The so-called Department of Government Efficiency is great branding. Who could be against a more efficient government? But “efficiency” obfuscates what’s really happening here.Efficiency to what end? Elon Musk, President Trump and DOGE’s boosters have offered various objectives — cutting the deficit, eliminating fraud and abuse, creating a leaner and more responsive government. But DOGE’s actions in the past two months don’t seem to align with any of those goals.Santi Ruiz is the senior editor at the Institute for Progress and the author and host of the “Statecraft” podcast and newsletter. He’s to my right politically and had higher hopes, at first, about DOGE’s efforts, but he’s now grappling with the reality of what it’s actually doing.This episode contains strong language.Mentioned:“50 Thoughts on DOGE” by Santí Ruiz“How to Defend Presidential Authority” by Santí Ruiz“The Anti-D.E.I. Crusader Who Wants to Dismantle the Department of Education” by Ross DouthatBook Recommendations:Stalin’s War by Sean McMeekinBack from the Brink by Peter MoskosPower And Responsibility by Romano GuardiniThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Elias Isquith, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Switch and Board Podcast Studio, Ryan Bourne, Rohan Grey, Don Moynihan, Quinn Slobodian and Jennifer Pahlka. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What is the purpose of DOGE?
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. When Doge was first announced, after Donald Trump won the election, I knew a lot of people who thought it was a way to get Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy out of the Trump administration's hair. It's an old tradition in Washington.
You have people who help you in the election, help you in the campaign, but you don't want them in the White House, so you give them a blue ribbon commission somewhere where you'll never hear from them again. Not how it worked out. The first person Doge purged was Vivek Ramaswamy. It became Elon Musk's operation.
But in becoming Elon Musk's operation, it became central to how Donald Trump is trying to and actually remaking the federal government. But I got to tell you, I hate the name Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency. Not that it's not good branding, it is. But it obfuscates what's really happening here. Efficiency towards what? There is no such thing really as efficiency.
Efficiency has to be in service of a goal. And you hear a lot of goals. Maybe it's here to make the government leaner, lower headcount. Maybe it's here to save money. Maybe it's here to make the government more responsive. What is it actually doing? What can we see after two months of its hack and slash operation through the federal government?
And what does that suggest about where Donald Trump's term is going? One of the people who's been writing on Doge and thinking about it with the most clarity in my view is Santi Ruiz. He is at the Institute for Progress. He's the author of the Statecraft newsletter and the host of its podcast. He's somebody who thinks very deeply and often about how do you build a capable state.
He's somebody to my right, so he has been much more open to the idea that what Doge is doing is well-constructed and well-thought-through, or at least was more open to it. Like everybody, he's trying to grapple with the reality of what it has really turned out to be. So I thought it'd be interesting to have him on the show to talk through it. As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com.
Santi Ruiz, welcome to the show. Thanks, Ezra. Good to be here. So I'm obviously a liberal and I'm pretty upset about what Doge is doing, but steel man it. When liberals see Doge and Musk as like a pulsing source of evil and corruption, what are we missing or at least what arguments are we maybe not considering?
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.
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.
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Chapter 2: How did DOGE become Elon Musk's operation?
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?
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.
If you are trying to reshape the government, radically make it more efficient or make it into something else, this question of how you're learning about it, what is the informational input into your project, is really important. The fact that a computer tells you money is going here and it's going there, it's actually a very thin form of information.
How is that money being used when it gets there? Like, what actually is the nature of that grant? Why was it started? Why did the people who started think it was a good idea? This concept that they're going in and just looking at things, and it's not even clear to me based on what, just deleting vast swaths of them.
Like, how do you think about that as a way of learning about government functions and
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.
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 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?
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.
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Chapter 3: What are the criticisms and support for DOGE's actions?
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 question is what happens if they lose. Yeah. I did not think this at the beginning. I think it now that if they don't get a lot of what they want from Roberts, they are really going to try to get around that. And they're going to try to get around it on technicalities.
But a decision was made by someone to not listen to the judge and turn the planes around and instead say, oh, no, you can't enforce a verbal order. These planes were over international waters. That was a provocation to the courts. A different administration just wouldn't have done that. They are attempting to assert a huge amount of power.
And I guess the thing that makes me very skeptical that what they're trying to do is get a favorable SCOTUS ruling is that there's a way you would go about doing that. And you would be very carefully choosing cases, creating a conflict that generates a case that is favorable to you. You would want what the lawyers call model test case.
And you would be acting in a way that is fairly respectful of the courts because you would be trying to politically hold them on your side. This thing where they are knocking through the glass left and right, where the test cases are really bad, where they are annoying the courts, where they are then sort of defying the courts and saying the judges should be impeached.
Unless you have a view that the right way to manage John Roberts politically is... is to try to cow him. I think that is basically how Donald Trump deals with everybody. So maybe that is his view. But in a world where what you're trying to do is get a favorable ruling in the Supreme Court because you are going to abide by that ruling, I don't think this is what you do with John Roberts.
I don't think that you get his backup in this way that you're actually getting rebuked by him before you even get to the Supreme Court on your main cases. So that's an administration that looks to me like they are preparing for a shutdown. And ultimately, the unitary executive theory might need a showdown.
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.
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.
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