript on CheckForFacts

Transcript:

[00:00:00,000]: I hate the name DOJ the Department of Government Efficiency not that it’s not good branding it is

[00:00:05,440]: And it’s going to do exactly what President Trump intended it to do to restore efficiency in our federal government

[00:00:12,539]: Efficiency

[00:00:13,239]: Do you guys think the government is efficient

[00:00:15,760]: No not really

[00:00:16,899]: I think it’s pretty wasteful

[00:00:18,299]: No

[00:00:19,899]: No

[00:00:23,799]: But it obfuscates what’s really happening here

[00:00:26,659]: Efficiency towards what

[00:00:27,959]: I’m here to provide the president with technology support

[00:00:31,059]: Maybe it’s here to make the government leaner lower head count

[00:00:34,520]: Fraud and abuse

[00:00:36,159]: Maybe it’s here to save money

[00:00:37,319]: America will go bankrupt if this is not done

[00:00:39,340]: That’s why I’m here

[00:00:40,220]: Maybe it’s here to make the government more responsive

[00:00:42,020]: The taxpayers deserve better

[00:00:43,400]: They deserve a more responsive government a more efficient government

[00:00:47,159]: What is it actually doing

[00:00:49,099]: And we’re going to take DOJ to Mars

[00:00:52,979]: What can we see after two months of its hack and slash operation through the federal government

[00:00:59,819]: And what does that suggest about where Donald Trump’s term is going

[00:01:03,119]: One of the people who’s been thinking about it with the most clarity in my view is Santee Ruiz

[00:01:07,440]: He is at the Institute for Progress

[00:01:09,080]: He’s the author of the Statecraft Newsletter and the host of its podcast

[00:01:13,260]: He’s somebody who thinks very deeply and often about how do you build a capable state

[00:01:17,680]: I mean somebody to my right

[00:01:19,559]: So he has been much more open to the idea that what DOJ is doing is well constructed and well thought through or at least was more open to it

[00:01:27,839]: Like everybody he’s trying to grapple with the reality of what it has really turned out to be

[00:01:32,319]: So I thought it’d be interesting to have him on the show to talk through it

[00:01:34,959]: As always my email Ezra Klein Show at NYTimes com

[00:01:43,839]: Santee Ruiz welcome to the show

[00:01:45,620]: Thanks Ezra

[00:01:46,139]: Good to be here

[00:01:46,540]: So I’m obviously a liberal and I’m pretty upset about what DOJ is doing

[00:01:55,379]: But steelman it

[00:01:56,739]: When liberals see DOJ and Musk as like a pulsing source of evil and corruption what are we missing or at least what arguments are we maybe not considering

[00:02:08,580]: So there’s a couple threads and I’ll try and steelman here

[00:02:11,639]: I’ve got my criticisms of DOJ

[00:02:12,919]: You’ve heard them

[00:02:13,419]: You’ll hear them

[00:02:14,479]: But I think there’s a couple of threads here that are worth trying to take on their merits

[00:02:18,419]: One is an experience of 2016 and 2020 where the Trump admin felt it could not get control of the executive branch

[00:02:27,300]: And you see this in ways small and large

[00:02:30,320]: I think there’s a lot there a lot of learnings from the first time about oh we tried to manage the executive branch this way

[00:02:36,320]: It didn’t work

[00:02:37,160]: And when we moved slowly to try and reform things you give your opponents in the civil service in the deep state time to coalesce to organize and then the clock runs out on you and they’re still there

[00:02:48,699]: So there’s one instinct that’s just like the president should be able to do things within the president’s remit

[00:02:53,600]: And then there’s another instinct I think as well there about the president should be able to do more things than the current constitutional architecture allows for

[00:03:01,300]: I think there’s a real we can disagree on whether Elon really cares about the national debt or whether it’s a fig leaf for other things

[00:03:08,240]: We’re in a different place on the national debt than we were five years ago right pre COVID response

[00:03:14,839]: And when you talk to people in and around DOJ you hear the debt come up over and over again

[00:03:22,059]: That if we don’t take this one opportunity now while the window is open before the midterms before public opinion naturally kind of swings back and we lose the house there’s a green field to run into to try and cut cut cut

[00:03:36,240]: And this will never happen any other time

[00:03:38,100]: There’s a strong instinct here

[00:03:39,080]: This is our one shot

[00:03:40,300]: And so if we’re going to err on one side we have to err on the side of cutting too much

[00:03:44,139]: And this is an Elon instinct

[00:03:45,199]: We can add things back later

[00:03:47,059]: I tend to disagree with that in specific places

[00:03:48,820]: I think we’ve cut some things that can’t be easily undone

[00:03:51,940]: But that’s very much the instinct

[00:03:54,179]: The Dems are going to stop us

[00:03:55,940]: They’re going to come in and we’re going to do crazy oversight in the house in a year and a half

[00:04:02,779]: Public opinion will just change over time because cutting things is unpopular

[00:04:08,339]: I say at one point I don’t think Musk is doing this as like a because Trump wants somebody else to take the fall

[00:04:15,600]: I don’t think that’s a dynamic

[00:04:16,859]: Trump and Elon have been very close

[00:04:19,459]: Trump is very proud of those things

[00:04:20,959]: I do think there’s a sense in which Elon sees himself as someone’s got to be the man wielding the sword and it’s not going to be anybody else

[00:04:28,380]: So I’ll do it

[00:04:29,660]: I’m just very skeptical of this cutting the debt theory

[00:04:32,339]: Not because we do need to cut the debt

[00:04:35,480]: We’re spending more now on interest payments than we are in defense

[00:04:39,540]: But every person I know who is a budget obsessive and I’ve been doing this work a long time

[00:04:46,799]: I know budget obsesses man

[00:04:48,920]: You can’t imagine the things I’ve heard

[00:04:52,440]: Every one of them says we’re going to have a higher debt in a year than today

[00:04:57,260]: That not only is this not going to significantly cut what we are spending money on but that they have lit on fire their opportunity to do it

[00:05:07,640]: Because to shift the major streams of money that’s not Elon Musk running around with a sword

[00:05:14,260]: That is convincing Democrats and Republicans alike or at least Republicans that we should cut Medicaid and Medicare spending

[00:05:23,420]: That’s maybe increasing taxes

[00:05:25,019]: And at the same time they’re doing this doge stuff they’re planning a 4 5 maybe 5 trillion tax cut

[00:05:31,579]: So you can imagine a group of people obsessed with cutting the deficit

[00:05:38,700]: But you really do have to do that through Congress

[00:05:41,260]: You probably I mean given what we’ve learned over time have to do that through some amount of bipartisan action in Congress

[00:05:47,119]: It’s very hard to do it while you are cutting taxes

[00:05:52,220]: I don’t know man

[00:05:53,320]: Convince me it’s not bullshit

[00:05:55,040]: If you go back to what Russ Vought one of the more powerful people in the administration head of the Office of Management and Budget says about this stuff he actually will say this quite clearly that he’s a deficit hawk

[00:06:11,100]: He’s a debt hawk

[00:06:13,119]: If you want to get into welfare if you want to cut social security if you want to tell people you’re cutting Medicare and Medicaid you have to start with the other stuff

[00:06:24,420]: The stuff that doesn’t seem as close to home with the stuff that’s you know the comic books in Peru about wokeness or whatever

[00:06:32,179]: You have to cut that stuff out first and you have to kind of hold up the bloody head before you have kind of popular interest and willingness to go with you to the stuff that touches their families

[00:06:46,760]: I think that’s definitely the view of some people in DOJ that you have to zero out the stuff that isn’t going to make a huge difference but because that’s the only way popularly you’ll be able to say look we really mean it

[00:06:57,279]: We’re not just taking you to the cleaners

[00:06:59,500]: We’re making the government smaller period

[00:07:03,339]: Now I think right we’re two months in so you can kind of project a couple different views into the future and say OK we’re going to cut off the funding streams to universities and to woke NGOs and you know you name the list of enemies and that’ll be it

[00:07:19,799]: And then we can’t touch the politically difficult stuff because it’s politically difficult and that’s why people don’t reform welfare

[00:07:27,339]: Or you can say no what’s going to happen is we’re gutting ideological enemies and then we’ve got room and popular credibility to go after the stuff that we know is closer to the American pocketbook

[00:07:42,220]: Maybe I’m naive and a fool to think that like those two paths are both still in play but we’re very early on

[00:07:48,239]: Well but what they keep talking about using DOJ to send a check back to every American

[00:07:52,500]: This is the best argument against the idea that it’s a debt thing

[00:07:57,820]: I just I always want to try to take people generously

[00:08:02,959]: If Donald Trump came in and Elon Musk and all these interviews as he kind of looks at and talks about how we might not have a country anymore if we don’t get the debt under control he said boy we really want our tax cuts extended

[00:08:16,540]: And if it wasn’t a fiscal emergency we would extend them

[00:08:19,980]: But unfortunately if we don’t get the debt under control we’re not going to have a country anymore

[00:08:26,040]: So we just can’t

[00:08:27,739]: It’s a real shame

[00:08:28,559]: But you know people like me Elon Musk the richest dude in the world are going to have to pay higher taxes

[00:08:33,840]: But they don’t right

[00:08:35,140]: The whole thing is like the Department of Education and USAID and people working at the Social Security Administration

[00:08:41,400]: And that’s just not where the money is

[00:08:43,799]: And so you are not DOJ but you are I think a very fair minded analyst of this

[00:08:51,080]: And so if you are still taking this theory seriously at all I would like to know why given what they are actually doing

[00:08:57,359]: This is again where maybe this is a cop out

[00:08:59,580]: I just keep coming back to the coalitional element of it

[00:09:02,739]: Is President Trump a deficit hawk

[00:09:05,179]: I don’t think there’s a lot of evidence for that right

[00:09:07,299]: Like just you know based on the first term

[00:09:11,260]: But you’ve got a bunch of different actors in here right

[00:09:13,940]: Russ Vought is you know touch tight to the president

[00:09:18,739]: It’s been was in the same role the first admin and the second

[00:09:22,419]: He’s been a lifelong deficit hawk

[00:09:24,239]: So like what do you make of that

[00:09:25,520]: It’s like a weird it’s a political coalition right

[00:09:29,179]: You have actors with the president partially in the hopes that you can get your own thing squeezed under the squeezed in the door

[00:09:38,260]: That said I do think Elon has a particular management style that has served him well in the private sector

[00:09:47,419]: And you can point to specific things

[00:09:50,340]: Ruthless reduction of headcount and cost

[00:09:53,020]: Headcount especially when he comes into places like Twitter which were bloated at the time

[00:09:58,140]: Reduction of cost especially in places like you look at SpaceX

[00:10:01,380]: He’s an incredible penny pincher at SpaceX

[00:10:04,539]: So you combine that instinct which you’re seeing very much here with a managerial impulse to push people as hard as you can to achieve really specific measurable kind of insane goals

[00:10:17,559]: This happens at SpaceX all the time

[00:10:18,820]: And you’re giving people stomach ulcers as they’re producing you know fantastic rockets in record time

[00:10:25,219]: This is I think what has worked for Elon

[00:10:27,599]: He looks at it and says like this is the right way to do corporate restructuring to get results that nobody else thought possible

[00:10:34,059]: People around him he keeps saying in private and in public it’s the source code

[00:10:38,239]: It’s the source code

[00:10:39,719]: The problem with the federal government is not this or that regulation

[00:10:44,179]: We need to get deeper into it right

[00:10:45,799]: This is an Elon instinct

[00:10:48,260]: And he sees an opportunity to apply a lot of those elements that many folks from the outside would say that won’t work on the federal government

[00:10:55,119]: He says no we can do that

[00:10:56,539]: And we can synthesize a bunch of information

[00:10:59,000]: We can get a better view from the top of how money flows in the federal government

[00:11:05,719]: And from there it will be much easier to cut the head off

[00:11:09,780]: So I want to pick up on that source code idea

[00:11:12,739]: So I was going through Elon Musk’s recent interview with Ted Cruz

[00:11:16,460]: And there’s a moment in it pretty early where Musk describes what he’s doing differently

[00:11:22,739]: A little bit to Ted Cruz’s awe

[00:11:24,520]: So I want you to take a look at this

[00:11:29,340]: Well the government is run by computers

[00:11:31,940]: So you’ve got essentially several hundred computers that effectively run the government

[00:11:38,340]: And if you want to know

[00:11:39,359]: Did you know that Ben

[00:11:40,200]: No

[00:11:41,320]: Yeah

[00:11:41,739]: So when somebody

[00:11:43,320]: Like even when the president issues an executive order that’s got to go through a whole bunch of people until ultimately it is implemented at a computer somewhere

[00:11:50,140]: And if you want to know what the situation is with the accounting and you’re trying to reconcile accounting and get rid of waste and fraud you must be able to analyze the computer databases

[00:11:58,359]: Otherwise you can’t figure it out

[00:12:00,719]: Because all you’re doing is asking a human who will then ask another human ask another human

[00:12:05,760]: And finally usually ask some contractor who will ask another contractor to do a query on the computer

[00:12:11,619]: Wow

[00:12:12,479]: That’s how it actually works

[00:12:14,159]: So it’s many layers deep

[00:12:15,500]: There’s a genuine innovation here

[00:12:18,359]: He is doing this differently

[00:12:20,460]: Yeah

[00:12:21,000]: What seems to me to separate Doge at some level is this sense that the power comes from control over the computers that send the money

[00:12:31,000]: If you control the computers you control the money

[00:12:34,179]: And if you control the money you control the power

[00:12:37,880]: And that genuinely does seem like something no one here has tried before

[00:12:45,080]: Yeah I think that’s right

[00:12:46,599]: You can call it a West Coast or a tech or Silicon Valley instinct on the problem

[00:12:53,880]: And I think some of it also comes from a sense from Elon’s career and a sense in Trump world that the people you’re engaging with civil servants et cetera are going to lie to you

[00:13:08,880]: But you’re not going to get source reality from what the general counsel of a given agency says

[00:13:14,140]: That the career civil servants are going to snow you

[00:13:17,159]: They’re going to wait you out

[00:13:18,440]: They’re going to slow walk you

[00:13:20,000]: And so in an effort to try and get to ground truth I think this makes a lot of sense as kind of going down the chain trying to figure out okay well where is the money going

[00:13:28,799]: And I think what you’re seeing with Doge for information environment reasons and for all kinds of reasons is that it can be a really misleading source of truth that where the money is going especially if you’re not familiar with how federal contracts work it’s not always going to give you the information you want but it certainly presents that way

[00:13:48,320]: If you are trying to reshape the government radically make it more efficient or make it into something else this question of how you’re learning about it what is the informational input into your project is really important

[00:14:01,099]: The fact that a computer tells you money is going here and it’s going there it’s actually a very thin form of information

[00:14:10,520]: How is that money being used when it gets there

[00:14:13,020]: Like what actually is the nature of that grant

[00:14:15,239]: Why was it started

[00:14:16,559]: Why did the people who started think it was a good idea

[00:14:20,500]: This concept that they’re going in and just looking at things and it’s not even going to be based on what just deleting vast swaths of them

[00:14:32,960]: Like how do you think about that as a way of learning about government functions

[00:14:39,640]: It’s one way

[00:14:42,919]: It’s a source of information

[00:14:44,500]: I think what you’re seeing with Doge is there’s a bunch of other kinds of information that you would want to have if you Ezra were leading the department of government efficiency that I would want to have in that role that they’re either not getting because they don’t have the capacity or because they’ve closed themselves off or in some cases I think take Elon and his particular relationship with Twitter the ways he’s getting information he’s built his own Twitter ecosystem both the way that you and I can curate your feed and he’s architected the actual platform itself to surface certain kinds of information

[00:15:18,340]: Twitter and online in general is a more adversarial information environment than it used to be

[00:15:23,099]: The algorithm is designed to kind of surface conflict right

[00:15:27,419]: And Elon spends a ton of time consuming information there

[00:15:30,500]: So if your sources of information are stories about malice and conflict and human opposition on the one hand and then just the data on the other hand and you’ve closed yourself off to other information flows in some ways you’re flying blind

[00:15:49,159]: And he’s very wedded to a really specific concrete memable target

[00:15:56,400]: He likes those

[00:15:58,099]: It’s like we’re taking the contracts and we’re zeroing them out and we’re putting them on the wall and you can see them

[00:16:03,739]: And I want you in different federal agencies Doge team find contracts find things to cut and zero them out

[00:16:12,000]: That instinct I think leads you to a lot of fat and a lot of waste and to a ton of stuff that if you don’t know what you’re looking at you should not be zeroing out

[00:16:20,359]: From this perspective right

[00:16:21,559]: I mean one example is the AHRQ the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality is this little agency within HHS

[00:16:29,320]: It produces a lot of research about avoidable deaths in the healthcare system which the incoming FDA commissioner thinks is like the third largest cause of death in the US

[00:16:39,520]: So it produces all this evidence

[00:16:41,760]: It tries to get hospitals to adopt best practices to make it easier to share information about what you’re doing

[00:16:47,500]: You know without being punished so that you can kind of better assess okay what is leading to deaths in hospitals

[00:16:53,619]: Doge wants to zero that out

[00:16:54,679]: It’s a cost center on the budget

[00:16:56,840]: It looks like okay that’s you know half a billion dollars a year that we’re spending on random research

[00:17:03,760]: Seems very plausible to me

[00:17:05,579]: Seems likely that that is like a net money losing move to zero that out because we actually care a lot about money and lives right

[00:17:13,719]: Yeah this is research that is supposed to help us with ineffective treatment

[00:17:19,060]: You can explain it

[00:17:19,780]: And over treatment of disease

[00:17:22,239]: Tons of stuff in the healthcare system we know that we are spending money on that in the end is not improving health but it’s very hard to know which things that we’re spending money on don’t improve health

[00:17:30,979]: Like my views we don’t do nearly enough of that and we also don’t enforce it enough right

[00:17:34,839]: If I were running Doge I would expand that but also pass legislation forcing hospitals to abide by more of it

[00:17:42,839]: But they’re not as you’re saying

[00:17:49,500]: Yeah without naming names I can just tell you from conversations

[00:17:53,720]: I know there are people in Doge who think Fed shouldn’t be in the business of this at all

[00:17:58,800]: We should just zero it out

[00:17:59,920]: And there are people who have this view probably makes more sense to fold that in somewhere else

[00:18:04,800]: Maybe the NIH can you know it’s got a AHRQ has a grants program

[00:18:09,220]: Why does it have a grants program

[00:18:10,600]: Let’s stick that with the other you know health grants

[00:18:13,780]: We can rationalize and corporately restructure this and you zero it out now

[00:18:17,700]: And then if Congress really wants it we bring it back somewhere else

[00:18:20,280]: We save some money

[00:18:20,840]: So you have genuinely you have both those views within this coalition even within kind of the Doge team

[00:18:28,620]: So maybe the people who want to bring it back are getting played by the folks who really just want to zero out

[00:18:32,560]: But I definitely think there are actors within Doge who have very different long term game plans of how this plays out

[00:18:38,000]: I want to talk about this idea of zeroing things out and bringing it back

[00:18:41,380]: So there’s a quote famously that Elon Musk gives to Walter Isaacson in his biography

[00:18:45,860]: And he says if you’re not adding things back in at least 10 of the time you’re clearly not deleting enough

[00:18:53,340]: And the point of that quote is that when Musk is running things he cuts

[00:18:58,020]: And his view is that if things don’t then begin to break such that you realize you’ve cut too much then you’ve cut too little fine

[00:19:06,320]: One of the things about the companies Musk has been in is that the information loop the feedback loop for that kind of thing is pretty fast and pretty clear

[00:19:15,440]: And it’s an engineering feedback loop

[00:19:17,340]: And it’s an engineering feedback loop exactly

[00:19:19,440]: So SpaceX is trying to build rockets that go up into space and land and they’re reusable

[00:19:23,360]: If the rocket blows up you’ve done something wrong

[00:19:26,960]: Tesla if the car doesn’t work if the door falls off if it needs to be recalled there’s apparently a new Cybertruck recall you’ve done something wrong

[00:19:36,260]: If customers don’t like what you did you’ve done something wrong

[00:19:39,620]: He’s destroying for instance a bunch of data collection functions in the federal government

[00:19:44,420]: There’s going to be no fast feedback loop on if that was a bad idea

[00:19:49,460]: Right now they’re cutting people from the IRS and the Social Security Administration

[00:19:54,620]: One of the things we are certain that’s going to do is lead to fewer audits

[00:19:58,100]: And when you try to call somebody on the phone during tax season or if you’re a senior and you’re having trouble getting your Social Security payment you’re going to have four hours three hours two hours of waiting

[00:20:07,740]: It’s going to be very hard to get customer service

[00:20:10,120]: I know people the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was a big target for them

[00:20:14,720]: I’ve known people there who are working on financial scams

[00:20:17,800]: People are just going to get scammed who weren’t going to get scammed before because there were some people out there protecting them and some people could have gone and reclaimed their money

[00:20:26,000]: But nothing’s going to break

[00:20:27,860]: Those people are just going to get scammed and ruined

[00:20:31,560]: There’s just this porting over in a way that really worries me of a theory of cutting that works when you have very fast feedback loops but the government doesn’t have very fast feedback loops and kind of can’t because it is on some like very grand level a long term risk management enterprise

[00:20:53,560]: How do you I guess steelman the argument for me but then how do you think about the critique I’m making of that argument

[00:20:57,960]: This is the place where I have the hardest time steelmanning the Doge thing because I think it’s true

[00:21:04,520]: I think there are all kinds of benefits to those kinds of fast iteration cycles and engineering especially when you have as he has at SpaceX for instance or Tesla people who are some of the best in the business at understanding the mechanism that they’re looking at right

[00:21:18,760]: If you push a cracked engineer to the limit on rocket fuel and you say like I’m demanding crazy outcomes from you and I want it cheaper than ever at SpaceX you’re entrusting some of the best people in the world at doing that thing to these really hard challenges

[00:21:36,200]: So far there’s not a lot of evidence that the people working on Doge are the best people in the world at understanding federal contracting or where the money flows despite having you know computer access

[00:21:46,920]: So I think you’re right

[00:21:48,380]: This is my biggest frustration and I think you can look at the cuts to PEPFAR whether you think oh that’s on purpose we actually don’t care about saving these lives or you think it’s foolishness right

[00:21:58,660]: Like the net effect is the same that you broke something that you cannot easily repair

[00:22:01,840]: The first really big thing Doge does is decapitate USAID

[00:22:08,160]: And you read in your piece about how you had been before that aware of two very parallel streams of argument about USAID

[00:22:16,680]: They really never crossed over to each other

[00:22:19,080]: What were they

[00:22:20,440]: So on the right for a long time predating Elon predating even the Trump administration you have these critiques of the nonprofit industrial complex

[00:22:34,520]: You have critiques about self dealing in liberal circles

[00:22:39,960]: You have critiques about the efficacy of foreign aid as administered by NGOs at all

[00:22:45,620]: At the same time that the debate is playing out largely on the right without a ton of kind of overlap to other parts of the discourse you have a very rich debate within the aid community within the foreign aid world among effective altruists about wait a second what works

[00:23:02,020]: Do we actually know that this or that program is doing the things that we want it to do

[00:23:07,620]: The things that it says on the tin is it reducing poverty in this African country

[00:23:11,820]: Is it increasing education

[00:23:14,420]: And you have this I think a very rich debate on that side as well about hey we should probably do this stuff better

[00:23:21,340]: We’re probably wasting a lot of money

[00:23:22,840]: And both of these arguments have played out for the last like seven years at least kind of you know it’s not longer

[00:23:28,960]: And what turned out when Doge came on the scene is that it looks like neither side has been at all familiar with what’s happening on the other side

[00:23:37,280]: People in the foreign aid community were shocked no idea and most of us were pretty surprised that Doge came in with this kind of decapitation attempt

[00:23:46,480]: And people on the right were totally unfamiliar

[00:23:49,580]: People within Doge are not familiar with this idea that for a long time economists you know there’s a chief economist at USAID who got canned working really hard on trying to make sure that we get more of the dollars out into the places that we want them to go

[00:24:01,240]: But were they unfamiliar with the idea or did they not want to know and not care

[00:24:07,600]: Like on one level I don’t believe they didn’t know

[00:24:10,520]: Or if they didn’t it’s a kind of weaponized and chosen ignorance like choosing to just say to yourself what I’ve seen on Twitter or what I’ve decided looks weird on the printout of funds going around as opposed to calling in the chief economist and head of the organization and having a conversation with them

[00:24:31,320]: I just think like this is where you get into this really tricky thing about what efficiency is doing here as a word

[00:24:36,640]: Sure

[00:24:37,280]: Because you can ask like how can I make something more efficient

[00:24:39,600]: Or efficiency can be a smokescreen for a set of other projects

[00:24:46,740]: I think you could probably tell what I think is going on here

[00:24:49,140]: But what do you think

[00:24:50,200]: Like do you really believe what happened is they didn’t know about this other debate or do they not want to

[00:24:55,900]: Ideologically they don’t like the idea of us spending money on aid to people who live in other countries

[00:25:01,680]: Genuinely I think there’s a lot of things going on

[00:25:03,460]: There’s a whole bunch of different intellectual streams a whole bunch of different actors in this funky Trump coalition

[00:25:10,940]: There are absolutely people in the administration you saw people who you get a clear sense don’t think this is a worthwhile project for America to engage in

[00:25:19,140]: I think that absolutely exists

[00:25:20,600]: I think that exists within DOJ itself

[00:25:23,520]: People like Marco Rubio have been champions of foreign aid their whole careers

[00:25:27,580]: So you look at that and you say oh wow the State Department wants to turn back on this funding or wants to give waivers to PEPFAR the anti AIDS program that the US has run since the W

[00:25:39,480]: Bush years in Africa and the Caribbean

[00:25:42,000]: And then apparently DOJ folks are on the computers are zeroing out those grants as they’re supposed to go out

[00:25:50,820]: One of the problems is just it’s kind of hard to tell from the outside who’s doing what

[00:25:55,020]: I think we’re getting more information as time goes on and you definitely have this sense that DOJ as an entity doesn’t think that these things should exist at all

[00:26:04,440]: USAID was to me it was very revealing because there was no feedback loop

[00:26:10,140]: This is money we are spending to prevent bad things from happening to people in other countries poor people in other countries primarily

[00:26:18,560]: And they can’t call up Elon Musk or their local member of Congress and get it turned back on

[00:26:23,460]: So this theory that what you’re doing is deleting things and seeing then oh does something break

[00:26:29,160]: But you’re not watching to see if something breaks

[00:26:31,360]: You’re not doing a monitoring effort to see what happens to malnutrition in the horn of Yeah

[00:26:37,580]: But without defending this view let me just tell you what I think they would say in response

[00:26:42,780]: If Americans don’t care that if there’s not enough of a domestic outcry why were we paying for it in the first place

[00:26:50,280]: Now I disagree with that view

[00:26:52,040]: I like humanitarian aid

[00:26:53,600]: I like life saving work in Africa

[00:26:54,780]: But that is the kind of clear answer that they will give you

[00:27:00,740]: Americans didn’t care enough to turn it back on

[00:27:03,000]: If they cared we’d hear from these senators and whatever

[00:27:06,840]: Well they did hear from senators right

[00:27:08,500]: Marco Rubio got yelled at and he said that he would save PEPFAR

[00:27:11,660]: And then as you mentioned they sort of deleted it

[00:27:14,200]: I guess the thing I’m saying is I don’t think they haven’t they claim to have a theory of responsiveness and they’re not putting into play monitoring mechanisms

[00:27:22,780]: I guess maybe that there’s an outcry but like I mean people cried out like a lot of people were mad about it but they don’t care

[00:27:29,540]: They exult in that

[00:27:31,560]: I mean they have contempt for many of the you know the globalists worrying about children in Africa

[00:27:37,160]: I guess that’s where you get into this question again of what is this all efficiency towards

[00:27:45,260]: And I think it’s important to bring this idea in is that there’s a view that these are all liberal power centers

[00:27:51,040]: Yes

[00:27:52,520]: So when I was talking to a well known right wing activist let’s say about USAID his perception of it and what was going on here and he was thrilled was oh they’re destroying this power center

[00:28:08,180]: Yes

[00:28:08,740]: You know all the liberals are paying themselves off and the nonprofits and it’s a feeder

[00:28:13,120]: And it was so interesting interesting is maybe a light word for it but I mean I can tell you as a liberal never for a second did I think to myself well one of the left’s real advantage is that we have a huge artillery of USAID grants that is like sending people to work on agricultural productivity in Ghana

[00:28:33,360]: One of the ways I’ve been trying to think about Doge and a lot of the Trump administration’s actions is if I put a rule into place what rule would help me predict what they’re doing

[00:28:43,100]: If I put a rule into place saying what would make government run more efficiently in the sense of taxpayer dollars would go further and government responsiveness would be improved

[00:28:52,900]: I don’t think I could predict it based on that

[00:28:55,080]: If I said what could I do that would destroy the power of nonprofits in America progressively coded nonprofits and agencies where the people in them are progressively coded

[00:29:12,860]: Yeah

[00:29:13,400]: I think I would get pretty close

[00:29:15,660]: You know Chris Rufo is at the Department of Education right now

[00:29:19,900]: It’s been a long time conservative goal to cut it since it began to exist I think in the 80s

[00:29:27,400]: Would we have seen that same attempt to kind of decapitate other ideological power centers without Doge

[00:29:33,900]: I think probably

[00:29:34,780]: What have they picked first

[00:29:35,780]: It’s places where either there’s a groundswell of opinion on the right that this is a liberal bastion in the case of USAID which I think is surprising to a lot of people on the left who have just not followed this for a while Department of Education grants to universities

[00:29:51,740]: You can’t pull the funding for the woke English department but you can cut off NIH grants or you can withhold funds from Columbia

[00:29:58,760]: You’re definitely seeing that the tip of the spear is the stuff that they read as liberal power centers

[00:30:04,780]: But here’s where I think what you’re seeing at Doge is less clearly ideological or well thought through than I think critics on the outside like you might even think it is

[00:30:16,320]: There are functions that the Trump administration cares about

[00:30:20,180]: For instance controlling the export and the sale of the highest end semiconductor chips to China

[00:30:26,940]: This is something that the Trump administration cares about

[00:30:29,220]: So there’s a public admin interest in doing this

[00:30:33,940]: The Bureau of Industry and Security at Commerce that does that was really understaffed really under resourced

[00:30:43,060]: And Doge went in and cut not a huge amount of people like 15 out of 500 but a bunch of the probationary employees the people who had been hired within the last year who had been promoted recently

[00:30:55,500]: And being somewhat familiar with this topic I think they fired some of the best people some of the people you really want if you’re going to improve on our really porous export control system

[00:31:06,200]: This is not like a self serving or a Trump team ideological move

[00:31:11,540]: You’re going to go back and realize wait a second we need to hire those people back

[00:31:15,200]: Right

[00:31:15,360]: This is something we are doing to compete with China which they agree with

[00:31:18,060]: Yes

[00:31:19,200]: On AI which they agree with

[00:31:21,580]: So there’s definitely this is where I just I have a less maybe a less clear perception of Doge than you do

[00:31:27,420]: I think there’s stuff that’s targeted at ideological enemies there’s stuff that’s nihilistic about the value of foreign aid and there’s stuff that I think is just like a good heart’s law problem

[00:31:36,900]: We’re just cutting stuff

[00:31:38,060]: We’re cutting things

[00:31:38,680]: Good heart’s law

[00:31:39,000]: Good heart’s law

[00:31:39,720]: The idea that anytime a measure becomes your target it stops being a really good measure

[00:31:45,620]: It’s the thing you’re thinking about

[00:31:46,560]: Once you hyper fixate on the measurement on the you know looking at the numbers on the computer you lose a sense of what’s the actual reality that you care about

[00:31:55,200]: So in this case great we cut people from headcount here

[00:31:58,760]: The Bureau of Industry and Security is leaner and more efficient

[00:32:03,320]: You’re going to run into this problem six months down the line or a year down the line

[00:32:06,540]: You want it to do things even if you’re a small government conservative

[00:32:11,300]: I want you know I count myself in that category

[00:32:13,900]: I want BIS to do things

[00:32:15,600]: It’s going to be a lot harder now

[00:32:16,700]: So I think there’s different things going on here but they’re not all like fully aligned

[00:32:22,080]: I think there’s a lot of things that the Trump administration itself will regret

[00:32:24,480]: In my reporting around Doge something that just comes up again and again is people saying look there is no master plan

[00:32:32,380]: There’s no document we’re all working off of

[00:32:34,540]: There’s no single objective

[00:32:35,980]: It’s not all pointed towards one thing

[00:32:39,620]: And we’ve been playing with different ideological objectives here cutting spending and controlling the government and ideological purges

[00:32:45,820]: But I do think one thing that is a driving force of Doge is simply action right

[00:32:53,120]: There’s a huge bias towards action

[00:32:55,660]: And Trump himself has a big bias towards action being able to show you are doing things acting relentlessly

[00:33:00,780]: It’s one of the very first things Trump said at the speech at the joint session of Congress

[00:33:05,260]: It has been nothing but swift and unrelenting action to usher in the greatest and most successful era in the history of our country

[00:33:16,340]: We have accomplished more in 43 days than most administrations accomplished in four years or eight years

[00:33:24,960]: And we are just getting started

[00:33:29,120]: This administration likes the perception that they are moving with incredible force and speed

[00:33:34,820]: Steve Bannon’s flooding the zone idea

[00:33:38,740]: And the assertion of power

[00:33:40,380]: One of the things you had in your piece on this was that you said you thought there was some legitimacy to was a tweet that took a scene from The Dark Knight where the Joker gets all this money from the criminal underworld and then having screwed them over lights it on fire

[00:33:58,860]: And his point is that everything burns

[00:34:03,280]: Nobody has any leverage on him

[00:34:04,640]: He’s not there for the money

[00:34:06,320]: He’s not there to win anybody over

[00:34:08,300]: He’s there to show that everything burns

[00:34:10,640]: And you said yeah there’s an everything burns quality to this a sense that they are showing that certainly with things like USAID that things that were considered sacred in Washington processes that were considered sacred in Washington civil service protections et cetera that part of the message is that they can do things that were far outside of the Overton window

[00:34:33,600]: And so the way that you might have predicted what a Republican administration would be capable of doing is gone

[00:34:39,580]: They are more powerful than you ever could have imagined

[00:34:41,920]: I think there’s definitely like a Schmittian friend we’re hurting our enemies we’re rewarding our friends thing going on

[00:34:50,040]: And you wrote a book about polarization

[00:34:51,780]: I think one of the dynamics here is that people on the right look at the left and they say you guys were doing that all along

[00:34:58,740]: We’re just copying you now

[00:35:00,020]: There’s a lot of like a mimetic this idea that oh you were self dealing

[00:35:03,920]: We’re just going to punish all those people who are self dealing

[00:35:05,920]: And I think this is always a defense for hyper partisanship is like they were doing it first sorry guys like turnabout’s fair play

[00:35:12,640]: I think there’s also something really interesting here that came up in a conversation your colleague Ross Douthat had with Chris Ruffo who he correctly called the most successful American activist since Ralph Nader or Phyllis Schlafly I think is the correct designation

[00:35:29,020]: And your colleague Douthat pushes Ruffo on why do you want to zero out the Department of Education

[00:35:34,600]: Why not capture it

[00:35:36,580]: Why are we trying to destroy it instead of staffing it with our own people and using it to achieve conservative ends

[00:35:43,980]: Other agencies can be perhaps reformed but Department of Education in my view is beyond reform

[00:35:50,960]: And so you have to spin off liquidate terminate and abolish to the furthest extent you can by law while maintaining your political viability and your statutory compliance for those things that are essential that are required by law and that are politically popular

[00:36:08,140]: You always want to maintain the popularity but can you take those things away

[00:36:12,500]: It just seems weird to me

[00:36:14,400]: Why

[00:36:16,000]: And they go back and forth but what Douthat writes later I think is really largely correct that there’s a underneath the slashing and burning of Doge there’s a kind of worry that we don’t have the people we don’t have the talent that it would take to recapture this institution post election and administer it the way we want

[00:36:36,980]: It would be really hard to use these tools for good governance

[00:36:40,980]: And sometimes that overlaps with the whole thing’s rotted out anyway like DOE is a den of iniquity and we just need to cut it

[00:36:47,740]: But I think there’s also this worry of administering these institutions is really hard

[00:36:52,300]: All the people who have done it for a generation are liberals

[00:36:54,820]: We don’t have our own people who can do it better and easier

[00:36:59,755]: I want to go back to something you said at the beginning of that this feeling that for the right they’re working with a symmetry here

[00:37:06,895]: Lefted this to us it spends in a way that’s completely self dealing and it just rewards its friends and punishes its enemies

[00:37:16,775]: And it bothers me because not only do I not think it’s true I think it’s untrue in a very obvious way

[00:37:26,455]: So you look at what was the central legislative achievement of the Obama era

[00:37:32,035]: It’s the Affordable Care Act

[00:37:34,115]: If you look at the Affordable Care Act fiscally it is a tax on blue states and a transfer to red states simply because the states that did not have generous and expanded Medicaid programs were red states and red states are on average poorer than blue states

[00:37:48,915]: If you look at the Inflation Reduction Act and you look at where it is sending its money it has sent a huge amount of its money to red states

[00:37:57,675]: If you look at where it is building clean energy where it is placing advanced manufacturing it’s red states

[00:38:05,615]: Red states have disproportionately won out that money

[00:38:08,835]: They’ve won that out partially because it’s easier to build there

[00:38:11,755]: And they’ve won it partially because this was actually political theory of the Biden administration

[00:38:17,435]: You build a broad base

[00:38:18,815]: You will build a broad base

[00:38:20,115]: You will win back these Trump voters by showing that the benefits of liberal government flow to these places too

[00:38:27,575]: Biden talked a lot about how you had Republicans who voted against the IRA or voted against the infrastructure bill but then they were out there at the ribbon cuttings for this bridge or that project

[00:38:40,595]: The left actually has like literally I’m not saying it doesn’t give money to nonprofits that are progressive and in their aims of course it does but that’s because it believes in those aims

[00:38:49,875]: But it doesn’t withhold money from conservative places or conservative people

[00:38:55,375]: You could just look like right at the fiscal flows of its major legislation and partially because that legislation is redistributive and partially for other reasons because it actually doesn’t have the view that the right way to run government is just to like reward your friends and punish your enemies

[00:39:15,195]: Yeah I think there’s an asymmetry in that the left is redistributive

[00:39:20,055]: It wants to take the money in and then you know as you said the big part of the Biden philosophy was we’re going to put the money in so many places that you’re all on board now and you’re seeing that play out in the you know lots of Republicans want to keep the IRA credits

[00:39:33,595]: Right

[00:39:34,995]: And I don’t want to I don’t want to sit here and say like I support a politics of resentment you know like it’s not it’s not my preference

[00:39:41,735]: I’m trying to be descriptive here though

[00:39:44,115]: And I think what you what people on the right notice is what they see as huge opportunities for graft in the nonprofit sector from federal grants

[00:39:56,495]: People like Rufo look at the university system and they see the taxpayers pays money for riots at Columbia or you know pick your pick your bogeyman

[00:40:05,075]: But he says that’s that’s funding your friends

[00:40:08,355]: And I think a lot of this just comes back to radicalization during COVID

[00:40:11,935]: I think during lockdowns I think towards rationing of vaccines in blue states which you saw you know along racial lines I would not underestimate how much that is a is a radicalizer on these lines that they reward their friends and punish their enemies

[00:40:27,055]: We should just do the same

[00:40:28,155]: I also think there’s a reality that they’ve convinced themselves of things that aren’t true

[00:40:33,295]: If they were true they would be very bad but I think they’re they’re not true but they do seem to me to be motivating action

[00:40:39,575]: So there’s this moment in the Ted Cruz interview of Elon Musk where he says to Musk look you used to be a liberal hero

[00:40:46,075]: You made Tesla’s you got invited to nice parties in Hollywood and now they hate you

[00:40:52,135]: Why do they hate you

[00:40:53,055]: And I want to play you or have you play Musk’s answer

[00:41:00,695]: The single biggest thing that they’re that they’re worried about is that DOJ is going to turn off fraudulent payments of entitlements

[00:41:11,235]: I mean everything from social security Medicare you know unemployment disability small business administration loans turn them off to illegals

[00:41:23,275]: This is the crux of the matter

[00:41:25,295]: Yep

[00:41:25,655]: Okay

[00:41:26,095]: This is this is the this is the thing that why they really hit my guts and want me to Um and do you think that’s billions hundreds of billions

[00:41:34,515]: What do you think the scale is of that

[00:41:36,255]: I think across the country it’s it’s in the it’s well within 100 billion maybe 200 billion

[00:41:42,975]: So uh by by using entitlements fraud the Democrats have been able to attract and retain vast numbers of illegal immigrants

[00:41:53,655]: And by voters

[00:41:55,815]: And by voters

[00:41:58,355]: The it basically bring in I don’t know 10 20 million people who are beholden to the Democrats for government handouts and will vote overwhelmingly Democrat as has been demonstrated in California

[00:42:12,015]: So Musk has said a version of that a lot that what he’s doing and the reason the left is so mad is that we’re running a massive scheme to pay off illegal immigrants to vote for Democrats

[00:42:20,955]: I think he believes this

[00:42:23,115]: Do you think he believes this

[00:42:25,955]: That he believes this

[00:42:26,715]: Yeah

[00:42:27,135]: Yeah

[00:42:27,835]: Yeah

[00:42:28,175]: So if you believe that then a lot of what they’re doing I think works backwards in a more straightforward way

[00:42:33,955]: If you believe if you believe this whole complex is really like at every level about moving money around to entrench leftist power in a way that is like bad for America and then bad for us eventually getting to Mars

[00:42:48,595]: And I think this explains this this view which is pretty common on the right also explains why you know if it turns out there’s not that much literal fraud in welfare which I think is true you know like improper payments in social security or something like 0 3 according to you know the the internal watchdogs

[00:43:09,755]: But if you think that actually the kind of the whole project of some of these welfare programs is to redistribute to your out to your friends to make new you know political machine Tammany Hall style pay off pay for votes then I think you you feel much better about taking the flamethrower to the whole institution

[00:43:27,515]: I’ve struggled with what I think is the generous interpretation of this actually

[00:43:32,255]: I can’t decide if I think the generous interpretation is that Musk believes it and that explains his actions or that he doesn’t believe it

[00:43:40,815]: But it’s a politically advantageous thing to say because it coheres right wing support for entitlement cuts which Donald Trump’s coalition which is older and poorer than some previous Republican coalitions have been would otherwise oppose

[00:43:58,075]: Because I think the thing that also has to be admitted here is they have control of the government

[00:44:01,275]: The people at social security actually do know where the money is going

[00:44:04,795]: There’s not some line item in the computer code that says political payoffs to illegal immigrants and they don’t seem to want to disprove any of their conspiracy theories

[00:44:17,695]: Like that that at some point is a choice to not ask somebody or track down the information like about what’s going about what you think might be happening here

[00:44:26,735]: I think Elon is interested in this question

[00:44:28,775]: You saw and I’ll agree with you he’s an unreliable narrator

[00:44:32,475]: I don’t think Elon loves the truth

[00:44:35,435]: But when you see the stuff about dead people taking social security benefits for instance pretty quickly apparently even before Elon kept repeating this line folks in the Doge team realized that’s not what’s going on

[00:44:49,655]: It’s not like there’s massive flows of money out the door to people who are pretending to be 135 year olds

[00:44:56,015]: But it is probably true that a lot of illegal immigrants are using those social security numbers for various purposes

[00:45:04,215]: Elon’s very interested in zeroing that out and they’ve absolutely swept up normal people in their you don’t exist push on social security

[00:45:11,615]: There were a bunch of reporting this week about people who social security has said we’re clawing back that money because you’re not real you’re dead

[00:45:19,755]: But I think there is like a real instinct a real belief from Musk that rationalization of the data on our end will solve a lot of the problems out there in the world

[00:45:28,775]: I think a lot of those problems are just political problems

[00:45:30,635]: They’re not amenable to being fixed by line item cuts

[00:45:35,035]: It’s just that different people believe different things and you have to win those voters too

[00:45:38,935]: But do you think that Doge as an entity is trying to learn about the thing that it is trying now to control

[00:45:47,195]: I mean we started this in a way talking about Musk trying to get at the ground level the payments data

[00:45:53,315]: And I think the appeal of that is it’s much more subjective

[00:45:57,355]: It’s literally where the money is going

[00:45:59,275]: But where the money is going does require interpretation and you could learn about it

[00:46:05,335]: Do they want to and do they want to know this better

[00:46:10,755]: And are they getting to know it better

[00:46:12,395]: Or is what they want to use these as a kind of polarization strategy to maintain support for what they’re doing right

[00:46:20,815]: I don’t know if those are the only two options but I’m definitely more dispirited than I was when I was on the job

[00:46:29,715]: I think you know you saw very early on the sloppiness about federal contracts

[00:46:34,675]: Oh we zeroed out a billion dollar contract and it’s a million dollars and they somewhat added three zeros

[00:46:41,835]: And you keep seeing that

[00:46:43,555]: You actually keep seeing that lack of facility with numbers and they update it later

[00:46:50,035]: The sort of thing that these are not mistakes that have to happen as you do this it’s not really staffed up in a way that you might expect if they really wanted to build a more robust better system here

[00:47:04,075]: It’s like a very small team

[00:47:05,835]: You have a small team that is definitely not learning as quickly or improving as quickly as you’d want to see

[00:47:11,675]: And I think classically a good Elon private sector team would do by iterating

[00:47:17,795]: You’re not seeing the same dynamic that I would want to see

[00:47:20,855]: So one thing I will say to Doge’s credit is incredible branding just incredible branding

[00:47:25,795]: Doge is a funny brand and it gets a lot of attention

[00:47:29,755]: Not everything happening in terms of the attack or reform or revitalization depending how you want to think about it of the administrative state is Doge

[00:47:40,435]: Behind Elon is Russell Vought who’s running OMB

[00:47:45,535]: OMB is a very powerful nerve center of the federal government

[00:47:49,755]: We talked about Vought earlier in terms of that he is classically somebody who does want to cut government spending

[00:47:56,735]: It’s not all he wants to do

[00:47:58,275]: He’s got a pretty big theory of how the government should work

[00:48:00,955]: You had him on your show

[00:48:02,895]: I found that to be a very very helpful episode for understanding him

[00:48:06,755]: What does he want

[00:48:08,475]: How does the ideal government or at least executive branch of Russell Vought function

[00:48:14,875]: Vought believes in a unitary executive theory

[00:48:18,075]: The idea that the president should have full control constitutionally should have full control of the executive branch that you elect a president and he’s in charge of the executive branch

[00:48:28,295]: It reports personally

[00:48:30,645]: On this theory there’s really no such thing as an independent executive branch agency

[00:48:36,005]: People elect a president that’s democratic accountability

[00:48:40,015]: Vought has a view that’s quite interesting even for people on the right that we have what he calls an imperial congress that now there’s all these agencies within the executive branch that don’t listen to the president they listen to appropriations in Congress

[00:48:55,435]: He thinks presidents should have the power to impound money

[00:48:58,675]: That is if they can achieve their policy priorities within the confines of the law for less money than Congress has appropriated presidents should be able to do that and not spend that money

[00:49:07,455]: So it’s in some ways a very capacious view of presidential power

[00:49:11,595]: There was this OMB memo that went out early on freezing grants and different kinds of spending

[00:49:16,615]: And it ended up being rescinded and kind of rejected by the courts

[00:49:22,515]: But something it said in that memo was that and I’m paraphrasing a little bit but this is basically right was that the government the executive branch should represent the will of the people and the will of the people is expressed in their choice of the president

[00:49:37,315]: And I think this is important for understanding them because it gives you a definition of responsiveness

[00:49:42,855]: I think a lot of the time when people think about what it would mean for the government to be responsive they think well if I’m having a problem there should be somebody I can call who can fix it

[00:49:53,275]: Or when the government is doing something it should be able to do that quickly and well

[00:49:57,355]: But government responsiveness in this definition is very responsive to the executive

[00:50:02,295]: When Donald Trump wants to do something the government responds and it does that thing

[00:50:08,135]: And this feels like a very it is their theory of what went wrong in the first term on some level

[00:50:12,815]: The government is unresponsive to Donald Trump and it is their theory of what they’re trying to achieve in the second term which is that the executive branch would be truly responsive to Donald Trump

[00:50:23,235]: And that is responsiveness that Trump has genuine control of the thing that he is in theory in charge of

[00:50:30,695]: I guess first do you think I’m misrepresenting that in any way

[00:50:33,315]: No I think that’s right

[00:50:34,155]: And I think what’s interesting about Vought’s view is that in some ways it rhymes totally with longstanding critiques of the administrative state going back across the right

[00:50:44,275]: The Federalist Society view that you have bureaucrats who are out of control and they need to be disciplined

[00:50:48,995]: The place where it does not rhyme with that kind of more libertarian or small government view is this idea of impoundments

[00:50:58,835]: That view that presidents have some piece of the power of the purse is much newer

[00:51:07,035]: It doesn’t have the kind of deep ideological threads that views about the rogue bureaucrats do

[00:51:12,735]: And Vought combines these two in a very interesting way

[00:51:14,415]: So I want to reveal what will not probably be that surprising but this is my integrated theory of Doge and Vought and the Trump administration fully which is that the right way to think about Doge is it’s the Department of Government control

[00:51:30,115]: There’s versions of it that Vought is trying to do in terms of impoundment and in terms of firing and traumatizing the civil service so there isn’t a deep state that is trying to stand in Donald Trump’s way

[00:51:40,555]: And then there’s what Musk is doing which is gaining source code level control over the plumbing the machinery of government the spending of it the computers that run it

[00:51:53,135]: And if you have that you have enormous power

[00:51:56,175]: If you combine impoundment and you’re running this through deciding which payments go and which don’t go then you’ve turned money into an incredible source of power and leverage

[00:52:09,515]: And you can use that ideologically

[00:52:11,835]: You could use that just to try to achieve policy goals

[00:52:15,075]: You could use that as a leverage over friends and enemies right

[00:52:17,775]: Donald Trump is a guy who loves leverage over friends and enemies

[00:52:20,295]: And that’s the whole play here

[00:52:22,275]: You’re making the thing respond to Donald Trump because you’re giving him control of the money and you’re doing that through the legal theory of impoundment and the actual grabbing control of the computers

[00:52:34,795]: Tell me how reasonable you think that is or poke your holes in it

[00:52:39,575]: I think that’s largely right

[00:52:41,295]: I think again what’s interesting to me is a lot of that is just normal conservative kind of movement instincts about how should the executive branch work

[00:52:50,415]: And then I think the part that’s quite striking is this impoundment’s view which plenty of folks It’s to my eye not an especially sturdy legal theory

[00:53:00,955]: It’s not an especially sturdy constitutional reading of the power of the purse

[00:53:05,675]: But what people vote would say and do say is this is what the branches are for

[00:53:11,015]: And if you don’t like it Congress or if you don’t like it courts you have to assert your own prerogatives

[00:53:16,975]: The pull point of the system in kind of a Madisonian sense is the executive tries to do a bunch of things

[00:53:23,475]: And he runs into the wall of the courts

[00:53:27,195]: And his vote will point to you know Vance and Trump all these people have said like the president will abide by these rulings even if they’re crazy district judges

[00:53:34,535]: And Congress if you don’t like this you know stop us

[00:53:37,495]: Well Vance has kind of said maybe he shouldn’t

[00:53:39,655]: And if you look right now at Stephen Miller’s Twitter feed Stephen Miller and Musk are two people who are very much on the other end

[00:53:48,175]: Yeah

[00:53:48,255]: But Vance sort of said this too

[00:53:49,595]: That I mean he sent out this tweet basically saying that it is the courts overstepping their bounds

[00:53:56,395]: I mean it depends how you understand like what is the proper role of the executive branch

[00:53:59,455]: But I think Vance has said stuff that implies very strong sympathy to the idea that for the courts to stop a bunch of this would be itself unconstitutional and the executive branch shouldn’t abide by it

[00:54:09,855]: There is a large number of people around Trump who are arguing that these judges should be impeached when they rule against Trump that this is a judicial coup has been the language we’re hearing

[00:54:20,115]: I mean this isn’t a kind of well we should have checks and balances

[00:54:24,915]: It feels to me and this is something I really worry about it feels to me clear that they are preparing for a showdown with the courts

[00:54:31,335]: I think there’s different versions of war with the courts

[00:54:35,575]: Some of them for me are five alarm fires right

[00:54:38,535]: SCOTUS says something and you say no we’re going to do it our own way

[00:54:42,935]: That’s very bad

[00:54:44,075]: I think and there’s other places where people say explicitly we think the 1974 Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional

[00:54:55,175]: DOJ is going to create a case for that

[00:54:57,795]: We want that to go to SCOTUS

[00:54:59,075]: We would like to have that fight because we think that law is unconstitutional

[00:55:02,775]: To me that instinct is not crazy

[00:55:06,055]: I think they’re wrong

[00:55:07,335]: I think SCOTUS should rule

[00:55:08,555]: The question is what happens if they lose

[00:55:10,395]: I did not think this at the beginning

[00:55:12,215]: I think it now that if they don’t get a lot of what they want from Roberts they are really going to try to get around that

[00:55:21,535]: And they’re going to try to get around it on technicalities but a decision was made by someone to not listen to the judge and turn the planes around and instead say oh no you can’t enforce a verbal order

[00:55:32,575]: These planes were over international waters

[00:55:34,575]: That was a provocation to the courts

[00:55:38,015]: A different administration just wouldn’t have done that

[00:55:40,215]: They are attempting to assert a huge amount of power

[00:55:45,188]: And I guess the thing that makes me very skeptical that what they’re trying to do is get a favorable SCOTUS ruling is that there’s a way you would go about doing that

[00:55:57,308]: And you would be very carefully choosing cases right creating a conflict that generates a case that is favorable to you right

[00:56:07,848]: You would want what you know the lawyers call model test case

[00:56:13,368]: And you would be you know acting in a way that is fairly respectful of the courts because you would be trying to politically hold them on your side

[00:56:22,328]: This thing where they are like knocking through the glass left and right where the test cases are really bad where they’re annoying the courts where they are then sort of defying the courts and saying the judges should be impeached

[00:56:35,168]: That doesn’t unless you have a view that the right way to manage John Roberts politically is to try to cow him

[00:56:43,268]: And I’m not sure Donald Trump I think that is basically how Donald Trump deals with everybody

[00:56:47,968]: So maybe that is his view

[00:56:50,508]: But in a world where what you’re trying to do is get a favorable ruling in the Supreme Court because you are going to abide by that ruling I don’t think this is what you do with John Roberts

[00:56:58,208]: I don’t think that you get his backup in this way that you’re actually getting rebuked by him before you even get to the Supreme Court on your main cases

[00:57:05,688]: So that’s an administration that looks to me like they are preparing for a showdown

[00:57:10,948]: And ultimately the unitary executive theory might need a showdown

[00:57:13,968]: I think that’s what you’re going to get

[00:57:16,808]: The nature of that showdown is I think an open question but the administration people like Vought say look we think these cases were wrongly decided

[00:57:26,588]: We want to refight them

[00:57:28,368]: And what happens next I’m not going to pretend to tell you in advance

[00:57:34,908]: But exactly the unitary executive theory to be fully implemented requires that we take this fight to the Supreme Court and get rulings in our favor

[00:57:45,588]: I was saying earlier that I think a very important question to keep asking yourself that I keep asking myself is what goal what value function would predict what they are doing fairly accurately

[00:57:59,198]: I think if you insert as the top goal here maximizing Donald Trump’s power you would get a fairly good not the Republican Party’s power by the way not conservatism Donald Trump maximizing the control Donald Trump has the authority Donald Trump has creating the imperial president I think you would be predicting things at a fairly high level of accuracy

[00:58:22,888]: And the problem with that the scary thing about coming to that conclusion is that imagine a world where it’s 2027 Democrats have won a huge House victory in the midterms

[00:58:35,988]: So Hakeem Jeffries is a speaker

[00:58:37,668]: So now there’s a lot of oversight happening

[00:58:40,988]: Donald Trump is at 39 in the polls which seems very plausible to me maybe lower

[00:58:47,828]: He’s maybe he’s at this point a lame duck though probably doesn’t want to be

[00:58:52,688]: And now you have a House that is not letting them do things

[00:58:56,928]: And you have a Supreme Court that maybe already has or is ruling that impoundment is unconstitutional

[00:59:03,588]: Does Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and Russ Vaughn and on the outside at this point Elon Musk all say to themselves well it’s a good try everybody

[00:59:12,828]: We fought the good fight and we lost

[00:59:16,048]: Or as like the final act of this no fuck you

[00:59:21,468]: I just I don’t see anything in here that makes me think they will live within limits particularly when the walls begin closing in

[00:59:30,248]: Right now the walls haven’t begun closing in but even the little bit that they have they’ve really reacted badly to

[00:59:36,488]: What happens when they really do

[00:59:38,788]: I don’t know how to answer the hypothetical

[00:59:40,528]: I’ll just I’ll say I’d be curious how you read the first term in office on this model because Trump lost in the courts

[00:59:50,848]: Yeah quite a bit

[00:59:51,548]: I read it exactly like this

[00:59:53,928]: The easiest way to understand the difference between the first and the second term is in the first term the most important member of the family who wasn’t Donald Trump but who brought a lot of people into the administration was Jared Kushner

[01:00:04,988]: Like as thoroughly a mainstream figure as you could possibly find

[01:00:07,788]: The administration is full of people who saw part of their role as keeping Donald Trump caged

[01:00:14,448]: And in the second term it’s Donald Trump Jr

[01:00:16,708]: who is like a like a right wing now acceleration escroper

[01:00:21,488]: Elon Musk has pushed Donald Trump to go further than Donald Trump would have gone without Elon Musk

[01:00:26,648]: Roosevelt wants to go further

[01:00:28,568]: J D

[01:00:28,828]: Vance’s only chance of power is that it all works out for Donald Trump

[01:00:32,808]: And if you look at the staffing it’s very very I think radical people

[01:00:35,968]: There’s no people who are slow down

[01:00:38,528]: And you really see this I think with the reaction to the markets

[01:00:41,548]: In the first term when the markets would crash or something would shake not only would Donald Trump be like oh my God like well we don’t want the stock market to go down

[01:00:49,148]: But there were a lot of people around him like Gary Cohn who were creatures of the markets

[01:00:52,548]: Jared Kushner would say okay like you know we don’t want to you know we want the economy to be good here

[01:00:58,288]: This time when the markets began going down clearly they are self confident enough to say we know better than the markets

[01:01:06,068]: You got to expect a little bit of short term turbulence here

[01:01:09,168]: So I think this is a very different administration where you have a disinhibited president surrounded by disinhibitors

[01:01:15,788]: I think a lot of that reading is really plausible

[01:01:18,148]: And I think to what extent you’re concerned about that depends on a couple of things

[01:01:22,768]: One is just are you ideologically aligned with Trump

[01:01:25,468]: And one is how much do you think personalist presidencies themselves presidencies that are incredibly dominated by the executive are bad in themselves

[01:01:35,008]: I was reading one of the books I was going to recommend to you at the end of this conversation is a book called Stalin’s War by Sean McMeekin

[01:01:43,168]: It’s a history of World War II and it’s largely about Stalin and the ways in which World War II is actually a product of his enmity for the West and the ways largely that the West the US especially gives into specific demands of the Soviets when we don’t have to without negotiation without better information about what are the Soviets really thinking

[01:02:07,688]: And a character who’s really striking in that reading is FDR who is probably our most powerful executive in American history has the most control of the executive branch similarly puts incredible pressure on the court system in service of his ideological and political goals

[01:02:28,368]: And one of the things that comes through in this book is that that kind of total personalization leads to bad outcomes for FDR himself in that we get ruled by the Soviets on all kinds of Lend Lease things

[01:02:48,508]: He’s a worse negotiator for being surrounded by only people who agree with him at Tehran in 1943

[01:02:54,228]: So I think there are dangers to fully personalist presidencies in general but it’s also just often you’re worse at doing things you care about if your information flows all lead one way

[01:03:07,548]: I mean it reminds me of Curtis Yarvin whose influence I think could be overstated but certainly somebody many people in the administration have read and found interesting

[01:03:18,688]: Let’s call it that

[01:03:19,828]: And he always says look what I’m looking for is an executive of the power level of FDR at the height of his powers

[01:03:27,788]: That’s my monarchy right

[01:03:29,168]: It’s FDR at the height of his powers

[01:03:31,168]: And I think he’s if you read him closely I think that’s not quite true

[01:03:35,648]: But he has this idea that the whole thing should be more like a corporation

[01:03:40,748]: And I guess it gets to this question of efficiency again in a slightly weird way which is that on some level the US government is supposed to be inefficient

[01:03:51,468]: Whenever people say well we should run government like a business well a business doesn’t have a multi party competition like separated across branches right

[01:04:02,668]: Like a business is a very different kind of structure

[01:04:04,988]: It’s got a board of directors you know

[01:04:06,568]: It does have some internal checks potentially but we built our system this way because we think there’s value not necessarily to inefficiency

[01:04:18,988]: I think that loads a deck but you know information is getting sourced from places right

[01:04:23,488]: The fact that the bureaucracies are full of people who are career civil servants that’s not just a protection against patronage

[01:04:30,848]: It’s also they know things

[01:04:32,868]: They know things because they’re not switched out every four years

[01:04:35,588]: Congress which the Republicans have very much cowed and Elon Musk has really reshaped with his threat to primary anybody to pump money into a primary against anyone who crosses Donald Trump any Republican

[01:04:49,988]: Even within parties Congress is supposed to be a generator of information and friction because what Lisa Murkowski knows you know what John Thune knows you know what any sort of individual member knows given they’re representing a geography in a different place is supposed to be absorbed into the machinery of government

[01:05:08,068]: And this idea that you would have it all just sort of coming down from Donald Trump rather than going up to Donald Trump you know it’s a very different vision that pits efficiency against representativeness against what I would call small d democracy this idea that the executive is not going to have perfect information

[01:05:32,148]: And again the places that I worry most about DOJ right now aside from things like PEPFAR which I just think is those cuts are a travesty

[01:05:42,508]: There are information sources within the executive branch that we all care about

[01:05:48,228]: There are actually tools for any executive to use R or D And in the particular kind of DOJ approach to government efficiency we’re losing a lot of those information streams

[01:06:03,328]: There are a bunch of surveys about K through 12 and higher education for instance at DOE that we’re losing

[01:06:11,868]: And we’re losing the ability to track this important longitudinal data

[01:06:15,208]: That stuff is if you’re conservative and you think the public schools are failing that’s what shows you that

[01:06:21,748]: So I totally agree

[01:06:24,088]: I also think to the corporation or the business model question should the government be run like a business

[01:06:31,548]: There are lots of ways for employees at a functioning private sector company to surface negative information that you’re not seeing right now

[01:06:42,608]: There were a lot of proposals when DOJ came in source savings ideas from people at the agencies and cut them in on a share give back 10 across the agency for any savings that you can find

[01:06:56,228]: The software licenses that we don’t need et cetera

[01:07:00,968]: That’s the sort of thing where you would see aligned incentives in a private sector company

[01:07:05,068]: That’s a good idea

[01:07:06,208]: And you’re not seeing that

[01:07:06,908]: You’re seeing a lot of top down if you’ve read James Scott seeing like a state the view from above with very little granularity from below

[01:07:14,748]: Or seeing like a payment system

[01:07:16,168]: Seeing like a payment system right

[01:07:18,808]: Corporations do a pretty good job of sourcing information from the bottom

[01:07:21,668]: That’s actually like a good thing about businesses is you get live data all the time from all over the place about the markets about consumer behavior about wasted functions

[01:07:31,988]: So I think that would be an improvement over the kind of DOJ model

[01:07:36,588]: I don’t think what you’re seeing from DOJ is exactly running a business application

[01:07:42,508]: It’s something different

[01:07:43,228]: You asked me a version of this question earlier

[01:07:46,088]: And so now let me throw it back at you so I’m not ending in quite such a dark vision of a future monarchy

[01:07:53,128]: Let’s say we do have the sort of backlash to this

[01:07:57,988]: Let’s say Democrats win in 2026

[01:07:59,908]: And then a Democrat wins in 2028

[01:08:02,388]: What should they learn from DOJ

[01:08:07,848]: If Democrats wanted to make the government more efficient where would you tell them to start

[01:08:14,988]: Do they

[01:08:17,848]: Entertain the hypothetical

[01:08:19,028]: Yeah yeah yeah

[01:08:19,768]: Josh Shapiro wins

[01:08:22,048]: And Josh Shapiro’s run I think he’s a guy who’s worked a lot on procurement reform in the state and permitting

[01:08:26,488]: And let’s say they all get abundance pilled

[01:08:28,788]: Totally

[01:08:29,888]: And they come to you and they say look you’ve been working on this for a long time

[01:08:33,908]: You’ve been interviewing people about this for years

[01:08:37,388]: Maybe they don’t want to but they’re going to ask you

[01:08:39,408]: What are you going to tell them

[01:08:41,088]: There are a couple of things that again maybe I’m naive

[01:08:44,708]: I’m still holding out hope for over this next cycle that if I’m wrong if I’m a fool and they don’t happen are absolutely ready to hand for somebody to come in

[01:08:53,368]: So for instance the Biden administration did a lot of really smart things on trying to get people into the government around the usual federal hiring system

[01:09:03,628]: OPM can basically hand out accepted service slots

[01:09:07,628]: They can say getting you into that position is critical for the national interest

[01:09:13,248]: And so you can just get hired like you would in the private sector

[01:09:17,568]: Someone can just say hey this guy’s great

[01:09:20,208]: We’re hiring him

[01:09:21,088]: It starts next week

[01:09:23,268]: The Biden admin did that for the CHIPS office

[01:09:25,628]: And the CHIPS office was staffed very well

[01:09:27,388]: A bunch of folks from Wall Street a bunch of rock stars very quickly

[01:09:31,088]: I thought it was very telling that on CHIPS which they really cared about what they did was circumvent a huge amount of government procedure

[01:09:39,508]: They eventually then passed also a bill from Ted Cruz and Mark Kelly exempting CHIPS from the National Environmental Policy Act

[01:09:45,848]: I thought it was very telling that well if we’re going to do this right we certainly can’t run it the way we run the rest of the government

[01:09:51,868]: What does that say about the way you run the rest of the government

[01:09:54,248]: And the people you’ll run into if you try to use OPM or direct hire authority or any of these end runs around the existing federal hiring system the roadblocks will be largely public sector unions

[01:10:06,208]: They’ll be dumb constituencies

[01:10:07,408]: So you’ll need somebody who’s willing to split that Gordian knot

[01:10:10,048]: The National Environmental Policy Act has large bases of support on the left

[01:10:15,428]: And people like you are trying to change how we think about that especially on the left

[01:10:21,888]: I think there is again one reading of what DOJ is doing is that the cutting comes early

[01:10:27,048]: You take Machiavelli’s advice that you do all the cruelty at the beginning and then you dole out the good stuff later

[01:10:33,308]: And people forget what came first and they remember all the nice things you did

[01:10:37,708]: And there’s a like with the Bureau of Industry and Security like with export controls on chips the administration will want to do things over the next four years

[01:10:47,228]: It will have things it wants to achieve

[01:10:49,308]: People like J D

[01:10:50,048]: Vance who are their own actors and want to build their political futures will want to achieve things

[01:10:54,748]: And to do that you’re going to need to do things like fix federal hiring

[01:10:58,868]: You’re going to run into their versions of the same problems as the Biden coalition did which is that everybody wants you to lump in their pet thing when you do it

[01:11:07,908]: But actually if you want effectiveness or efficiency you’re going to have to prioritize and say no to parts of the coalition and yes to other parts

[01:11:15,088]: That’s going to require filling in after DOJ cuts

[01:11:19,468]: And even if you think that this doesn’t accord with a view of Trump’s personal power you’ve got a bunch of actors in this current administration who want to have futures for themselves

[01:11:29,248]: They want to be able to plant the stake and say I did that

[01:11:33,108]: I think that’s a good place to end

[01:11:34,548]: Then I’ll ask our final question

[01:11:36,068]: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience

[01:11:39,168]: So Stalin’s War is one which I just think is a tremendous history

[01:11:43,348]: Slightly revisionist but not beyond the pale

[01:11:45,468]: Just Stalin’s a much worse actor than you remember him from your World War II experience

[01:11:51,248]: Or World War II education

[01:11:52,748]: You know I actually it’s a pretty limited my World War II experience

[01:11:59,328]: But a really eye opening book also just about yeah diplomacy and the ways that you can tell yourself things that aren’t true and convince yourself

[01:12:09,768]: I just had a guy named Peter Moskos on Statecraft

[01:12:12,668]: His book is coming out in a couple of weeks

[01:12:15,128]: It’s called Back from the Brink and it’s the story of the 90s crime decline in New York City

[01:12:19,628]: He did a fantastic oral history

[01:12:21,088]: He talked to basically everybody who’s still alive and able to discuss it

[01:12:25,068]: And it’s a fantastic story both about state capacity about how do you actually do something that you want the federal government or in this case the state and local government to do

[01:12:36,328]: And it’s a really interesting management history

[01:12:39,248]: But the real revolution was just almost a kind of Muskian we’re just going to hold you accountable to the facts on the ground you know to these numbers

[01:12:47,568]: And we’re going to call you in every week at seven in the morning

[01:12:49,568]: And you’re going to show me that you know all about this specific area

[01:12:52,488]: So it’s that firm mandate incredible political pressure from above combined with something that I don’t think you’re seeing much of at Doge which is giving people power over the areas they know best and holding them accountable for that

[01:13:05,208]: Just like a remarkable success story

[01:13:07,728]: And then the last thing I’d recommend as somebody who’s AGI pilled a little bit there’s a book by a Catholic priest named Romano Guardini a book called short books called Power and Responsibility

[01:13:19,428]: And he writes it after the Second World War about what kinds of people do we need to be what kinds of governors and leaders we need to be in a world where the bomb exists where we’ve built a crazy new kind of power over each other

[01:13:33,448]: What are the demands on us to be better leaders

[01:13:36,328]: Like how exactly do you have to change now that you live in a world where the bomb exists

[01:13:40,548]: I find it a useful starting point for thinking about the next few years

[01:13:44,268]: I have to say you’ve really narrow targeted my interest in these three book recommendations

[01:13:48,088]: I think you sold me

[01:13:50,128]: Santi Ruiz thank you very much

[01:13:51,708]: Ezra it’s a pleasure

[01:13:52,368]: Thank you

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