Santi Ruiz (0:00)

Hi, this is Santi Ruiz. You're listening to Statecraft. Doge is the most interesting story in state capacity right now yet. Although we've talked around it on this podcast, I haven't covered it directly since the beginning of the administration. In part that's because of the whirlwind pace of news, but also because of the sense I get in talking to other Doge watchers that were like blind men feeling different parts of the elephant. And frankly, we've avoided talking about it because it's the most polarizing issue in public discourse right now. But we're far enough into the administration that some things are clear, and I think it's relevant for Statecraft listeners to hear how I'm personally modeling Doge. We're also far enough along that it's worth taking stock of what we expected and forecasted about Doge, where we were right and where we were wrong. So instead of an interview today, I'm going to read you this essay I wrote, which is also on the newsletter@www.statecraft.pub. it's called 50 Thoughts on Doge, and I try to keep these thoughts as concise as possible. Effective altruists do this thing in their online posts where they specify the quote unquote epistemic status of a post, how confident they are about the claims they're making. The epistemic status of this essay is low to medium confidence. Two things before I start one I'm pretty stuffy today, so I apologize if you hear that, and 2 this essay is structured as a list, so if there are places where there's a discontinuity in how I'm reading, just know that I'm going from bullet point to bullet point. And I'll note that this essay the transcript form contains a lot of links to the stuff I've been reading over the past two months. I tried to cite as many of the smart people I've been paying attention to as I could, so it's a richer text than this audio version. Okay, I'll get started. We're in an extraordinarily adversarial information environment. This is too broad a topic to really do justice to here, and if you spend time on the Internet, you likely have your own view on this. But my view briefly Elon Musk has many great strengths, but he is not a reliable narrator. Elon has also engineered his Twitter experience in a way that constrains the information he is able to receive, which adds to this problem of being an unreliable narrator. Elon also spends a prodigious amount of time on Twitter. The feedback loops he generates from tweeting shape his actions at Doge to a degree I did not expect. In 2020, a guy named Venkatesh Rao wrote, online public spaces are now being slowly taken over by beef only thinkers as the global culture wars evolve into a stable, endemic background societal condition of continuous conflict. Elon has noticed this trend. He enjoys partaking in beef, and he's incentivized beefing as the modal form of Twitter engagement since taking over the company. The algorithm rewards beefing much more now, but it's not just Twitter subscriber capture. The incredible incentives for mainstream media outlets to cover Trump as salaciously as possible, and the architecture of the Internet itself all make it very difficult to find reliable narrators. The media actors rewarded in this ecosystem are those who are good at leveraging and maintaining beefs with other actors, which in practice means partisans of various kinds. All of the above means that Elon looks into problems in the federal government that are largely driven by institutional capture, structural incentives, and overregulation, and he sees them instead as problems of waste, corruption, and fraud. Again, I don't think this is about Elon's personality so much as it is about the way the information he receives is structured. The more time you spend on the PvP platform that is social media, the more you'll be primed to see enemies everywhere. That said, there's likely some malicious compliance from disgruntled federal actors and a huge amount of selective leaking. For an example, the latter see the firestorm over the administration purportedly canceling cyber operations against Russia. It didn't. Many stories you read are true only in the most technical sense. If you don't believe this or do not come from a subculture that's used to being misrepresented in mainstream media, you can check out this good list from Zvi Moskowitz of the way formally correct journalism can practically mislead information silos are also crazier than ever. For example, I've been privy to two parallel heated debates about foreign aid over the past half decade. People who work in foreign development, especially effective altruists, have engaged in a battle about the efficacy of various forms of foreign aid. What works best, what works less well, what doesn't work at all, and how we can know. Meanwhile, right wingers have spent much of the last five years since the summer of 2020 in particular, documenting how deeply embedded left wing NGOs are in many federal and local funding programs and developing a critique of that tight federal NGO linkage. But neither debate the foreign aid effectiveness debate, and the foreign aid NGO linkage debate exhibits much awareness of the other at all, and that's had very negative consequences. The Doge team has axed the most effective and efficient programs at usaid, forced out the chief economist who was brought in to oversee a more aggressive push toward efficiency. It does not appear to be interested in engaging with what we know about more or less effective humanitarian aid. And people in the NGO class were completely blindsided by the animosity the Trump administration had toward them and their critiques circling on the right about NGO involvement in foreign aid and the speed at which many of their contracts would be torn up Personally to stay informed on Doge, I'm drinking from the fire hose a bit. One part mainstream coverage from folks like Jeff Stein, Kyle Cheney, Teddy Schliefer and Josh Code, one part right wing Twitter, part Elon's tweets, a couple parts various DC and Silicon Valley group tweets now on the role of Elon himself One common view of Doge is that Elon is functioning as a kind of sin eater or fall guy for Trump, doing the dirty work that the president himself do. I don't think there's much to that view, and I don't think it helps explain what's happening at Doge. See Trump's speech to Congress on Tuesday, which emphasized the cuts happening across the federal government. Also, Elon and Doge currently maintain remarkable freedom of action across the federal government. Sources I've talked to within the administration do not necessarily have a better or more coherent sense of what Doge is doing on a given day than I do. They also describe Doge operations as rather freelancy. Often Doge team members arrive on detail at a federal agency without a specific mandate, except to poke around. One model of Elon's political worldview is a kind of folk libertarian Tea Party ethos. Another is a kind of quote right Maoism, as my friend Chris Beiser suggests. Bizer points out several organizing principles that Musk adheres to, including quote, mobilization through intense ideological campaigns organized around concise edicts, quote, rapid and repeated reorganizations aimed at preventing alternate power centers from developing. I think there's something there, and there's probably a longer essay to be written here about how Elon rhymes with other right wing activists from Chris Rufo to Steve Bannon, who have inherited principles from other communist thinkers like Lenin. Lastly, some of you will remember Elon's involvement in the CR fight on the Hill in December, where it seemed like the sole metric he cared about was bringing down the number of pages in the bill. Lots of the pages that were struck were important context or nuance around spending that was already in half. In retrospect, that episode was a foreshadowing. Now what did we get wrong here at Statecraft? And by we I mean me. Early on it seemed like Doge would be a glorified blue ribbon commission and I thought about what it would be able to accomplish in those terms. Although I don't think anyone expected that Doge would be placed in the pre existing Obama era shell of the U.S. digital Service, which is now the U.S. doge Service. I was probably too confident that Doge would take a particular form. Now many of my early instincts on this front were based on Vivek. Ramaswamy was saying Doge would be and would focus on since originally he would be co leading it with Elon. I don't think I updated quickly enough after Vivek exited. He clearly had a more sophisticated vision than Elon's. You can argue about whether it's good or bad, but it was grounded in a particular conservative critique of the administrative state that's been around for a while. You can see the Wall Street Journal column that Elon Vivek wrote. Vivek actually wrote that one and filed that himself, as I understand. As the Wall Street Journal reported later, the Elon Vivek split was predicated in part by Doge's increasing attention on achieving spending cuts, which Musk has championed, and less of a focus on cutting regulations and bureaucracy, which has been helmed by Ramaswam. The Vivek model of Doge had a theory that overregulation constrains American economic growth. That's a theory I mostly subscribe to. But Doge's as it exists now is not especially focused on regulatory rollback. And to the extent that rollback's happening, it's happening elsewhere in the administration. Doge and this Elon iteration is much more focused on two metrics, number of federal employees cut and dollars saved. I've been told that given the political pressures on it, Doge is focusing staffers on projects that have a figure associated with them, either headcount or dollar spend. Obviously those are brute metrics and they can be vulnerable to Goodhart's law. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a measure. I do think there's plenty of wasteful spending in the federal government, and one of the upsides of DOGE is clearly the potential of creating a federal culture that's more aware of how it spends taxpayer dollars. But the parts of government efficiency that are easiest to message to the public are not the same parts that improve state capacity. Elon tweets a lot about bad or silly experiments that science agencies fund. Crimp running on treadmills is the kind of classic case the $500,000 we spent on this or that. I don't think this is necessarily the right target. Now, the metrics DOGE is explicitly measuring itself against are public, but another goal of DOGE is destroy internal enemies and punish the opposition and take the stuff they like away. To take one obvious example, the agencies being targeted for layoffs are disproportionately ones that code left wing. You don't listen to this podcast for my psychoanalysis of political figures, but there's definitely some of this going on. And here I include a screenshot of a tweet referencing the Dark Knight where the Joker says it's not about money, it's about sending a message. Everything burns now on Firing and Hiring In November, I wrote a piece for the Free Press on the five things President Trump should do, although I had written the piece before the general election and edited it only lightly after. The recommendations for the next administration were drawn from this broad range of our interviews, and they were intended to apply to either potential president. There was one recommendation. This seemed especially relevant to an incoming Department of Government efficiency Hire bureaucrats. Just make them the right ones, it said, and emphasize that our current system makes it too hard both to fire bad bureaucrats and to hire better ones. From that piece, a strategic administration will encourage agencies to find creative ways to bring in top talent. They could try using new tools to assess technically talented applicants in bulk, or it could increase the number of academic rotations through the Intergovernmental Personnel act, or ipa, which allows academics to contribute part time to special federal agency projects. The Office of Personnel Management, or opm, can and should encourage more aggressive use of what's called direct hire authority, allowing agencies to avoid certain procedural steps of the federal hiring process. So far, DOGE has focused only on the firing part and not at all on the hiring part. That's a shame for a couple reasons. One, it's just a missed opportunity to fix the talent pipelines plague federal hiring. And because DOGE is constrained by a pre existing set of rules around reductions in force, the people DOGE is firing are disproportionately the more talented and more useful people. In December, I went on the American Compass podcast to do some forecasting forecasting and wishcasting. And although some of that conversation was over indexed on Vivek's public statements, there's one particular section I want to note. We expected the DOGE would run into trouble if it tried to cut federal headcount with across the board actions because of the way Civil Service protection is structured. Title 5, Part 351 of the Code of Federal Regulations means that if you're doing reductions in force across the board, you have to start with employees who are serving in specific temporary positions or those under specific special authorities before you get to the career employees who have been there for 20 years. Doge has indeed tried to cut federal headcount extremely aggressively. They've gone about this by, as we've expected, firing probationary employees and those hired under certain special authorities. Unlike tenured federal employees, probationary employees can't appeal to the Merit Systems Protection Board unless they claim discrimination or whistleblower retaliation. Note also that probationary doesn't just mean in your first year on the job, but also people who have been recently promoted. In many cases, the probationary employees are exactly who I would not like to hoist a fire. From an efficiency standpoint, they're the younger, less entrenched, more technologically savvy people. Take the Bureau of Industry and Security, or bis. It's an agency within the Department of Commerce. BIS is mandated to enforce American export controls on dual use technologies, things that could be used for military purposes like uranium enrichment technologies and high end semiconductor chips. From a team of about 500, Doge canned about 15 people. At least a handful of them were, in my view, some of the people best positioned to improve our ability to keep Chinese hands off the most powerful AI technologies. A similar dynamic has played out across the federal government. Firing probationary employees is what you do if you define the problem as there are too many employees of the federal government and there should be fewer. It's not what you would do if you defined the problem as we can't fire the bad employees or good federal employees are constrained by too much process. The administration is also shuttering the Presidential Management Fellowship, a small program that made it easier to hire new graduates outside of the usual clunky federal hiring process. Now whether the cuts to probationary employees will continue is unclear at the time of writing. Many of these layoffs are being contested in court, and some of them have been undone already. You should expect long drawn out fights in court over unfair firings. And you should note that people that win their suits will likely be very expensive. Future cost streams. Now I want to talk about sloppiness. It's been well covered in mainstream outlets that Doge has been extremely sloppy about cutting contracts and about reporting the numbers. Most of the biggest ticket savings that is reported have been the result either of misreading federal contracting data or of killing contracts that were already dead. What's more concerning than the sloppiness itself to me is that it doesn't appear to be getting resolved over time. The same kinds of data parsing errors and confusion about how federal contracts are awarded and then paid out have persisted over two months. Some of this, I think, comes back to the information environment. Doge has instituted few if any, ground up mechanisms within the federal government to surface real savings opportunities. In January, I wrote a piece with my colleague Matt Esche calling for better data collection in the federal government and listing a set of places the Trump administration could start. There have been some encouraging signs on this front, like future NIH head Jai Bhattacharya's commitment to focusing on quote, replicable, reproducible, and generalizable science. But Doge has also made some missteps. For instance, as Stuart Buck has documented, it's canceled some of the most valuable long run education studies we have. This is one of the best examples, in my view, of a pennywise pound foolish orientation at Doge. The studies cost almost nothing, provide information no private actor can provide, create the basis for smarter policymaking at the federal and state level. A question I've had recently is how much of this would have happened without Doge? Doge is a label that's getting slapped on all kinds of Trump administration activities, including activities that are unrelated to the actual Elon helmed institution. There seem to be a couple reasons for this. For one, it's good branding for the administration, and there are incentives for non Doge initiatives to claim the Doge mantle. For critics of the admin, calling everything Doge plays into a rhetorical line of attack that Elon is secretly the shadow of. So for both those reasons, it can be hard to tell what's what. But analytically I've been trying to separate out the Doge stuff that would have happened anyway from the stuff as a result of this particular Elon Doge project. There's the Elon Playbook, which we've seen at Twitter and SpaceX, of turning everything off and on and seeing what breaks. But there are also other actors involved in Doge, and many of them are executing playbooks that would have been used anyway even if Elon had never come on board for example, many conservatives have pushed for the Department of Education to be dismantled since it was created. Chris Rufo put together a detailed playbook for doing so. In a world without Doge, you would still see an attempt to shutter or to aggressively limit the department. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB is another interesting example. Headlines say Doge is canceling hundreds of contracts at the CFPB and imposing stop work orders. But internal emails show that the push to functionally shutter the CFPB is not coming from Doge but from its acting director, Russ Vogt, who is also Trump's head of the Office of Management and Budget. You may remember our interview with him last fall. The chief legal officer of the CFPB is Mark Paoletta, a close vote ally. He's long advocated for the CFPB to be shut down entirely. I think it's fair to say that even if Doge is the proximate cause, the CFPB is in tumult right now. It's not the reason it's in trouble. Vote and Paoletta also believe and have argued that the President constitutionally has the power to choose not to spend or to quote pound money that Congress has appropriated. Vogt believes in unitary executive theory that there constitutionally is no such thing as an independent federal agency. Doge is working closely with Votes and the moves to freeze congressionally appropriated money are originally Vote's idea. The shuttering of USAID is a fuzzier story. Doge clearly played a key role in it, as did omb. But the acting head of usaid, Peter Morocco, attempted many of the same moves in the first Trump administration. See this 13 page dissent memo from his first time at USAID. This was Morocco's critics. Morocco has leveraged once routine administrative processes to reopen previously approved plans, interrogate and redirect country programs, halt movement on programs, procurements and people, and inject uncertainty into daily operations and office planning. I'll just note that from recent reporting, Morocco and Doge appear to be at odds with some White House and State Department staff over USAID funding. Elon's statements on USAID have been all over the map in the last two months. At one point he tweeted about feeding USAID into the wood chipper, but now he describes those actions as a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding. I don't believe that second description is an accurate representation of what has happened to humanitarian aid through usaid. Elon has also said that Ebola prevention funding was accidentally cut and then restored when it has not been restored. So I would just say be doubtful of claims from DOGE about the status of USAID without independent verification. USAID is a very frustrating story, and for me personally it's the DOGE move that I see as truly egregious as opposed to uncomfortable, foolish or poorly executed. Our first conversation on this podcast was on pepfar, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which provides funding to prevent and treat HIV AIDS in poor countries. It's an extraordinarily effective American institution and it saved millions of lives. There have been a variety of claims about the cuts to foreign aid and cuts to pepfar. That the cuts aren't bad, that the cuts must not actually be to life saving stuff, that USAID defenders are using programs like PEPFAR as a hostage puppy to protect the bad or wasteful things USAID funds and so on. But I just don't think these arguments have merit. There are good things USAID funds and wasteful and very bad things it funds, in my opinion. But good governance means being able to distinguish between the two. I should also point out for the record that we've covered the failings of USAID in depth. For instance, our conversation with Kyle Newkirk, who ran procurement for USAID in Afghanistan. If you dug into the story of American aid involvement there, what you found was report after report from inspectors General and the Government Accountability and the Government Accountability Office blasting USAID for the same inability to track where money was going, refusal to subject itself to congressional oversight, and a lack of long term planning. I cataloged several examples of this in a thread on Twitter in March 2024 before Doge. In many cases, oversight bodies all but directly accuse USAID of lying. The information reported by USAID to decision makers in Washington, D.C. did not accurately portray the status of the overall assistance effort. That's a D.C. euphemism. Now USAID may end up being folded into the State Department, perhaps via the Development Finance Corporation. Politicians as different as Madeleine Albright and Marco Rubio wanted to make this happen for a while. I think it's quite plausible that this leads to a better, leaner, more politically accountable USAID in the long run. But in the meantime, real life saving aid has been halted and the systems that administer it have been broken. Here's a personal encounter with USAID and pepfar. So last year before the election, PEPFAR was up for reauthorization in Congress, and global health advocates worried that it would only be reauthorized for one year rather than a typical five years. Representative Chris Smith a Republican from New Jersey, was one of the original co sponsors of PEPFAR in the early 2000s, but he was unwilling to support a full reauthorization without assurances that PEPFAR dollars weren't going to perform abortions or to groups that lobbied for abortion access in Africa. Negotiations over PEPFAR reauthorization were stalled for months. Republicans were unwilling to countenance a longer reauthorization without those assurances, and Democrats weren't willing to explicitly rule out support for abortion in the reproductive services mandate of pepfar. The program works largely with pregnant lovers. I spent some time connecting global health advocates with Republican Hill staffers on this issue. The staffers informed me that they had been asking PEPFAR for a list of its sub grantees for months, the organizations it contracts with, and that PEPFAR had stonewalled it was unable or unwilling to provide that data. It later came out that PEPFAR dollars had gone to nurses who performed at least 21 abortions in Mozambique. That information came out through a CDC review of its grantees, not from PEPFAR itself. So readers can come to their own conclusions about who's politically or morally responsible for the aid. Pause My point is that the dynamics that led us to this moment have been a long time brewing. There's some things that DOGE is doing that I like. They're bringing real technical talent in, like Airbnb co founder Gabia, to fix specific systems. They're modernizing and integrating IRS data systems. One of the mandates of DOGE is to improve the tech stack across the whole of the federal government. Now, I think the jury is still out whether this executive order will be implemented in the way observers like Sam Hammond expect it to. But there's potential for real upside here. I also like the general culling of handouts via contract to politically aligned NGOs. In addition, some of the biggest federal contractors or beltway bandits are malign actors that benefit from wasteful contracting practices, and they're very worried about losing access to this new regime. We're also going to see major artificial intelligence advances during this presidency. Tech modernization in the federal government will be essential for navigating that reality, along with more complex and data rich versions of Doge's whole of government chart. Again, for me, the jury remains out on how much of that modernization on how much of that modernization will happen through doge. We're only a few weeks in, and this is another place where my error bars on Doge's impact are just extremely wide. It's just not clear to me yet whether the Federal agencies that avoid getting slashed like usaid, will emerge from this stronger and more effective or not. But as friend of statecraft Dean Ball has pointed out, a country with excess intelligence but dysfunctional institutions may not be a superpower for long. At Statecraft, we care about institutions getting better at their core missions. Sometimes that involves cutting waste. It's quite plausible to me that cutting headcount and automating more systems will help certain federal agencies do their work better. But I tend to think that many of the problems with federal agencies come from regulatory and procedural burdens on the agencies themselves. From that perspective, the solution isn't to punish civil servants, but to release them from crappy strictures that make them worse at their jobs. Friend of statecraft Sam Hammond says that the people interested in state capacity on the left and the right tend to have different views of what state capacity means, what that phrase means. But as he points out later in this Twitter thread that we link, the two aren't mutually exclusive. The left tends to think state capacity means hiring more and better paid civil servants in relaxing some procedures. The right thinks state capacity means lean hierarchical org structures with high agency leaders and the affordances to achieve desired outcomes. Again, these aren't actually in contradiction, but you tend to see different versions of them pop up on the left and the right. DOGE is pretty heavily relying on the right leaning definition of state capacity, leaner org structures with more powerful politically appointed leaders. But if you want Singapore style government effectiveness, you need to do some of that and some things that historically coded left, like paying civil servants more and giving them more freedom. Now you may be wondering, where is Statecraft headed in all this? We're a quasi journalistic publication, but our strength is not in breaking news reporting. We'll be following DOGE closely and aiming to give you special insight into it when we can. Or when we can find an interviewee who can't. That's definitely going to be a part of our goal, but we think a big part of our value ADD is providing historical and institutional context, and that will continue to be our focus. There are a number of stories we think can shed light on what Doge is doing right now. Stories like Al Gore's reinventing Government push, or Madden Albright's attempt to bring USAID under tighter political control. Or how IRS Direct file was built, to name a few. If you have other ideas, we'd love to hear from you. The medium term question we're watching is an upcoming fight at SCOTUS over the President's impoundment authority. The administration wants this question taken up by the Supreme Court. I have my doubts that the court will fully take the administration's position that the president can choose not to spend congressionally appropriated money. But it's certainly not outside the realm of possibility. And that creates a real issue for Congress. How do you build the bipartisan trust to pass a budget bill if one side can, if one side can't, prove the president won't just turn off the parts he doesn't like? Finally, just frankly, I still find it hard to evaluate DOGE in total. There are things I hate and things I very much appreciate, but it still feels too early to pass judgment on whether DOGE is or will be a net positive or negative. And listen, I get if listeners think, hey, that's a cop out. Biologists say we're still less than two months into the new administration. DOGE has only existed for seven weeks, and we're going to continue to cover this over the months. We're not going away. I think there's a lot more we could say, and I'm sure there's things we left out in this essay. But I'll just flag to close something I've been thinking about. It's an idea from a couple essays by Alana Newhouse. She's the editor in chief of Tablet magazine, and over the past couple years, Alana has been writing about how the left and the right are increasingly defined by the rival views of American institutions. Increasingly the left is for people who think American institutions are under threat and must be defended, and the right is for people who think the institutions are broken and need to be fixed. DOGE fits pretty neatly into that typology, and how you feel about a given agency getting doged depends largely on if you think the agency was broken or not to begin with. Thanks for listening.