The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Why You Shouldn't Expect Good Policy || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: March 24, 2025

A nice convo with mom and dad can always yield some new ideas, so if all you get from this video is "give your parents a call" - I'll consider that a win. The TLDR of our convo is that you shouldn't expect good policy from the Trump Administration.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/why-you-shouldnt-expect-good-policy

Hey, L. Peter Zine here. I come to you from Colorado. I just had a phone call with my mommy and my daddy, where we talked about Trump and, hmm. And it occurred to me that the conversation could really be distilled into a fun video about why we should not expect any meaningful, positive evolutions in policy out of the Trump administration, really from any department. The way the U.S. federal system works is at the top of every department is something called a secretary. So secretary of defense, secretary of the interior, secretary of energy, all the way. that good stuff. And the primary job of the secretaries is not to make policy, is not to carry out the president's wishes. It is to keep the president informed of what is going on in their little circle of the world. The job of secretary as a political appointment has to be confirmed by the Senate. The next step down are the deputy secretaries. These are the people who are responsible for carrying out policy for the most part. There are again political appointees, again confirmed by the Senate, and they're in charge of the day-to-day operations and giving the orders and managing the department directly. So three-tier systems so far. President at the top gives the orders.

Secretary is one step down. They're the ones who keep the president informed and make sure he understands what's going on. And then the next step down are the deputy secretaries whose job it is to manage the department and push through the president's agenda. Below that, you get these multiple tiers. You get things called assistant secretaries and deputy assistant secretaries and executive secretaries. And this is where it shifts. And it's different department by department. But these are the folks who actually make the trains run on time. These are the people with the institutional knowledge of what's going on in the department in the sector. These are the people who have managed day in, day out, the staff of the department in its many thousands over the years.

They've been people who have been seeped in the culture and they know with the ins and the outs of how things work. They're the ones who actually implement any policy changes that come down. Now, the problem that we're having with the Trump administration is that most of these position, most of these technocratic positions are still technically political appointees. But established by tradition over the last 140 years, they're allowed to keep their positions year in, year out, administration after administration, because they're the ones who know how the things work. And so it is very, very rare for a president to dismiss anyone at this lower level because this is where the knowledge is. Well, Trump came in and fired them all in every department.

And in most of the cases, he replaced them with people who were politically loyal to him, but actually have no experience in the sector in question. So a great example. In the Defense Department, all of these top levels, there's only one person who has any experience in defense work. and it's experiencing as a contractor as opposed to policy or war fighting. So basically the top three levels of all the departments have been stripped of any knowledge of how these things work. Now, if your goal is to eliminate regulation by simply hobbling the institutions, you know, this is one way to do it. It's the expensive way.

And it's making sure that you can't react to anything in a crisis. So if something does go wrong in defense and energy and so on, there is no longer a cadre. of people who are capable of informing the president of what's going on because they don't understand what's going on the sector. And then there is no longer cadre of people who can do anything about it because those people have all been fired. You have to go down into your career civil servants and hope that they're competent enough and that they can upmanage the people above whom them who really aren't familiar with the sector at all. Now, you go below all that political pointe and managerial stuff. And eventually you get to the rank and file of the people

who do the jobs that Congress has mandated that they do. And of course, there's different categories of people here as well. The two that have been in the news the most are the provisional employees and the temporary employees. Now, provisional employees are people who have been onboarded into their department within the last two years, typically, and so they don't enjoy full civil service protections. They're not full members of the union. And so Daugge and Elon Musk has really gone after this class of people in firing them because they're easier to fire. But they haven't really paid attention to what they were doing. They just fired anyone that they could. One problem here is that Congress has mandated and appropriated money and was signed by the president in the budget for them

to do X, Y, and Z, the departments. And they need the staff to do that, including the provisional staff. So the question is whether or not the provisional staff can be fired. And in most cases where they have sued in the aftermath, either the labor boards or the unions or the workers themselves, they've won. Now, to the credit of some of these new secretaries who have come in, who do have some concept of what's going on, a lot of these provisional and temporary workers were fired before they even got confirmed. So they came into their departments denuded of staff and discovered that they were playing catch-up. Probably the best example of this that I have seen so far is Brooke Rollins of Agriculture. Now, I have said a couple of not nice things about her in the past. I need to

apologize for that. She was raised on a farm. She has a degree in agricultural development. So she has some concept of what's going in agriculture. She just hasn't worked in that space for her career as an adult. She was in the law firm and then ended up working for Rick Perry. Rick Perry? No, shit. Whoever the governor, Abbott, Governor Abbott of Texas now as well as in a conservative think tank. She's not dumb. She's got a college degree, but she hasn't worked in the agricultural space until now. So she comes in her first job and realizes that, you know, we're not testing for foodborne diseases. The people who are testing for bird flu are gone.

And so she is on her back foot trying to reconstruct this. And she has to do it by herself because the people that Donald Trump has put under her don't know what they're doing. So for every positive story we have like somebody like Secretary Rollins, we've got a negative story of someone like Pete Hagseth, the defense, our RFK Jr. Health and Human Services, who knows. very little about their department and maybe has a couple of ideological or crazy conspiracy level ideas about what they want to do, and they're surrounding themselves with people like themselves who also don't know anything about their departments. And the result is already pretty widespread dysfunction at higher cost than what we had before. And when I think of defense and I think

of health and human services, I don't think of optional departments. These are ones we kind of need. Now, as policy continues to break down and as management of these systems continues to crack, it's a question of what's geopolitical and what's not. I could spend months going through some of the disasters that are happening in domestic policy right now. But unless it hits American power, I'm going to kind of leave that one out. That still leaves me with a very rich tableau of things to work with, unfortunately. And we'll be covering lots of those in the days, weeks, and months to come.