Firing air traffic controllers over a busy holiday travel weekend, cutting a veterans crisis hotline, axing and then rehiring people who maintain and keep our nuclear arsenal safe: Musk and his minions aren't trying to "fix" the government. They're trying to make it more susceptible to Trump's personalized leadership. And the MIA Dems need to get out there and throw some punches since the media loves fights. Meanwhile, the US is now more of a problem than a solution on Ukraine, Elon's massive corruption isn't drawing anywhere near the same attention as Hunter/Burisma—and Bill Cassidy could just vote against Kash or delay his confirmation if he's really worried about the FBI. Bill Kristol joins Tim Miller show notes Bill's 'Bulwark on Sunday' conversation with Eric Edeleman Don Moynihan's newsletter that Bill mentioned
Chapter 1: Why are Musk's actions a threat to government efficiency?
I remember it was like a little bit of a conservative thing in the 70s and 80s to object to the change from Washington's birthday to President's Day. I guess they were sort of mushing together Lincoln and Washington. And then, of course, it had to be on a Monday. But yes, insofar as it sort of implies that we equally respect all presidents. It's very bad, and I'm glad you've decided.
I'm glad you've declared the bulwark policy of not recognizing President's Day, right? I mean, if we could all just adopt whatever names we want, right?
Yeah, we're not recognizing President's Day. We're dead naming the Gulf of Mexico. That's just kind of how things are going here. Much to discuss, I guess, it seems like. Your newsletter this morning was focused on all of the – trouble that has been being created from Elon Musk's quasi-governmental Department of Government Efficiency.
Many different specifics I think worth getting into, but I'm just at the highest level interested in what you are trying to get across.
I just want to wrecking ball it is. And as Don Moynihan, the professor of political science at Michigan, says in a very good newsletter that I recommend, and he's a sober guy, serious student of public administration, the point isn't government efficiency.
The point is to wreck the government and make it more susceptible, wreck the structures, you might say, of the government, of which civil service is such an important part. and make it susceptible to Trump's personalized leadership and really to autocracy. And so all the idiotic things they're doing, if you sort of individually, it's hard to understand.
Why do they want to make air travel less safe? Why do they want to, you know, damage our nuclear safety inspection regime? But if you think of it more as just taking a wrecking ball to the government, you... I think have a pretty good sense of what's going on. And then I was provoked this morning to write about this particularly.
I was going to write actually more about the foreign policy stuff from the weekend, which was the last four or five days, which was so terrible. The IRS headline, I guess, broke last night in the Washington Post and in the New York Times.
Doge is insisting on getting into the IRS and into the very, very sensitive part of the IRS that even IRS commissioners don't have access to, which has your tax returns and my tax returns and 180 million or something other Americans. Trump's tax returns, presumably. Yeah. And Elon Musk's tax returns. And Doge needs to get in there. I don't know why.
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Chapter 2: What are the implications of firing nuclear safety employees?
They showed up to the office Friday and were locked out. One of the hardest hit offices was the Pantex plant near Amarillo, Texas. The employees there work on reassembling warheads, one of the most sensitive jobs across the nuclear weapons enterprise with the highest levels of clearance.
As of this morning, the administration has decided that that was an oopsie-doops, and they're going to try to bring back all but 28. But there's some kind of HR and legal questions about how to do that. Just to your original point, this is not about efficiency. Yeah.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that there are some bureaucrats that maybe are cashing a government paycheck and aren't providing value at the level of their compensation. I do not think that is the case for the people that are reassembling the nuclear warheads. And I don't think anybody would consider that. But I don't know.
Maybe Elon thinks big balls or one of his 19-year-olds could reassemble nuclear warheads better. I'm not sure.
Yeah, and God forbid they should actually study it for 30 days and see whether they can cut 10% or maybe increase 10% in some parts or reorganize the place. There's none of that, of course. They show up. They give, I guess, each supervisor 200, if I read this correctly, 200 characters, not 200 words.
total characters like on a tweet to explain what each of these employees are doing these are the probationary employees which mean people who've been hired in the last year or two or people who've assumed new jobs in the last years i understand it so they could be quite senior some of them they don't have civil service protections they're easier to fire they just went in and fired them i mean it's such a wrecking ball it's so unserious about any of the things government does this one i guess was even this was a bridge too far there was a public outcry and some congressional outcry and experts saying what what are you doing
And they did retreat, which incidentally is a good sign, which suggests to me that if there's a little more of an outcry in all these areas, including by the Democratic Party, maybe they would retreat a little more.
Part of the problem, though, is it's happening so quickly, it's hard to get enough of an outcry to focus on a particular thing. So just a couple of other examples. The FAA. We've had like... Six plane crashes recently? I don't know. We didn't have a plane crash for 16 years.
We had, obviously, the horrific one outside of Reagan National in D.C., but then a couple of other smaller incidents recently. The Trump administration has started firing several hundred FAA probationary employees who maintain the air traffic control infrastructure. We've been discussing the CDC and NIH cuts, which just seem draconian.
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Chapter 3: How are government cuts affecting public safety and services?
I said this to some Democrat over the weekend. I said, well, they're doing town halls, you know, and they're really laying the predicate for fighting on the budget. which is coming out. It's really all about winning back the House in November 2026, which I don't disagree with in a way.
That's why these town halls are so important, Tim, because if you do a town hall on February 17th of 2025, it's really going to help you win back the House in 2026. I think you get a little more punch, actually, out of making this a huge national story of how they're destroying these important
government agencies that help us you know fly safely and take drugs with confidence that they work and check epidemics and make sure our tax returns are treated professionally but what do i know maybe this town hall where they have some happy talk with 80 people is really better i don't know
Yeah, I mean, I think that you're right about, or this Democrat you talked to is right about, they do seem to be thinking a lot about the budget fight that is coming up. And I had Brendan Boyle over on the YouTube feed at the end of last week, who's the ranking member on the budget committee. And I think he's sharp on this. And I think that their strategies are making sense.
And later in the week, we're going to have other folks from the Hill on to talk about what the Democrats are doing. People that I think are doing a good job. That said... There was a big Politico story over the weekend on this about how far the Democrats are behind on messaging and platforms, particularly in the online media world. And I was quoted in there. And what I said was basically.
Anything that you tell me they're doing well, they should be doing 700x with that much more intensity. It's just the amount that Trump and Musk are in people's faces. I mentioned this the other day, but I was scrolling through one of my sports podcasts I listen to, and it was a non-political comment.
It was just like the guy on this Barstool podcast was saying, he's like, I'm so fucking sick of Elon Musk. He's like, I just don't want to hear about him anymore. He's like, I feel like the only people I ever hear about are Taylor and Travis and Elon Musk. And it's like on somebody that's not political, the show doesn't talk about politics.
And I think that that's just a telling anecdote, though, about volume and just how much of the messaging from Trump and Elon is just seeping in to casual Americans. And Democrats are doing some stuff on the Hill and in these town halls, but they're
These examples, the Veterans Crisis Hotline, the FAA, nuclear, these are all things that if you're really banging the drum, I do think just regular people are like, why are we firing the Veterans Crisis Line? Is that really what's going to resolve our trillion-dollar budget gap? It doesn't feel like it.
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Chapter 4: What should the Democratic Party's strategy be against recent changes?
If I talked to actually a few Democrats this weekend, it kind of, my head's exploding, but I've got to, I've got to calm down.
Swing at every pit. I might do the meme where it's like, it don't make me tap the sign again, which is that like, actually, yes, swing at every pitch right now. I mean, maybe don't swing at every pitch on labor day of 2026, but like right now I start, well, not, we're really going to beat this metaphor to death, but do anything that, And see what sticks. We don't know.
We can't predict what is going to stick.
Right. Put the ball in play. Right. You know, they could be errors. They could turn out to have done something very stupid, like they apparently did with the nuclear safety officials. So you don't know until you challenge it.
Nobody last week would have been like, you know, the real thing to focus on is the National Nuclear Security Administration. Right. Like, you know, you just don't you just don't know, especially with how quickly things are moving while we're on. complaining about people on the Hill. We should also focus a little bit on the Republicans because Bill Cassidy is just going to be my cause celeb.
I think, unfortunately, I don't, you know, because I just can't, I can't take it with him in particular. So somebody's got to talk about it. Here's a tweet he sent over the weekend. This was on Saturday. So every sentence on that I agree with, every single word on that I agree with. But here's the thing. The Kash Patel vote is tomorrow. So Cash is not mentioned in this tweet.
The only action that he can take is to vote against and maybe convince some of his colleagues to vote against or to delay the confirmation of the person who reportedly, according to whistleblowers, was behind the downsizing at the FBI that he's so upset about. So Bill Cassidy, if you're pissed about this, if you think it hurts Louisiana, then vote against Kash Patel.
Or go out and do interviews about how Kash Patel needs to come clean about whether he was involved in this. And that we need to have another round of hearings to ask Kash Patel what his plans are for the staffing of the FBI. I mean, like, this is your moment. Like, you have a moment now for 24 hours. Now, obviously, he's not going to do anything. So I don't want to pretend like...
We might think that he could, but like, this is the window for him to do something about this. And instead it's just this limp tweet that doesn't even actually address the person who's responsible.
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Chapter 5: Can congressional oversight counteract recent governmental shifts?
I mean, it seems to me.
Ezra Klein had a column over the weekend about how the Republicans on the Hill have become non-player characters, which are like the characters in the video game that don't do anything. They just exist. And that is correct. It is kind of a marvel that they have just decided that they have no – role at all.
And it's interesting because it is interesting to see the McConnell, you know, play on this. I mean, obviously I have no sympathy for him or I'm not at all moved or inspired by his 11th hour effort to be the one person that votes against these various Trump nominees.
But when he was majority leader, you know, he at least tried to exercise some power, oftentimes in ways I disagreed with, sometimes in ways that was good during Trump 1.0. That is gone. You know, I mean, John Thune might as well not exist.
Right. I mean, these people do have agency. They're pretty important people, actually. They have more agency than most of us. But everyone has some agency. Actually, Rene DiResta, in this conversation that's online, conversations with Bill Kristol about the internet, makes this point, too, about regular people.
You know, when he talks about something going viral, well, people choose to hit the button that allows it to go viral, and they can choose not to, and they can choose to tweet and retweet things and so forth. Now, Musk is putting a thumb on the scale of the algorithm, so people don't have that much agency in some of these cases.
Yeah, but agencies, isn't that one of your favorite themes in JVLs and stuff? And I think it's a good one. We should remind people of that. I don't know. Everyone's a commentator, right? No one, including elected officials who were elected to govern, not to commentate.
Yeah. Everybody's a podcaster. Ted Cruz and Matt Gaetz are competing with me in the marketplace. It's not as great of a job as it looks. They're all aspiring to be podcasters instead of doers. Speaking of people with agency, an update on the story we talked about with Andrew Wiseman on Friday.
So we had these resignations to the DOJ over the effort to kind of, I guess, let Eric Adams off the hook in exchange for... promises that he would follow the administration's immigration guidelines. The character Emil Bove has been one of the central villains of the first month of the administration, who was the person at DOJ that was pushing this.
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Chapter 6: Who is Kash Patel and why is his confirmation controversial?
No, and I keep getting assured by people who are on the Hill. Some of the Republican senators are not very comfortable with the cash per tell vote. They're talking privately to some FBI veterans. Some of them know people in the FBI, obviously, over the years, especially if they're on the relevant committees. They're not happy. But, you know, no one is speaking out.
The one guy who spoke out, William Webster, the FBI and CIA director from Reagan and Bush way, way long ago, who's 100 years old. And he went to the trouble of writing quite a good letter explaining how damaging it is to have the politicization that we're seeing of the FBI, CIA, and people totally unqualified for the job in those two positions.
I think he's the only person to have held both positions. But again, there are other former FBI and CIA directors. There are other national security officials. And they mostly just decided to let the new administration have a chance to destroy the U.S. government, you know?
Well, we should also shout out to Brian Driscoll, who is the acting FBI director, who's been really holding the line here so far. Yeah, I think he's about right. He'll probably be getting fired later this week. We'll see how that shakes out. So there'll be much more to discuss about that. You know, when you buy a new house, everything's a hassle.
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Chapter 7: What recent resignations have occurred over legal disagreements?
That's not a trivial consideration, all of which has benefited us. But we've made mistakes. There are times we've been two-coast with dictators, and maybe some of these wars were ill-advised and so forth. But on the whole, we've been directionally, you might say, on the right side. You really have to ask the question, is the U.S. now part of the solution or part of the problem?
That's where I think it's so demoralizing for people in Ukraine and people in Europe and the And soon people in the Indo-Pacific, I mean, they're thinking about a world in which the U.S. is not basically with them.
Sometimes, as I say, hesitantly, too hesitantly from the point of view of some of us, sometimes from the point of view of the more dovish parts of the internationalist coalition, too aggressively, but not on the right side. And I hate to even say that. I mean, I really honestly don't like saying it. I don't want to say it.
I mean, we're meeting with the bad guys and not inviting the good guys to the table. I don't know what else other way there is to describe it. Keir Stormer in UK over the weekend expressed that, if necessary, that openness to sending peacekeeping troops in. I just mentioned that because... Just the gap between that and what you're saying from us is so wide. I guess it's not a gap. It's opposite.
They are actually saying that we will put boots on the line if necessary to help protect Ukraine. And meanwhile, I guess Marco, little Marco and Lavrov are meeting about what Russia can get out of this deal. It's really, really something. One other foreign policy thing I just had to mention to you because it connects to the domestic that you mentioned with Elon.
Did you see the meeting between Elon and Modi? Just saw a photo of it, yeah. Okay. All you kind of need to do is see a photo. Modi, leader of India, of course, they're meeting at the Blair House. And it's like the flags are up. It's like the formal setting for a meeting between either state leaders or our secretary of state and their lead diplomat.
On the Modi side of the table, there's like all of his advisors. And on the Musk side, it's like a couple of his children. And that's it. And Trump is then asked about this meeting. And he's like, I didn't know about it. And he says, maybe they're meeting about business. I mean, like, you know, it's hard to even think about what to say about something like that, right?
Like, you know, all of these, like the whole conspiracy about the Biden administration, about Burisma, that Hunter was doing a deal in Ukraine and that Joe Biden like took a phone call at some point with one of the Burisma people. Yeah. And like that was the big controversy. And here we have like the shadow president meeting with a counterparty in the Blair House in like a formal setting.
And the president is saying, well, that's fine because maybe they're just doing some deals. Like the scale of corruption is just is really mind boggling. And I do think it connects to the foreign policy side of this when you talk about us being on the wrong side, because it's the type of behavior of an autocratic nation. Right. Like that's what it is. Yeah, that's very well said. Absolutely.
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