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- [00:00]
Oren Cass
Foreign.
- [00:04]
Santi Ruiz
I'm Santi Ruiz and this is Statecraft. We interview top political appointees and civil servants about how they achieved a specific policy goal. You can find the transcript for this conversation and many others at www.statecraft.pub. we've got a special episode today. This is a conversation I originally recorded with my friend Oren Cass for his American Compass podcast. I hope you enjoy.
- [00:28]
Oren Cass
Hello and welcome to the American Compass Podcast. My name is Oren Cass. I'm the chief economist here at American Compass, and today we are talking doge, the Department of Government Efficiency, with Santi Ruiz, who is senior editor and author of the Statecraft newsletter at the Institute for Progress. He wrote a fantastic piece recently for the Free Press, the five things President Trump should do on Day one. And also in his work at Statecraft has done a great job just identifying what's real and what's vaporware. In these discussions that we're now starting to have about opportunities on actually cutting red tape, making government more efficient, reducing headcount, cutting spending, some of it might actually happen. Some of it could be really positive. Some of it looks less promising. And we will dive into all of that. But here is Santi Ruiz and Mr. Santi Ruiz, welcome to the podcast. How are you?
- [01:19]
Santi Ruiz
I'm doing well, Oren. Thanks for having me.
- [01:21]
Oren Cass
Thank you for being here. Well, we are here today to talk about government efficiency, state capacity, all the wonderful things a new administration focused on such efforts could do and which of them we we think they will do. You had a fantastic piece, really diving to sort of, hey, here's how, you know, a Trump administration should approach some of these questions. So really want to start there. What, what do you see as, you know, if there was a top one or a top three important points of focus for getting this kind of thing right.
- [01:56]
Santi Ruiz
Sure, I flagged the top five in this piece. But of those, I would say one of them is something that people have been talking about quite a bit recently, which is hiring and firing. Elon and Vivek have talked quite a bit about this kind of initial idea of clearing out a bunch of employees right off the bat, whether by as Vivek suggested, I think earlier this year during the campaign, picking the ones with odd numbered Social Security numbers and firing them. I think there's like a deeper question that I'm sure they're thinking about, about not just how do you reduce headcount right now, but how do you fix the hiring and firing process in general? The federal government fires four times fewer, four times less per capita than the private sector does for a variety of procedural reasons. Federal bureaucrats can all appeal their own firings internally. There's no for cause. You have powerful public sector unions. You have, you have a variety of rules about when you're doing reductions in headcount, who has to be fired first. So certain kinds of employees are protected. If you're doing large scale cuts, it's also really hard to hire good talent. In this piece, I talk about a vignette that Jen Palka flagged about a kid named Jack Cable who was 17 when he won the Department of Defense's Hackv Air Force contest. He beat 600 other applicants. He finds all these weaknesses of Pentagon software. He's excited. He decides to apply for a Pentagon job. And the HR manager does not recognize the languages, the coding languages, he flags. And so his resume is graded, not minimally qualified, and he's told to basically take a hike. They tell him that if you spend a couple years at Best Buy and put that on your resume, that it'll help you get the job later. So there's a two sided problem there that you can't just fix by firing a bunch of folks off the bat. You need to find ways to make it easier to hire good talent, to bring them in the first place, and to be able to fire the bad folks consistently ten years from now.
- [03:45]
Oren Cass
Yeah, and I guess it, it strikes me that there are sort of, there are a few different issues. I mean, you've already just highlighted. There's, there's the question of can you fire bad people? Which is a very different question from can you hire good people? It also strikes me there's, there's something of a question of to what end here, where, you know, I think obviously we want the government to run efficiently and effectively. It's also sometimes pitched as sort of a key source of, of savings. Right. We're gonna, if we got rid of 50% of the, the workers, imagine how much money we'd save. One of my concerns is always actually, sure, you know, you save hundreds of millions of dollars, but, but by, and if you're, if you're running Twitter, that, that makes a big difference. If you're talking about the federal budget deficit, it's, it's barely, it's another day's interest payment. Which of those you see as kind of the, the ends that are really in focus here? Is it, is this how do we get the best people doing the job? Is it efficiency? Is it savings? What's actually practical to be going after?
- [04:47]
Santi Ruiz
Yeah, the Doge guys Elon and Vivek have flagged three things that they're interested in and there's a Wall Street Journal op ed recently where they flagged cutting regulation, reducing costs to the taxpayer. And I believe the last one was something like government efficiency or effectiveness. And I think they acknowledge in that the stuff that they're looking at is not going to make a massive dent in the federal deficit. That as most people know, as probably your listeners know, defense spending and welfare in Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid constitute the bulk of federal spending. They acknowledge that. And I think to the extent there are certainly savings that you can find in a lot of the places that I expect them to be looking at. Ifp, the Institute for Progress, my home think tank. One thing that we're just really interested in is state capacity more broadly. There's a whole bunch of actual problems with the way the federal government does the things it tries to do right now and could do them better, I think, including with smart cuts. And then there's the hiring and firing thing is a classic version of this long term state capacity problem. Maybe you can save, you know, some hundred million dollars here and there by firing, reducing headcount, period, but if you want to make the thing work better long term, you need to be able to do that consistently. You need to be able to cut not just right now of 20%, but higher and fire for the long haul. And that might mean, for instance, increasing pay for certain roles, which, you know, is a, is a big problem, especially in technical areas where Silicon Valley pays five times what you can, what DC can pay. Maybe you can't match that number, maybe you can't match the private sector, but you can reduce that gap a little bit.
- [06:24]
Oren Cass
Yeah, this, the state capacity point is super important. It's something we, we always find in the research we do at American Compass where, you know, everyone complains about the federal government, everybody says they want smaller government. If you ask people, okay, which of the things that the federal government does do you actually not want it to do? There's almost nothing. I mean you can always, you know, you can always find this regulation that's annoying and so forth, but in terms of the actual functions that the government provides, they're essentially all overwhelmingly popular, which, which helps to explain why we have them all, I suppose. And so, you know, to your point, I think there is, there's both a recognition that a lot of it does get done very poorly and inefficiently and a real desire for change there, but it's very different In a sense from cutting. And in a way it's the sort of thing that cutting can make worse, not better if you do it primarily with an eye toward just saving money or just sort of being smaller. So I guess I sort of want to spend some time diving to each of these different elements in terms of okay, so what, what can actually be done if we actually wanted to make progress on these things. And so let's sort of, let, let, let's run through it a little bit. The, the way that you've laid it out, you've got the, the hiring, you've got the firing, you've got the sort of, then more long term how do things, you know, process improvement, essentially hiring the higher pay is a great example. Is that feasible? What do you, what do you see as actually feasible? What if, maybe are there things have been done at the state level or in other countries? Where should we actually be aiming if, if we, if we wanted to be hiring better talent?
- [08:17]
Santi Ruiz
So the pay thing, I believe the fundamental pay structure Congress can change and the executive branch can't do much there. And obviously it's a hard political sell to go to your constituents and say we should pay federal employees more money, even if it's a smart thing to do. There are a lot of tools that the executive branch does have to tinker on the margins here. So the Intergovernmental Personnel act or the IPA is a way to get in academic talent on short term rotations, one or two years. The Biden administration has used it a good bit. There's lots of opportunities to do that. So you end run the normal pay scale and you bring these people in on, on short timelines. Outside entities can pay their salary. So you could have like an academic on loan from their parent institution doing interesting work at the federal level. There's also work that's been done recently under something called smequa. And don't ask me to spell out the acronym. We can link it in, show notes where basically you can. Agencies can do batched hiring for positions where instead of putting out one role at a time, you can say, look, we need programmers, we need a bunch of them. They all need to meet certain qualifications, but we need to hire 50 of them. Things like that, which shouldn't seem like incredible innovations actually are at the federal level. So more aggressive use of those sorts of things and then different agencies. It might be possible to convince Congress, even if you can't change the pay scale to say, look, the Department of Energy needs technical talent and right now we can't get it because you're paying, you know, a quarter of what the private sector pays. Can we do like a, a separate pay scale for the, for the technical talent? That's something that exists already in some places where the federal government acknowledges that even though we can't crank up bureaucrat pay across the board, everybody knows that the elite computer programmers need a little bit more of an incentive.
- [10:07]
Oren Cass
Yeah. I also wonder if there's an, if there's a. I guess it's not exactly a log rolling exercise, but if, if we are actually reducing headcount there, there is hypothetically a world in which you could simultaneously be boosting pay and reducing cost, which presumably would be a little bit more palatable on, on the legislative side. You do still have the problem. I remember I was, I was on C Span's Washington Journal recently where you, you get a, a wide variety of interest viewing public and we're talking about the, the deficit and someone called in to ask, you know, can, can we cut congressional pay as, as a way to kind of tackle the, as a way to tackle the deficit? And so I was sort of walking through the, the problem both that, you know, it's 500 people get getting paid a couple hundred thousand dollars a year. It's, you can kind of do the math there. But more importantly that at this point we are paying our congressman less than somebody can get in their first year as a law firm associate. And thinking that we're going to end up with a, a more effective government by cutting that further is, is probably quite backward to your point. It is awfully difficult to make the contrary case, especially in an environment where people do feel like the government is so ineffective. You sort of have a bootstrapping problem of you. No one wants to pay more for what we have now and we're not going to have anything different unless we pay more. But I do wonder if you could pair having fewer people with maybe paying them more. That is, I don't know.
- [11:47]
Santi Ruiz
That is, that is something that I also dream about. And you do see I think recently with, especially with Doge, a lot of. And it's kind of general tech realignment. A lot of people who would not have thought twice about a federal role in the past now thinking maybe there's a role for me to play here. And I think the, the good government reformers I know all acknowledge. Look, we're never going to get parody with the private sector on, on certain kinds of roles. That's not the point. It, it's a fool's errand but what you can do is just make the number a little less of an insult to somebody who would, you know, see something five times that number in the private sector. There's plenty of civic minded folks who need a little bit more of a nudge to get in the door. But I do think, yeah, maybe, maybe you can reduce headcount quite a bit and then you can distribute the savings. Connor O'Brien at EIG had this fun idea of sourcing savings ideas from agency staff and then cutting them in, giving them a small share of the savings generated that way. The idea being that you're never going to find all of the waste, fraud and abuse looking at it from the top and you actually need good ideas from the bottom. And to do that you need to incentivize the production of those good ideas. So maybe.
- [13:03]
Oren Cass
Well, and it's that that does speak also to just the, the wild ratio in the amount of funding that, that these folks oversee and send out the door compared to the amount that they are themselves being paid. In other words, the, the typical bureaucrat in an agency may be paid $70,000 a year and in effect be signing off on hundreds of millions of dollars going out the door. If you could get rid of the element of that that doesn't need to be going out the door. The extra $20,000 to the employee is a rounding error in what a more effective job would amount to.
- [13:44]
Santi Ruiz
I think that's right. My, just one other, one other off the wall proposal. My colleague Caleb Watney had this idea which is that the Bureau of Industry and so the Bureau of Industry and Security, BIS at Commerce, which is responsible for export control work, if it seized and kept the proceeds from one shipment of illegally shipped semiconductor chips, I think it would self fund, you know, it would double the, the funds dedicated to BIS that year. So just to give a sense of.
- [14:10]
Oren Cass
The scale, you need three Nvidia GPUs covers the entire stuff.
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Santi Ruiz
Exactly.
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Oren Cass
That's a really interesting point. So okay, on the, on the firing side then there is, there's both the how do you do it? Well, but there's also just the sort of legal constraints that have obviously become quite controversial in, in the question of who can be fired when. What do you think is actually plausible in terms of putting aside how to do it? Well, just what the actual scope of authority and potential action is going to be in a single administration.
- [14:46]
Santi Ruiz
I have a lot of uncertainty here and I won't pretend to be confident. I think there's a lot of ways on the margins that Vivek in particular has talked about to try and basically encourage the equivalent of self deportation, but for federal employees, so mandating employees come back into the office five days a week and then saying, look, if you don't want to, there's the door. But basically creating onerous checkpoints as a, you know, or onerous or just, you know, removal of perks that employees have gotten used to over the past few years.
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Oren Cass
Although that seems like a good way to lose all of the best employees.
- [15:22]
Santi Ruiz
First, I think there's a lot of questions there about if you're just going for reducing headcount period off the bat. The, the people who are probably the most desperate to hang on are the people who will have fewer opportunities in the private sector. I mean, just to put it bluntly, unless you're firing for cause and you're finding ways to fire for cause, which is difficult in the federal government, there's, you know, the equivalent of performance improvement plans that you require to put people on at every step of the way. You're going to lose a lot of the people you would really like to keep, a lot of the smart people. There's also the federal regulation, which again, Jen Palka flagged this morning actually in a, in a substack that 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. And so what that means is people who you've brought in technical talent on.
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Oren Cass
Special, kind of outside everybody you talked about a few minutes ago. All the people with examples of best hiring.
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Santi Ruiz
Exactly. And the people who, you know, you imagine Elon and Uvek would be most excited to work with, you have to start by taking a pound of flesh there before you move on. So there's a bunch of regulatory questions that I don't tend to know. I do think it's a good sign that the House is doing a parallel committee. We'll see how serious that is. But I think if you can get some of the recommendations from Doge straight into a House bill, then at least you get a chance at incorporating a bunch of those into law, as I'm sure, as you know, that one of the problems with blue ribbon commissions or advisory committees is you don't have the political power, the clout afterwards to make the recommendations stick. You would think Elon does, potentially. So maybe that's one of the ways that stuff actually gets into legislation.
- [17:12]
Oren Cass
Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting point. It sort of cuts both ways. On one hand, it's a really interesting point that, you know, at the end of the day, all of these constraints we are talking about are constraints of the law. And you know, who could change that? The, the, the people who write the laws. I'm curious, what is the political economy there though? I mean, obviously you have fairly powerful, you know, public sector unions and lobbies that are, are resisting that sort of change. On the flip side, it does seem to me you have an awful lot of political momentum, both in a Republican Party that, that is sort of hoping to, to carry forward some of, of Donald Trump's priorities here. And frankly, in a, in a Democratic Party that is quite desperate to find savings and perhaps even improvements in government performance that don't require cutting programs, how does that come out in the wash? I, as someone who does not study this carefully, I would have looked at this and said this looks like the kind of place where the case for action would potentially swamp the concentrated resistance to it. But obviously for, I don't know, 100 years, that has not actually been the case. What's going on there?
- [18:32]
Santi Ruiz
Yeah, if you talk to folks who spend a lot of time on this in Washington, they'll say there's been lots of improvement on the margins in various ways. Congress functions as an institution better than it did 10 years ago, for instance. So you see these little tweaks where you, where, especially when it's not a highly publicized issue. There's lots of room for bipartisanship even today or yesterday. I think Senator Sanders came out and said that he's fully on board with the DOGE effort to cut waste at the Pentagon. You can see these parts of the project where everybody has their pet bugbear. And it's true. There's incredible, incredible waste of the Pentagon. It failed its seventh audit in a row, eighth audit in a row, maybe this month or last month. I would be surprised to see genuine large scale bipartisan consensus on this just because the headcount piece is going to be aggressive, because the regulatory rescissions are very much a Republican interest and not a Democrat one. And I also think there's a political economy problem where the parts of this that are easiest to message to the public are the places where there's not necessarily improvements in state capacity. So you've seen a lot of the Rand Paul style Elon tweeting about bad or silly experiments that our science agencies fund. You know, the shrimp running on treadmill stuff. Right.
- [19:47]
Oren Cass
The $500,000 we spent on this or that.
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Santi Ruiz
Right. And I think those are easily the easiest part of this project to sell to the public. Look at this, you know, science experiment we've, we've described a little, a little cruelly or which may be a relatively meaningless project for relatively small amounts of money. You can get a lot of people on board with cutting that. I think there's a paradox here where the parts that are easiest to message are the least meaningful fixes or maybe even moving you in the wrong direction.
- [20:18]
Oren Cass
Yeah. And so then on the, on the flip side you've got the, you know, what is the doge at the end of the day does has no formal power of any sort. It is not technically even part of the government. How do you anticipate that playing out? Do you, do you feel like there's actually a path forward where it essentially operating from the outside can still have the sort of influence it wants or is it the sort of thing that is likely to sort of a Silicon Valley innovation that is about to run into the reality of how Washington operates in a sense?
- [20:55]
Santi Ruiz
I don't think it's naive or silly. We had recently a guest on Statecraft, our interview series, Dr. Arun Serafin, who was on another blue ribbon commission recently on fixing the process by which the Pentagon and Congress hash out the defense budget. And he flagged for me that the, basically that the problem with blue ribbon commissions is anybody can make the recommendations, but it's do you have buy in from the people on the commission itself to go push those recommendations later? And you have a political moment where those pushes could succeed. And I think you have both of those in this case Elon and Vivek clearly very much bought in on this project and it's been backed by the President. There's a clear kind of political mandate. There's political cover here in a way that plenty of blue ribbon commissions never get. And there's a megaphone here. Right. They, the, the two co heads have, can go directly to the public in a way that plenty of experts and PhDs on blue ribbon commissions can't or don't. So I think there's a lot of room. I don't think the room is limitless, but it's, I don't think it's a, a kind of classic west coast coming in and thinking they can one stop shop fix the fix the way the east coast works. I think there's a little bit more going on here than that doesn't mean it'll succeed, but I think there's, it's not a fool's errand.
- [22:18]
Oren Cass
Yeah. One thing I do wonder about with it, and based on some of the initial comments, you've seen them floating $2 trillion in savings and so forth. The kinds of savings they're talking about would ultimately necessitate the kinds of reforms to, let's say Social Security and Medicare or healthcare coverage that lots of technocratic experts over the years have always very enthusiastically embraced and yet are typically dead on arrival politically, including with at least to date, the rhetoric of President Trump, who's shown no interest going all the way back to 2016 in touching entitlements at all. Is there a world where, I guess I can envision a world in which the Doge, in pursuit of what it sees as the big, big successful effort, has the kinds of ideas that are, are not actually in line with what a White House would be, would be interested in, in advancing at all? Do you think that that is are they worried about that or. Well, should they be worried about that or do you feel like there's more alignment there on, on what is in versus out of bounds?
- [23:33]
Santi Ruiz
I would, I would not be surprised and again, this, you know, this is speculation, but I would not be surprised if of the three things that Doge has said they want to, they said they want to tackle the regulatory rescissions that are handed off directly to President Trump, recommendations that for regulations can be struck or there's there's no problem there. And the question is just a legal one about, you know, which regulations you can, you can futz with how. Right. I'm guessing that roughly the same will be true for the administrative reductions. The can you, can you make it a car, you know, can you do headcount stuff? Can you force people to come back in the office? I'm guessing those, that part of the puzzle will likely be pretty aligned with the administration's agenda. And then the cost saving recommendations. I think you're right. It may be that the, the, the recommendations are just completely politically dead on arrival and those are the parts that have to get pushed under the rug because it's hard to squeeze 2 trillion out of the federal budget without doing things people don't like.
- [24:33]
Oren Cass
Yeah. Or maybe there's a world in which we actually take some of that on, but we will have to wait and see.
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Santi Ruiz
It's certainly a bigger, bigger political lift than hammering the bureaucrats.
- [24:45]
Oren Cass
Cutting them. Yeah. Cutting red tape. Always, always the place to start. I want to flip over to the. The state capacity side in terms of what. What we might actually be thinking about building as as opposed to just taking away. I think it's been interesting to see some commentary even within the more sort of whether you want to call it the techno optimist community, the abundance Bros and so forth, seeing these kinds of efforts as an opportunity to build state capacity, even if sort of in the negative by removing things that obstruct state capacity, but also in a few places starting to raise a few red flags and say, wait a minute, we actually did do need a robust NIH or a robust NSF and so on and so forth to fuel the kind of innovation that the economy actually requires. Government does play an important role in these things. Where if anywhere, would you want to see focus on not just cutting away, but actually building up more in terms of what the government has to get right?
- [25:55]
Santi Ruiz
Yeah, I would point to exactly what you're talking about, which is R and D, basic R and D spend. There's a paper co authored by my IFP colleague Heidi Williams, looking at the toolkit of ways that policymakers have to to juice productivity growth and funding. R and D comes out as one of the top one or two that we have. The return on investment there is just really concrete. And so that's the place where I would be most worried that we're looking for savings in the wrong places and we're penny pinching. We're pennywise and pound foolish. As Thomas Hockman pointed out on this, on this podcast, I think a few months ago, we love a good podcast callback. It was a great episode. But he put this well, that basically the abundance push has something for everybody to hate. That if you're on the right. The deregulatory push on infrastructure, energy and housing is a very easy sell. And it goes back whether you're on the new right or whether you're Grover Norquist. This idea of deregulation is, you know, in. In sectors where productive forces are being hobbled, it makes a lot of sense. The problem, as he flagged in the nuclear case specifically, is sometimes you do want investment. You know, federal, you know, nuclear has huge startup costs. Maybe you can de risk some energy technologies, make it easier for private sector investment. But sometimes if you want emerging technology, you need someone to take a chance on it financially, that part is harder to push, especially in this political moment when purse strings are tighter. So it's not obvious. I think there's a lot of room to run just on the deregulatory side, especially if you think that regulation is the blocker to housing and in a lot of ways energy, and that our infrastructure, the reason we spend four times more on infrastructure than France does say is entirely regulatory. I think there's a lot of room there and I wouldn't discount how much you can do on an abundance agenda just by deregulation. But I do think there's a lot of pieces that require investment that folks on our side are a little bit more leery about.
- [27:51]
Oren Cass
Yeah, the investment side. Of course here at American Compass we, we attempt to, to reduce leriness about exactly that, that set of stuff. You know, Elon Musk is actually a super interesting figure in that debate because of course, you know, whether one is talking about the structure of federal support, shall we say, that enabled everything that Tesla did, or essentially the government as the, the, the sole customer in many cases fueling, you know, SpaceX's progress, you know, his business's success, his business success has obviously been driven by extraordinary innovation, but also in every case innovation that would have likely gotten absolutely nowhere without a significant role of government as either funder or sort of market participant. And so I guess, I don't know, maybe I'm the one with the naive optimism now that that, that is something that, that may come into focus as more a, a, a plausible place to focus from an IFP perspective. What are the, what are the kind of top hit items? Is it space and nuclear? Is it the mundane how to build houses faster? What if you did have some sort of right of center openness to that sort of second side of the abundance agenda as well? Where, where would you want to, where would you be prying open the hardest?
- [29:20]
Santi Ruiz
I would be pushing on and my colleagues have been doing a lot on this, on different tools that the federal government has that aren't just tax credits. You know, you can look at advanced market commitments. Operation Warp Speed is an example of one of these. Where we said we will, we will buy large quantities at this price of a vaccine that meets these criteria. We've said that look, we'll, the promise is there, we'll pay for performance basically, obviously a massively successful financial commitment. And a lot more agencies can use advanced market commitments than currently do. They're they currently you can either procure things through the normal, the normal federal procurement process, which is legendarily difficult. And then certain agencies have what's called ota other transactions authority. And that literally means what it says on the tin. It's you have authority to do other kinds of transactions, not specified procurement. So for instance, the COTS program that SpaceX got its start through at NASA was an OTA, was another transactions authority program. An interesting kind of public private partnership didn't go through the usual process where people who parties who don't get it can sue and counter sue and take forever. Quite a few federal agencies have ota. Even agencies that have used it quite well like the DoD has used OTA in a lot of successful cases. But institutionally is very leery of doing this and this is not like an ideological thing. It's a. It's scary. The lawyers say ah, it's easier to just go the normal route. People don't have the muscle memory for it. So there's a lot of ways that muscular administration could just provide better guidance to agencies through OMB or through OIRA to say look, you have these tools, we are giving you political cover to use them. We want these kinds of end results and we're going to look for places beyond just tax credits and an annual appropriations bill to get them done. And that's the kind of issue area agnostic policy push where you could just say look agencies, you have this power already. We're acknowledging it, we're giving you cover, we want you to use it.
- [31:24]
Oren Cass
Yeah, so that's interesting. That's not even. In a sense you don't even there. There is no new funding associated with an OTA because it is something that in theory you are going to be buying anyway eventually. It's. It's a matter of whether you sit and wait for something to show up and then buy the best available or try to, to shape it yourself through. I mean I, I almost think of it kind of like a Dear Colleague letter that has become popular in some place. If it's sort of a. You're almost sending adv. An advisory with a little commitment behind it that if anybody out there happened to go and, and do this sort of thing, there would be some money in it for you basically.
- [32:03]
Santi Ruiz
And, and to be clear, an advanced market commitment where you promise to buy some future, not yet produce technology is just one of, I mean other transaction authority encompasses literally anything that's not normal procurement. So you could do AMCs especially. I think there's a lot of use for them where the thing that you want is technically feasible. You know, we, for instance, the MRNA vaccines were a good example. They were not, they're not impossible technology to produce. You just said like hey, we need a lot of production of that thing. You could see those used for, for all kinds of things. Carbon capture is one that folks on the center, center left talk about a lot. It's totally fit for purpose tool. But there's a whole bunch of other ways that you could just encourage better public private partnerships and agencies don't have that muscle memory. Yeah, NASA, NASA hasn't done anything, you know, really useful since the COTS program, since this ota. Like you could, you could basically write off most of the work that NASA has done since then and SpaceX would have filled in the slack anyway.
- [33:01]
Oren Cass
Yeah, interesting. What about on the financing side? Do you think there is. It's been interesting to watch with, with chips in particular, essentially trying to relearn from scratch how to participate on that side. You know, what does it even look like to contract with the private sector to be making these kinds of investments? Where does that fall? Is that a sort of. You may need it in a few places but, but definitely not preferred or does. Is that a prime tool in the toolkit as well, from your perspective?
- [33:36]
Santi Ruiz
I don't know that I can answer the full question. I think that a lot of our interviewees recently have come out of DOD and in that context I think you get like a really good case study in miniature of how good or bad federal contracting practices can make or break Entire Industries. So DoD currently does, you know, sporadic large purchases and it's very hard to build a manufacturing and defense sector off the back of those, especially when the contracts go to the primes as opposed to more predictable long term production orders, you know, across, across the industry. But that's to the extent. I've got a lot things to say there. It's, it's DOD specific.
- [34:14]
Oren Cass
Yeah, that's interesting. We're, we are doing a bunch of work on that now ourselves, so listeners should stay tuned. We will be diving into the dib in, in, in the months to come, I guess let's, let's wrap up here on kind of evaluating success. What to look for? What do you think? I mean, I guess technically the Doge, for instance, is supposed to wrap up its work by next July, July 4, 2026. And so that'll be roughly a year and a half after the administration comes into office. Is that at all a useful timeline? Can anything be done that quickly?
- [34:54]
Santi Ruiz
Personally, I love it. One of the things that, that I called for in this Free Press article was for agencies to set ambitious and concrete goals. The Biquin Centennial, I just learned that word. But that's a great kind of external target that you can basically hold yourself accountable to. I think it's important to both have the political cover to make a big push and then to actually say here we're going to do this, we're going to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. For instance, would NASA have done it if it was an internal goal but it wasn't said by the president on tv? Doubtful. Right. I would look to both at Doge and in other places OMB and oira, this kinds of, this kind of procedural change. Are we making pushes or asking Congress to change up the pay scale or to help fix hiring and firing? Trump's old head of own B, Russ Vote, who we interviewed on statecraft, is coming back in the second term and has a very aggressive vision of how, how OMB should work with the agencies. A very centralized idea of kind of presidential control through OMB of the varying agencies. I would love to see OMB provide this kind of guidance on other transactions authority to say look agencies, it's not just that we want you to achieve the President's, fulfill the president's mandate here. We want the agency to work better and you have these tools already in the toolkit or we're clarifying these rules for you go into likewise.
- [36:19]
Oren Cass
Yeah, it will be interesting to see. We may have to have you back to, to assess things 18 months from now, but for now, Santa Ruiz, thank you so much for taking the time to join us.
- [36:28]
Santi Ruiz
Oren, it's been a pleasure. Thank you. LA.