Today, Explained - Trump’s government purge

Episode Date: January 28, 2025

Trump is remaking the federal government in his name, says Vox’s Andrew Prokop. Efforts at a more efficient government may have a point, says Jennifer Pahlka, who co-founded the precursor to DOGE. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy and Travis Larchuk, edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Amanda Lewellyn, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Rob Byers, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members An Elon Musk X post about DOGE displayed on a phone screen. Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Donald Trump said he'd end the war in Ukraine in his first 24 hours in office. He did not. He also said he'd immediately slash grocery prices, yet my eggs keep costing more, Donald, but he has delivered on a bunch of other promises. If you heard yesterday's Today Explained, you know the pardons are flowing as are the deportations, and he's really shaking up the federal government.

He fired a dozen or maybe more inspectors general late Friday night with zero notice. That's not even legal. On Monday, he fired another dozen or so prosecutors who worked with Jack Smith. They can sue and they're lawyers, so probably. And then he also just issued a pause in federal grants, loans, and financial assistance,

apparently until his administration can make sure all that money is being doled out in line with their priorities But he's also trying to deliver on that ancient promise of his to drain the swamp And that is where we are gonna focus our energy on the show today Hey Spotify, this is hobby my biggest passion is music and it's not just sounds and instruments. It's more than that to me It's a world full of harmonies with chillers from streaming to shopping. It's on Prime Mike has always wondered what makes some people want to play action hero when I see people speeding or skydiving

Or surfing on hundred-foot waves, I always think, are you crazy? What are you doing? Because I'm like risk averse. I'm trying to like, you know, keep Mike in one piece. But what about people who get their thrills from playing pop? This week on Explain It to Me, Citizens Arrest, is it a real thing? And should it be? New episodes every Wednesday. Today Explained, Sean Ramisferma here once again with Andrew Prokop, senior correspondent at Vox. Andrew, we've seen lots of pardons. We've seen deportation. How is Trump to doing so far on reshaping the federal government? Trump has come out the gate very aggressively in his first week in office, but in ways that

I believe are only the tip of the iceberg. I think that he and the people around him, most notably people from Silicon Valley, have very grandiose ambitions to reshape the federal government. And we are seeing the beginning of those plans being put into action, but not yet anywhere near the end. When you talk about people from Silicon Valley, are you talking about Elon Musk, who of course is still in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency,

RIP Vivek uncle, which of course pledged to cut two trillion from the federal workforce, or are we talking about something else? Elon Musk has been installed at DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, which is in practice a rebranding of the United States digital service is in practice a rebranding of the United

States Digital Service. It got a mission statement, which is about modernizing government technology, but it's been pretty quiet so far from them. We don't know exactly what they're up to yet. But Musk's efforts are being undertaken in concert with various other appointees at other agencies who have been much more aggressive getting started very quickly. So the most dramatic stuff so far has come from the United States Office of Personnel Management, OPM.

This is kind of like a sleepy, process-minded agency that oversees the federal civil service, government benefits, HR, practices for hiring, and not generally an action center for big controversial policy fights within the American government until now. So let me go through a few of the things that OPM has done just in the past week. They issued the instruction that almost all remote work has to end and federal employees must return to government offices five days a week. They called for the names and information of any employees who have been employed for less than a year because that's called probationary status

and they are easier to fire. They took various moves instructing agencies to reclassify certain positions that had career civil service protections as not having those protections anymore, making it easier for Trump to fire many civil service workers. And they also, as part of Trump's executive order rolling back DEI programs across the federal government, OPM said that all federal employees working on DEI must be placed on

paid administrative leave immediately. They even sent out a note to federal workers saying that if you are aware of any DEI programs that since the election have been renamed something else in an effort to kind of disguise or hide them, tell us now. So we're really seeing something we haven't seen before which is OPM being used as kind of an instrument of control of intimidation, an effort to instill fear into federal workers, perhaps to convince some to quit, perhaps scare some straight in Trump's view to make them less inclined

to defy him in any way. And it's also worth mentioning that the newly installed Chief of Staff at OPM is Amanda Scales, who was just recently working at XAI, which is Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company. So that's why a lot of people think what's happening at OPM is part of this larger Elon and the TechRight effort. Okay, so we've got a really broad effort here

to shake up federal agencies between returning employees to the office, removing these protections from various classifications, rolling back DEI, getting rid of people who've been around for less than a year. What is the greater goal here? Is it just to lay off a bunch of people?

I think we are seeing the beginning of what will be a pretty wide-ranging project to really take aim at the federal government to dismantle the way it works and perhaps to build it back differently. And I think there are a few different motivations from different people involved in the MAGA coalition behind this project. First you have Trump himself. Trump views the permanent civil service as kind of a deep state that is reflexively anti-Trump,

hostile to him, inclined to investigate him, inclined to say stuff he's doing is illegal or immoral or can't work. He wants to have greater control over the executive branch. He wants employees not to leak against him, not to resist what he's trying to do, and not to raise pesky concerns about potential corruption or the legality of his policies. So that's Trump. Second I'd say is the longtime conservative coalition that's been defined by hostility

to government and wanting to scale back government. Less regulation, less bureaucracy, government is hostile to big business and so on. Then third, I would look at several of the very wealthy Silicon Valley figures who have endorsed Trump in 2024 and who are deeply involved in Musk's Doge project. You know, if you are someone who funds startups from Silicon Valley or has run them, you are used to looking at the way things work, the existing system, and it looks to you like it's very inefficient, bloated, ripe for disruption. There are sort of understandable reasons to believe this.

Like, there are many dysfunctional things about the way the federal government works. A lot of people have very legitimate frustrations with it. Of course, the approach of many in Silicon Valley is to kind of move fast and break things, shake things up, and establish something new. So I think part of that is what's going on too. But then there's also a fourth motivation from some other figures on the tech right that I think is really important here. For this, I think we should look at the words of Mark Andreessen, who is a big venture capitalist guy,

very close to Elon Musk, has been involved in Doge's planning and hiring of people for it. Here's what Mark Andreessen posted on X this Sunday. The long 20th century was 1915 to 2024. The 21st century starts in 2025. He's viewing this in grandiose historical terms. He wrote that about laying off federal employees? I think the ambitions are broader than that. OK, yeah. He goes on that the unifying theme of that long 20th century

was managerialism, systems at scale run by expert managers credentialed by elite institutions, a method now increasingly exposed as ineffective, corrupt, moribund, stagnant, rotten, demoralizing and demoralized time for change. Andreessen recently appeared on a New York Times podcast and he said they have plans for how to pull on three different threads, the federal government spending, the money, but also the headcount and the staffing side. They have plans on how to do it that are, I would just say, light years beyond anything I've ever heard of before. You just have the smartest entrepreneur

of our entire generation who's like the conceptual genius of our time across multiple domains. And they have plans where I think when people see them, I think people are going to be like, oh, I didn't realize that that's the way that you could go about this. They are at least thinking about stuff on the scale of FDR level change. And I don't think we yet know exactly what they're going to do. We don't have anywhere near the full scope of it, but they're shooting for the moon. They're not coming at this like they're going to make minor incremental changes. Some of them are even shooting for Mars here. I do think it's important that we remember that while clearing out the federal government, you are affecting thousands

upon thousands of families with mortgages and kids and schools and all the rest. I've been at my job for nine months. I really love my job. I'm a little worried I'm gonna lose it. I am very confused and don't know what to do. I have a disability. I had temporary accommodations. I feel that the fear and confusion is on purpose. It's to make us leave. Is there going to be any pushback along the way, Andrew? Are there going to be challenges in court or is this all within Trump and OPM and Doja's purview? Oh, there's going to be tons of challenges in court. Some are gearing up already, it's clear.

Trump tried to fire the inspectors general positions within agencies that are in charge of investigating malfeasance or misconduct, but there's a law that says that he can't do that in that particular way. But I think what we're going to find out is how much can Trump and his people, how much can they do and make it very difficult for anyone else to undo later, even if they get a slap on the wrist from the courts later on? I think we're even if they get a slap on the wrist from the courts later on. I think we're seeing that they are going to push the limits of their executive authority

as far as they can go. They've already done several things that seem clearly illegal and likely doomed for court rebuke, but they don't seem to care about that very much. They think right now what's important is Pushing ahead as hard as they can while they have the chance Andrew Procop box.com you also heard the voices of some federal employees That tape came to us from our friends at 1A over at WAMU 88.5 Public Radio here in Washington, DC. Mr. Musk goes to Washington when Today Explained returns. This episode is brought to you by Samsung Galaxy.

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I'm Jennifer Polka. I'm a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center and the author of Recoding America. What's that about? Well, the subtitle is Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better. And it looks like a tech book, but it's really about how government just needs to kind of move into the modern era more generally. So when you see what our new and former presidents trying to do right now with Doge and all the rest, the Office of Personnel Management, all that stuff, are you kind of like, heck yeah, someone needs to do that?

Or what's your reaction? I think it's more, I wish Democrats had been as bold as they are being. I do think that there is enormous work to be done. I am going to remain optimistic as long as I can that the Trump administration will do that work in a way that has long-term positive impacts. So you're saying you wish Democrats had done more, and you were part of a Democratic effort to do more. Could you tell people about what that was called and how it went?

Yeah, I came to federal government in 2013 to be part of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. I was actually recruited to run a fellows program, but what I told them I wanted to do, and in fact they were already thinking about doing, was really upending the whole approach to technology and service delivery. What we realized was that we could potentially build a SWAT team, a world-class technology office inside of the government that was helping across agencies. We've dubbed that the U.S. Digital Services.

And we've got some of the top talent from Google, from Facebook, from all the top tech companies. So the USDS is the United States Digital Service. And unlike Doge, which a lot of people know because it's got a very famous guy in charge and also because it's a meme coin, I imagine most people haven't actually heard of the US Digital Service,

which is maybe part of the problem. What were y'all doing and why didn't people know about it if they didn't? I think one of the reasons is that the way to change things sustainably is to help agencies change themselves. And so while the United States Digital Service has, and I think will at least for some time continue to, take folks with fantastic digital expertise and put them in agencies and help them do things differently, you really at the end of the day can't do it for them forever, right? And in fact what you're doing when you go into those agencies is finding people who

already were really hungry for different ways of doing things. And so they have been quite quiet about their many successes, in part because the successes needed to be the agency's successes, in the sense that when an agency works with USDs on something like, say, online passport renewal, which rolled out several months ago and has been quite successful, it's successful because of the combination of both the new approaches that the USDs brings in and the willingness and ability and energy by, in that case, the Bureau of Consular Affairs to say, yes, we're gonna adopt these new ways of working.

And in fact, in the best case scenario, they don't just adopt them for the project they're partnered on, but they take that into other projects and say, we're gonna use new tools, new approaches, and we're gonna start doing things fundamentally differently across the board. So is DOGE, which is this new effort, the Department of Government Efficiency, just like a USDES 2.0?

Is it literally going to be some of the same people or is this an entirely new outfit trying to reach the same end more or less? It's hard for me to know exactly what it will be because I only know what they've said about it. They did rename the U.S. digital service the U.S. Doge service. The people who work at USDS who are mostly, you know, assigned out to agencies doing great projects, some of them are still doing that. I mean, it's only been a week, but they're still doing that.

And I don't see any reason why DOJ would say, hey, you who are working on modernization at the Social Security Administration, you don't do that anymore. Like, that's still very, very important work. They've also stated that there will be a team of four that goes into each agency that's a DOJ team that sounds like it's separate, I think, from whatever agencies have USDS staff attached to them

at the moment. And those teams from DOJ will have a team lead, a lawyer, an HR person, and an engineer. And it sounds like what they're meant to do is sort of a full scale review of how that agency might be more efficient. They've said they intend to look at staffing cuts. They've also said they intend to look at reducing the regulatory load, essentially. Like there are a lot of regulations that agencies both put out, but also regulations that sort of constrain what the agencies can do in their own operations. And I think it'd be great, actually, if the DOGE teams looked at that and said, these

are some ways that we might change these regulations to make the agency able to move faster and serve the American public better. The other thing we know which we've covered on this show is that Elon Musk at least and formerly Vivek Ramaswamy said that they aimed to cut two trillion dollars worth of federal agencies, federal workers. When you heard that number, as someone who's been in this work before, what did you make of it? Because our colleague Dylan Matthews, who helped us cover that news, said the betting money is they don't get anywhere close. Somewhere there's already a doge clock counting down savings that I have heard of.

Two trillion, they've even even acknowledged is not remotely possible without Congress really taking the axe to programs that the American public really cares about. So I don't think that's going to happen. What I heard when I saw that and then saw that they rolled it back is that they're going to learn a lot and they're going to have to learn it quickly. And anybody who comes in from outside government thinks that they rolled it back is that they're gonna learn a lot and they're gonna have to learn it quickly and anybody who comes In from outside government Thinks that they know how to change things in fact

I was one of those people and I spent now 15 years learning how much harder it is than it looks and I think I've also Hopefully spent 15 years figuring out things that do work and I hope they can figure those things out because they have more power than our existing USDS and they have very, very strong backing from the executive. So I hope they learn very quickly. Let's expedite the process for them.

I don't know if uncle Elon listens, but I mean, if you could offer him any advice, maybe you already have. What would you tell him as he's embarking on this, his first major government venture? Well, you tell him as he's embarking on this, his first major government venture? Well, there's some signals he's giving that I think I've sort of sent a general thumbs up on, which is things like, it's probably a pretty good use of advanced technologies

like large language models to go in and say, let's try to understand the law as it exists, the regulations as this agency is subject to, and figure out what's really serving us and what's not, because we are subject to really decades, even centuries of regulatory cruft. Now, I'm not talking here about taking the shackles off of private industry, which I think is also an interest of his, and I know he's spoken quite a bit about because he's subject to those. I'm talking about the shackles on the administrative state that make it hard for it to move.

So he's going to bring some new tools to the table to be able to understand that stuff better. I think he could shake things up in a way that could be good. It could be good in the hands of this current administration. It could also be really good in the hands of others who have competing goals. Where I think he and his colleagues are going to have trouble is it's really easy to walk in and say these people, because what they're doing, frankly, often does seem kind of crazy, right? Like, if you don't know how bureaucracy

works, you really just don't see how many barriers exist, how many hoops people have to jump through. And it's easy to say these people must be stupid or bad because they're jumping through these hoops. They didn't put those hoops there. Congress did, or the agency did, or the executive branch did. And I think there's almost always an arc from judging civil servants to having a lot of empathy for them. And I hope he follows that path. That's one of the things I try to point out when people say, you know, this is the same thing with big companies, all bureaucracies are the same, and the skills that you might have changing a company

can be used on government. Yes, some of the skills are relevant, but we only have one government. We only have one Social Security Administration. We only have one IRS. And in the marketplace, if a company fails, another company takes its space, and that doesn't happen in government,

then people get hurt. Jennifer Polka, she helped found the United States Digital Service, which is somehow now called the United States Doge Service. What a time to be alive. Abhi Shai Artsy and Travis Larchuk made our show today. They were edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Amanda Llewellyn. My voice is going.

It was mixed by Andrea Kristen's daughter and Rob Byers. I'm Sean Ramos for him. And this has been Today Explained. I'll stop talking now.