No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen - Trump goes off the deep end with Cabinet pick

Episode Date: December 1, 2024

Trump goes off the deep end with the dangerous pick of Kash Patel to lead the FBI. Brian interviews Pod Save America’s Tommy Vietor to discuss the extent to which Democrats need to retool. And Max Stier from the Partnership for Public Service joins to discuss whether Trump could actually be successful at enacting the worst element of Project 2025: firing career civil servants and replacing them with loyalists.Shop merch: https://briantylercohen.com/shopYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/briantylercohenTwitter: https://twitter.com/briantylercohenFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/briantylercohenInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/briantylercohenPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/briantylercohenNewsletter: https://www.briantylercohen.com/sign-upWritten by Brian Tyler CohenProduced by Sam GraberRecorded in Los Angeles, CASee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today we're going to talk about the danger of Trump's latest pick to lead the FBI and what it says more broadly about his priorities in this administration. And I've got two interviews this week. I sit down with Potsave America's Tommy Vitor to discuss the extent to which Democrats need to retool after the 2024 election. And I'm joined by Max Steyer from the Partnership for Public Service to discuss whether Trump could actually be successful at enacting the worst element of Project 2025, firing career civil servants, and replacing them with loyalists. I'm Brian Tyler Cohen, and you're listening to No Lie. You know by now that Donald Trump has nominated Cash Patel to lead the FBI. To give you an idea of who Cash Patel is, I'm actually going to defer to Bill Barr's words here from his book. The president then started advancing the idea of appointing Cash Patel as deputy FBI director. Patel, who was completing a stint as deputy to acting director of national intelligence, Rick Grinnell,

had been a staffer to Congressman Devin Nunes and had served briefly on the NSC staff at the White House under Trump. I categorically opposed making Patel deputy FBI director. I told Mark Meadows it would happen, quote, over my dead body. In the first place, all leadership positions in the Bureau, except the director, have always been FBI agents. They've all gone through the same agent training and have had broad experience in the field and at headquarters. Someone with no background as an agent would never be able to command the respect necessary

to run the day-to-day operations of the Bureau. Furthermore, Patel had virtually no experience that would qualify him to serve at the highest level of the world's preeminent law enforcement agency. The Bureau had already had an exceptionally able deputy, Dave Bowditch, in whom I had total confidence. He was a strong leader with high integrity. He was indispensable as far as I was concerned. The very idea of moving Patel into a role like this showed a shocking detachment from reality. That was Bill Barr.

That was Trump's handpicked Attorney General. The same guy who straight up lied about the Mueller report in an effort to protect Trump from what the report actually said. For that guy to say that Cash Patel should lead the FBI over his dead body probably gives you a decent indication as to why he is so unqualified, so uniquely unqualified for this position. And if Bill Barr's warnings don't move you, listen to Cash Patel's own words

during an interview with Steve Bannon from just before he was nominated FBI director. Do you feel confident that you will be able to deliver the goods that we can have serious prosecutions and accountability? And I want the morning show producers that watch us and all the producers to watch us. This is just not rhetoric.

We're absolutely dead serious. You cannot have a constitutional republic and allow what these deep staters have done to the country. The deep state, the administrative state, the fourth branch of government never mentioned in the Constitution, is going to be taken apart brick by brick. And the people that did these evil deeds will be held accountable and prosecuted, criminal prosecutions. Cash, I know you're probably going to be head of the CIA, but do you believe that you can deliver it? the goods on this in a pretty short order of the first couple of months so we can get rolling on on prosecutions? Yes, we got the bench for it, Bannon, and you know those guys. I'm not going to go out there

and say their names right now so the radical left-wing media can terrorize them. But, excuse me, the one thing we learned in the Trump administration the first go around is we got to put in all America patriots top to bottom. And we got them for law enforcement. We got them for intel collection. We got them for offensive operations. We got them for DOD, CIA, everywhere. And the one thing we will do that they never will do is we will follow the facts and the law and go to courts of law and correct these justices and lawyers who have been prosecuting these cases based on politics and actually issuing them as lawfare. We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government, but in the media. Yes,

we're going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rigged presidential elections. We're going to come after you, whether it's criminal civilly, we'll figure that out. But yeah, we're putting you all on notice. And Steve, this is why they hate us. This is why we're tyrannical. This is why we're dictator. That he'll go after the media for the apparent crime of helping Joe Biden rig the presidential election. In other words, this is the guy up for FBI director who is claiming that Joe Biden lost the election in 2020, which is an outright lie and conspiracy theory. And he's willing to criminally prosecute anyone from lawyers to members of the media

who correctly reported on or litigated in favor of Joe Biden? This is out-and-out-weaponized government. This is what an actual witch-hunt looks like. Claiming that Donald Trump won in 2020 and prosecuting those who acknowledge objective reality. If this doesn't scare you about Donald Trump's incoming administration, I don't know what will.

But what's telling here is that while Donald Trump's picks for certain roles are pretty uncontroversial, Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, Susie Wiles as Chief of Staff The roles that he's swinging for the fences on All have a very obvious through line Matt Gates and then Pam Bondi as Attorney General Cash Patel at FBI

His personal lawyer Todd Blanche as Deputy Attorney General It's the positions where he needs a loyalist To be able to wield the government as a cudgel Against his enemies where he's swinging for the fences That is where he's spending his political capital Marco Rubio at State goes to show The Trump does not care what happens in that role What he is focused on is because

being able to enact his retribution tour. And the way he does that is with the very people who he's nominated to those positions. Not only will there be no pushback from these people, but they're just as eager as him to weaponize the government. So, look, I've been pretty clear about what we should do as Democrats in terms of resisting this administration.

I've been pretty clear that we have limited capital and that if we treat everything like a five-alarm fire, then really nothing feels like a five-alarm fire. But this is a fire worth focusing on. This is above Pam Bondi, above Tulsi Gabbard, above Pete Hegseth, insofar as we're ranking them, or we only get a bite or two at the apple. If there's anyone to raise hell over, it is Cash Patel.

This should be our focus in a political environment where we still have the ability to drive the narrative if someone is particularly dangerous. Matt Gates' nomination didn't survive confirmation hearings for a reason, likely because he wants to be the governor of Florida, and he knew that the ethics report would eventually come out in his confirmation hearings, and he didn't want that. But let's be clear, it was Democrats who forced the issue, and we should do this same here. This is also why it's important not to tune out here. Like if you're anything like me, you're probably exhausted to some degree and discouraged to some degree. I get it. But this is a

moment where it is necessary to pay attention and to sound the alarms. This is why it's so necessary not to check out, because let's be clear, the Trump White House will be bad, but it would be so much worse if there's nothing moderating Donald Trump's worst impulses. We saw it work with Matt Gates, and we should ensure that it works again. I know it may not feel like it, but we've still got power, we've still got influence, and this is the moment that we need to use it. Next up are my interviews with Tommy Vitor and Max Steyer. No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen is brought to you by Zbiotics pre-alcohol. So, let's be honest.

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alcohol than usual. With pre-alcohol, I can stay on track and not let the season throw me off course. Go to zbiotics.com slash lie to learn more and get 15% off your first order when you use lie at checkout. Zbiotics is backed with a 100% money back guarantee. So if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked. Remember to head to zbiotics.com slash lie and use the code lie at checkout for 15% off. I'm joined now by Tommy Vitor. Tommy, thanks for joining. What's up, buddy. How you doing? How you doing? Uh, you know. Yeah. Yeah, that resonates. That tracks. You know. So we're in this moment of post-election introspection. And there's a lot of people that have a lot of things to say about what

Democrats did wrong, what Democrats can do better moving forward. There is also this underlying theme where, you know, the whole world was dealing with high inflation and high prices, and there was pushback amid the whole world to folks who were in office. And we lost incumbents. We lost majorities in governing parties all across the planet. U.S. was no different. So I'm wondering, to what extent do you think that the Democratic Party needs to look inward and figure out how it needs to move forward versus to what extent do you think that this was just the result of the economic environment more broadly and that all of our efforts to upend and everything are maybe not so warranted. Yeah, I mean, this is a problem with like a zero-sum election process, right? I mean,

you win, you're a genius, you lose, you're a fool, and it could be a margin of a couple thousand votes. I think we'll know better in February when there's better data that comes out and gets released and analyze. My guess is this was mostly because people were pissed about the pandemic and inflation and broader economic forces and they were punishing incumbent parties. I do think they were probably kind of Democratic Party specific challenges on the margins that contributed. I think Joe Biden's age contributed in a big way to his standing before he dropped out. I think his decision to run for re-election was an enormous mistake. It kind of set a lot of these trains in motion. But I think you're right. I mean, you don't want to, you don't want to

overreact to an election loss, but you also don't want to actually. like there's no problem and just put your head in the sand. So it's a balance. Although that's exactly what the Republicans did. Not only did they not take any steps to fix anything that was wrong, but they actually pretended that the election was stolen when it wasn't. So they just perpetuated disinformation the entire time. And, you know, clearly Democrats aren't willing to do that. But I'm just saying, like, having this strategy where you just pretend nothing's wrong has been proven to work before. Yeah, I mean, being out of office has its benefits. Yeah, should we do just like a stop this deal, maybe charge the Capitol, see what happens?

hey, we'll have full control of government in four years. Yeah, the irony of a lot of this is when Barack Obama won twice, the Republicans did this autopsy of what went wrong and they decided they needed to be less strident in terms of anti-immigration policy, more welcoming as a party, et cetera, and Donald Trump seemed like the absolute antithesis of all of those recommendations, then he ran one, obviously lost his reelection bid, but then won again and racked up even bigger vote totals with voters of color, working class voters, et cetera. So sometimes your best attempts of being introspective and really thinking through the challenges and how to address them can get undercut by the

reality if these are wave elections. It's just opting not to address them whatsoever. Yeah, I mean, look, I think sometimes there's just, there are large, like, forces in the world that dictate the outcomes of these elections and the pendulum swings one direction, then it'll swing back. Okay, so with that said now, I do want to, I do think it's important to take this opportunity to have some introspection because even if it was 99% the economic environment, I still think that it's good to take these moments to figure out where we can do better. You can always do better. Nobody's running a perfect campaign.

No political party is perfect, certainly not the Democrats. So what are you thinking about in terms of, I guess, what your priorities would be in terms of seeing the Democrats move forward and implementing some type of change? I mean, I think a lot of it is going to be messengers and new leaders and merging. We got to get out of our gerontocracy mode. We need to run candidates that are young, that understand the culture, that are vigorous, can get out and debate. And again, like, I think Joe Biden did a lot of things that were great, especially in domestic policy, but he should never have run for re-election, in my opinion. I think that we as a party need to reckon with the

fact that despite the fact that we're running against Donald Trump, a guy who I think pisses into a golden toilet, somehow he took the mantle of the working. class. Populist champions. Guy. Yeah. Like that's a challenge. Like we clearly didn't do enough to put forward policies that spoke to people in their needs. We didn't do enough during the four years of the Biden administration to help people who are struggling and we need to refocus and rethink that. And then I think a lot of it is going to be how are we communicating with voters and how are we reaching them. We cannot do another election cycle where we dump half a billion dollars into campaign ads that don't seem to move the needle. Yeah. You had an interview, you guys,

at Potsay of America had an interview. I believe it was Favreau, who actually conducted the interview with Stephanie Valencia, who deals with Latino voters. And she spoke about how, for $350,000, Republicans were able to buy up one of the last remaining neutral radio stations in South Florida. And meanwhile, Democrats set like millions and millions and millions of dollars on fire. This election cycle, we had nearly a billion dollars that was spent on ads that would go in one ear and out the other. And so how do you think that Democrats should focus on the media environment? At a moment like right now, as opposed to just waiting for, you know, like August or September of an election year to start remembering that the media actually plays a big role in this thing. Yeah. I mean, I think we have to realize we have a brand problem.

People don't like the Democratic Party. They don't think it's cool. They don't think it fights for them. It's not a party they want to be a part of. And right now, people feel the opposite about Trump. You know, you see like athletes doing the Trump dance at games. He's sort of like seen as being culturally cool. People are excited about them. And we need to fix that. And I think part of it is going to be. figuring out how to talk to people and reach them early and often. Another part of it will be, I think in Washington, people worry too much about inputs and not outputs. Like they spend two weeks writing and editing the speech and then two minutes thinking about who it gets to, who hears the speech. And so, I mean, you can do daytime, you know, MSNBC hits all you want. And I think that's great.

but there's like a swath of voters that are never consuming political content. I mean, a swath of voters, if you're talking to the MSNBC crowd, you're basically talking to the same couple hundred thousand people, that's it. Like forget about swath of voters. We're missing the vast, vast, vast majority of Americans out there. Yeah. And a lot of them don't vote at all. They don't care.

And so you have to get out of your comfort zone and go find people where they're at. Way too much has been said about like Joe Rogan, whether you go on a show or not. I think the answer is obvious. You go on that show. you go on Barstall sports, you go on all these networks, if they'll have you on, that are sort of politically adjacent to talk about culture and sports and Hollywood and music and, you know, try to introduce yourselves to those people. And so I'm curious because, you know, we have a brand problem in terms of being able to reach out

to working class Americans and middle class Americans right now who just don't trust the Democrats to be able to do that. And so when you have a party, like today's Democratic Party, like Joe Biden's Democratic Party in the first two years of his term, where they passed so much. I mean, from American Rescue Plan, Inflation Reduction Act, PACT Act, Chips Act, added, you know, 16 million jobs with the unemployment rate down. They did all of the things. They did them with a focus on bolstering and protecting the middle class. I mean, you know, automatic airline refunds for cancellations, eliminating junk fees, $35 insulin and inhalers. All that stuff is meant to help a certain segment of the population, not the ultra wealthy, as opposed to what Trump did in his first term, which was just use his political capital for a tax cut for millionaires and billionaires.

when you have a party that largely is walking the walk, and still it doesn't matter, right? Then how do you move forward in a way that basically says, like, do we have to do more of the stuff that people don't seem to recognize in the first place? I think a lot of this was luck in timing. Like, Donald Trump got handed an economy that was revved up and going from Barack Obama. Gas was cheap, and that propelled him for three years until the pandemic hit. then Joe Biden took over in a deep, deep hole and had to climb out of it after the pandemic and all the job loss, et cetera. So that's part of it was just like lucky or unlucky. Yeah.

But the other piece is, yes, we did some big things past a highway bill, the Chips Act, the IRA, but a lot of that money wasn't spent. Like most people weren't feeling that money in any way in their own lives. Like, yes, the capping the price of insulin was a big deal for a lot of people, but it's a discreet thing for a subset of the popular. Whereas everybody was mad about the cost of gas, you know, and I think it's going to always, it's going to be, there's not ever going to be a quick fix to solving that problem, but I think at times we sounded completely tone deaf about how we talked about it. Remember the big fight over whether inflation was transitory or here to stay? How stupid does that seem in hindsight? Yeah. How do you think about this? Because, you know, you were in the Obama administration as spokesman for the National Security Council. And I think Obama's administration stood in stark contrast to Trump in that you have the ACA, Obamacare, which ultimately to today would afford 50 million more Americans' health care. And there was a messaging vacuum that occurred in the Obama administration where something that was that 10 years later would end up being so significant, so popular that even in a Republican-controlled Congress, they couldn't get rid of it. And yet at the time, there was such a messaging vacuum that Republicans were able to brand this thing. as death panels, as ushering in death panels where we would decide, you know, politicians would

just decide whether grandma or grandpa live or dies. Now, cut to you have the Trump administration where, you know, Trump could wake up and tie his shoes and they would try to throw a parade on Pennsylvania Avenue for it. I mean, anything he did would be caused for like some giant jubilant celebration within the administration. And we even see Republicans like now former Republican Madison Cawthorne, who famously didn't even have legislative staff because he just wanted comm staff. And more and more, there's the incentive structure for Republicans to do that. We have Nancy Mace, whose entire life right now is predicated on getting as much airtime as humanly possible because she's being a bully to a new trans member of Congress for the crime of existing.

So how do you view this as someone from an administration who left an opening for Republicans to fill a messaging void, only to then see a Trump administration, the first go around, basically use anything as an excuse to beat their chess about even things that were like not accomplishments by any stretch of the imagination. Yeah, I mean, sort of the Affordable Care Act example, I think is instructive. I mean, there was just like very long policymaking legislative process where Republicans were able to fearmonger and make up this nonsense about death panels, et cetera, and there was no bill yet or nothing had been passed so like people weren't feeling anything.

And in fact, a lot of the ACA didn't kick into place until. after the re-elect, right? So it was putting good governance and an attempt at a process that was inclusive and could include Republicans ahead of the politics of it. In the long game, the ACA, Obamacare is now very popular. A lot of people rely on it, and you're right. I mean, John McCain ultimately saved it. We'll see if Trump tries again. I think what Trump has been good at for better, for worse, is just dominating the conversation every single day. He He was doing his COVID press conferences. He was tweeting all the time.

He was seen as such an aberration and so new and so shocking to people that it was like the early days of like Howard Stern, right? The people who loved him would listen for three hours. The people who hated him and listened for four hours because they wanted to hear what he was going to say. I wonder if that's going to be the case this time. Like I find myself exhausted by the guy. Yeah.

I will follow him. I will cover him. I'll do my job. But it's like it's not novel. Right. It's not exciting in any sense in like a scary sense. but exciting in any sense. It's just he's relentless.

And he can talk about himself forever without stopping. Like I was listening to Joe Rogan talk about the Trump interview. He said Trump walked in, didn't use the bathroom, talked about himself for three hours left, didn't use the bathroom again. You know, like this guy doesn't have to pee. Just fueled by an insatiable urge to keep talking about himself. 7,000 Diet Coke's later and nonstop talking. You don't have to pee once. Just 70-something-year-old man.

So I don't know how. I got here, but that was a point about messaging, I think. Well, look, we are heading into a holiday season now where there are going to be people, you know, who are, you know, families who are coming together now who have folks who voted for Trump and people who voted for Kamala Harris and Tim Walls. How do you recommend people move into this period right now where we have to try to figure out how to coexist while, you know, on one hand, not completely surrendering your values? And if people are mad at folks for ushering in a future that they don't want, should they capitulate?

Or is it more important? Like, I'm just curious where you stand on this, on mending bonds versus, like, fighting back against what folks see as a wrong, especially as we head into the holiday season. Yeah, I get it. I mean, look, I've never, like, had a family meal with someone who sits down and screams at me about a political thing. You know, it's just, like, not how we roll. But I imagine it sucks. I think the thing we all got to remember with Trump. is that we have to watch what he does more than we watch what he says.

And so when he finally takes power in January, if they start separating families and doing mass deportations and causing real harm to people, that's when I think you start to have those conversations with people. I think this year, like, well, we'll see, you know. Like, I don't think anyone needs to capitulate or, you know, like, genuflect in front of your mega uncle, But like, you don't have to fight it out yet.

Like, we're about to see how this goes now. Yeah. And I think that that's the key more broadly, too, is a lot of people, you know, and I do live streams and whatnot, people are asking, like, will Trump do this? We'll Trump do this. We'll Trump do this. And we're unfortunately going to be in a period where we're going to have a lot of time to discuss and analyze every shitty thing that Trump is going to do.

And I don't think we have to take this moment to imagine in advance what he's going to do because we'll get there. And so try to save some semblance of sanity for a moment that, actually warrants it. Yes, absolutely. And I think there is part of me that's a little worried, like there was so much energy and momentum and marches and rallies after the 2016 election. You don't feel that energy right now. You just feel exhaustion. But I do think that could

change if he starts doing some really heinous stuff. And unfortunately, I think that's what we're going to see. Yeah, yeah. Tommy, where can people see and hear more from you? If you want foreign policy, check out Pod Save the World or Pod Save America. Thanks for taking the time. Thanks, buddy. No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen is brought to you by Lumen. Lumen is the world's first handheld metabolic coach. It's a device that measures your metabolism through your breath,

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Max, thanks for taking the time. Thank you. So I wanted to talk a little bit about your area of expertise, which is as we move forward in the Trump administration, something that I've been especially worried about and sounded the alarms about in the lead-up to this election was the prospect of Trump enacting Schedule F, which is his plan to change all of the career civil servants in the federal government into a political appointee designation. So would he be able to do this as easily as I think he's planning on doing it as easily as Project 2025 head-end? anticipated it would be for him to do that. So, Brian, you're 100% right to be concerned about this. I think that if you pull out for a second, the key issue here is President Trump wants to convert our current system, which is a government that's there for the public and for the people, into a government that is the spoiled system, one that serves the winner of the

election and not the broader public interest. And Schedule F, as you just described, is an important piece of that. So President-elect has already stated that he wants to use government authorities to go after his personal enemies. He's choosing people to run agencies on the basis of their loyalty to him, not to their competence and character. And the civil service is the last remaining bastion of representation for that rule of law and the public interest. And Schedule F was something that he tried in the first term to implement the very end of his first term ran out of time. But that would have done just what you said, which has convert many, many thousands of career apolitical experts into yet more political appointees. I think that he will have difficulty

getting to answer your direct question in implementing Schedule F very quickly because the Biden team has put in place a regulation that they would have to undo to make that happen. But I think the more important issue is that he can pursue that same goal of up, the career professional civil service through a lot of other means. And we need to be alert to not just Schedule F, but all kinds of other things like just terrible management that might drive away the experts that we want in our government and enable more politicization, more cronyism, and worse government. Right.

People just seeing that there are unqualified, incompetent people at the top of each department and basically self-selecting out by virtue of not wanting to work under a. Pam Bondi, under a Pete Hegseth, under an RFK Jr., for example. I want to go back to the regulation that you had spoken about before, the fact that Biden had put forward a regulation that would presumably prevent this type of thing from happening. You would imagine if Trump was actually serious about moving forward with turning the career civil servant sector into political appointees, that his team would just be committed

to overturning this regulation, and that would be basically a very small obstacle for him to have to overcome. Would you agree with that? Is that actually going to pose some type of some type of a serious barrier for him? So I think it's always dangerous to say never, but government process actually matters. And when you don't understand government process and you work to use that government process to achieve your ends, you often don't get very far. And the truth is that it takes a lot of time to change a regulation that exists to do it right so that you can actually avoid successful court challenge. Now, it may very well be that the Trump team will simply bulldoze through, not care about what the courts might say or litigation, but the reality

is that it could take six months or a year to do Schedule F. Again, you said it exactly right, though, and that is you don't have to have Schedule F to have the impact of Schedule F. If you chase away the good talent. And it's worth stepping back and making sure we understand who these people are. They're the air traffic controllers. They're the food inspectors. They're the 70% of the workforce that is involved in national security, keeping us safe. A third of them are veterans. You know, these are people who overall headcount, I should also add, is the same size today in the federal government as it was in the 1960s. So these are people that are serving America, they deserve better. The OMB intended nominee has been taped and quoted as saying

that he would like to traumatize the federal workforce so that they don't want to come to work. You do have to worry about how federal employees are being treated because that can lead to effectively the same thing as Schedule Left. Great talent leaving Americans getting hurt because they don't have the best civil servants looking out for them. What about the prospect of legal protections for these career civil servants? If Donald Trump does move forward with his plan to oust them in deference to political appointees, do these people have any legal recourse? So they should.

But again, if you are in a horrible job where your boss or your boss's boss is intending to try to traumatize you, you may not want to stick around to see through your legal recourse. And that legal recourse might take a very, very long to work a long time to work its way through the system. So it's not enough, is what I would say. We need to support our career civil servants. We need to make sure the rule of law is being followed. And we need to do our best to protect federal employees from having to go through that process. They shouldn't have to.

They shouldn't be in an environment where anyone is trying to traumatize them. They should be in an environment where people are trying to help them do their job. which is to help the American people. Well, do you think that this would be a little bit of a different situation? Because if you're in, you know, if you work at a restaurant and you have a boss that comes in, a new boss that comes in, that's just like, for lack of a better phrase, just being a dick, right? That's a different example than all of these people recognizing that Donald Trump is coming in with the express purpose of trying to traumatize them in an attempt to get them to self-select out

so that he can replace them with political appointees. knowing that that's the backdrop on which he's coming in, would it be easier for them to recognize, like, the context of the situation? Now fighting back against this, maybe it's in the form of a class action lawsuit, fighting back against this is more of a duty as opposed to just, you know, a normal business in the private sector where you just don't enjoy your job. I mean, Trump is coming in and we know that he's coming in with the express intent of getting these people to leave so that they do self-select out.

Right. Look, I think your point is a powerful one. It's also a lot to be asking public servants who are sacrificing all kinds of other things in order to serve the public that they need to stay in order to protect the system. I hope that we do have, like the high-quality people decide that they do want to stay. They're going to have to make their own individual choice on this. I think the system issues you raise are important. And the reality is that they're there in order to serve the public.

They're there for mission reasons. And it's still the case that for many, many, many of them, they can, in fact, help Americans in the ways they care about by being in that job. And you can't do that anyplace else. No, I'm just, I'm curious here in terms of Trump's ability to be able to enact Schedule F, his plan for Schedule F. Can you talk about what that would look like and where you think the biggest barrier to him being able to accomplish it would lie? So I think, again, just to one quick step back. once more. And that is that we have a career, a political system for our civil service because in the 19th century, we did have the spoils system. President Jackson instituted the spoil system.

Basic concept was, I won the election, therefore I get to place people who are loyalist to me in government jobs as payoff to them. And frankly, I can then tax them so that they support my political party and on and on and on. The end result was first and foremost, incompetence in government. corruption. And then ultimately, in 1883, the assassination of President Garfield. And that resulted in people looking up and saying, this is not the best way to run our government. You really ought to have, you know, civil servants who are there on the basis of their, you know, oath of office to our constitution and the rule of law. For 140 years, that is the system that we have had. President Trump is upending, this is not a partisan issue. He's upending 140 years of Republicans, independence,

Democrats, all agreeing that this is the better way to run our government. And it is. Truth is our government does need to be reformed, but not in this way. And that's a very important point. You ask how is Schedule F going to be implemented? What are the issues that will come up here? And what I would say that the first barrier will be the regulation that the Biden team has put in place that essentially says you cannot do Schedule F. As you noted, what a president can do, a next president can undo. That's not true for the law, but it is for regulation. It takes a long time. You need to get public comment. You need to go through a pretty arcane process. A lot of people think it may be too difficult to process. But in this instance, it may frankly slow things down. And if you don't go through that process, you open yourself up to procedural complaints in the court, not just substantive ones. That truth is that I think that Schedule F could be attacked substantively as well. We have not seen that happen. But again, you know, I'm worried that just the threat of this, will create an outflow of really critical talent, and we don't need that. Do you have any indication as to whether, like, we've known for a long time that Republicans' goal is to, in large part, break different facets of government in an attempt to kind of prove to the American people that government then doesn't work, and so they have a basis then, a justification to start funding to it. Do you think that that could be kind of a tangential benefit to what they're seeking to do?

is to, by putting, by virtue of putting incompetent people in charge, people who clearly don't know how to run their respective departments, that it will then give them a predicate to be able to turn around and say, look, look, this doesn't even work. It's not even worth, it's not even worth funding. We can get rid of the Department of Education because look how poorly it's being run. Look how, look how, I mean, but it's, but it's by virtue of his own people being there. Right. So listen, I think, you know, first I have to say that I don't even see this as a partisan question at the end of the day, there's huge argument about what our government should do. You raise the Department of Education. My view is big or small. Everyone, it's in everyone's

interest for our government to work effectively. Our democratic process should decide, you know, what things we're going to invest in. And once we make that choice, then we should have the best public infrastructure to get it done. So I think that there are plenty of Republicans that actually want large parts of our government to work effectively. The Veterans Affairs, VA, would be a great example of that. Or I mentioned 70% of the federal workforce is focused on national security issues. Historically, Republicans have been very, very strong on national security issues. So I think that there is actually common ground that our shared public institutions should work irrespective. I think what we're seeing today is something different. The key questions on

leadership should always be around competence. Do you have the large organizational management issues to run these huge places and character? Are you going to do this on? on behalf of the American people? Are you going to do this supporting the rule of law in our Constitution or because you're fulfilling your own private interests or the interests of the president? Those should be the issues that determine who's put in charge here. I'm hoping the Senate will be some check on the choices

and they will be examining that character and competence issue. And even more important, I hope the public is paying attention to the nature of these people being selected and what these agencies do. The saddest thing of all will be damage to our government and a public that doesn't understand that they've now lost something really important and therefore no accountability. That accountability is the only thing that's going to save us from having the boat just flipped rather than rocked. And I think that's especially important because a lot of times we don't recognize that things work well until we don't have them anymore. And so in this instance, if you don't know what the Department of Education is, if you don't know what VA is, if you don't know what the Department of Defense is, that might.

just be by virtue of the fact that they are working properly and that and that the alternative to that is is, you know, putting somebody like Pete Heggseth, putting somebody like Linda McMahon, putting somebody like, you know, Lee Zeldon at the EPA, RFK Jr. at Health and Human Services, putting them in charge. Maybe the first time that you know that those agencies exist solely by virtue of the fact that they are then not working as they're supposed to. So we will, of course, stay on top of this. Max, I want to thank you for your time and expertise here. It was great talking to you. Hey, thank you so much for paying attention.

Thanks again to Tommy and Max. That's it for this episode. Talk to you next week. You've been listening to No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen. Produced by Sam Graber, music by Wellesie, and interviews edited for YouTube by Nicholas Nicotera. If you want to support the show, please subscribe on your preferred podcast app

and leave a five-star rating in a review. And as always, you can find me at Brian Tyler Cohen on all of my other channels, or you can go to Brian Tyler Cohen.com to learn more. Thank you.