The Ezra Klein Show - What is DOGE’s Real Goal?

Episode Date: March 25, 2025

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency is great branding. Who could be against a more efficient government? But “efficiency” obfuscates what’s really happening here.Efficiency to what end? Elon Musk, President Trump and DOGE’s boosters have offered various objectives — cutting the deficit, eliminating fraud and abuse, creating a leaner and more responsive government. But DOGE’s actions in the past two months don’t seem to align with any of those goals.Santi Ruiz is a senior editor at the Institute for Progress and the author and host of the “Statecraft” podcast and newsletter. He’s to my right politically and had higher hopes, at first, about DOGE’s efforts, but he’s now grappling with the reality of what it’s actually doing.This episode contains strong language.Mentioned:“50 Thoughts on DOGE” by Santí Ruiz“How to Defend Presidential Authority” by Santí Ruiz“The Anti-D.E.I. Crusader Who Wants to Dismantle the Department of Education” by Ross DouthatBook Recommendations:Stalin’s War by Sean McMeekinBack from the Brink by Peter MoskosPower And Responsibility by Romano GuardiniThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [e-mail] can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Elias Isquith, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Switch and Board Podcast Studio, Ryan Bourne, Rohan Grey, Don Moynihan, Quinn Slobodian and Jennifer Pahlka. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From New York Times opinion, this is the Ezra Klein show. When Doge was first announced after Donald Trump won the election, I knew a lot of people who thought it was a way to get Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy out of the Trump administration's hair. It's an old tradition in Washington. You have people who help you in the election, help you in the campaign, but you don't want them in the White House so you give them a blue ribbon commission somewhere

where you'll never hear from them again. Not how it worked out. The first person Doge purged was Vivek Ramaswamy. It became Elon Musk's operation. But in becoming Elon Musk's operation, it became central to how Donald Trump is trying to, and actually remaking, the federal government. But I gotta tell you, I hate the name Doge.

The Department of Government Efficiency. Not that it's not good branding, it is. But it obfuscates what's really happening here. Efficiency towards what? There is no such thing really as efficiency. Efficiency has to be in service of a goal. And you hear a lot of goals. There is no such thing really as efficiency. Efficiency has to be in service of a goal. And you hear a lot of goals.

Maybe it's here to make the government leaner, lower headcount. Maybe it's here to save money. Maybe it's here to make the government more responsive. What is it actually doing? What can we see after two months of its hack and slash operation through the federal government? And what does that suggest about where Donald Trump's term is going? One of the people who's been writing on Doge and thinking about it with the most clarity

in my view is Santi Ruiz. He is at the Institute for Progress. He's the author of the Statecraft Newsletter and the host of its podcast. He's somebody who thinks very deeply and often about how do you build a capable state? I mean, somebody to my right. So he has been much more open to the idea

that what Doge is doing is well constructed and well thought through, or at least was more open to it. Like everybody, he's trying to grapple with the reality of what it has really turned out to be. So I thought it'd be interesting to have him on the show to talk through it. As always, my email is roclineshow at nyt times.com. Santi Ruiz, welcome to the show. Thanks, Ezra. Good to be here. So I'm obviously a liberal and I'm pretty upset about what Doge is doing, but steel man it.

When liberals see Doge 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? So there's a couple threads and I'll try and steelman here. I've got my criticisms of Doge. You've heard them, you'll hear them. But I think there's a couple of threads here that are worth trying to take on their merits.

One is an experience of 2016 and 2020 where Trump admin felt it could not get control of the executive branch. And you see this in ways small and large. 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. It didn't work. 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. So there's one instinct that's just like, the president should be able to do things within the president's remit. 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. 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. We're in a different place on the national debt than we were five years ago, pre-COVID response. And when you talk to people in and around Doge, you hear the debt come up over and over again. 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, and this will never happen any other time. There's a strong instinct here, this is our one shot, and so if we're gonna err on one side, we have to err on the side of cutting too much,

and this is an Elon instinct, we can add things back later. I tend to disagree with that in specific places. I think we've cut some things that can't be easily undone, but that's very much the instinct. The Dems are going to stop us. They're going to come in and we're going to do crazy oversight in the house in a year and a half. Public opinion will just change over time because cutting things is unpopular. I don't think Musk is doing this because Trump wants somebody else to take the fall. I don't think that's a dynamic. Trump and Elon have been very close.

Trump is very proud of those things. 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. So I'll do it. I'm just very skeptical of this cutting the debt theory, not because we do need to cut the debt. We're spending more now on interest payments than we are on defense.

But every person I know who is a budget obsessive, and I've been doing this work a long time, I know. You've been in the field. I know budget obsessives, man. You can't imagine the things I've been doing this work a long time. I know. You've been in the field. I know budget obsessives, man. You can't imagine the things I've heard. Every one of them says, we're gonna have a higher debt in a year than today. 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. Because to shift the major streams of money, that's not Elon Musk running around with a sword. That is convincing Democrats and Republicans alike, or at least Republicans, that we should cut Medicaid and Medicare spending. That's maybe increasing taxes. And at the same time they're doing this Doge stuff, they're planning a $4.5, maybe $5 trillion

tax cut. So you can imagine a group of people obsessed with cutting the deficit. But you really do have to do that through Congress. You probably, I mean, given what we've learned over time, have to do that through some amount of bipartisan action in Congress. It's very hard to do it while you are cutting taxes. I don't know, man. Convince me, it's very hard to do it while you are cutting taxes. I don't know, man, convincingly it's not bullshit. 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, he's a debt hawk. If you want to get into welfare, if you wanna cut social security, if you wanna tell people you're cutting Medicare and Medicaid, you have to start with the other stuff, with the other 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. 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. I think that's definitely the view of some people in Doge, that you have to zero out the stuff

that isn't gonna make a huge difference, but because that's the only way popularly you'll be able to say, look, we really mean it. We're not just taking you to the cleaners. We're making the government smaller, period. Now I think, right, we're two months in. So you can kind of project a couple different views into the future and say, okay, 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 and then we can't touch the politically difficult stuff because it's politically difficult and that's why people don't reform welfare or You can you can say No, what's gonna 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. 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. Well, but what they keep talking about using Doge

to send a check back to every American. This is the best argument against the idea that it's a debt thing. I just, I always want to try to take people generously. If Donald Trump came in and Elon Musk in all these interviews as he kind of looks at and talks about how he 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.

And if it wasn't a fiscal emergency, we would extend them. But unfortunately, if we don't get the debt under control, we're not going to have a country anymore. So we just can't. It's a real shame, but people like me, Elon Musk, the richest dude in the world are going to have to pay higher taxes, but they don't, right? The whole thing is like the Department of Education and USAID and people working at the Social Security Administration.

And that's just not where the money is. And so you are not Doge, but you are, I think, a very fair-minded analyst of this. And so if you are still taking this theory seriously at all, I would like to know why, given what they are actually doing. This is again where maybe this is a cop out. I just keep coming back to the coalitional element of it. Is President Trump a deficit hawk? I don't think there's a lot of evidence for that, right?

Just based on the first term. But you've got a bunch of different actors in here, right? Russ Vought is touch tight to the president, was in the same role, the first admin and the second. He's been a lifelong deficit hawk. So like, what do you make of that? It's like a weird, it's a political coalition, right? You have actors with the president,

partially in the hopes that you can get your own thing squeezed in the door. That said, I do think Elon has a particular management style that has served him well in private sector, and you can point to specific things. Ruthless reduction of headcount and cost, headcount especially when he comes into places like Twitter, which were bloated at the time, reduction of cost especially in places like you look at SpaceX. He's an incredible penny pincher at SpaceX.

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. This happens at SpaceX all the time, and you're giving people stomach ulcers as they're producing fantastic rockets in record time. This is, I think, what has worked for Elon. He looks at it and says, this is the right way to do corporate restructuring to get results

that nobody else thought possible. People around him, you know, he keeps saying, you know, in private and in public, it's the source code. It's the source code. That's this is the problem with the federal government is not this or that regulation. We need to get deeper into it, right? This is an Elon instinct. 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. He says, no, we can do that. And we can synthesize a bunch of information. We can get a better view from the top of how money flows in the federal government. And from there, it will be much easier to cut the head off. So I want to pick up on that source code idea. So I was going through Elon Musk's recent interview with Ted Cruz. And there's a moment in it pretty early where Musk describes what he's doing differently,

a little bit to Ted Cruz's awe. Well, the government is run by computers. So you've got essentially several hundred computers that effectively run the government. And if you want to know... Did you know that, Ben? No. Yeah. So when somebody... 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. 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. Otherwise, you can't figure it out. Because all you're doing to reconcile accounting and get rid of waste and fraud, you must be able to analyze the computer databases. Otherwise you can't figure it out. Because all you're doing is asking a human who will then ask another human, ask another human, and finally usually ask some contractor

who will ask another contractor to do a query on the computer. Wow. That's how it actually works. So it's many layers deep. There's a genuine innovation here. He is doing this differently. So it's many layers deep. There's a genuine innovation here. He is doing this differently.

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. If you control the computers, you control the money. And if you control the money, you control the power. And that genuinely does seem like something no one here has tried before. Yeah, I think that's right. You can call it a West Coast or a tech or Silicon Valley instinct on the problem. 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 gonna lie to you. But you're not gonna get source reality from what the general counsel of a given agency says, that the career civil servants are gonna snow you, they're gonna wait you out, they're gonna slow walk you. And so in an effort to try and get to ground truth, this makes a lot of sense as kind of going down the chain, trying to figure out, okay, well, where is

the money going? 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. 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. 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. How is that money being used when it gets there? What actually is the nature of that grant? Why was it started? Why did the people who started think it was a good idea? 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.

How do you think about that as a way of learning about government functions? It's one way. It's a source of information. 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. Twitter and online in general is a more adversarial information environment than it used to be. The algorithm is designed to kind of surface conflict and Elon spends a ton of time consuming information there. 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. And he's very wedded to a really specific, concrete, memeable target. He likes those. 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. And I want you in different federal agencies, Doge team, find contracts, find things to cut and zero them out. 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 from this perspective. I mean, one example is the AHRQ, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, is this little agency within HHS. 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. So it produces all this evidence. It tries to get hospitals to adopt best practices to make it easier to share information about what you're doing,

you know, without being punished so that you can kind of better assess, okay, what is leading to deaths in hospitals? DOJ wants to zero that out. It's a cost center on the budget. It looks like, okay, that's, you know, half a billion dollars a year that we're spending on random research. Seems very plausible to me. Seems likely that that is a net money losing move to zero that out because we actually care a lot about money and lives, right?

Yeah, this is research that is supposed to help us cease with ineffective treatment. You can explain it better. And overtreatment of disease. There's 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. Like my view is we don't do nearly enough of that,

and we also don't enforce it enough, right? If I were running DOGE, I would expand that, but also pass legislation forcing hospitals to abide by more of it. But they're not, as you're saying. Yeah, without naming names, I can just tell you from conversations, I know there are people in Doge who think, fed shouldn't be in the business of this at all. We should just zero it out.

Right. And there are people who have this view, probably makes more sense to fold that in somewhere else. Maybe the NIH can, you know, ARC has a grants program. Why does it have a grants program? Let's stick that with the other health grants. We can rationalize and corporately restructure this and you zero it out now.

And then if Congress really wants it, we bring it back somewhere else. We save some money. So you have genuinely, you have both those views within this coalition, even within kind of the Doge team. So maybe the people who want to bring it back are getting played by the folks who really just want to zero out. But I definitely think there are actors within Doge who have very different long-term game

plans of how this plays out. I want to talk about this idea of zeroing things out and bringing it back. So there's a quote famously that Elon Musk gives to Walter Isaacson in his biography and he says, if you're not adding things back in at least 10% of the time, you're clearly not deleting enough. And the point of that quote is that when Musk is running things, he cuts 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.

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. Yeah. And it's an engineering feedback loop. And it's an engineering feedback loop, exactly. So SpaceX is trying to build rockets that go up into space and land and they're reusable. If the rocket blows up, you've done something wrong. Tesla, if the car doesn't work, if the door falls off, if it needs to be recalled, there's apparently a new cyber truck recall, you've done something wrong. Tesla, if the car doesn't work, if the door falls off, if it needs to be recalled, there's

apparently a new cyber truck recall, you've done something wrong. If customers don't like what you did, you've done something wrong. He's destroying, for instance, a bunch of data collection functions in the federal government. There's going to be no fast feedback loop on if that was a bad idea. Right now, they're cutting people from the IRS and the Social Security Administration. One of the things we are certain that's gonna do is lead to fewer audits.

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 gonna have four hours, three hours, two hours of waiting. It's gonna be very hard to get customer service. I know people, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was a big target for them. I've known people there who are working on financial scams.

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. But nothing's going to break. Those people are just going to get scammed and ruined. 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 very grand level a long-term risk management enterprise.

I guess steel man the argument for me, but then how do you think about the critique I'm making of that argument? This is the place where I have the hardest time steel manning the doge thing, because I think it's true. I think there are all kinds of benefits to those kinds of fast iteration cycles in engineering, especially when you have, you know, 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.

If you push a cracked engineer to the limit on rocket fuel and you say, 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. So far, there's not a lot of evidence that the people working on Doge are the best people

in the world to understanding federal contracting or where money flows despite having computer access. So I think you're right. 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?

Like the net effect is the same, that you broke something that you cannot easily repair. The first really big thing Doge does is decapitate USAID. And you write in your piece about how you had been before that aware of two very parallel streams of argument about USAID. They really never crossed over to each other. What were they? So, on the right, for a long time, predating Elon, predating even the Trump administration, you have these critiques of the nonprofit industrial complex, you have critiques about self-dealing in liberal circles, you have critiques about the efficacy of foreign

aid as administered by NGOs at all. The same time that the debate is playing out largely on the right without a ton 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? Do we actually know that this or that program is doing the things that we want it to do? The things that it says on the tin, is it reducing poverty in this African country? Is it increasing education? And you have this, I think, very rich debate on that side as well about, hey, we should

probably do this stuff better. We're probably wasting a lot of money. And both of these arguments have played out for the last seven years, at least, kind of, you know, if not longer. And what turned out in the, 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. People in the foreign aid community were shocked, no idea. Most of us were pretty surprised that Doge came in with this kind of decapitation attempt.

And people on the right were totally unfamiliar. People within Doge are not familiar with this idea that for a long time economists, 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. But were they unfamiliar with the idea or did they not wanna know and not care? Like on one of them, I don't believe they didn't know 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. I just think like this is where you get into this really tricky thing about what efficiency is doing here as a word. Sure. Because you can ask like how can I make something more efficient or efficiency can be a smoke

screen for a set of other projects. What do you think? Like, do you really believe what happened is they didn't know about this other debate or do they not want to? Ideologically, they don't like the idea of us spending money on aid to people who live in other countries. Genuinely, I think there's a lot of things going on. There's a whole bunch of different intellectual streams, a whole bunch of different actors

in this funky Trump coalition. 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. I think that absolutely exists. I think that exists within Doge itself. But people like Marco Rubio have been champions of foreign aid their whole careers. 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. Bush years in Africa and the Caribbean. And then apparently DOJ folks on the computers are zeroing out those grants as they're supposed to go out. So one of the problems is just it's kind of hard to tell from the outside who's doing what. I think we're getting more information as time goes on and you definitely have this sense that Doge as an entity doesn't think that these things should exist at all. So USAID was to me it was very revealing because there was no feedback loop. This is money we are spending to prevent bad things from happening to people in other countries,

poor people in other countries primarily. And they can't call up Elon Musk or their local member of Congress and get it turned back on. So this theory that what you're doing is deleting things and seeing then, oh, does something break? But you're not is deleting things and seeing then, oh, does something break? But you're not watching to see if something breaks. You're not doing a monitoring effort to see what happens to malnutrition in the Horn of Africa.

Yeah. But without defending this view, let me just tell you what I think they would say in response. If Americans don't care, you know, if there's not enough of a domestic outcry, why were we paying for it in the first place? Now, I disagree with that view, right? I like humanitarian aid. I like lifesaving work in Africa. But that is the kind of clear answer that they will give you.

Americans didn't care enough to turn it back on. If they cared, we'd hear from the senators and whatever. Well, they did hear from senators, right? Marco Rubio got yelled at and he said that he would save PEPFAR and then as you mentioned, they sort of deleted it. 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.

I guess maybe that there's an archive, but like, I mean, people cried out. Like a lot of people were mad about it, but they don't care. They exult in that. I mean, they have contempt for many of the, you know, the globalist worrying about children in Africa. I guess that's where you get into this question again of what is this all efficiency towards?

And I think it's important to bring this idea in. There's a view that these are all liberal power centers. Yes. 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, he was thrilled, was, oh, they're destroying this power center. Yes. All the liberals are paying themselves off and the nonprofits and it's a feeder. 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 USAID. The huge artillery of USAID grants that is like sending people to work on agricultural productivity in Ghana. 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? 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. I don't think I could predict it based on that. 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? I think I would get pretty close. Yeah. You know, Chris Ruffo is at the Department of Education right now. It's been a long time conservative goal to cut it since it began to exist, I think, in the 80s. Would we have seen that same attempt to kind of decapitate other ideological power centers without Doge?

I think probably. What have they picked first? 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. 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. You're definitely seeing that the tip of the spear is the stuff that they read as liberal power centers. 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. There are functions that the Trump administration cares about, for instance, controlling the export

and the sale of the highest end semiconductor chips to China. This is something that the Trump administration cares about. So there's a public admin interest in doing this. The Bureau of Industry and Security at Commerce that does that was really understaffed, really under-resourced, 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.

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. This is not like a self-serving or a Trump team ideological move. You're going to go back and realize, wait a second, we need to hire those people back. Right. This is something we are doing to compete with China, which they agree with. Yes. On AI, which they agree with.

So this is where I just, I have a less, maybe a less clear perception of those than you do. 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. We're just cutting stuff. We're cutting things. Good heart's law, the idea that any kind of measure becomes your target, it stops being a really good measure.

So the thing you're thinking about, once you hyperfixate on the measurement, looking at the numbers on the computer, you lose a sense of what's the actual reality that you care about. So in this case, great, we cut people from headcount here. The Bureau of Industry and Security is leaner and more efficient. You're going to run into this problem six months down the line or a year down the line. You want it to do things. Even if you're a small government conservative, I count myself in that category. I want BIS to do things.

It's going to be a lot harder now. So I think there's different things going on here, but they're not all fully aligned. I think there's a lot of things that the Trump administration itself will regret. In my reporting around Doge, something that just comes up again and again is people saying, look, there is no master plan. There's no document we're all working off of. There's no single objective. It's not all pointed towards one thing.

And we've been playing with different ideological objectives here, cutting spending and controlling the government and ideological purges. But I do think one thing that is a driving force of Doge is simply action, right? There's a huge bias towards action. And Trump himself has a big bias towards action, being able to show you are doing things, acting relentlessly. It's one of the very first things Trump said at the speech, the joint session of Congress. There's been nothing but swift and unrelenting action to usher in the greatest and most successful session of Congress. This administration likes the perception that they are moving with incredible force and

speed. Steve Bannon's flooding the zone idea and the assertion of power. 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. And his point is that everything burns. Nobody has any leverage on him. He's not there for the money.

He's not there to win anybody over. He's on a show that everything burns. And he said, yeah, there's an everything burns quality to this, a sense that they are showing that certainly with things like USAID, the 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. And so the way that you might have predicted what a Republican administration would be

capable of doing is gone. Like, they're more powerful than you ever could have imagined. I think there's definitely like a Schmidian, we're hurting our enemies, we're rewarding our friends thing going on. And you wrote a book about polarization. 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, we're just copying you now. There's a lot of like a memetic, this idea that, oh you were self-dealing, we're just gonna

punish all those people who are self-dealing. And I think this is always a defense for hyper-partisanship. It's like, they were doing it first, sorry guys. Like turnabouts fair play. 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. And your colleague Douthat pushes Ruffo on why do you want to zero out the Department of Education? Why not capture it?

Why are we trying to destroy it instead of staffing it with our own people and using it to achieve conservative ends? 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.

It would be really hard to use these tools for good governance. 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. But I think there's also this worry of administering these institutions is really hard. All the people who have done it for a generation are liberals. We don't have our own people who can do it better and easier to just cut it.

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. The left did this to us. It spends in a way that's completely self-dealing and it just rewards its friends and punishes its enemies. And it bothers me because not only do I not think it's true, I think it's untrue in a very obvious way.

So you look at what was the central legislative achievement of the Obama era, the Affordable Care Act. 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. 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. If you look at the, where it is building clean energy, where it is placing advanced manufacturing, it's red states. Red states have disproportionately won out that money. They've won that out partially

because it's easier to build there. And they've won it partially because this was actually a political theory of the Biden administration. You build a broad base. You will build a broad base. You will win back these Trump voters by showing that the benefits of liberal government flow to these places too. Biden talked a lot about how you had, you know, Republicans who voted against the IRA or voted against the infrastructure bill, but then they were out there at the ribbon cuttings, you

know, for this bridge or that project. Like the left actually has like literally, I'm not saying it doesn't give money to nonprofits that are, you know, progressive in their aims, of course it does, but that's because it believes in those aims. But it doesn't withhold money from conservative places or conservative people. You could just look right at the fiscal flows of its major legislation because it actually doesn't have the view that the right way to run government is just to reward your friends and punish your enemies.

Yeah, I think there's an asymmetry in that the left is redistributive. It wants to take the money in and then, 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 lots of Republicans want to keep the IRA credits, right? And I don't want to sit here and say, like, I support a politics of resentment. You know, like, it's not my preference. I'm trying to be descriptive here, though. And I think what people on the right notice is what they see as huge

opportunities for graft in the nonprofit sector from federal grants. People like Rufo look at the university system and they see the taxpayers pays money for riots at Columbia or, you know, pick your bogeyman, but he says that's funding your friends. And I think a lot of this just comes back to radicalization during COVID. I think during lockdowns, I think towards rationing of vaccines in blue states,

which you saw along racial lines, I would not underestimate how much that is a radicalizer on these lines that they reward their friends and punish their enemies. We should just do the same. I also think there's a reality that they've convinced themselves of things that aren't true.

If they were true, they would be very bad. But I think they're not true, but they do seem to me to be motivating action. 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. You made Teslas, you got invited to nice parties in Hollywood, and now they hate you. Why do they hate you?

And I want to play you Musk's answer. The single biggest thing that they're worried about is that Doge is going to turn off fraudulent payments of entitlements, I mean everything from Social Security, Medicare, you know, unemployment, disability, small business, administration loans, turn them off to illegals. This is the crux of the matter. Okay, this is the thing that, why they really hit my guts and want me to die. And do you think that's billions, hundreds of billions? What do you think the scale is of that? I think across the country,

it's well worth of 100 billion, maybe 200 billion. So, by using entitlements fraud, the Democrats have been able to attract and retain vast numbers of illegal immigrants. And by voters. And by voters, exactly. It basically bring in 10, 20 million people who are beholden to the Democrats for government handouts

and will vote overwhelmingly Democrat as has been demonstrated in California. So Musk has said a version of that a lot. The what he's doing and the reason left is so mad is that we're running a massive scheme to pay off illegal immigrants to vote for Democrats. I think he believes this. Do you think he believes this? That he believes this?

Yeah. Yeah, totally. So if you believe that, then a lot of what they're doing, I think, works backwards in a more straightforward way. If you believe this whole complex is really at every level about moving money around to entrench leftist power in a way that is like bad for America. Yeah, and I think this explains this view, which is pretty common on the right,

also explains why if it turns out there's not that much literal fraud in welfare, which I think is true, you know, improper payments in social security or something like 0.3%, according to, you know, the internal watchdogs. But if you think that actually kind of the whole project of some of these welfare programs

is to redistribute to your friends, to make new, you know, political machine, Tammany Hall style, pay for votes. Then I think you feel much better about taking the flame thrower to the whole institution. I've struggled with what I think is the generous interpretation of this actually. 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, 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. Because I think the thing that also has to be admitted here is they have control of the government.

The people of social security actually do know where the money is going. 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. Like that at some point is a choice to not ask somebody or track down the information about what you think might be happening here. I think Elon is interested in this question.

You saw, and I'll agree with you, he's an unreliable narrator. I don't think Elon loves the truth. 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. It's not like there's massive flows of money out the door to people who are pretending to be 135 year olds. But it is probably true that a lot of illegal immigrants are using those Social Security

numbers for various purposes. Elon's very interested in zeroing that out. And they've definitely, they've absolutely swept up normal people in there. You don't exist push on Social Security There are 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. But do you think that Doge is an entity is trying to Learn about the thing that it is trying now to control right? I mean we started this in a way talking about Musk trying to get at the ground level, right?

The payments data. And I think the appeal of that is it's much more, you know, it's objective. It's literally where the money is going. But where the money is going does require interpretation and you could learn about it. Do they want to, and do they want to know this better and are they getting to know it better? Or is what they want to use these as a kind of polarization strategy to maintain support for for what they're doing

I don't know if those are the only two options, but I'm definitely more dispirited than I was Two months ago about Doge's ability to learn on the job I think you know you saw very learn on the job. I think, you know, you saw very early on the sloppiness about federal contracts. Oh, we zeroed out a billion dollar contract and it's a million dollars and they're somewhat added three zeros. And you keep seeing that you actually keep seeing that lack of facility with numbers and they updated it later. These are not mistakes that have to happen. 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. It's like a very small team. You have a small team that is definitely not learning as quickly or improving as quickly as you'd want to see. And I think classically a good Elon private sector team would do by iterating. You're not seeing the same dynamic that I will say to Doge's credit is incredible branding, just incredible branding. Doge is a funny brand and it gets a lot of attention. 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. Behind Elon is Russell Vought, who's running OMB.

OMB is a very powerful nerve center of the federal government. We talked about Vought earlier in terms of that he is classically somebody who does want to cut government spending. So not all he wants to do. He's got a pretty big theory of how the government should work. You had him on your show. I found that to be a very, very helpful episode for understanding him. What does he want? How does the ideal government or at least executive branch of Russell Vaught function? Vaught believes in a unitary executive theory, 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. It reports personally. So on this theory, there's really no such thing as an independent executive branch agency. People like the president, that's democratic accountability. VOT 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. He thinks presidents should have the power to impound money, 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. So it's in some ways a very capacious view of presidential power. There was this OMB memo that went out early on freezing grants and different kinds of spending, and it ended up being rescinded and kind of rejected by the courts. 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. Yes. And I think this is important for understanding them because it gives you a definition of responsiveness. 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. Or when the government is doing something, it should be able to do that quickly and well. But government responsiveness in this definition is very responsive to the executive. When Donald Trump wants to do something, the government responds and it does that thing. And this feels like a very, it is their theory of what went wrong in the first term on some level. 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. And that is responsiveness, that Trump has genuine control of the thing that he is in theory in charge of. I guess, first, do you think I'm misrepresenting that in any way? No, I think that's right. 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, you know, the Federalist society view that you have bureaucrats who are out of control, they need

to be disciplined. The place where it does not rhyme with that kind of more libertarian or small government view is this idea of impoundments. That view that presidents have some piece of the power of the purse is much newer. It doesn't have the kind of deep ideological threads that views about the rogue bureaucrats do. And Vought combines these two in a very interesting way.

So I want to reveal what will not probably be that surprising, but like this is my integrated theory of Doge and VOT and the Trump administration fully. Which is that the right way to think about Doge is it's the Department of Government control. There's versions of it that VOT 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. 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. And if you have that, you have enormous power. If you combine impoundment and you combine you're running this through deciding, you know, which payments go and don't go, then you've turned money into an incredible source of power and leverage. And you can use that ideologically. You could use that just to try to achieve policy goals. You could use that as a leverage over friends and enemies, right?

Donald Trump is a guy who loves leverage over friends and enemies. That's the whole play here. You're making the thing respond to Donald Trump because you're giving him control of the money and you're doing that, you know, through the legal theory of impoundment and the actual grabbing control of the computers. Tell me how reasonable you think that is or poke your holes in it. I think that's largely right.

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? 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, not especially sturdy constitutional reading of the power of the purse.

But what people like vote would say and do say is this is what the branches are for. And if you don't like it, Congress, or if you don't like it, courts, you have to assert your own prerogatives. Like the whole point of the system the kind of a Madisonian sense is the executive tries to do a bunch of things and he runs into the wall of the courts and As vote will point to you know Vance and Trump and all these people have said like the president will abide by these rulings Even if they're crazy district judges and Congress if you don't like this Well, that's kind of said maybe he shouldn't.

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. But Vance has sort of said this too. I mean, he sent out this tweet basically saying that it is the courts overstepping their bounds. I mean, it depends how you understand it, like what is the proper role of the executive branch.

But I think Vance's sense of, 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. 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. This isn't a kind of, well, we should have checks and balances. It feels to me, and this is something I really worry about, it feels to be clear that they are preparing for a showdown with the courts. I think there's different versions of war with the courts. Some of them, for me, are five alarm fires. SCOTUS says something and you say, no, we're going to do it our own way. That's very bad.

I think there's other places where people say explicitly, we think the 1974 Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional. DOJ is going to create a case for that. We want that to go to SCOTUS. We would like to have that fight because we think that law is unconstitutional. To me, that instinct is not crazy. I think they're wrong, I think SCOTUS should rule. The question is what happens if they lose.

Yeah. I did not think this at the beginning, I think it now, that if they don't get a lot of what they want from Roberts, they are really gonna try to get around that. And they're gonna 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. These planes were over international waters. That was a provocation to the courts. A different administration wouldn't have done that. They are attempting to assert a huge amount of power.

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. And you would be very carefully choosing cases, creating a conflict that generates a case that is favorable to you. You would want what the lawyers call model test case. And you would be acting in a way that is fairly respectful of the courts because you would be trying to politically hold them on your side. This thing where they are knocking through the glass left and right, where the test cases are really bad,

where they are annoying the courts, where they are then sort of defying the courts and saying the judges should be impeached, unless you have a view that the right way to manage John Roberts politically is to try to cow him. I think that is basically how Donald Trump deals with everybody, so maybe that is his view. But in a world where what you're trying to do is get a favorable role 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. 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.

So that's an administration that looks to me like they are preparing for shutdown. And ultimately the unitary executive three might need a showdown. I think that's what you're gonna get I think you know 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 we want to we want to refight them and what happens next I don't I'm not gonna pretend to tell you in advance but the 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. 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? Because efficiency is not a helpful word. I think efficiency is a word that obscures things. Well, efficient towards what? Efficient towards following the law? That's something different, right?

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 the imperial precedent, I think you would be predicting things at a fairly high level of accuracy. 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. So Hakeem Jeffries is a speaker.

So now there's a lot of oversight happening. Donald Trump is at 39% in the polls, which seems very plausible to me, maybe lower. He's at this point a lame duck, though probably doesn't wanna be. And now you have a house that is not letting them do things. And you have a Supreme Court that maybe already has or is ruling that impoundment is unconstitutional. Does Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and Russ Vought and on the outside at this point, Elon Musk,

all say to themselves, well, it's a good try everybody. Like we fought the good fight and we lost. Or as like the final act of this, no, fuck you. 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. Right now the walls haven't begun closing in, but even the little bit that they have,

they've really reacted badly to. What happens when they really do? I don't know how to answer the hypothetical. I'd be curious how you read the first term in office on this model, because Trump lost in the courts. Yeah. Put a bit. I read it exactly like this.

The easiest way to understand the difference between the first and the second term is that 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, like as thoroughly a mainstream figure as you could possibly find. The administration is full of people who saw part of their role as keeping Donald Trump caged. And in the second term, it's Donald Trump Jr. who is like a right wing now acceleration a scraper.

Elon Musk has pushed Donald Trump to go further than Donald Trump would have gone without Elon Musk. Russ Vought wants to go further. JD Vance's only chance of power is that it all works out for Donald Trump. And if you look at the staffing, it's very, very, I think, radical people. There's no people who are slow down. And you really see this, I think, with the reaction of the markets. 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, but there are a lot of people around him like Gary Cohn, who are creatures of the markets, Jared Kushner, would say, okay, like, you know, we want the economy to be good here. This time, when the markets began going down, clearly they are self-confident enough to say, we know better than the markets. You got to expect a little bit of short-term turbulence here. So I think this is a very different administration

where you have a disinhibited president surrounded by disinhibitors. I think a lot of that reading is really plausible. And I think to what extent you're concerned about that depends on a couple of things. One is just, are you ideologically aligned with Trump? And one is how much do you think personalist presidencies themselves, presidencies that are incredibly dominated by the executive are bad in themselves? I was reading one of the books I was gonna recommend

to you at the end of this conversation. It's a book called Stalin's War by Sean McMeekin. 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 or without better information about what are

the Soviets really thinking. 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. 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, you know, we get rolled by the Soviets on all kinds of lend-lease things. He's a worse negotiator for being surrounded

by only people who agree with him at Tehran in 1943. 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. I mean, it reminds me of Curtis Yarvin, whose influence I think can be overstated,

but it's somebody many people in the administration have read and found interesting, let's call it that. 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. That's my monarchy, right? It's FDR at the height of his powers. And I think he's, if you read him closely, I think he's, that's not quite true.

But you know, he's has this idea that the whole thing should be more like a corporation. 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. Whenever people say, well, you should run government like a business. Well, a business doesn't have multi-party competition, like separated across branches. A business is a very different kind of structure. It's got a board of directors. It does have some internal checks potentially. But we built our system this way

because we think there's value, not necessarily to inefficiency, I think that loads a deck, but information is getting sourced from places, right? The fact that the bureaucracies of all people who are career civil servants, that's not just a protection against patronage. It's also, they know things.

They know things because they're not switched out every four years. 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. Even within parties, Congress is supposed to be a generator of information and friction because what Lisa Murkowski knows, what John Thune knows, what any sort of individual member knows given that they're representing a geography in a different place, is supposed to be absorbed into the machinery of government.

And this idea that you would have it all just sort of coming down from Donald Trump rather than going up to Donald Trump. 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. Again, the places that I worry most about Doge right now, aside from things like PEPFAR, which I just think is those cuts are a travesty, there are information sources within the executive branch that we all care about that 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.

There are a bunch of surveys about K through 12 and higher education, for instance, at DOE that we're losing, and we're losing the ability to track this important longitudinal data. That stuff is, if you're conservative and you think that public schools are failing, that's what shows you that. So I totally agree. I also think to the corporation or the business model question, should the government be run like a business, there are lots of ways for employees at a functioning private sector

company to surface negative information that you're not seeing right now. There were a lot of proposals when Doge came in, source savings ideas from people at the agencies and cut them in on a share, you know, give back 10% across the agency for any savings that you can find, the, you know, software licenses that we don't need, etc. That's the sort of thing where you would see aligned incentives in a private sector company. That's a good idea. And you're not seeing that.

You're seeing a lot of top down, if you've read James Scott, seeing like a state, you know, the view from above with very little granularity from below. Or seeing like a payment system. Seeing like a payment system, right? Corporations do a pretty good job of sourcing information from the bottom. 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. So I think that would be an improvement over the kind of Doge model.

I don't think what you're seeing from Doge is exactly running a business application, something different. You asked me a version of this question earlier. 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. Let's say we do have the sort of backlash to this. Let's say Democrats

win in 2026 and then a Democrat wins in 2028. What should they learn from Doge? If Democrats wanted to make the government more efficient, where would you tell them to start? Do they? Is this a, I mean, this is the, this is the The entertain hypothetical. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Josh Shapiro wins, you know, and Josh Shapiro's run, I think he's a guy who's worked a lot on procurement reform in the state and permitting and let's say they all get abundance pill and...

Totally. You know, and they come to you and they say, look, you've been working on this for a long time. You've been interviewing people about this for years. You know, maybe they don't want to, but they're going to ask you. What are you going to tell them? There are a couple of things that again, maybe I'm naive. 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. 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. OPM can basically hand out accepted service slots. They can say, getting you into that position is critical for the national interest. And so you can just get hired private like you would in the private sector. Someone can just say, Hey, this guy's great. We're hiring him starts next week. The Biden admin did that for the chips office and the chips office was staffed very well. A bunch of folks from Wall Street, a bunch of rock stars, very quickly.

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. They eventually then passed also a bill from Ted Cruz and Mark Kelly exempting CHIPS from the National Environmental Policy Act. That's right. I thought it was very telling that, you know, well, if we're going to do this right, we certainly can't run it the way we run the rest of the government. Yeah.

Like, what does that say about the way you run the rest of the government? 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, will be them constituencies, so you'll need somebody who's willing to split that Gordian knot. The National Environmental Policy Act have large bases of support on the left,

and people like you are trying to change how we think about that, especially on the left. Again, one reading of what Doge is doing is that the cutting comes early. You take Machiavelli's advice that you do all the cruelty at the beginning, and then you dole out the good stuff later. You know, and people forget what came first, and they remember all the nice things you did.

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. It will have things it wants to achieve. People like JD Vance, who are their own actors and want to build their political futures, will want to achieve things. And to do that, you're going to need to do things like fix federal hiring.

You're going to run into the same, there are 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. 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. That's gonna require filling in after

Doge cuts. 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. They want to be able to plant the stake and say, I did that. I think that's a good place to end. Then also our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? So Stalin's War is one, which I just think is a tremendous history, slightly revisionist, but not beyond the pale.

Just Stalin's a much worse actor than you remember him from your World War II experience or World War II education. You know, I actually, it's a pretty limited my World War II education. From when you served. It's a pretty limited my role in the experience. Yeah. But a really eye-opening book also just about diplomacy and the ways that you can tell yourself things that aren't true and convince yourself. I just had a guy named Peter Moskos on Statecraft. His book is coming out in a couple weeks. It's called Back from the Brink and it's the story of the 90s crime decline in New

York City. He did a fantastic oral history, talked to basically everybody who's still alive and able to discuss it. 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. And it's a really interesting management history. But the real revolution was just almost a kind of Muskegon,

we're just going to hold you accountable to these numbers and we're going to call you in every week at seven in the morning, and you're going to show me that you know all about this specific area. 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. It's just a remarkable success story. 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 short book called Power and Responsibility, 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 do we need to be in a world where the bomb exists, where we've built a crazy new kind of power over each other, what are the demands on us to be better leaders, how exactly do you have to change now that you live in a world where the bomb exists?

I find it a useful starting point for thinking about the next few years. I have to say you've really narrow targeted my interest in these three book recommendations. I think you've sold me. Okay. Santi Ruiz, thank you very much. Ezra, it's a pleasure. Thank you. This episode of The Azuclanchos is produced by Roland Hu. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker, and Kate Sinclair.

Mixing by Isaac Jones with the female Shapiro and Amin Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Elias Isquith, Kristin Lin, and Jack McCordick. We have original music by Pat McCusker, audience strategy by Christina Simuluski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times of Pinnion Audio is Andy Ross Strasser, and special thanks to Switch and Board Podcast Studio,

Ryan Bourne, Rohan Gray, Don Moynihan, Quinn Zolabodian, and Jen Polka.