Santi Ruiz
Appearances
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
It looks like, okay, that's, you know, half a billion dollars a year that we're spending on random research. Seems very plausible to me. Seems likely that that is a net money losing move to zero that out because we actually care a lot about money and lives, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Yeah. Without naming names, I can just tell you from conversations— I know there are people in Doge who think feds shouldn't be in the business of this at all. We should just zero it out. And there are people who have this view, probably makes more sense to fold that in somewhere else. Maybe the NIH can, you know, AHRQ has a grants program. Why does it have a grants program?
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Let's stick that with the other health grants. We can rationalize and corporately restructure this and you zero it out now. And then if Congress really wants it, we bring it back somewhere else. We save some money. So you have genuinely, you have both those views, right? within this coalition, even within kind of the Doge team.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
So maybe the people who want to bring it back are getting played by the folks who really just want to zero out. But I definitely think there are actors within Doge who have very different long-term game plans of how this plays out.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
This is the place where I have the hardest time steel manning the Doge thing because I think it's true. I think there are all kinds of benefits to those kinds of fast iteration cycles and engineering, especially when you have, you know, as he has at SpaceX, for instance, or Tesla. people who are some of the best in the business at understanding the mechanism that they're looking at, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
If you push a cracked engineer to the limit on rocket fuel, and you say, like, I'm demanding crazy outcomes from you, and I want it cheaper than ever, at SpaceX, you're entrusting some of the best people in the world at doing that thing to these really hard challenges.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
So far, there's not a lot of evidence that the people working on Doge are the best people in the world at understanding federal contracting or where the money flows, despite having, you know, computer access. So I think you're right. This is my biggest frustration. And I think you can look at the cuts to PEPFAR, whether you think, oh, that's on purpose.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
We actually don't care about saving these lives. Or you think it's foolishness, right? Like the net effect is the same, that you broke something that you cannot easily repair.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
On the right, for a long time, predating Elon, predating even the Trump administration, you have these critiques of the nonprofit industrial complex. You have critiques about self-dealing in liberal circles. You have critiques about the efficacy of foreign aid as administered by NGOs at all.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
The same time that the debate is playing out largely on the right without a ton of kind of overlap to other parts of the discourse, You have a very rich debate within the aid community, within the foreign aid world, among effective altruists about, wait a second, what works? Do we actually know that this or that program is doing the things that we want it to do?
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
The things that it says on the tin, is it reducing poverty in this African country? Is it increasing education? And you have this, I think, a very rich debate on that side as well about, hey, we should probably do this stuff better. We're probably wasting a lot of money. And both of these arguments have played out for the last like seven years, at least kind of, you know, if not longer.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
And what turned out when Doge came on the scene is that it looks like neither side has been at all familiar with what's happening on the other side. People in the foreign aid community were shocked. No idea. And most of us were pretty surprised that Doge came in with this kind of decapitation attempt. And people on the right were totally unfamiliar.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
People within Doge are not familiar with this idea that for a long time, economists, you know, there's a chief economist at USAID who got canned, working really hard on trying to make sure that we get more of the dollars out into the places that we want them to go.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Genuinely, I think there's a lot of things going on. There's a whole bunch of different intellectual streams, a whole bunch of different actors in this funky Trump coalition. There are absolutely people in the administration, you saw people who you get a clear sense don't think this is a worthwhile project for America to engage in. I think that absolutely exists.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
I think that exists within Doge itself. But people like Marco Rubio have been champions of foreign aid their whole careers. So you look at that and you say, oh, wow, the State Department wants to turn back on this funding or wants to give waivers to PEPFAR, the anti-AIDS program that the U.S. has run since the W. Bush years in Africa and the Caribbean.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
And then apparently Doge folks on the computers are zeroing out those grants as they're supposed to go out. So one of the problems is it's kind of hard to tell from the outside who's doing what. I think we're getting more information as time goes on, and you definitely have this sense that Doge, as an entity, doesn't think that these things should exist at all.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
But without defending this view, let me just tell you what I think they would say in response. If Americans don't care, you know, if there's not enough of a domestic outcry, why were we paying for it in the first place? Now, I disagree with that view, right? I like humanitarian aid. I like life-saving work in Africa. But that is the kind of clear answer that they will give you.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Americans didn't care enough to turn it back on. if they cared, we'd hear from these senators and whatever.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Yeah. You know, Chris Ruffo is at the Department of Education right now. It's been a longtime conservative goal to cut it since it began to exist, I think, in the 80s. Would we have seen that same attempt to kind of decapitate other ideological power centers without Doge? I think probably. What have they picked first? It's places where either there's
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
a groundswell of opinion on the right that this is a liberal bastion in the case of USAID, which I think is surprising to a lot of people on the left who have just not followed this for a while. Department of Education, right? Grants to universities. You can't pull the funding for the woke English department, but you can cut off NIH grants or you can withhold funds from Columbia.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
So there's a couple threads, and I'll try and steel man here. I've got my criticisms of Doge. You've heard them, you'll hear them. But I think there's a couple threads here that are worth trying to take on their merits. One is an experience of 2016 and 2020 where the Trump admin felt it could not get control of the executive branch. And you see this in ways small and large.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
You're definitely seeing that the tip of the spear is the stuff that they read as liberal power centers. But here's where I think what you're seeing at Doge is less clearly ideological or well thought through than I think critics on the outside, like you might even think it is.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
There are functions that the Trump administration cares about, for instance, controlling the export and the sale of the highest end semiconductor chips to China. This is something that the Trump administration cares about, right? So there's a public admin interest in doing this. The Bureau of Industry and Security at Commerce that does that, It was really understaffed, really under-resourced.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
And Doge went in and cut not a huge amount of people, like 15 out of 500, but a bunch of the probationary employees, the people who had been hired within the last year, who had been promoted recently. And being somewhat familiar with this topic, I think they fired some of the best people, some of the people you really want if you're going to improve on our really porous export control system.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
This is not like a self-serving or a Trump team ideological move. You're going to go back and realize, wait a second, we need to hire those people back. Right.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Yes. On AI, which they agree with. So... This is where I just, I have a less, maybe a less clear perception of doge than you do. I think there's stuff that's targeted at ideological enemies. There's stuff that's nihilistic about the value of foreign aid. And there's stuff that I think is just like a good heart's law problem. We're just cutting stuff. We're cutting things. Good heart's law.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Good heart's law. The idea that anytime a measure becomes your target, it stops being a really good measure. So I think you're thinking about once you hyper fixate on the measurement on the, you know, looking at the numbers on the computer, um, you lose a sense of what's the actual reality that you care about. So in this case, great, we cut people from headcount here.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
The Bureau of Industry and Security is leaner and more efficient. You're going to run into this problem six months down the line or a year down the line. You want it to do things, even if you're a small government conservative. I count myself in that category. I want BIS to do things. It's going to be a lot harder now. So I think there's
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
different things going on here, but they're not all like fully aligned. I think there's a lot of things that the Trump administration itself will regret.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
I think there's a lot there, a lot of learnings from the first time about, oh, we tried to manage the executive branch this way. It didn't work. And when we moved slowly to try and reform things, you give your opponents in the civil service and the deep state time to coalesce, to organize, and then the clock runs out on you and they're still there.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
I think there's definitely like a Schmittian, we're hurting our enemies, we're rewarding our friends thing going on. And you wrote a book about polarization. I think one of the dynamics here is that people on the right look at the left and they say, you guys were doing that all along. We're just copying you now. There's a lot of like a memetic, this idea that, oh, you were self-dealing.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
We're just going to punish all those people who are self-dealing. And I think this is always a defense for hyper-partisanship. It's like, they were doing it first. Sorry, guys. Like, turnabout's fair play.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
I think there's also something really interesting here that came up in a conversation your colleague Ross Douthat had with Chris Ruffo, who he correctly called the most successful American activist since Ralph Nader or Phyllis Schlafly, I think it was. a correct designation. And your colleague Douthat pushes Rufo on, why do you want to zero out the Department of Education? Why not capture it?
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Why are we trying to destroy it instead of staffing it with our own people and using it to achieve conservative ends? And they go back and forth. But what Douthat writes later, I think is really largely correct, that there's a underneath the slashing and burning idea
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Doge, there's a kind of worry that we don't have the people, we don't have the talent that it would take to recapture this institution post-election and administer it the way we want. It would be really hard to use these tools for good governance. And sometimes that overlaps with the whole thing's rotted out anyway, like DOE is a den of iniquity and we just need to cut it.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
So there's one instinct that's just like the president should be able to do things within the president's remit. And then there's another instinct, I think, as well there about the president should be able to do more things than the current constitutional architecture allows for.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
But I think there's also this worry of administering these institutions is really hard. All the people who have done it for a generation are liberals. We don't have our own people who can do it better and easier to just cut it.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
I think there's a real, we can disagree on whether Elon really cares about the national debt or whether it's a fig leaf for other things. We're in a different place on the national debt than we were five years ago, pre-COVID response. And when you talk to people in and around Doge, you hear the debt come up over and over again.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
that if we don't take this one opportunity now, while the window is open before the midterms, before public opinion naturally kind of swings back and we lose the house, there's a green field to run into to try and cut, cut, cut. And this will never happen any other time. There's a strong instinct here. This is our one shot.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
And so if we're going to err on one side, we have to err on the side of cutting too much. And this is an Elon instinct. We can add things back later. I tend to disagree with that in specific places. I think we've cut some things that can't be easily undone. But that's very much the instinct. The Dems are going to stop us.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
They're going to come in and we're going to do crazy oversight in the House in a year and a half. Public opinion will just change over time because cutting things is unpopular. I don't think... Musk is doing this because Trump wants somebody else to take the fall. I don't think that's a dynamic. Trump and Elon have been very close. Trump is very proud of those things.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
I do think there's a sense in which Elon sees himself as someone's got to be the man wielding the sword, and it's not going to be anybody else, so I'll do it.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
I think that's largely right. I think, again, what's interesting to me is a lot of that is just normal conservative kind of movement instincts about how should the executive branch work. And then I think the part that's quite striking is this impoundments view, which plenty of folks...
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
To my eye, not an especially sturdy legal theory, not an especially sturdy constitutional reading of the power of the purse. But what people like vote would say and do say is this is what the branches are for. And if you don't like it, Congress, if you don't like it, courts, you have to assert your own prerogatives. Like the whole point of the system is,
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
in kind of a Madisonian sense, is the executive tries to do a bunch of things, and he runs into the wall of the courts. And as Vogt will point to, you know, Vance and Trump and all these people have said, like, the president will abide by these rulings even if they're crazy district judges. And Congress, if you don't like this,
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
And if you look right now at Stephen Miller's Twitter feed... Stephen Miller and Musk are two people who are very much on the other end.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
I think... There's different versions of war with the courts. Some of them for me are five alarm fires. SCOTUS says something and you say, no, we're going to do it our own way. That's very bad. I think there's other places where people say explicitly, we think the 1974 Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional. DOJ is going to create a case for that. We want that to go to SCOTUS.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
We would like to have that fight because we think that law is unconstitutional. To me, that instinct is not crazy. I think they're wrong. I think SCOTUS should rule.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
I think that's what you're going to get. The nature of that showdown is, I think, an open question. But the administration, people at Vought, say, look, we think these cases were wrongly decided. We want to refight them. And what happens next, I'm not going to pretend to tell you in advance.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
But exactly, the unitary executive theory, to be fully implemented, requires that we take this fight seriously. to the Supreme Court and get rulings in our favor.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
What happens when they really do? I don't know how to answer the hypothetical. I'd be curious how you read the first term in office on this model, because Trump lost in the courts quite a bit.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
I think a lot of that reading is really plausible. And I think to what extent you're concerned about that depends on a couple of things. One is just are you ideologically aligned with Trump? And one is how much do you think personalist presidencies themselves, presidencies that are incredibly dominated by the executive, are bad in themselves?
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
I was reading one of the books I was going to recommend to you at the end of this conversation. It's a book called Stalin's War by Sean McMeekin. It's a history of World War II, and it's largely about Stalin and the ways in which World War II is actually a product of his enmity for the West and the ways largely that the West, the U.S. especially,
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
gives in to specific demands of the Soviets when we don't have to, without negotiation or without better information about what are the Soviets really thinking.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
And a character who's really striking in that reading is FDR, who is probably our most powerful executive in American history, has the most control of the executive branch, similarly puts incredible pressure on the court system in service of his ideological and political goals.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
And one of the things that comes through in this book is that that kind of total personalization leads to bad outcomes for FDR himself in that, you know, we get rolled by the Soviets on all kinds of lend-lease things. He's a worse negotiator for being surrounded by only people who agree with him at Tehran in 1943.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
So I think there are dangers to fully personalized presidencies in general, but it's also just... often you're worse at doing things you care about if your information flows all lead one way.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Again, the places that I worry most about Doge right now, aside from things like PEPFAR, which I just think is, those cuts are a travesty, there are information sources within the executive branch
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
we all care about that are actually tools for any executive to use r or d and in the particular kind of doge approach to government efficiency we're losing a lot of those information streams there are a bunch of surveys about k-12 and higher education for instance at doe
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
That we're losing and we're losing the ability to track this important longitudinal data That stuff is if you're conservative and you think the public schools are failing.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
That's what shows you that so I totally agree I also think to the corporation or the business model question should the government be run like a business there are lots of ways for employees at a functioning private sector company to surface negative information and that you're not seeing right now.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
There were a lot of proposals when Doge came in, source savings ideas from people at the agencies and cut them in on a share, give back 10% across the agency for any savings that you can find, the software licenses that we don't need, et cetera. That's the sort of thing where you would see aligned incentives in a private sector company. That's a good idea. And you're not seeing that.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
You're seeing a lot of top-down, if you've read James Scott, seeing like a state, you know, the view from above with very little granularity from below. We're seeing like a payment system. Seeing like a payment system, right? Corporations do a pretty good job of sourcing information from the bottom. That's actually like a good thing about businesses is you get live data online.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
all the time from all over the place about the markets, about consumer behavior, about wasted functions. So I think that would be an improvement over the kind of Doge model. I don't think what you're seeing from Doge is exactly running a business application. It's something different.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
If you go back to what Russ Vought, one of the more powerful people in the administration, head of the Office of Management and Budget, says about this stuff, he actually will say this quite clearly, that he's a deficit hawk. He's a debt hawk.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Sure. What are you going to tell them? There are a couple things that, again, maybe I'm naive, I'm still holding out hope for over this next cycle, that if I'm wrong, if I'm a fool and they don't happen, are absolutely ready to hand for somebody to come in.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
So, for instance, the Biden administration did a lot of really smart things on trying to get people into the government around the usual federal hiring system. OPM can basically hand out accepted service slots. They can say... Getting you into that position is critical for the national interest. And so you can just get hired private, like you would in the private sector.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Someone can just say, hey, this guy's great. We're hiring him. Starts next week. The Biden admin did that for the CHIPS office. And the CHIPS office was staffed very well. A bunch of folks from Wall Street, a bunch of rock stars, very quickly.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
And the people you'll run into if you try to use OPM or direct higher authority or any of these... and runs around the existing federal hiring system, the roadblocks will be largely public sector unions. There'll be dumb constituencies, so you'll need somebody who's willing to split that Gordian knot.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
The National Environmental Policy Act have large bases of support on the left, and people like you are trying to change how we think about that, especially on the left. Again, one reading of what Doge is doing is that the cutting comes early.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
You take Machiavelli's advice that you do all the cruelty at the beginning and then you dole out the good stuff later, you know, and people forget what came first and they remember all the nice things you did. Like with the Bureau of Industry and Security, like with export controls on chips, the administration will want to do things over the next four years.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
It will have things it wants to achieve. People like J.D. Vance, who are their own actors and want to build their political futures, will want to achieve things. And to do that, you're going to need to do things like fix federal hiring.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
If you want to get into welfare, if you want to cut Social Security, if you want to tell people you're cutting Medicare and Medicaid, you have to start with... the other stuff, with the other stuff that doesn't seem as close to home with the stuff that's, you know, the comic books in Peru about wokeness or whatever.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
You're going to run into the same, their versions of the same problems as the Biden coalition did, which is that everybody wants you to lump in their pet thing when you do it. But actually, if you want effectiveness or efficiency, you're going to have to prioritize and say no to parts of the coalition and yes to other parts. That's going to require filling in after Doge cuts.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
And even if you think that this doesn't accord with a view of Trump's personal power, you've got a bunch of actors in this current administration who want to have futures for themselves. They want to be able to plant the stake and say, I did that.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? So Stalin's War is one, which I just think is a tremendous history, slightly revisionist, but not beyond the pale. Just Stalin's a much worse actor than you remember him from your World War II experience or World War II education.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
But a really eye-opening book also just about, yeah, diplomacy and the ways that you can tell yourself things that aren't true and convince yourself. I just had a guy named Peter Moskos on Statecraft. His book is coming out in a couple weeks. It's called Back from the Brink, and it's the story of the 90s crime decline in New York City. He did a fantastic oral history.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
He talked to basically everybody who's still alive and able to discuss it. And it's a fantastic story, both about state capacity, about how do you actually do something that you want the federal government, or in this case, the state and local government to do. And it's a really interesting management history.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
But the real revolution was just almost a kind of Muskian, we're just going to hold you accountable to these numbers. We're going to call you in every week at seven in the morning, and you're going to show me that you know all about this specific area. So it's that...
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
firm mandate, incredible political pressure from above, combined with something that I don't think you're seeing much of at Doge, which is giving people power over the areas they know best and holding them accountable for that. It's just a remarkable success story.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
And then the last thing I'd recommend, as somebody who's AGI-pilled a little bit, there's a book by a Catholic priest named Romano Guardini. It's a short book. It's called Power and Responsibility. And he writes it after the Second World War about What kinds of people do we need to be?
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
What kinds of governors and leaders do we need to be in a world where the bomb exists, where we've built a crazy new kind of power over each other? What are the demands on us to be better leaders? How exactly do you have to change now that you live in a world where the bomb exists? I find it a useful starting point for thinking about the next few years.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
You have to cut that stuff out first and you have to kind of hold up the bloody head before you have kind of popular interest and willingness to go with you to the stuff that touches their families. I think that's...
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Definitely the view of some people in Doge that you have to zero out the stuff that isn't going to make a huge difference, but because that's the only way popularly you'll be able to say, look, we really mean it. We're not just taking you to the cleaners. We're making the government smaller, period. Now, I think, right, we're two months in.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
So you can kind of project a couple different views into the future and say, okay, we're going to cut off the funding streams to universities and to woke NGOs and, you know, you name the list of enemies. And that'll be it. And then we can't touch the politically difficult stuff because it's politically difficult. And that's why people don't reform welfare.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Or you can say, no, what's going to happen is we're gutting ideological enemies. And then we've got room and popular credibility to go after the stuff that we know is closer to the American pocketbook. Maybe I'm naive and a fool to think that like those two paths are both still in play, but we're very early on.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
This is the best argument against the idea that it's a debt thing.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
This is, again, where maybe this is a cop-out. I just keep coming back to the coalitional element of it. Is President Trump a deficit hawk? I don't think there's a lot of evidence for that, right? Like, just, you know, based on the first term. But you've got a bunch of different actors in here, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Russ Vought is, you know, touched tight to the president, was in the same role, the first admin and the second. He's been a lifelong deficit hawk. So, like, what do you make of that? It's like a weird... it's a political coalition, right? You have actors with the president partially in the hopes that you can get your own thing squeezed in the door.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
That said, I do think Elon has a particular management style that has served him well in the private sector, and you can point to specific things. Ruthless reduction of headcount and cost, headcount especially when he comes into places like Twitter, which were bloated at the time, reduction of cost, especially in places like, you look at SpaceX, He's an incredible penny pincher at SpaceX.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
So you combine that instinct, which you're seeing very much here, with a managerial impulse to push people as hard as you can to achieve really specific, measurable kind of insane goals. This happens at SpaceX all the time, and you're giving people stomach ulcers as they're producing, you know, fantastic rockets in record time. This is, I think, what has worked for Elon.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
He looks at it and says, this is the right way to do corporate restructuring to get results that nobody else thought possible. People around him, he keeps saying in private and in public, it's the source code. It's the source code. The problem with the federal government is not this or that. regulation. We need to get deeper into it, right? This is an Elon instinct.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
And he sees an opportunity to apply a lot of those elements that many folks from the outside would say, that won't work on the federal government. He says, no, we can do that. And we can synthesize a bunch of information. We can get a better view from the top of how money flows in the federal government. And from there, it will be much easier to cut the head off.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Yeah, I think that's right. You can call it a West Coast or a tech or Silicon Valley instinct on the problem. And I think some of it also comes from a sense from Elon's career and a sense in Trump world. that the people you're engaging with, civil servants, et cetera, are gonna lie to you.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
But you're not gonna get source reality from what the general counsel of a given agency says, that the career civil servants are gonna snow you, they're gonna wait you out, they're gonna slow walk you. And so in an effort to try and get to ground truth, This makes a lot of sense as kind of going down the chain, trying to figure out, okay, well, where is the money going?
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
And I think what you're seeing with Doge for information environment reasons and for all kinds of reasons is that it can be a really misleading source of truth that where the money is going, especially if you're not familiar with how federal contracts work, it's not always going to give you the information you want. But it certainly presents that way.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
It's one way. It's a source of information. I think what you're seeing with Doge is there's a bunch of other kinds of information that you would want to have if you, Ezra, were leading the Department of Government Efficiency that I would want to have in that role that they're either not getting because they don't have the capacity or because they've closed themselves off.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Or in some cases, I think take Elon and his particular relationship with Twitter and The ways he's getting information, he's built his own Twitter ecosystem, both the way that you and I can curate your feed, and he's architected the actual platform itself to surface certain kinds of information. Twitter and online in general is a more adversarial information environment than it used to be.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
The algorithm is designed to kind of surface conflict, and Elon spends a ton of time consuming information there. So if your sources of information are stories about malice and conflict and human opposition on the one hand, and then just the data on the other hand, and you've closed yourself off to other information flows, in some ways you're flying blind, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
And he's very wedded to a really specific, concrete, memeable target. He likes those. It's like we're taking the contracts and we're zeroing them out and we're putting them on the wall and you can see them. And I want you in different federal agencies, Doge team, find contracts, find things to cut and zero them out.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
That instinct, I think, leads you to a lot of fat and a lot of waste and to a ton of stuff that if you don't know what you're looking at, you should not be zeroing out. From this perspective, right? I mean, one example is the ARC, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. It's this little agency within HHS.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
It produces a lot of research about avoidable deaths in the healthcare system, which the incoming FDA commissioner thinks is like the third largest cause of death ever. So it produces all this evidence.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
It tries to get hospitals to adopt best practices to make it easier to share information about what you're doing, you know, without being punished so that you can kind of better assess, okay, what is leading to deaths in hospitals? Doge wants to zero that out. It's a cost center on the budget.