Bulwark Takes - Canadian DOGE? How Canada Succeeded Where DOGE is Failing

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

Sam Stein is joined by Tony Altimore, a strategy consultant involved with Canada’s 2012 version of DOGE — an efficiency audit by Deloitte. They discussed how the current DOGE is failing to bring actual efficiencies while they could be learning from Canada’s many successes.

Bettering your business takes working with the best. With the James Hardy Alliance, you gain access to leads, training, networking, and support from the number one brand of siding in North America. Achieve new levels of success by joining the James Hardy Alliance today. Hey guys, me Sam Stein, Managing Editor at The Bulwark. I am back. I am joined by Tony Aldemore. He is a strategy consultant at his own firm. He talks a lot about college football too. But for today's purposes, Tony graciously has joined us because he ran a doge like enterprise or spearheaded it in Canada.

I was part of it. Part of it. Part of it. Yeah. We were part of the team. I don't want, I don't want to take, I don't want to take too much credit. Fair enough. But if we, if we do take them over as the 51st state, it all started with you. So thank you, Tony. Tony's going to talk to us a bit about how that worked. And then I guess the most important thing is sort of using that experience to sort of understand what the current Doge is doing right, but also mainly what they're doing wrong and what they

could do differently to actually achieve the end result, which they want, which I think a lot of people want, which is actually more efficient, cost-effective governance. So Tony, before we get into your experience up north, tell us a bit about yourself. How did you even get to this place where you were consulting Canada? Yeah. so I had kind of an interesting background. I first started out out of undergrad, went to USC, fight on Trojans as an investment banker, and then actually went and spent a number of years working domestically and abroad on the business side

of the Central Intelligence Agency. And from there, went into consulting, did my MBA at Wharton, was at Booz, at Deloitte, and then TIA, now my own firm. But the – Which one was your favorite? Which one is your favorite? I'll tell you the best people anywhere were at CIA. Okay.

Cool. CIA is amazing. That's the coolest answer you could have given. If you had said Deloitte or Bain, I would have been like – The funny thing about CIA, right, is like half the day you think you're in the show Alias and half the day you think you work at the DMV. You know, it's like amazing, amazing people who don't get credit for what they do. But when and this is kind of a really interesting situation was Deloitte. And by the way, just to clarify, I do not speak for the firm.

I am no longer there. I am not talking about anything confidential. Project is a matter of public record. And, you know, just sharing my, my experiences in related to the public record element before anyone, don't want to make it even bad. Yeah. But the Deloitte had been awarded a project for the,

for the conservative prime minister of Canada at the time to help do – This is what? 2011, 2012? 2011, 2012. To help do very much a Doge-like project because they had a huge – and they were doing it for all the right reasons. None of the political nonsense. They were like, we have to trim the budget. So Deloitte put together a phenomenal program and way of running it. And I was part of the central team. So we were sort of running it.

We had seven of us, I think, on the central team, and there were 120 people in the project. And our goal was to help them reduce their cost of government while minimizing the impact of citizens. Why did they – so I guess let's back up for a second. Why – how did – because normally you would say, okay, well, you have a legislative body. The body is responsible for passing budgets and expenditures and appropriations. Why didn't the Canadian government just handle it for themselves? Why did they feel like they had to turn to an on-site consultancy to do this? Well, for the same reason that in theory, the Doge stuff would work if it wasn't, if it was, you know, competent people and not, you know, hackers trying to break the government.

It helps to have people that are from outside that are, you know, are experienced in doing this. And, you know, we've done that. And you have people inside that are also experienced. So one of the first things that we did, as part of the overall structure, by the way, we didn't come in like the Doge people and just like assume that we knew everything. Instead, we first started, every agency created a small task force within their agency. And we trained those task forces about, you know, how do you find areas to reduce costs? And we had some themes, right? Like we knew they needed to manage property better. We knew IT stuff. I mean, those were all, you know, kind of special things. But in general, we worked with

each agency. And then each agency came up with their own list of 5% reductions and 10% reductions. What was your goal going in? How much did you want to cut across the board? Well, the two pieces were 5% and 10%. Across every agency? Every agency, yeah. But what happened then is that, because one of the big elements that's very different

between this thing and what we did is that we don't make decisions. We shouldn't make decisions. The village people shouldn't make decisions. Decisions need to be made by elected leaders, by, you know. So they actually created a committee. It was sort of like a central committee that was sort of run by their equivalent of like the head of like OMB and CBO kind of combined the Treasury Board. And then it had members of parliament from both parties.

It had like the senior people of the civil service for the depending on which which agencies they were doing. The ministers were always in their own meeting and they made the decisions. What was your time frame? What was your time when you started out? Let's just start out from the beginning. So you get tasked, you say, okay, six months. The goal is five to 10% agency cuts across the board. You're going to have basically little teams in each agency.

You'll have buy-in from each party. The cabinet minister will be part of the process so that they will buy in. And then you get to work. And what do you do to actually – because it's one thing to say, oh, we got to spruce up the IT. We got to sell off the properties that aren't being used, things like that. But when do you start getting to sort of the tougher decision makings? And how do you go about, what's the process you go about saying, okay, no, actually this program can be eliminated? Well, so there were a couple of things. First of all,

was what we called policy decisions. So for example, one of the things that I had that, you know, came across for me was they had proposed the idea of eliminating the gun registry and saving the, like like it actually was not very it's like 250 grand i don't remember what it was but it was more than that i'm sure but you know just like like you know the two it people or something that run the gun rigs okay that's not a that's a political decision not a savings decision so we did not evaluate those but we helped look at you know could they actually accomplish the things they were talking about so you, one of the agencies I worked with was trying to defer maintenance. Well, you can't defer maintenance because you're going to have to do it anyway.

Right. That's just kicking the can down the road. Yeah. But yeah. Maybe next year, I'm sure it'll be fine in Canadian winter. So, you know, things like that. That's like me with my water heater. I know it needs to be there, but I'm not going to spend it this year.

That's not going to save you money. With governments, it's not about cash flow. It's about spend. For sure. So we help them evaluate their savings, but then we also look for other areas. And I'll give you one really interesting example. So what you're looking at right now with the Doge stuff, for example, there's a huge mess that people talk about with their access to these databases. And it is outrageous that they would want to have right access to the databases, that they would have live access.

Explain what right access means. You can go in and actually do things in the database so for example we're finding out we found out today's in the news these hacker kids were going in and like interrupting like the payments for people like to get medevaced out in helicopters like that is wild i i don't know how like in any other administration people would probably be in like the fbi would be taking you out in cuffs not joking if you did something like that um but it you know that's why that's why you put that's why you put cash patel at the fbi but i'll get but i'll give you an example of there was a database very sensitive database um that was and also just for anybody who's wondering we we had we were Americans, and one of the things they loved about us Americans

is that we didn't know their internal political drama. We were just there to help them save money. That's very American of you, by the way. Yeah, no, I mean- Just having that. What is this system of governance here? One of their security agencies I was working with had somebody trained in interrogation

who apparently spent the afternoon trying all these subliminal things to tease out what I thought about these controversial issues. working with had somebody trained in interrogation who apparently spent the afternoon like trying all these subliminal things to like tease out what i thought about these controversial issues and they were loved that i didn't even know what the words were i didn't know they were talking about uh they were like they told me when the guy told he's like i'm so glad you're here so what do you mean he said they told us they were sending the cia guy from wharton who had no idea about our dramas i was like i really don't he. He's like, I know. It was really funny. It was great. You know, but that was one thing that we, and of course we had clearances. So everything we did

was in secret clearance. You know, it was on secret computer. The reports were, were public, but we, we followed like complete protocol for NATO secret documents and secret integration, which is not happening here. You don't tweet. You didn't have right access to these things. No, we didn't touch those data. We didn't touch those databases. They would give us a copy of a thing and they didn't even want to do that. But in this one agency, very, very prominent, big time agency, I wanted the database of all of their case files of everything they had done for like the past two years. And they did not want to give it to me. They did not. This was like, I mean, it was like almost cheers in the face of the people they didn't want to give it to me.

But here's the secret. And this is one of the things that if Doge was being done right, that it would do is anytime you have a database that people aren't looking at, there's gold in it. If you have smart people looking at it, smart people are figuring stuff out. But if you have a database people aren't looking at, there's gold in it. And in about a day and a half, I was able to figure out really the core problem of cost of this entire agency to the point where I showed them efficiencies that if they could bring some of their inefficiencies that they didn't realize were there to like half of normal. Give me an example of some things that you did that created more efficiency and that's for, say, some purpose. For example, they had all these different, this particular agency had their own teams that were in every other government agency, and then they billed those agencies for the time. And so that was these case files. So I helped them look at it, and we found, okay, well, you know,

these people do the same thing in two hours that these people do in 35. Right. Now, they're a little bit different right because it's you know it's a little bit different but but if they can do it in two and they need 35 35 can get down to 20 right you can cut you can cut yeah 35 you can if they can do it in two you can do it in 20 even if it's a little bit different and all of a sudden they they and they were just again these people that were in your tears they did not want to give it to me all it was like a community theater production like they also started leaning in and looking at the charts like in excitement because actually they didn't even need to cut a lot of stuff they just needed to be figure out where they were being inefficient and make it more efficient so as you look at um your experience in light of what's

happening now, I mean, obviously, you see missteps. Let's start with what you see that Doge is doing right. Well, first of all, our process, this was never admitted to me, but I am 99% sure it was made for the Obama administration to do with the U.S. So we, and they, and they didn't do it because they, you know, the U.S. doesn't like to do things like that. We absolutely need an exercise to, to fix stuff in our federal government. I mean, Homeland Security, who I've done a lot of work with, they're awesome. They have way too many middle managers. At least they always have every time when I was there. So, you know, the idea of streamlining our government, making our government more efficient is awesome. The idea of randomly, you know, coming in and a rampage ends up costing

you more than it does to do it right. So, for example, when we did these workshops with their government people, we were teaching them how to look for things that can actually stay savings, that you can actually have effective cost process. And by the way, Canada does a lot of stuff way more efficiently than we do. A lot of their stuff, in fact, we would laugh. We'd be like, can we just bring this to us? Because there's a lot of things that they do great with. And so the idea of this Doge project is great. It shouldn't be the people who broke the Twitter search function.

It should be cost people who understand government. So the devil's advocate, let's just take their argument here, which is there have been, and Obama did try this, right? Obama put together a commission to try to make government more efficient. Bill Clinton, of course, reduced the size of government, was very public about his desire to whittle down the federal workforce. The Doge people would say people have tried this again and again. The bureaucracy always stays entrenched.

If anything, it grows. If you're going to actually be effective at reducing the size of government, you have to move fast. You have to be indiscriminate. You have to cut first, then add back later if you need to. But otherwise, if you're going to wait it out and do these studies and have a lengthy process where you're bringing in all these different various stakeholders, it's a recipe for incremental change at best. Well, and I would say that that's wrong in a lot of ways, because actually the cost of adding back is tremendously expensive.

Contractors are tremendously expensive. Now, there's some things that are better off being done as contractors, but contractors are incredibly expensive when you have to bring that in. I mean, if you look, and I did a lot of stuff to help Homeland Security in their, I don't know, they're like year five, year six, year four, year seven, that kind of area. And you could see the cracks of how they had to hodgepodge this together. And we're going to be hodgepodging stuff back together to fix the mess that these people have made. And that is going to be so much more expensive to fix than if we'd just been doing it right in the first place. I think that a lot of, again, looking at

this from a cost reduction standpoint, a lot of the stuff they're doing is not about reducing costs. The other thing is that when you have people that are not qualified to be doing what they're doing, and you're not involving the actual agencies, you up doing stupid stuff like for example they've published oh we're going to cancel west law for lawyers okay we know that's not going to work that's no more bloomberg terminals at treasury yeah it doesn't really i mean that's kind of done doesn't really save you much money yeah and you're not but you're also not really looking at a lot of this stuff is about like caddy. It's sort of like what if you got the cattiest twerps together and let them just like pick line items as opposed to actually let's look at the cost structure.

Shared services. I'll give you an example. Here's what Canada does that's so much better than what we do. Think about this from a service end too because, again, one of our issues with efficiency wasn't just how do we spend less money? It's how we more efficient in serving the people. So they have they have an agency, a federal agency called Service Canada. It's like like the DMV for the entire government. Like there's one place.

There's a phone number or there, you know, in the shopping mall, there's like a little like a storefront. And if you need something from the government, that's where you go. Do you need a hunting license? Do you need to renew your passport? You know, whatever. There's one place and you just go there instead of not in a social security office and, you know, this office. It's great. That's the irony of this thing is that, you know, to a degree, if Elon and his Doge bros have technical talent, it would be in creating that type of system, right? They can use their expertise.

They can use AI. They can try to make those various government functions more efficient. And then even creating like a sort of digital help center or 311 for the government would make sense, right? And you take different functions from different agencies and put them all together. But that's not exactly what they're doing. Yeah, but except one of the other things, and this is one of the things that consultants sort of know and people that have worked with government knows, there's a big difference between this.

And I don't want to sound like, you know, get off my lawn here, but there's a big difference between the tech people who can break Twitter and it doesn't matter and the people who have to make sure that social security never talk about that talk about that because everyone's always like well elon you know he did the same thing at tesla he did something at twitter and twitter's fine and yeah obviously it's different because we need faa personnel to make sure our planes are flying yeah i'll give you another an example a different, from a different client. I've done a lot of work in the payroll space. So I know I have some clients that are payroll companies and one of them was so frustrated

because they're, what they felt was their worst product. They wanted to get rid of this product because it was like so old and they didn't think it was as far as their product because remember payrolls that it's an it service that you know it's sort of processing your payroll but so many massive mega mega mega important companies use this product and they said we are absolutely not messing our pay with our payroll we don't care that it's old we don't care that you don't like it we don't care that it is the worst thing you offer because you know what? Every two weeks our payroll goes out and that's all we want.

It's almost a too big to fail thing. It's like you can't touch these things because if you do, people will freak and that's a critical service. Yeah, you can't risk it breaking. I mean, that's the thing is NASA can't just fire rockets up and if they blow up, it's fine. Like they can't do that it has to work whereas twitter twitter you know you might go down for an hour and life goes on it's fine yeah the space station goes down for an hour that's a problem right why do you think um elon's people want to get the access to these

payment systems and to personal information i mean there's there's a lot of, they don't need it. Yeah. So the speculation is that the speculation is they're trying to, I mean, their public sense is we're trying to root out fraudulent payments, dead people who are receiving benefits. We can't do that unless we get a total insight into the numbers. The more nefarious interpretation is that they want to fuck around with and have control over government payments. And of course, you referenced the piece in the post about, and this is- Yeah, they're doing that apparently. Yeah, yeah. USAID basically shut down USAID. They put it under Marco Rubio. Marco Rubio then

was saying, look, let's have these PEPFAR payments. Let's have these MedVac payments. They're fine. And then the Doge guys are actually saying, no, we're going to cancel that contract. And they're in the back end. But I'm just sort of curious, why do you think they want that type of granular, sensitive access? So here's actually the bigger issue is that if you're really after – and by the way, again, I'm all about let's cut the cost of government. Let's make things more efficient. Let's audit things and make sure that they're right um well if you if that's what you want then you're bringing in forensic auditors from pwc these these guys don't know what because you can actually if people that are no government

finance see the things they're saying and they know it's like you don't know what those words mean right the social security stuff where they were just totally off base and had no clue what they're talking no clue what they're doing yeah. They had no clue what they were doing. Yeah. So by all means, the first way that you know that it's not good intent is that they literally don't know what they're talking about as they keep showing when they come in the press and just sort of demonstrate like, oh, look what we found. It's like, no, you didn't find that. I mean, again, with the Canada Project, for example, we had no leaks ever of our internal documents. No, because there were not.

Again, one, because we don't talk to the press. One of the things that we did is we're working with that agency. And so when we found things. Well, they had buy-in, right? That's why. They had buy-in. They wanted to make it work. Yeah, exactly.

But when we found, there were things that I found, I was like, oh, right? That's why. They had buy-in. They wanted to make it work. Yeah, exactly. But when we found – there were things that I found. I was like, oh, this looks kind of funny. And the agency would tell me, oh, that's a whole other thing. That's a whole other thing. We're not doing that. There were other things. All right, I'm going to wrap them out.

The Mounties have like – they pay triple health insurance. They're insured like three times. And they wanted to stop doing that. They were like, this is dumb. Can we stop doing this? Because they're veterans. And again, they're covered by like three different ways. And I actually gave it to one of the high administers. I said, oh, you know, I put together these awesome PowerPoint pages.

He goes, nope, nope. I said, what do you mean? He goes, they are not going to put in the paper tomorrow morning that I cut health insurance for the Mounties. The Mounties? Nope. I said, well, they already have like three. He goes, nope.

He goes, then they can have three Band-Aids. You don't fuck with the Mounties. You do not fuck with them. It's like touching Social Security in America. Don't fuck with the Mounties. Even though it was the Mounties that asked me.'re like we've been begging them to stop you know because they want to take that money and spend it on mounties you know doing yeah it's been a mountain stuff yeah of course yeah so again great great people uh the other big thing that i sort of

see here that's an issue is they it appears that they really think government people are stupid and they're not um by the way think government people are stupid and are not. By the way, if government people, to those who aren't familiar with the government, if you, if government people give you the impression they're stupid, it's because they think you're a pain in the ass and they really want to get away from what you're doing. Like they are very smart, really competent people. And so because of that, when you assume people are stupid, you do, you don't necessarily do things the right way. And, but with the databases, back to that, when you assume people are stupid, you don't necessarily do things the right way. But with the databases, the big thing is if you were doing a forensic audit, for example, and you would need that kind of access to stuff. You don't need right access to it.

You don't need right access to it. Why do you think they want right access? So there's a nefarious reason and there is a possible – it's a stretch, but one of the reasons would almost be almost kind of an imposter syndrome. And this is an issue that you see a lot of times when people come into projects like this where they don't know what they're doing and they know they don't know what they're doing. And so they try to compensate by saying, we want everything, give us this, give us this. And all consultants are guilty of that to some extent. You're under pressure. You didn't know anything about this organization

when they staffed you on it two nights ago. And so you're trying to seem like you know what you're doing. And so somebody asks, do you want this or this? You're like, Hmm, give me both. Yeah, give me everything. Just give me everything I want to see. Or the other alternative is if they won't give it to me, it means they're hiding something. Exactly. And, and, you know, one of the things that you have to have when you do projects like this, you have to have enough dialogue to figure out, you know, can you get 95% of what you need? And it only takes them 20% of the effort, you know, so you have to have a dialogue with the

data people about, you know, what does it take to get this versus that? Because, I mean, for example, the Treasury payments system, if you were just thinking about, there's a lot of value you could get from that. Like, again, it also sounds, by the way, like people don't look at that database. So that means there's gold in it as far as insights that can be derived that you could get really valuable stuff from. But you definitely don't need write access. And they've shown by tampering with people's medivacs again people quote people would go to jail for this what's your nefarious explanation that's the nefarious explanation is it's not about cost

reduction at all it's just about energy but again you know it's not about cost reduction because you don't have people that understand cost you don't have strategy people you don't have accountants you don't have government people you have have the kids who can't make Twitter work. And so that is a sign that this is not about cost. And it should be about cost reduction. I mean, like I said, Deloitte, I am very confident designed this whole program for the US government. I know McKinsey has repeatedly tried to get the US government to do all kinds of cost production stuff. There are all – Booz Allen does cost production stuff all – I've done stuff for them. They do stuff all the time to make government more efficient, to cut costs.

There is no shortage of really great people who can help you reduce costs in this, in DC. And so we have 19-year-old, uncleared, wildly egregious security clearance risks with like abuse. I mean, I know a lot about the security clearance process and I can tell you that like, it is not designed for, you know, big balls who got fired for leaking hacked information to have a temporary top-secret security clearance. I mean, the counterintelligence releases of this program alone are astronomical.

But you do also see a lot of things with what they're asking where I look at and i think well that kind of makes sense so for example the personnel lists um is people made a huge thing about the personnel list i had the personnel list for the government in fact we actually made a better database of government personnel than they had um because we were trying to figure out i think the personnel stuff i understand i think the criticisms they've endured is why just do a straight hatch, a hatchet to the probationary employees, right? Like you're basically cutting indiscriminately and saying, well, they're the easiest to cut. Let's just cut them. And then in the process of doing that, you're getting people who were just recently promoted because now they are probationary. So it's not really any –

You also get big problems. So, for example, when I was at CIA, one of the huge issues is that CIA, the bell curve of employees looks like a messed up proportion of distribution of your people. You're going to age out a generation of workers and then they're going to be replaced by, you know. Yeah, the whole thing is messed up. It's a generation to fix. And again, that's where we say, you know, it's more costly to fix than if you just left it. So there's a lot of this stuff that's is not being done from a cost reduction standpoint. And all that a lot of I think your viewers, you know, Bulwark, Bulwark folks, I ran a Republican state Senate campaign in college. Like, you know, I know the way our these folks, our folks think is that we want to see Republicans and Democrats want to see efficient, effective. Well, I think that gets to the first part. Yeah. I think that gets to your

first part, which is that one of the ways you guys were successful is that you had buy-in from each side going into it. Let me ask you a closing question here and we'll get you back on when we get to this place. Anytime. If you have to sit here right now, how do you predict that Doge ends or whether it's a success and how how do you would you even define success? Well, my hope would be that over time, the I fear that they've sort of damaged the brand of cost reduction for the government in a bad way, because, again, this is not with good intent with what they're doing is not intended to save money. So my best case scenario, and if you look at the people working on Doge, there are a couple, you know,

we sort of, we hear about these clown hackers. They have, there's a partner from McKinsey who's, to have that level at McKinsey, you've got to be really smart and really great. That's gotten in there now. Their top lawyer, actually a friend of mine from freshman year lived down it was a surfer surfer bro from uh from malibu down the hall for me freshman year

uh brilliant brilliant guy um so you know they do have some people that are getting in there that that are are good people and i think that if you can get more of those good people in it will really there's a lot to fit i i have to imagine also by the way that uh booze allen deloitte mckinsey and bcg are salivating at the opportunity to fix the messes well sure i mean no no offense not to cast dispersions but i think they would like the contracts too to do it but well and i've done this for my clients too before where they've done things. And I, I saw what they were doing and I was like,

okay, do me a favor. And I was like, what? I said, just save my number, call me when it's a mess and I will help you fix it. And there's,

there's more money to be made in fixing the mess than, than, than cutting the costs. So do you think, do you think Doge will come out of this with what? Like 500 billion that they can pinpoint to? Do you think it's going to be? Well, first of all, their numbers will be – their numbers are complete nonsense.

I saw one analysis. There's a major trust deficit already. Like anything they put up, people are going to be like, are you really representing the truth here? And that's problematic if you're trying to do anything that's cost-cutting related. Yeah. And the other thing too with cutting costs is that you don't't now Canada, again, one of the things Canada did, but it was really good is that once they agreed on the number, and this is by the way, a process for you guys listening, this is a better process. Once they agreed on the number,

they lost that number in the next budget. And so that, that money wasn't there. And then, you know, they had, and then the agencies had to get you know move the people on you figure out the stuff you can't really know what you save until the money is not spent the next year right so it's up to congress to institutionalize the doge cuts and they're still having trouble getting and the other problem is if you've done a bad job of it and we know they've done a bad job of it is that that then you end, you know, Congress can cut the money. Well, then you're actually cutting the money from somewhere else because you're having to also paper over the cracks with contractors. This also gets to your point.

This gets to your point about having buy-in and we do need to cut it here. But if you want to make these cuts permanent, you do need to have people on both sides of the aisle committed to the enterprise because ultimately whatever you decide right now, it could be undone in a year or two. Right. And that's where I think the doge thing is going to fall apart is that if you come in and you're just burning it down and you're saying, I have the best answers and I'm not going to listen to anyone else. And that's that. Then you're just inviting the opposition to say, actually, no, fuck you. Well, and the other thing, too, on that also, it's not even just buy-in, I think, but at least an authenticity. Right.

You know, for example, I mean, they only had, I don't know what, there were 15 people on the committee maybe and two were with the opposition party. I mean, it wasn't like a bipartisan effort. But just one of the issues with Doge, too, is with transparency. You can't do cost cutting in a transparent world because you can't talk. You can't talk. Should we cut this? You can't do that. It has to be done very confidentially until the decision point comes, and then it should be transparent.

So you need those people to be there to have some kind of authenticity to be like, okay, this is not, you know, we're actually doing this thing. We're not secretly trying to just wreck USAID. Right. All right. Tony Alomar. Thank you so much, man. Appreciate it. Didn't think we'd be doing 33, 34 minutes on Doge Canova. This was awesome. Sorry about that. No, no, I loved it thank you we're gonna have you back when we get a little bit further down the doge uh timeline uh until then man take care good luck to your trojans bite on