Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein

Summary

Summary of "Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein"

The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart – Episode Released on March 27, 2025

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1. Introduction to the Episode

In this episode of The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart, host Jon Stewart engages in a deep and insightful conversation with Ezra Klein, renowned journalist, co-author of Abundance, and host of The Ezra Klein Show. The discussion centers around Ezra Klein's latest book, which critically examines the internal challenges faced by the left in implementing effective government policies.

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2. Introducing Ezra Klein and His Book

Jon Stewart [06:56]:
“Today we're going to be talking about Ezra Klein, who I and I, I love his podcast and I, I, I, but he's written a book that has angered some people on the left because it is self-critical.”

Ezra Klein's book delves into the shortcomings of left-leaning policies, offering a blueprint for improvement. Klein emphasizes that his work is not just a broad critique but a specific analysis of how governmental mechanisms hinder the realization of progressive agendas.

Ezra Klein [07:31]:
"Books are artifacts to ground a conversation people already want to have. They’re an excuse for people to begin thinking about something and debating something."

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3. Challenges in Government Implementation

A significant portion of the discussion focuses on the inefficiencies within government structures that impede the execution of well-intentioned policies. Klein uses the example of the rural broadband initiative to illustrate the complex bureaucratic hurdles that delay progress.

Ezra Klein [16:05]:
"This process, which currently all 56 applicants had passed through at least step five. It took at least, it took more than three years."

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4. Case Study: Rural Broadband Initiative

Klein breaks down the 14-step process required to implement the rural broadband program, highlighting how each step introduces delays that cumulatively render the initiative ineffective.

Ezra Klein [21:29]:
"Step one is the NTIA must issue NOFO notice of funding opportunity within 180 days. That’s step four."

He criticizes the extensive procedural requirements, such as lengthy review periods and multiple approval stages, which result in only a handful of states successfully receiving funding after years of delays.

Jon Stewart [30:52]:
"It's a long time."

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5. Bureaucracy and Regulation in Government Projects

The conversation delves into how excessive regulations and bureaucratic processes stifle innovation and slow down the implementation of essential services. Klein argues that the current regulatory framework often requires applicants to meet numerous, sometimes unrelated, criteria that increase costs and complexity.

Ezra Klein [25:01]:
"The notice of funding opportunity can make a project very complicated."

Jon Stewart [26:46]:
"The expense that it would take for smaller, more agile, more local businesses... you are excluding an enormous amount of the American economy in terms of building things by laying on compliance costs that would drive most companies into the ground."

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6. Comparison with Other Countries' Governance

Jon Stewart and Ezra Klein compare the United States' bureaucratic inefficiencies with the more streamlined governance seen in countries like China and European nations. They discuss how other democracies manage to implement large-scale projects more efficiently due to less convoluted processes.

Jon Stewart [43:08]:
"California high speed rail... China built 23,000 miles of high speed."

Ezra Klein [45:33]:
"One of the things I'm trying to shake people on with this book is that Democrats, liberals, people who believe in government, have entered into a kind of learned helplessness about how government works."

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7. Role of Civil Servants and Bureaucratic Reform

Klein emphasizes the importance of trusting civil servants and reducing the regulatory burden to empower government employees to execute projects effectively. He advocates for civil service reform that allows for greater discretion and less micromanagement.

Ezra Klein [66:13]:
"We're going to treat you like you're good at what you fucking do, and we're gonna let you do it."

Jon Stewart [73:53]:
"The measure of government is the people it helps, not the processes it follows."

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8. The Politics of Government Reform

The hosts discuss the political challenges of enacting government reform, noting that both Democrats and Republicans have their own issues with the current system. Klein points out that Democrats often fail to address internal governance issues, while Republicans mistrust government institutions.

Ezra Klein [60:43]:
"If you just go back over recent elections, you can basically predict the winner just on who owns the politics of reform."

Jon Stewart [61:29]:
"That's the exact crux of what we're talking about."

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9. Conclusion and Final Thoughts

In wrapping up, Klein and Stewart agree that meaningful government reform is essential for the successful implementation of progressive policies. They stress the need to prioritize outcomes over procedural correctness and advocate for a balance between regulation and efficiency.

Ezra Klein [73:53]:
"The measure of government is the people it helps, not the processes it follows."

Jon Stewart [74:00]:
"Boom. Bars."

Klein reiterates the importance of focusing on the tangible benefits government should provide to its citizens, rather than getting bogged down by endless bureaucratic processes.

Ezra Klein [74:00]:
"The measure of government is outcomes, not process."

Jon Stewart [78:54]:
"Here we go. But really appreciated the gentleman coming on and, and explaining all those various things. Get the book. It's called Abundance and it really does give an awful lot to think about."

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Key Takeaways

• Bureaucratic Inefficiency: Excessive regulations and bureaucratic steps significantly delay the implementation of government projects, exemplified by the rural broadband initiative.

• Need for Reform: There is a pressing need for civil service reform to empower government employees, reduce red tape, and focus on outcome-based governance.

• Comparative Governance: The U.S. lags behind other democracies in implementing large-scale projects efficiently due to more complex and prolonged bureaucratic processes.

• Political Ownership: Effective government reform requires both Democrats and Republicans to recognize and address internal governance challenges rather than externalizing blame.

• Outcomes Over Processes: The success of government initiatives should be measured by the tangible benefits they provide to citizens, not merely by adherence to procedural correctness.

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Notable Quotes:

• Ezra Klein [73:53]: "The measure of government is the people it helps, not the processes it follows."

• Jon Stewart [74:00]: "Boom. Bars."

• Ezra Klein [74:00]: "The measure of government is outcomes, not process."

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This episode provides a critical examination of the inherent flaws within governmental systems that hinder the realization of progressive policies. Through insightful dialogue, Stewart and Klein shed light on the necessity for substantial bureaucratic reform to ensure that government actions translate into meaningful benefits for the populace.

Transcript

[Jon Stewart]

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[Ezra Klein]

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[Ezra Klein]

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[Jon Stewart]

Your purchases will help you earn more points for future trips. Experience more on your travels with Amex Business Gold terms apply. Learn [e-mail] Business Gold AmEx Business Gold Card built for business by American Express. Hey everybody. Welcome to the weekly show podcast. My name is Jon Stewart. We are taping this on Wednesday, March 26th. It probably you probably get it Thursday, March 27th. Who knows what will be revealed in the secretive group chats of our nation's most powerful people between now and then? Perhaps lunch orders. An egg salad with onions and celery on a a nice pumper nickel. Perhaps that's the order that went around. I, I, I've got to stand up on this situation for for just one moment. A this is why I don't do group chats. They're so fucking annoying. Not even when you're obviously planning on bombing another country, but just in the sense I think their group chat must have had what Pete Hegseth and the Department of Defense and the National Security Advisor waltz and generals and a journalist from the Atlantic. There must have been 16 or 18 people. The notifications alone would make me want to launch missiles. Every fucking thumbs up emoji or bicep arm and fist pump and fire and every little. You got that right. I agree. And your phone. Ding ba bing ding. I would have thrown my phone out the window it's, it's maddening. There's got to be four people on a chat room or whatever they call them. Text chain, all that other shit. And Donald Trump, like, this is when he is at his best, when he gets that quick onset dementia. Anytime he gets caught in a situation that would require some accountability, he immediately goes into the. I don't even have a text. I don't. I've never heard about it. This is the first I've heard about it. You know, they confronted him on, there's classified information going on TextChange and there are. It's. It's not secure. They're on fucking Snapchat or wherever they're on, and they've got a journalist on there. And he's like, I don't know what you're talk. Hey, man, that's not me. I do everything Goodfellow style. I go outside, I go to the phone booth, I talk to one person on the phone or we pass notes. I don't do any of that kind of, that kind of stuff. He did the same with, I think, the deportation orders. You know, these deportation orders that the Justice Department says that they're illegal. Oh, well, whoever did them is in a lot of trouble. And I'll make sure to, to talk to them about it if I ever figure it out. I didn't sign it. I don't even know what a pen is. I don't have a pen. I don't use writing. I don't have hands. How could I have done. Really is just a remarkable game of hey, man was me. And the one thing, you know, nobody's actually really talked about is the, the crazy arrogance in this text chain and confidence. This whole, like, fuck Europe, fuck these freeloaders. Like, all these countries, what did they ever do for us other than sign up to go fight in a war that we started over an event that didn't happen to them. Fuck them. I mean, it's just the most myopic, selfish, arrogant. And then this whole idea, I guess we gotta bail these out again. By what, Bombing the Houthis? Like, how many years are we going to be bombing the Houthis? Like, you didn't solve anything. These guys, maybe the new attacks on shipping in 2023 or 2024, maybe they'll chill that out for a little bit. But, I mean, the Saudis have bombed the shit out of them. They did a blockade against them. They're acting like, okay, finally Daddy's home and he's going to throw a couple of missiles at them. And that'll cure everything. Like that hasn't been the solution to everything we've been doing over these past 30, 40 years. We'll just throw a few cruise missiles into Libya. That should fix it. God, it's just man. Arrogance is, is, is. But here's what I like about the show we're going to do today. Today we're going to be talking about Ezra Klein, who I and I, I love his podcast and I, I, I, but he's written a book that has angered some people on the left because it is self critical. It is, it is looking at the things that the left can do to maybe improve their case for people. And it couldn't be more timely. And people are talking about it. And I'm happy to have him on because I think it is a fascinating and the beauty of it is in the specificity of it. This is not some broad polemic about. This is a deep and interesting dive into just the mechanics and guts of how a government accomplishes something. And it's really, for me at least for somebody who loves this kind of stuff, is fascinating. So I'm just gonna, I'm gonna get to them and, and we'll get this thing damn started. We're so excited to have this gentleman as a guest on the program. We're gonna get right to him. New York Times podcast host of the Ezra Klein show, co author of Abundance with Derek Thompson, staff writer at the Atlantic. It's Ezra Klein. Ezra John, what is man, I feel like this book. First of all, congratulations on the book.

[Ezra Klein]

Thank you.

[Jon Stewart]

Fabulous reception. People are really interested in it. I think there's a real thirst for this kind of blueprint and the type of things. But I have to tell you, the first thing that pops to mind is you are like the Timothee Chalamet of the book world right now. This press tour, it is the complete unknown of economic blueprints for a path forward.

[Ezra Klein]

I am mostly following this analogy.

[Jon Stewart]

His, his press tour was ubiquitous. Are you pleased with the way that, that this has entered the world that has entered the chat?

[Ezra Klein]

Oh, man, I'm, I'm like beside myself. Thrilled. Right. Look, you write a book and you spend years on it and mostly you spend those years wishing you had not decided to write a book. That is the story of both of my books. Right? I signed the book at some point, I'm like, oh no, I have to write this thing. And I spend a year being like, I had a good life, I didn't need to do this to myself.

[Jon Stewart]

So just a Lot of self reflection on why did I undertake this?

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah, it's a lot of rumination. And then what you want is for that thing you put all this time and energy into to not just slip soundlessly beneath the waves. This is different, though. I've never. I mean, I have people write books on my show. I'm, like, pretty familiar with the book publishing process. I think the way, you know, your book is doing well is a number of people who haven't read it who have developed a strong opinion on it.

[Jon Stewart]

I don't get severance. Have you watched it? I have not watched it.

[Ezra Klein]

Right. Like what you're trying to create with the book is a discourse, like generating object. Right. Like some subset of people are reading the book. More will read the book, hopefully over time. But it has become a huge object of argumentation for people who haven't read the book. And in a weird way, I kind of think that's a big part of what books do. They are artifacts to the ground, a conversation people already want to have. They're an excuse for people to begin thinking about something and debating something. You know, the Anxious Generation by John Haidt, I think was a version of that. It wasn't like nobody had thought of maybe having all these phones in schools are bad before he wrote that, but it created a structured way to have that debate. And I think this has, to our delight, along with some other books. Mark Dunkelman's why Nothing Works, Yoni Applebaum, stuck. There's a kind of moment here that people are apprehending in different ways. And, yeah, I mean, to write a book that people care about in the year of our Lord 2025, like, what a goddamn gift.

[Jon Stewart]

A book.

[Ezra Klein]

Book.

[Jon Stewart]

What is. Is that a podcast that you turn manually? What is a book? But it's fascinating to me. When did you start this project? Three years ago, two years ago, four years ago.

[Ezra Klein]

It's always, like, hard to say when it really starts. The piece I write that I think kicks us off in a way is in 2021, and it's called the Economic Mistake the Left Is Finally Confronting. But I can also see a lot of early threads of it in some earlier pieces I write about California. In the couple of years before that, I have a piece. I forget what that piece is called. But where I make this, this can be like when I said orthogonal to you on my podcast. But I make this point that I always really liked, which is that there's an old political science idea that gets talked about all the time, which the political Science version of it is that Americans are symbolically conservative and operationally liberal. And the version of it people know is the Tea Party person with a sign that said, keep the government's hands off my Medicare. And the idea is Americans often, like in national politics, talking like conservatives. They like the rhetoric of personal responsibility and freedom and so on.

[Jon Stewart]

Bootstraps.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah. And then they want Medicare and Medicaid and spending on social insurance. And I had this realization for a bunch of different reasons. I was living in California, where I'm also from, so I know that state very well and I love it, and I'm talking to you from it. But that in a lot of California, the politics were symbolically liberal and operationally conservative, that you had all these yard signs. Kindness is everything. No human being is illegal. We believe in science.

[Jon Stewart]

Hate has no home here.

[Ezra Klein]

Hate has no home here. And it was all in yards zoned for single family housing, where the working class had been driven out of the city, where, at least in San Francisco, the black population for all the BLM stickers had been going down in census after census after census. And at the core of that was an unwillingness to let things change. The willingness to symbolically state your liberal values was very high. But the willingness to instantiate them in change, that might mean something for you personally, not mean you tax some other rich guy, but for you personally was very, very limited. And so it was something I've been trying to work through around what was going on in California and then over the Biden administration, as I began to think about what was going to be required to build all this green energy we were funding, I began to see some resonances across these two projects. So, yeah, early 2000-20s to now.

[Jon Stewart]

Right. But it's this disconnect between we have a value system that we espouse certainly on Facebook or in our Twitter handles. And yet operationally, we can never live up to this value system because you really don't want that value system anywhere near your house.

[Ezra Klein]

Yes. I have this line in one of the pieces I did this piece that is actually personally in the book about what it takes to build affordable housing in Los Angeles.

[Jon Stewart]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

The housing that all of us on the left in theory agree on. What do we do when we trigger that public money? And there's a line in there that's like, the politics of this are, when do we want affordable housing Now? Where do we want it? Definitely somewhere else. I mean, not right here.

[Jon Stewart]

That would be some somewhere down the road. The crazy thing to me is that the moment that it drops because it's this really interesting theory of there's this absurdity at the heart of some of the liberal idealism that comes in the difficulty of making it actionable because of liberal resistance to some of it forgetting about regulation or various things that go into it. But nobody a few years ago is really thinking about that. The Democratic playbook might be obsolete. It drops in this moment when there is such confusion and chaos as to the direction or the foundation or the blueprint. You know, what you're starting to conjure before any of all this project 2025 becomes evident is maybe a building block for that, some kind of cornerstone. Do you think that's part of why this has generated such a interest?

[Ezra Klein]

I do. And I want to say very clearly because I do think sometimes people get this piece of it wrong. Not the only cornerstone.

[Jon Stewart]

Sure.

[Ezra Klein]

There's a lot in the liberal agenda that we're just not trying to edit here. Right. My view is that liberals have a lot of good ideas and I've covered many of them over the years.

[Jon Stewart]

Are you suggesting you've been criticized for not including everything that could ever possibly be a wish list?

[Ezra Klein]

There's a funny reviews have a real quality of. We read the book not as a book is but as we are. And I am sure I have done this as a reviewer. But. But there is sometimes I'll read reviews and I know who's writing them and it's like this beautiful thing where it's like this book is great, great, great, great. And then right here it diverges from my personal politics and that part isn't great at all. I have some real problems. So there's a lot in the liberal agenda that works and we get. Right. But I think there is a. Look, man, it didn't work. Right.

[Jon Stewart]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

There was a theory of the Biden administration and that was a couple things. But what were the Biden administrations? At least what in terms of what it was able to pass. What were its major. What differentiated it maybe is the best way to say this than Obama.

[Jon Stewart]

Green energy, baby. Green energy and investment.

[Ezra Klein]

Green energy and infrastructure.

[Jon Stewart]

Sure.

[Ezra Klein]

This was a building liberalism.

[Jon Stewart]

Yes.

[Ezra Klein]

Right. The main achievements of Obama, if you like go down and list them, it's like you'll say the Affordable Care act, you'll say the Dodd Frank regulations. It'll be a bunch of things like that. And what's interesting about those is that they're all etched into regulation. They didn't require a lot to happen in the physical world. Right. Bank capital requirements. Does not require the laying of a lot of transmission line. But Biden, it wasn't like that Lunch pail Joe, Scranton Joe. They had an agenda. I mean they lost a lot of their care agenda because of Manchin, but they had then an agenda that was very much about building.

[Jon Stewart]

Building rural broadband maybe even back better. They didn't want to just build it, Ezra. They wanted it back better.

[Ezra Klein]

Wow, man, that's a. There's something about throwing me back to that moment that hurts at this moment. Right. Like the optimism. It was a simpler time.

[Jon Stewart]

It was a simpler time. But you make the point in the book, which I think is really interesting, that that moment of optimism actually crystallized in some ways the failure.

[Ezra Klein]

Yes.

[Jon Stewart]

And you make it very stark in terms of, for instance, the chargers, which I think is a great example.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah. Liberals pass $7.5 billion for a nationwide network of electric vehicle chargers. We also get $42 billion. And this is a big thing. They tout a lot to do world broadband. There's a lot of parts of this country that are not hooked up to broadband. And in both cases, and these were passed early in the administration, particularly the rural broadband money, by the end of the administration, by the election, by the time I'm fact checking the book, they just have not happened. And you look into why, and we did look into why. And what you get are these incredibly baroque internal processes. I'll focus on rural broadband for a minute here because that one was a good idea.

[Jon Stewart]

Still a good idea.

[Ezra Klein]

And they liked it. Like that was the one they went around when they talked about the infrastructure bill. They were like roads in rural broadband. Right. And if you look into what happened, they created not in the bill. But this is really important. We have this whole little Schoolhouse Rock song about like how bill becomes a law. And it's like sitting on the steps of the Congress.

[Jon Stewart]

I'm not going to ask you to sing it, Ezra.

[Ezra Klein]

That's what I'm so I've been practicing. I have been practicing. We don't have this song about how the law becomes reality, how the law becomes a series of implementation rules, then a notice of funding opportunity, then there's a comment piece period. Then there's a challenge period for the comments, then there's a series of court cases. And so for rural broadband, for instance, what you end up having is a 14 stage process. Like there's a period where the Commerce Department needs to drop a map of which parts of the country don't have the right amount of broadband. And then there's a challenge Period on the map. And da, da, da, da, and da, da, da, Da. And 56 states and jurisdictions try to apply for this money. And again, this passes at the end of 2021. They have time. By the end of 2024, three have gotten to the end of the process. They were trying.

[Jon Stewart]

Three? Three of these?

[Ezra Klein]

56 out of 56. Yes.

[Jon Stewart]

End of the process. Meaning they've actioned it, they've built it, or they've now they've gotten the.

[Ezra Klein]

No, no, no. Oh, no, of course I didn't mean they had built it, John. Sorry, I was so. I confused you.

[Jon Stewart]

Oh, dear God.

[Ezra Klein]

They just got to the point where, in theory, they could get the money to build it.

[Jon Stewart]

They had been approved for the money.

[Ezra Klein]

Yes. Basically.

[Jon Stewart]

How many of these obstacles are. Let's try and tease it out a little, because I think the more specific you get here, Ezra.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah.

[Jon Stewart]

I think the more helpful it is for everybody to understand.

[Ezra Klein]

And I will say in the book, we try to get. Not on this part of the issue, but we get very specific on how these things work.

[Jon Stewart]

Yeah, you're very granular, and it's fascinating. So I want to tease out how much of this is also local and state issue. How much of this is litigation. How much of this is kind of the liberal instinct of you can't solve anything unless it also solves everything. Meaning it also has to be carbon neutral and hire only disabled contractors and also small businesses. You know, what is the percentage of this that really affects what you think is a blueprint forward for. For Democrats and what is other kind of noise?

[Ezra Klein]

I'm trying to see if I can pull up where I actually have to get granular with you somewhere. I have from Derek, the actual chart.

[Jon Stewart]

Derek, by the way, the co author.

[Ezra Klein]

Yes.

[Jon Stewart]

Who should. And again, this is not in any way a criticism. Grow a beard, because it really. He does, in the interviews, appear to be your enthusiastic intern. He looks 17.

[Ezra Klein]

I will neither laugh at this nor agree with it. Derek is a beautiful man. It was sometimes distracting for me in the writing of this book. And he is currently perfect in every way.

[Jon Stewart]

His youthful visage I find a little bit distracting as a grizzled veteran. All right, we got to take a quick break. Be right back. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try [e-mail] Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by State law not available in all states.

[Ezra Klein]

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[Jon Stewart]

Wow, I've got a complicated project.

[Ezra Klein]

No problem. I can even help schedule a professional measuring install. We can also send you samples fast and free. I just might have to do more. Whatever you need.

[Jon Stewart]

So the first room we're looking at is for shopblinds.com now and save up to 40% sitewide. Blinds.com rules and restrictions may apply. We are back. All right, here we go. Ezra's Googling as we speak and he's pulling it up. I'm going to do this like a golf announcer. Ezra Klein, he is coming up on the, on the 18th green. He is pulling up examples.

[Ezra Klein]

Okay, okay. The issue action number one. The this is all running through the ntia, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which I know you're all big fans of.

[Jon Stewart]

Sure. They've done fabulous work.

[Ezra Klein]

Yes. So step one is the NTIA must issue NOFO notice of funding opportunity within 180 days. I want to note, by the way, that within 180 days is already kind of something interesting here because you look at say the works progress administration.

[Jon Stewart]

WPA was at the 30s.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah. The new Deal. Right. And Harold Meyerson has a great piece on this back from the 2010s and that was employing people by then. I mean, 180 days is. I could do some quick math here. It's about half a year.

[Jon Stewart]

The 180 days is just them notify. They have to notify people that there might be this opportunity.

[Ezra Klein]

Yes. Medicare. When we passed Medicare in this country, it gave people Medicare cards one year later. So we are taking half a year here just to tell people that there is going to be an opportunity to apply for grants.

[Jon Stewart]

What are. And I'd hate to even break this down even further because this is just.

[Ezra Klein]

I'm so glad we're doing this. This is my shit, man. This is like I didn't expect we' go here.

[Jon Stewart]

But Ezra, I think it's so important for people though to really get an understanding of just what is. Yeah, the bureaucracy. It's this faceless thing right now at Doge. It's demonized as though the people that are running the bureaucracy are the evil ones. Like they're just executing what they've been told to do by Congress. These are just hard working, smart people trying to do the right thing by what's been legislated.

[Ezra Klein]

And I want to say this is a big part of the book. We talk a lot about how hard it is to be a civil servant. Right. We get incredibly talented people to come into the government.

[Jon Stewart]

Absolutely.

[Ezra Klein]

Now we make it incredibly hard for them to do their job.

[Jon Stewart]

Absolutely.

[Ezra Klein]

So I'm a huge fan of this book by Jen Palka called Recoding America, which it absolutely shows, like how the bodies are buried and how frustrating this is. But okay, so what I'm reading off of here is testimony that was offered by Sarah Morris, who was part of the Commerce Department to Congress on March 4, 2025. So everything I am telling you is valid post Biden administration. Right. March 4, 2025. So, okay, so we have to issue the notice of funding opportunity within 180 days. That's step one. Step two, which all 56 applicants completed, is states who want to participate must submit a letter of intent. After they do that, they can submit a request for up to $5 million in planning grants. Then the NTIA step four has to review and approve and award again planning grants. Not broadband grants, planning grants.

[Jon Stewart]

And it's still at the ntia. It's still at the first step?

[Ezra Klein]

Yes.

[Jon Stewart]

Just out of curiosity, what is the half a year? What's going on in the 180 days between when this is passed as legislation and when they're going to notify people it's been passed and it's an opportunity.

[Ezra Klein]

So the no foe is being. The notice of funding opportunity is being written. And in the book, I actually spend a lot of time on the notice of funding opportunity for the Chips and Science act because that's not a small thing. And I don't have the no foe for this in front of me. But the notice of funding opportunity, no foe for the grants that will go to semiconductor manufacturers to locate semiconductor fabs, as they're called in America. That NOFO was long. I read it and it is just full of stuff.

[Jon Stewart]

Sure.

[Ezra Klein]

Look, I call this everything bagel liberalism. The tendency, like an everything bagel, you put a little bit of stuff on the bagel and it's great, delicious. And you put too much. And if you saw the movie, everything everywhere, all at once, it becomes a black hole from which nothing can escape. So notice of funding opportunities can make a project very complicated. When chips and science passed, I, a naive and idealistic policy reporter, thought, oh, good, we're going to give a bunch of semiconductor companies money to locate their plants here. And then I read the NOFO because somebody alerted me to it. And it's like there's a part that's like in, in your application. Explain how you are going to attract more women into the construction industry, which is like a totally fine goal. But does the Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation know a lot about that or like how are you going to diversify your subcontractor chains? And there's a seven step process process and like one idea is maybe you can break deliveries into smaller subcategory. Like it's all this stuff.

[Jon Stewart]

This is for your application?

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah, this is for your application. There's a thing about, you know, giving it, showing your plans to put child care on site in the factories which again I have children. Childcare is great but you're trying to do something really hard. We have lost semiconductor manufacturing to Taiwan, to South Korea, to at a lower level China. And we are trying to get it back. And one reason we've lost it is we've made it very expensive to do here. And so now we're putting more than $30 billion to make it cheaper to do here and in the NOFO to get people to apply for the 30 plus billion dollars. We are putting in a bunch of things that are going to make it more expensive and they're going to make it harder to do the thing. Eventually that money did go out, I want to say but you know, we'll see how it works out.

[Jon Stewart]

And also by the way going to make it impossible for anyone other than larger corporations to comply because the expense that it would take for smaller, more agile, more local businesses. Yes, they would not have the manpower, the financial resources. You are excluding an enormous amount of the American economy in terms of building things by laying on compliance costs that would drive most companies into the ground.

[Ezra Klein]

Yes, that, that is very true. I will say on the semiconductors you don't have a lot of small semiconductor manufacturing.

[Jon Stewart]

Right. In other areas.

[Ezra Klein]

But in general what you are saying is completely right. Okay, back to roll broadband. So the NOFO that comes out can have a lot of things in it that you wouldn't expect. It's going to try to achieve a lot of different goals. What are the workforce standards? What are the equity standards? What are the subcontractor approaches?

[Jon Stewart]

Meaning you can't apply unless you live up to those.

[Ezra Klein]

Yes, this is what's going to be in your application. They are setting out a series. You might think that basically what they're setting out is here's how to persuade us you are going to be the best at building whatever we're trying to get you to build. Again, I don't have this NOFO in front of me. So I don't want to say things that may not be true about it. But having read other reporting on this, my sense is all this stuff was in the nofo, and I have a bunch of examples in the book. It's all in every liberal bill now, right? They pass bills, and then in the process, where the different interest groups and players can come in and shape how the bills are turned into regulations and grants and so on. That's where it's much easier to say yes to all these other members of your coalition. And by the way, it's not like Republicans are great here. It's just they're, like, circling interest groups are like the oil companies and so on.

[Jon Stewart]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

There is a lot of bad stuff that happens after a bill passes, in part because most of the system stops paying attention when we're fighting about it in Congress. They're reporters. There are members of Congress. There's a lot going on. The regulatory process, which is very, very powerful and important, does not have that level of attention on it. It's more complicated, it's slower, it's annoying. There's less conflict.

[Jon Stewart]

I'll give you something else, Ezra. This.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah, please.

[Jon Stewart]

This, I think, is also an important part of the process. Congress people are very busy. And so the space between what they have the capacity to do to delineate these things versus what lobbyists in these industries have to do. In other words, a lot of what's in these wish lists are industry wish lists. The lobbyists who have the time industry is writing a lot of what's in these bills.

[Ezra Klein]

Yes. Yeah. And this goes to something that we talk about throughout the book because it affects housing and everything else. This happens at the local level. We have created, with all good intention, a lot of processes meant to expand the role of citizen voice. You know, regulatory notice and comment periods are, in theory, something that anybody can show up to. But, like, how many regulatory notice and comment periods have you shown up to? Possibly actually you, specifically because of some of the work you've done?

[Jon Stewart]

I actually have shown up to a few.

[Ezra Klein]

You've shown up to a couple. But you're a special flower, right? Yes. So a delight. You know, these things get captured. Who knows when the planning meeting is happening? It's the people who have houses down the block from the potential affordable housing complex. It's not the people who might benefit from living in that complex in the future. All right, so the NTIA must issue a NOFO within 180 days. States who want to participate Must submit their letter of intent. Step three, they can request up to $5 million in planning grants.

[Jon Stewart]

Just planning.

[Ezra Klein]

Just planning. Step four. The requests are reviewed, approved, and awarded by the NTIA.

[Jon Stewart]

How long is step four? Just out of curiosity?

[Ezra Klein]

I actually don't know. It's a great question.

[Jon Stewart]

That's good. So that's step four.

[Ezra Klein]

But this process we are talking about, which currently all 56, you know, three years later, all 56 applicants had passed through at least step five. It took at least, it took more than three years. So it's a long time.

[Jon Stewart]

Oh, my God.

[Ezra Klein]

States must submit a five year action plan. So the states kind of go back and they kind of think about how they're going to do this. And they don't just say, okay, you know, thank you for the money. We're going to spend it. And you can see how it worked out later. We're like, here's our five year action plan. Then the FCC must publish the broadband data maps before NTIA allocates funds. So this one is, I think, a little funny at least. So these maps, right? This is supposed to show you where you don't have enough broadband. But it then says in parentheses and states needed opportunities to challenge a map for accuracy. So having done the nofo, the letters of intent, the request for planning grants, then the review, approval and awarding of the planning grants, then the five year action plans in between that, the federal government has to put forward a map saying where it thinks we need rural broadband subsidies. And then of course, the states need an opportunity to challenge the map for accuracy. And you can imagine this doesn't all happen in like a day. Okay, so then the ntia, step seven has to use the FCC maps to make allocation decisions. Then having already done their letter of intent, the request for planning grants. It's hard even to talk about this, man.

[Jon Stewart]

Ezra, I just want to say, like, if you were going to design a machine that would keep people from getting broadband.

[Ezra Klein]

Yes.

[Jon Stewart]

If you were to design a machine that would. It's almost as though they have designed this to make sure that people in rural areas never, by the time this is around, Musk will already have the chips in our brains. We won't even need it.

[Ezra Klein]

Well, that, that literally is happening, by the way. By the time this could have gotten off the ground, Musk is taking it over for Starlink.

[Jon Stewart]

Right?

[Ezra Klein]

Okay. Step seven is NTIA must use the FCC maps that were already challenged for allocation decisions. Then having submitted all this, I think this one is actually quite amazing. Having submitted their five year plans or letters of intent. Step eight is states must submit an initial proposal. An initial proposal to the NTIA.

[Jon Stewart]

Is that the result of their $5 million planning fund? This initial proposal, I assume.

[Ezra Klein]

But then what was the five year.

[Jon Stewart]

Plan, and what the fuck did they apply for? What was their nofo God like?

[Ezra Klein]

If the five year action plan isn't the initial proposal, then what's the five year action plan?

[Jon Stewart]

Forget nofo, mofo. These are motherfuckers. These regular. This is crazy.

[Ezra Klein]

Step nine, NTIA must review and approve each state's. Again, initial proposal. By my read, we have had at least two initial proposals here, but that's a different issue.

[Jon Stewart]

Oh, my God.

[Ezra Klein]

Step 10, states must publish their own map and allow internal challenges to their own map. Government has published a map. They have invited the states to challenge the map. Then states have submitted initial proposals, and they then have to publish their own map and allow challenges.

[Jon Stewart]

Wait, who's challenging it within the state?

[Ezra Klein]

Well, you know, organized interest groups, environmental group, like, I don't know who specifically, but any. Literally anybody.

[Jon Stewart]

Oh, my God.

[Ezra Klein]

This is. I want to say something because it's very important I say this. This is the Biden administration's process for its own bill. They wanted this to happen. This is how liberal government works now.

[Jon Stewart]

This is something they instituted for their bill. For this bill. They wanted this.

[Ezra Klein]

So I just. It's so important to say this. This is not how Republicans handicapped a liberal bill.

[Jon Stewart]

Oh, wow.

[Ezra Klein]

This is a bill passed by Democrats with a regulatory structure written by Democratic administration. Okay, this, by the way. So the thing I'm looking at, it tells me as of March of 2020, many of the players had gone through everything. So until what I just said, states must publish their own map and allow challenges. Three years plus into this, all 56 had done that. But now you begin to see players falling out. Step 11, the NTIA must review and improve the challenge results in the final map. So the NTIA has put forward a map. The states have challenged that map. Then the states have put forward their maps, had other challenges, and now the NTIA must review and approve the challenges to the state maps. Okay, at this point, it's 47 of the 56. So we've just lost nine of the applicants.

[Jon Stewart]

My hair was dark when we started this process. I was a young, healthy man. I had the bone density of a.

[Ezra Klein]

Your VO2 max was amazing.

[Jon Stewart]

Of a stainless steel. My. I didn't need any supplement. This is. And by the way, I want to make sure that everybody understands each one of these steps. I'M sure. And pardon me if I'm. I'm being presumptuous. Each one of these steps has an amount of time.

[Ezra Klein]

Yes.

[Jon Stewart]

That they write into. So in other words, it's a 90 day waiting period for these challenges. It's a 120 day review process. Like there's already, without anybody even submitting anything that they could have seen on a macro level. 2 1/2 years of nothingness built into the plan.

[Ezra Klein]

Yes. I mean, I can't say because I haven't looked at every regulation here, but. But yes, yes, yes, yes. You are confident.

[Jon Stewart]

I feel confident. I feel confident knowing what the public comment times are like. You always have 90 days, 120 days. They have a 30 day review process. They have an 800 day. You know, it's all of this.

[Ezra Klein]

Yes.

[Jon Stewart]

Okay, gotta take a quick break. We'll be right back.

[Ezra Klein]

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[Jon Stewart]

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[Ezra Klein]

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[Ezra Klein]

Ezra, by the way, this whole thing, I'm looking at this testimony. This is a member of the Commerce Department who is part of this, coming to testify in March 4, 2025 before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, their subcommittee on Communications and technology, in a hearing called Fixing Biden's Broadband Blunder.

[Jon Stewart]

Oh, my God.

[Ezra Klein]

So this is somebody trying to defend what they're doing to a Republican Congress. It's trying to take their money away. So I just want to note that because it gets interesting for, for them, what gets said ultimately. Okay, so we've done step 11. NTIA must review and approve challenge results and final map. We've lost nine of the applicants at that point step 12 states must run a competitive sub granting process.

[Jon Stewart]

Oh my fucking God. At step 12 by after all this has been done.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah, none of that could have happened along the way here. We have now lost 17 more applicants. So now 30 of 56 have completed step 12. Step 13 states must submit a final proposal. All the proposals weren't enough to NTIA. Now that goes to 3 of 56. So we've gone in the last couple steps from 56 had gone to this point to 3 of 56. Step 14, the NTIA must review and approve the state's final proposal. And that is three of the 56 jurisdictions and states are there. And then I will just tell you John, because it will break your heart as it breaks mine. As this very, I am certain, hardworking and well meaning public servant stares down a hostile Republican Congress that is like peppering them with questions. The next line, which is in bold, says in summary, Colin, states are nearly at the finish line and it says to stop their progress now, or worse, to make them go backwards would be a stick in the spokes of the most promising broadband deployment plans we have ever seen. End seen.

[Jon Stewart]

I'm speechless, Ezra. Honestly, like it's a far worse than I could have imagined. But the fact that they amputated their own legs on this is what's so stunning. And I'll just for, for fairness sake, I'll give you the flip side of that, which is the PACT act, right?

[Ezra Klein]

I'm going to say to you, as you said to me, about orthogonal. What's the PACT Act, John?

[Jon Stewart]

Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

[Ezra Klein]

You, you Washington types.

[Jon Stewart]

It's the burn pit bill where soldiers who had been exposed to toxins, who had slept near there were getting all these illnesses for the VA to cover them presumptively for these other illnesses, it took, you know, a few years. They, they let us write it. They literally, the committee in Congress was like, could you guys write that? So with the help of some people and all the VSOs, they wrote this bill that would cover all these veterans. Then it went through, you know, House Veterans Affairs, Senate Veteran affairs put together, they come up with this bill. The big Republican complaint was once they realized they were going to get strong armed on having to help veterans who were sick. Oh really was. Well, geez, all these new people that are dying, isn't that going to flood our hospitals at the VA and create a lot of lag times for people getting in there? So the va, to their credit, in a very short amount of time came up with an action plan about what they would need to do to hire people to create the capacity so it wouldn't have that. They implemented it. They did it within six months. They put it all together. Hundreds of thousands of veterans were helped because of that. The lag times didn't happen. And it worked. It's working. And what did the Republicans do? The first thing they did when they came in is they fired all those people. So understand there are two sides to this coin. There is this incredibly frustrating over complicated Rube Goldberg machine that keeps people from getting Broadway. And then on the flip side is a group of legislators who don't want to give you anything.

[Ezra Klein]

We are caught between a party that wants to make government fail and a party that does not make government work. Yeah, that is my very simple version of politics. Look, I want to give a different, not a different, but take on why this is such a problem for a minute. Okay, There's a line from Jake Sullivan I think it was, but fact check me, but I'm pretty sure it was him and it was one of the sort of Biden retrospective pieces I believe in the Washington Post. And he said, look, the problem here is elections happen in four years and Joe Biden's policy agenda is measured in decades.

[Jon Stewart]

It's epochal. It's. You can't expect Methuselah to get in there.

[Ezra Klein]

But I've heard this in different ways from a bunch of people. Gavin Newsom said a version of it to me when I was on his show that I just taped the other day. And I want to say two things about this. What actually upsets me the most about the way liberals govern is that they excuse it all away like this. Like this. I mean, it's such a shame election cycles are short. We can't do anything about that.

[Jon Stewart]

We only had four years.

[Ezra Klein]

We are choosing this. All those things I just read to you are chosen. There is nothing in the history of this country that would say that we can't figure out how to put like you, like you probably got broadband set up in your house. Did it take you four years?

[Jon Stewart]

Well, we did have. They did give us some times that they said they would be over and there take a while.

[Ezra Klein]

The problem with getting into this mode where you've persuaded yourself that for the government to do anything, it's going to be a 6 to 10 year timeline like the infrastructure bill. Most of the road projects have a, that have a completion date, have a completion date in mid-2027 for a bill passed in 2021. So except for being annoyed that there is construction, nobody's going to feel that anything good was done for that. And the reason this really matters is that if you stretch the timeline of liberal democracy like taffy, so it gets longer and longer and longer, what you have broken is the fundamental way people can feel that they benefit from liberal democracy. And it would be one thing if there was just no other way to do it. Right? But you look at the history of this country I mentioned earlier, when we, when Lyndon Johnson passed Medicare, it gave people a Medicare card in a year. The Affordable Care act took four years negotiating down the prices of a limited number of drugs under Medicare, which is arguably the most popular policy. The Biden administration passed more than three years just to agree on the prices of that concern. So they couldn't run on anything, by.

[Jon Stewart]

The way, just the idea that the government, the largest customer to drug companies, the same people that give those drug companies subsidies and billions of dollars, can't just go in there and go, and by the way, give us 20% off this shit because it's so much cheaper in every other country. It's not even just a question of liberal democracy writ large. It's. You can look at democracies around the world, Western democracies that build shit faster.

[Ezra Klein]

Yes.

[Jon Stewart]

Cheaper and better. It's, it's unconscionable.

[Ezra Klein]

Like I always say, like in the time it took California to not build 500 miles of high speed rail, China built 23,000 miles of high speed.

[Jon Stewart]

That state, state run capitalism is hard to, to match it to.

[Ezra Klein]

But Europe does it too.

[Jon Stewart]

Yes, that's, that would be my point.

[Ezra Klein]

You know, like Spain builds it. And like we have this like joke in the book. It's like they have a government. We checked. They have higher union density than we do.

[Jon Stewart]

They nap Ezra, they nap Spain is building it. But yet between 3:00 and 5:00 they're all asleep. How is that possible?

[Ezra Klein]

One of the things I'm trying to shake people on with this book is that Democrats, liberals, people who believe in government, have entered into a kind of learned helplessness about how government works. As if like the way they have ended up doing it. I call this a culture, it's not an ideology. The culture of how Democrats govern has become like this. Look, I was talking to Jon Favreau the other day of Pod Save America. We were doing an event and I will yell about high speed rail forever in California. But high speed rail was one of three headline projects out of the stimulus in 2009 because they had the whole part where they're just trying to pump money into the economy. But then they had this idea of the infrastructure of the future. And the three they always talked about were high speed rail that Obama talked about, smart grid and national network of interoperable electronic healthcare records. I said this and like John's like, well, 0 for 3.

[Jon Stewart]

They couldn't get the computers at the Department of Defense to talk to the computers at the Department of Veterans affairs for 10 years.

[Ezra Klein]

Yes. So the idea, they get all the private computers to talk, but we keep failing. We're good at moving money around. If we tell you we're going to do social insurance, we're going to expand the undercover tax credit, you're going to get a bigger child tax credit. The irs, which Musk and Trump are gutting, was actually in a million different ways a model of efficiency. What it has been able to do in terms of building out a tax and transfer state that was never actually designed to run, and particularly what it did during COVID is for whatever failures are, they are actually quite remarkable.

[Jon Stewart]

The fact that they got checks out to people in the amount of time that they got them out there and they distributed those funds efficiently, it can work. But it doesn't. And I, and I have to tell you. So some people may listen to this conversation, right? And they may go, well, how the fuck are you two still believers in a government that accomplished things? And I think for me it's a question of because we're doing it wrong. This is not the method by which to accomplish things. And I have examples of doing it right.

[Ezra Klein]

Yes.

[Jon Stewart]

And if you have analogs that can show you that that can be done, then it, it still fills you with perhaps misguided idealism or a misguided optimism. But I know it can be done because it's been done.

[Ezra Klein]

Well, I'll say a couple of things here because it is easy to get so focused on failures you don't see successes as you said. So one is, I do get this. Well, if you hate government regulation so much and you think Texas is building housing so well, why aren't you just a Republican? It's like, are you asking me why in my fury that we are not building the liberal future I think we deserve, like the just, humane, green future, why don't instead embrace a vision of a future that I think sucks? Like a future where like I'm choking on dirty air and the world is in a heat trap and nobody's even trying to build high speed rail that's your big question for me. That's your gotcha? Yeah. I'm allied with the people trying to create a vision of the future that I think is a good one and two. Look, it's not that nothing ever happens. It happens too slowly. But in fact, the Inflation Reduction act has set off a huge boom in building solar and battery manufacturing. It could be happening faster if we have better laws for building things, but it is happening. The Affordable Care act took four years to deliver health insurance to people, but people have the health insurance now, and if we never passed that bill, they wouldn't have the health insurance. And like, what's fucking Donald Trump trying to do? He's trying to gut Medicaid. So, yeah, government does do something just fine.

[Jon Stewart]

There are differences, but I think that's. Where do people on the left get angry at you? Because what I find is I can tend to be critical about those delays because of my fear that it, it puts the entire idea that government can be a force to ease some of the struggles. Look, the system, the operating system that we've chosen to use, right, is capitalism. And it generates wealth better than any of these other systems that has been operated. But there's no question there's collateral damage, sometimes by design, sometimes by externalities, sometimes by the idea that as money begins to accumulate, well, then people can rig the system more easily. Government is the only influence that is large enough to provide a check or a balance to that kind of rapacious or destructive wealth building. Right. If that isn't functioning appropriately, that is my anger. How do they criticize you for criticizing that if that is not too convoluted?

[Ezra Klein]

I want to be kind to criticisms here, some of which I think are well founded and some of which are not.

[Jon Stewart]

Yes, yes, yes.

[Ezra Klein]

I guess here's what I would say. One, I just really want to co sign what you just said and add one thing to it, which is that part of the problems of capitalism are that it is rapacious, that it will ship its own mother off onto an ice floe to make a buck. It just doesn't know it's impersonal. Capitalism is an impersonal force. It is not immoral, it is not moral, it is amoral.

[Jon Stewart]

Right. It's like being mad at a great white shark, something.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah, yeah. And so there are things it does that create collateral damage, and then there are things it just doesn't do because those things are not connected to a profit motive at all. There is a huge amount of public good provision capitalism. I mean, can you imagine Creating the libraries today, the public libraries. Right, of course, like capitalism creates bookstores, it's never going to create a library.

[Jon Stewart]

Right. Public utility.

[Ezra Klein]

Not because it's rapacious and terrible, just because it's not what it does. It's like asking a great white shark to scramble you some eggs, you know, like, it's not what a great white shark does.

[Jon Stewart]

Oh, boy, would that. That would be a show I would watch though, if that was. I think Mr. Beast could probably make that happen for us.

[Ezra Klein]

So that's one thing about capitalism, but then the other thing about the critique on the left is that I genuinely believe that nobody should be angrier. Like consumers are delighted by government failure. If you are a liberal or you're on the left, you should be rip shit about government failure because it is striking at your project. You should be rip shit about high speed rail, rip shit about the rural broadband initiative, rip shit about how long everything has taken compared to what it took in the past. If you look at like AOC came out with a really big ambitious public housing bill a couple years ago, she's saying, look, the people who are all out there saying the Yimbys, et cetera, saying we don't have enough housing, the right, but let's do a lot of it through public housing. And people don't know this, but one of the things we've regulated very heavily, and that's partially why some of these projects are so baroque, is we've regulated the government very heavily. When people talk about deregulation, they think of the market. For me, I have to think of the need to deregulate the government itself. But it was made functionally illegal for the federal government to build public housing. It really can't do it. But in order for it to build public housing, well, you would have to make a lot of changes to how it builds, like all across the board because it layers so many standards. I mean, look at that rural broadband process. You're not going to fix the housing problem if that's what they came up with for rural broadband. Just fucking imagine what a nationwide public housing project would look like.

[Jon Stewart]

No, yeah, but other countries do it.

[Ezra Klein]

Like Singapore, Like, I think, what is it? 80% of people live in some kind of social housing there. There are countries that do a lot of this. Well, right. And one thing I think that the left and for that matter liberals often just don't pay enough attention to is what stands in between them and their agenda. That is not Republicans, because they can really see when Republicans stand between them and their agenda. And Republicans often do. But one reason a bunch of this book is focused on governance failures in California, in New York and places like that is because these are places Republicans hold no power. So you can't say, oh, if only the mean Republicans would let us do it, we'd get it done.

[Jon Stewart]

Boy, that's a good point.

[Ezra Klein]

You're actually left looking in the mirror thinking, why haven't I made my own bed here? And if you want to do what AOC and Bernie Sanders want to do, right, if you want to do a Green New Deal of the size of their Green New Deals, we just flatly do not have the laws that will allow you to build that much green infrastructure. And we definitely, like nobody disagrees. We definitely don't have the fucking laws that will let you lay down transmission lines across the country to get all that new clean energy you're generating to the places it needs to go. And if we don't have those laws, then your bill will fail, right? One thing that liberals get very and leftists get very stuck on is the price tag. The economist Noah Smith calls this checkism, where it's like we sort of judge how good or ambitious legislation is on how big the estimated price tag on it is. It's like we got $300 billion for green energy. I mean, good, but that was bullshit compared to my $900 billion plan. But money, look, you could spend a lot of money in California high speed rail and build nothing, right? Money isn't the end goal here. It's particularly when you're building things, built infrastructure, right? It's the number of people hooked up to world broadband, et cetera. Our sort of provocation in the book, what we're telling all these stories for, is not to come down on one set of policy solutions because honestly, the problem in transmission lines is different than the one in housing. The problem in housing is different than the one in kind of supply of healthcare. There's all these things here, but is to try to get people to ask a question much more regular than we do, which is simply this. Like this is the whole book boiled down to one question. What do we need more of? And why is it so hard to get it? That's like the whole thing that we just don't ask. Well, I think some of the criticism that isn't as strong comes from a tendency that we all have to just group certain means into ideological buckets. Deregulation, that's a thing. Republicans spending money, that's a thing.

[Jon Stewart]

We did that in finance and look what it did. To the world economy.

[Ezra Klein]

That's a thing Democrats do, right? Critiquing government. Republicans do critiquing government, thinking the private sector can solve some things. That's the thing Democrats do. But sometimes you need to flip it. A bunch of the things we're talking about here. I want to deregulate the government enough that it can build high speed rail itself. I am trying to make a much stronger government, and it just kind of scrambles people's ideological categories a bit. So I just did this podcast with Governor Newsom, and we were talking about high speed rail, which he walked into office and it was already fucked. And he's the one who came in and said, we are going to shrink this from L8SF, which we have no money and no capability to do, to Merced to Bakersfield. And you can critique him for not scrapping it, because I'm not sure Merced to Bakersfield is worth doing. But I was talking with him because the book is very critical of California governance. And he was very, interestingly to me, positive on the critique. He's like, this is right. This is what's going wrong. But what he said is like, look, we cannot build under this level of lawsuit. He's like, high speed rail is built.

[Jon Stewart]

He put it in the litigation term. That was.

[Ezra Klein]

Well, that's a big part of it. One difference between the way we do government in America and the way they do it in Europe is we restrain government through litigation here. A huge amount of the bills passed by both liberals and, you know, I mean, they're sort of liberals, Republicans and too. But a lot of the bills, the big environmental bills, are passed by Nixon, right? The EPA is created by Nixon. The National Environmental Policy act, the Endangered Species act, that's all Nixon stuff. But it's, you know, done with Democrats.

[Jon Stewart]

And a lot of it is also to be fair, state and local. Like, if you even. Even without the federal government intervention, state and local zoning restrictions, environmental law, all these different things are also there. Ezra, I want to ask you, like, what do you think about even stepping back a bit further than that, which is, you know, we're talking a little bit about the priorities of a more progressive agenda, the things that they want to build. Is there even a more basic step that needs to be addressed first? Because one of the issues that I think afflicts, maybe more progressive policies, which is we need 500 billion to build this. We need to tax billionaires to get the money to do this, but the public does not trust that that money will be attached to A value that directly impacts their lives because they haven't seen it for a couple of decades or so. And on the flip side, the Republicans come in with a sith and they're chopping it in the name of efficiency, but again, with no eye to value. Do Democrats have to almost take even a step further back and simplify the case for value and making that case to people and competence?

[Ezra Klein]

Let me say this one as clearly as I possibly can. Democrats have to be the party that owns government reform, right? One thing is, if they don't, then what you're going to get is something like Doge, which is the destruction of the government under the guise of reform. But two, the politics of reform. It is one of the most powerful streams of politics that exists in American life. I think if you just go back over recent elections, you can basically predict the winner just on who owns the politics of reform. So Obama runs as a good government reformer. I mean, people forget this now about him, but his big pitch was not post racialism, it was, yes, we can. The special interests and the lobbyists, they're dicing us up into red and blue and they're fooling us and they're fucking up our politics and we're going to get him out of here and we're going to have a government for you. Obama was very much a reformer. Trump, in his own Way, in 2016, he runs as a reformer. Drain the swamp is a reform line. And Hillary Clinton is very much like she's been in Washington forever. She took all this money from Goldman Sachs. Right. She embodies the opposite of reform.

[Jon Stewart]

Status quo, establishment status quo.

[Ezra Klein]

People always say status quo and change. And I think this is a place where Democrats often don't want to see part of what that implies because they're like, we're not the status quo. We have all these big projects, just as you're saying, John, to give people money. But status quo is also about this question of will you change the way the thing works? So Trump runs as a reformer in 2020 in a way like during the pandemic, when the Trump administration is fucking up government left and right. I wouldn't really say Biden runs on an agenda of reform, but he does run on agenda of trying to make government work and believe science and things like that.

[Jon Stewart]

And we were in a very unusual moment in 2020.

[Ezra Klein]

And then in 2024, Harris has this very unusual problem of running as sort of the incumbent, but not the incumbent. She runs as the defender of the institutions.

[Jon Stewart]

Yes.

[Ezra Klein]

Not the reformer of that's right. And the politics of government reform. Like Bill Clinton ran on government reform, reinventing government. The Al Gore on with David Letterman talking about how expensive the ashtray at the Pentagon.

[Jon Stewart]

Cass Sunstein in the back room writing all the things.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah, right. So the politics of reform are very, are very important. But also it also reminds me of something else. Like look, you live in a relatively high tax liberal state. I lived in California and then I now live in New York. I hear a lot of people complain about taxes, but what I don't primarily hear them say is just that my taxes are too high. It's that my taxes are too high and I get nothing.

[Jon Stewart]

That's everything. That's everything. That is the exact crux of what we're talking about. And it even, you know, when we talk about the, the great examples of democratic revolutionary legislation over the past 20 years, even when you talk about the ACA. I pay a lot of taxes. Oh, so you get health care? Well, no, I get maybe a stipend that'll buy me insurance. Oh, so the insurance is health care? Well, no, it's actually like a ticket and you have to go up to the counter and they'll say, well, yes, you can have a little bit of health care, but you can't have this health. There is a disconnect. It reminds me of the education conversation. There was once sort of. It went viral. It was a list of the 10 ways that people learn best. And then they put the 10 ways that things are taught and they were exactly contradictory of how things. We have designed a system that is in many ways government has just become the trough for big business to come in. Give nothing away, only extract. And I think nobody has demonstrated to people in recent times that it doesn't have to be that way.

[Ezra Klein]

Okay, but I want to, I want to do the one uncomfortable thing here, please, because I want to say yes.

[Jon Stewart]

And are we, are we improv? We're improv in this bad boy. All right.

[Ezra Klein]

We're improving.

[Jon Stewart]

Bring it.

[Ezra Klein]

Liberals are really comfortable when the government, when the enemy is big business. And it often is. But in a lot of what we are talking about, that 14 stage rural broadband thing I just went through.

[Jon Stewart]

Yes.

[Ezra Klein]

That wasn't business.

[Jon Stewart]

It's a good point. It's.

[Ezra Klein]

Well, I bring this up because we're actually pretty comfortable saying no in some cases, not as many as it would pretty ideal to business. We have a politics of that. What we have a lot more trouble saying no to is ourselves, our allies, or if you're in a local Government, Right. A bunch of homeowners who never want the affordable housing.

[Jon Stewart]

Our idealism.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah. And sometimes our idealism. Right. You can sort of imagine if I like unwound those nofos and everything, how all the things that get in there, like the subcontractor diversity requirements and everything for the people in the room, it's like, I mean, I don't want to say no to that. Like the people asking for that are good people, they're our friends. Like they're trying to do something good in the world. And all the things that are making all the building more expensive. Look, there's like a big I report on this affordable housing project in San Francisco and it has an interesting fight tucked inside of it. It has a lot of interesting fights in it. You should read the book.

[Jon Stewart]

Was that the one where they bought every unit cost like $400,000 to build.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah. Instead of the double that it usually costs, which it still sounds like a lot, but it was finished for half the cost, comparatively. It was half the cost and half the time. And one of the big reasons is that they use modular housing construction, off site, factory built housing first affordable housing. To do that either in San Francisco or in, to my knowledge, California though, I'd want to fact check that. But I think that's right. Anyway, there's a big fight with the unions on that. But it's interesting because it's a fight in two directions. You have the construction trades who try like hell to kill that project. And the only reason they can't kill it is, is it uses private sector money. But the factory that was doing the modular housing construction was unionized. So there was a union benefiting on the other side of this too. But you get into these sort of local political power fights which are, I know California politics really well and it's really significant there. And it's not that you can't work with some of your allies. I tell at some length the story of Josh shapiro rebuilding the i95 bridge in 12 days as opposed to 12 to 24 months, 10 years.

[Jon Stewart]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

And he does that with union labor, but those unions are working 24, 7. And what he also does is put down an emergency declaration that wipes out all these other procurement and environmental review and contracting the 14 steps.

[Jon Stewart]

It takes away the Al Anon 14 steps.

[Ezra Klein]

It's actually a great counter example because here's something. So this tanker rolls over, catches on fire and the bridge falls down. And this is like one of the major arteries of the northeast corridor. So it's A huge problem. And the first day, Shapiro comes out, Governor Shapiro, and says, look, this is a huge disaster and people are going to need to be patient. This is very likely to take 12 or more months to reconstruct, but they wipe out all the rules. And what the Department of Transportation head does is he goes, and remember all that stuff we just did with rural broadband? He goes that day and on the bridge nearby, working on just normal maintenance projects that had already been in play, are two different contractors. And he basically grabs one and says, you're the demolition guys now. And he grabs another and says, you're the rebuild guys.

[Jon Stewart]

Oh, leadership.

[Ezra Klein]

And the contractors are on the job at the end of the first day. And I talked to him, it's in the book. And I say, how long would that normally have taken? He said, under our normal process with the bids and the challenges to the bids and et cetera, it takes 12 to 24 months to do the build.

[Jon Stewart]

And contracting, just to get ready to start. I think ultimately the point is this. I look at government as we need to use it to harness the power of business, not let citizens be exploited by the rapaciousness of business. And they are too very different things. That is not to say you're anti business, but it's to suggest that you have to be some kind of a bulwark against those kinds of. Of instincts that they have there. And that is the way. Do you remember there was a book called, ah, the Death of Common Sense? Is that ring a bell to you, Howard? That sounds like a book who wrote about. It's not that we don't necessarily have, you know, regulations. Thing is that we don't interpret them with any common sense. We don't allow leadership, whether it's within the judiciary or whether it's in the regulatory that we allow the bureaucracy of it to become almost sentient and forget that it's a tool. And I almost wonder, you know, you talked earlier about what man is capable of. We put somebody on, on the moon. Maybe we need a kind of bureaucratic moonshot. A Manhattan Project we have begun.

[Ezra Klein]

It is such a absolute fucking shame what we've done. We have made bureaucrat into this dirty word, but we've done it by making.

[Jon Stewart]

The job miserable because it's adversarial in many respects.

[Ezra Klein]

It's not just adversarial. We don't give them any latitude. So Elon Musk wants to fire all the bureaucrats. Right. Things are all lazy and unproductive. I wanted before this, and I want now to have Genuine civil service reform. I want it to be easier to hire, easier to fire, easier to manage. I want them less bound by rules. I want to trust their discretion. No system of government works at some basic level.

[Jon Stewart]

No system of anything.

[Ezra Klein]

If you have so little trust in it that you won't allow people to make decisions, it just doesn't. This is a big part of Jen Palka's book. I have, again, like, a really pretty interesting interview that's in the book about. This part's about LA public housing. It's why. So in la, they passed this bond measure, more than a billion dollars to build public housing. And whatever it was, six years later when I'm writing, they built like, I don't know, a couple thousand units. And many of them were like $700,000 per unit. And it's like, why end up talking to a woman named Heidi Marston, who'd been running the homelessness services in la, and she had quit and, like, written this letter about why she was quitting. And she said something I think about a lot. She was like, I had a billion dollars and if you had just allowed me to spend it, I could have really done something with it.

[Jon Stewart]

Oh, it's fucking heartbreaking.

[Ezra Klein]

And I'll just give an example from this project. So we passed this bond measure, and what we do in the bond measure is we put in rule, regulation, whatever, but you're basically supposed to use the public taxpayer money to seed the project. Not to build it, to seed it. And then you're supposed to cobble together like five more sources of funding to build it. And the idea was that this is going to save taxpayer money, we're going to leverage taxpayer money. Right? A great word from finance. What it ends up doing is making it really, really, really difficult to finance a project. And you're getting. I mean, it's affordable housing, right? So it's not like Blackstone is giving you the money. So you're like, here's a tax credit program to house homeless veterans. But then I need to put in these particular things for homeless veterans, and I need to find them. And here's another thing for survivors of domestic abuse, and I get some money from that. And I was talking to people who work on affordable housing, and they also did the same thing. And I talked to the LA comptroller, a guy at that time named Ron Galbrin, and what he said to me, he's like, look, you would think I'd be all in favor of this. I'm the person watching LA's Money and I am telling you, this was absolutely insane because how much we slowed everything down as we were trying to show we were saving taxpayer money, we added that much cost just in what we were adding to the project, and we made it not happen, and we slowed it down and whatever. And I want to say, at the core of this we were never doing was trusting the civil servants, right? Like giving them the room to run, giving them money and saying, you spend it and we're not going to audit you 27 times and run you in front of a keyring and yell at you.

[Jon Stewart]

Right?

[Ezra Klein]

We're gonna treat you like you're good at what you fucking do, and we're gonna let you do it. And if the public doesn't like how this is all being managed, they can vote the mayor out in the next election.

[Jon Stewart]

Here's the final pitch, Ezra. Cause I think that is dead on. And it reminds me of something, that what happens is they're so afraid of waste, fraud, and abuse, which are very legitimate things to be concerned about, that they build into the system. Waste, fraud and abuse.

[Ezra Klein]

Yes.

[Jon Stewart]

That the waste, fraud, and abuse of the system that is there to prevent waste, fraud and abuse is waste, fraud, and abuse. I know we're going down a rabbit hole.

[Ezra Klein]

And you know Elon Musk is saying this right now, right? He keeps saying this. He says at a certain point, waste is indistinguishable from fraud. Incompetence is indistinguishable from fraud. It's a line he keeps using on the right. And I don't like it because I think it, like, totally misunderstands the problem. And his solution is terrible. But his point on a certain level, that the way we are running the government has made the government incredibly wasteful.

[Jon Stewart]

But they're doing it because Republicans are so mistrustful.

[Ezra Klein]

Right. But then he wants to light the whole fucking thing on fire and privatize it.

[Jon Stewart]

Here's. So here's the flip side of it. Make government programs more accessible, less adversarial. You would streamline all of those processes and then on the back end, build in a more robust fraud enforcement.

[Ezra Klein]

Yes.

[Jon Stewart]

So in other words, you flip it. I can tell you this at the va, that would transform that organization if they didn't, in their search for the 3% of those that were abusing the system, force 97% of the people into this hellish labyrinth. They would save a shit ton of money on that. They would save a shit ton of lives and just have more robust, streamlined fraud enforcement on the back End. It's just a simple flip of how we're viewing it and I think it would be profound.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah, I'll say it even simpler. The measure of government is the people it helps, not the processes it follows.

[Jon Stewart]

Boom. Bars.

[Ezra Klein]

That's it.

[Jon Stewart]

Bars.

[Ezra Klein]

Ezra Klein, if you just really kept that in mind, if that was your only governing model, and you just said to yourself, the only thing I wish liberals would learn from Musk is this kind of relentlessness of the middle, not lawlessness. And you're gonna have to change a bunch of laws to do the kind of government you and I want to see happen. But this recognition that in the middle you might make a lot of people upset, you're going to say no to a lot of people. It's going to be politically painful and it's going to be worth it if you achieve the hard thing you're trying to achieve. The measure of government is outcomes, not process. And we treat government. And again, whole section on the book in this liberal legalism has evolved in a way where it believes government is legitimate based on the processes it follows. It is legitimate and also, by the way, protected from adversarial lawsuit. If it could show that at every point it checked every single box.

[Jon Stewart]

It's so self protective. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

And the point of government is not to check the boxes, it's to help.

[Jon Stewart]

The people, it's to get the shit out there. One other thing I wanted to ask you, what I'm seeing in the Trump administration, right, is that they've got historians and legal scholars combing through the history of this country finding whatever Byzantine or abstract emergency power. It's the Illegal Enemies act, it's the. Oh, we used this once in 1813, trying to get some native tribes off of land. They're using powers that have been granted under emergencies to do sort of day to day governance things. And I don't like it. But is there anything to be learned from this? For people who have more liberal aims and progressive aims, There very much is.

[Ezra Klein]

And I do want to say, to be fair, that Democrats do this too. If you look at things like Obama's immigration executive actions, if you look at things like the student loan actions, Democrats are actually pretty good at this move as well. You go and you find a sort of of emergency power vaguely written word in a law, right? Like, yeah, we had something to deal with public health and now you're using it to change immigration law. Okay. But an interesting thing that I noticed while reporting out case studies here and then I have this whole thing about Josh Shapiro in the i95. And he uses an emergency declaration. This also happens around a recent disaster in Maryland with Wes Moore. And then I was talking with Gavin Newsom on his podcast. He's like, you talked about the i95. What about the i10? We did that in 10 days. It wasn't even 12 days.

[Jon Stewart]

Oh my God.

[Ezra Klein]

And we were talking. I was like, if you guys are all so proud of the outcomes you get, and I mean, now they're doing rapid rebuilding under emergency declarations after the fires. If you guys are also proud of what you can do under these emergency authorities that wipe away all of this process and you can get these things done fast and people like it. I mean, this is like the fundamental basis on which a lot of Shapiro's like, you know, political renown is built. He's not known so much for policies as he is for getting things done fast. Right. His whole line is get shit done. Well, then what does that say about the non emergency procedures? Like when emergencies happen to me, I typically am not happy about them. I don't like it. I don't like it. I don't like what happens after it. I don't like what happens during it. I'm not saying they like the emergencies. They don't. But the amount I am hearing governors, and as you sort of say, at the federal level too, you see this brag about what they can do when something triggers the emergency rules.

[Jon Stewart]

That's right.

[Ezra Klein]

Should actually make people really rethink the non emergency rules. Because also the public likes seeing things done fast. They're impressed. Look at that. Government rebuilt this in 12 days. That shit's amazing. People like it when their government works.

[Jon Stewart]

And they don't realize, Ezra, every problem is an emergency. To someone.

[Ezra Klein]

Yes, I say that. Yeah. I have a line like this in the book that emergencies are not just crises that happen fast, they are also crises that happen slow. Climate change is an emergency. It's actually a much bigger deal than part of a bridge fell down. We are not treating it as one.

[Jon Stewart]

Ezra Klein. Fantastic.

[Ezra Klein]

John. I've. I've loved this. This has been one of my favorite interviews by far. Thank you.

[Jon Stewart]

I will never say mofo again without thinking, no, Fox, that's. That's what you've implanted into my brain. We've.

[Ezra Klein]

I've accepted this in you. That's the mimetic endpoint of this.

[Jon Stewart]

I really appreciate you spending the time. Congratulations on all the things. It's Ezra Klein. New York Times Podcast the Ezra Klein Show Co author of abundance with 11 year old Derek Thompson who is a prodigy.

[Ezra Klein]

Derek Thompson. I can't get on board with this, man.

[Jon Stewart]

Please come back and talk again. Add me to your group chats.

[Ezra Klein]

I will, I will. I will add you to our. We're going to bomb Jon Stewart group chat.

[Jon Stewart]

There you go.

[Ezra Klein]

You'll be there.

[Jon Stewart]

I love the thing.

[Ezra Klein]

You'll be right there.

[Jon Stewart]

Ezra. Pleasure. I hope to get a chance to talk to you soon.

[Ezra Klein]

Thank you, man. Me too.

[Jon Stewart]

Man. I'm exhausted. I just spent an hour and a half in that dude's head and I'm, I'm. The amount of information, the amount of specificity. No wonder he had to google a couple of things. Things. But wow. I will never take WI fi for granted ever again. Knowing the 14 step program that has been put in place just to get to the starting line for me, that that will ultimately be the takeaway. But really appreciated the gentleman coming on and, and explaining all those various things and get the book. It's called Abundance and it really does give an awful lot to think about as far as you know, there's an opportunity for the next iteration of what that type of governance will look like. And I think this is a great start and picking that apart. But anyway, thanks everybody for listening. We went long, so we're gonna rush things out. As always, thank our lead producer, Lauren Walker, producer Brittany Mametovic, video editor and engineer Rob Votolo, audio editor and engineer Nicole Boyce, researcher and associate professor, producer Gillian Spear. And our executive producers Chris McShane and Katie Gray. And I am Jon Stewart and we will see you next week. The weekly show with Jon Stewart is a Comedy Central podcast. It's produced by Paramount Audio and Busboy Productions. This ranch is under attack. Our whole wheel age is under attack.

[Ezra Klein]

Now streaming on Paramount plus the return.

[Jon Stewart]

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[Ezra Klein]

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[Jon Stewart]

I pray Spencer can get here. This fight ain't no Anything worth having.

[Ezra Klein]

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[Jon Stewart]

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[Ezra Klein]

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[Jon Stewart]

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[Ezra Klein]

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[Ezra Klein]

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