Real Clear
Clinical Psychologist and Psychoanalyst addresses relevant political and social issues of our times in a straightforward and honest manner. Taking on anti-logic factions that are growing in society. News and opinions that you can rely on for integrity and depth!
Real Clear
D.O.G.E.
The episode explores the controversial Doge initiative led by Elon Musk, which aims to increase government efficiency by cutting wasteful spending and modernizing outdated processes. The discussion raises questions about oversight, the balance of power, and the implications for public services.
• Overview of the Doge initiative and its objectives
• Historical context of government efficiency efforts
• Challenges posed by outdated systems in federal departments
• Public perception of Musk and Trump's partnership
• The impact of AI on government processes
• Concerns over public spending and social programs
• Legal and ethical issues involving Congress and personal gain
• Future expectations for the Doge initiative's effectiveness
What would you say you do here?
Speaker 2:Well, look, I already told you I deal with the goddamn customers, so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills. I am good at dealing with people. Don't you understand what the hell is wrong with you people?
Speaker 1:Of course, that's a clip from the legendary movie Office Space, where they have an efficiency group, a sort of Bain Capital. Come in and audit the company and overrun it for inefficiency, and anyone who grew up in the 90s or come of age around that time will recognize that clip. Always a good idea to inject a little humor into the situation. But, in all seriousness, the country's dealing with something very new right now. But how new is it? People are anxious, and I think one of the goals of Real Clear here is to help you sort through what's real versus what is simply presentation.
Speaker 1:Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency, run by special appointee Elon Musk, actually has precedent. Almost every administration turns into a deficit hawk in its own way, and you might be surprised to learn that this is almost identical to the 2010 executive order signed by Barack Obama establishing the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. Of course, that was in response to what was then almost a $14 trillion federal deficit, and they wanted to reduce that running deficit by around a trillion each year over 10 years to eliminate the federal deficit and get the country back on track. And so I bring this up in order to say that, if you're worried that there's no precedent for anything like this. There of course is, but there are some unique and perhaps concerning features of Doge which we'll get into. There's also some very striking findings so far from Elon Musk, which I'll also tell you about. However, history often lays bare patterns which can help people feel more grounded in precedent. The Simpson-Bowles Commission was headed by, of course, alan Simpson, senator and former White House Chief of Staff, erskine Bowles, and it had the aforementioned task. The long and short of it here is that Simpson-Bowles Commission failed. They ran on a commission instead of a spearheaded task force like Doge, and they ended up not being able to agree on what to do. They demonstrated the very problem that they were set out to fix, which is an utter irony. At the end, they had various budget proposals and they were unable to agree, and so they couldn't get anything through. It was a failure, but the attempt was, I think, the same thing as Doge, just through different mechanisms. Let's turn to Doge here, knowing that there's precedent, and talk about what's concerning, what is good, and then what is weird and perhaps what's unknown. Get the most juicy thing out of the way.
Speaker 1:Individually striking press conference with elon musk and president trump yesterday, where musk's son x was actually present and may have picked his nose and put it on the resolute desk one of the many striking features of that meeting standing next to his father or below him, who had a trench coat on, a mega hat and a t-shirt, who sat there for a half an hour and, with President Trump, explained as best he could what he was up to and fielded questions from reporters. The thing that Musk told us about that was most striking was that the government retirement system actually goes like this Paperwork for an employee and for all of their files goes into a truck which literally goes out of DC up into the mountains and into a giant underground bunker and inside of that are around 600 federal employees who process federal employee benefits and retirement through paper. And it takes around 60 days to even get the ball rolling to retire a federal worker, after which that paperwork is then trucked back out and back down into DC. Then this was started many decades ago because it was a facility that the government could buy out and it held paperwork that was important and was protected from the elements. But there's no reason to have this now, but we still have it. It's really quite striking. They're not doing anything clandestine down there, nothing secret. They're just processing paperwork with pen and paper and putting it into envelopes and moving it around and checking boxes and then sending things back down into DC on a truck.
Speaker 1:This is obviously extremely ineffective and it's one of the things that has must said. You could literally do anything else and it would be an improvement. We haven't even brought the federal employee benefits and retirement system into the internet age. It's still doing the exact same thing it did back in 1960. Trucks, paper routing. This is really weird.
Speaker 1:Another thing that he found was that there are payments going on through social security where they don't even do basic accounting. There are payments to companies that are on the no-pay list that are still being paid, and it takes, again I think, around 60 days to even get that company on the roll, or even more of the no pay and so forth. There's a person around 150 years old still receiving social security benefits, and that's a little odd. And there's no categories or memos as to what payments are made and where they're going and what they're for. So these are things that I think are pretty reasonable. But the question is it reasonable for a singular human spearheading the, I guess oddly featured doge to be doing. That's always the problem.
Speaker 1:The biggest issue with Trump is that he can do things that are reasonable, but he might do them in an unreasonable way, and right now I think he's scaring the heck out of a certain percentage of the American public. Now, that fear, I think his faction then takes as some sort of righteous admission of wrongdoing, as if people who are unnerved by what's going on are somehow evidencing that they're part of the problem. Unnerved by what's going on, or somehow evidencing that they're part of the problem. I think we should treat each other with much more humanity than that. There are a lot of people right now who are seeing an administration who has come into power that they may not have voted for or voted for bad concerns about, and then they see Elon Musk standing next to him with the trench coat in the Oval Office and they feel unnerved by that, despite Musk saying he's not up to anything draconian. You then have to wonder to what degree is anyone made more comforted versus more agitated by someone having to attest that he's not doing anything draconian you follow. So it has odd optics to it, doge, which makes it different than Sim-Bowles One of the things that's unnerving for the American public right now is that Trump's doing a lot of things. Even NPR had to admit this on their weekend edition, where they had political analysis that Trump is doing the things that he said he was going to do, and that's really weird for people to see government doing anything they're used to. Frankly, the Simpson-Bowles Commission, which is a bunch of bureaucrats sitting around debating and arguing about what they found and ultimately agreeing that they couldn't agree and walking away, and nothing happened. So, if anything, again, simpson-bowles wasted the money that it said it was trying to save and even added to the deficit by way of its own costs.
Speaker 1:Musk is going through and using AI to make more efficient people working in the government. That can also have an odd tinge to it. It, of course, is more efficient to use large language models and huge algorithms that can carve out and notice where things are not making sense. It makes intuitive sense to me that he would be doing that. Some people have made mention that it's a little odd that the guy who is making a bid to buy OpenAI, chatgpt's parent company, is currently using that same feature to cut away human work at the level of salary. But it's just something odd. Again, the optics of this can be a little weird and I'm presenting that to you so that if you're in support of Doge, you can also have some sort of common humanitarian position toward your fellow neighbor who is a little irked by this. I think we can't forget to be human to one another, even when we're trying to make the government efficient.
Speaker 1:He's gone through some parts of the Department of Education and he's trying to look at programs that he doesn't think serve the American public or which are not very useful to them. The NIH is, of course, up for grabs and there's various weird things at the NIH that probably do need to be eliminated. Rand Paul every year has his list of odd government wasteful programs things like putting shrimp on treadmills to measure how fast they can go on a treadmill and things of that nature. Obviously, everyone is aware of the USAID programs and how the country is debating that right now People who support the previous administration's efforts to put things like Sesame Street into Iraq in order to try to socially program the Middle East to be more Western in its thinking. They make the claim that if you don't do that, then you're opening up a vacuum within which China or radical Islamic terrorists are going to continue to promote their own ideologies, and we'd rather have ourselves doing it. But then you have the deficit hawks who are going through saying, hey, do we really need to be trying to do this at all? Whatever the rationale is, do you need to have 40 million for Sesame Street in Iraq when we're in 30 some odd trillion dollars of debt as a country? And so that's really. Those are the two perspectives right now.
Speaker 1:Going through and taking a look and saying is this necessary for the functioning and prosperity of the American public domestically? And if it is okay and if it's not, I can't tell right now, when I read stories that Musk has cut or slash something, what that means. Does that mean that it is no longer in operation? I don't think a special appointment of the president can do that. I'll have to get clarity on that for you. Musk does not have the same disclosure requirements because he's a special appointee as opposed to an actual member of the cabinet, and so that's why you don't see any kind of review of him or him testifying in front of Congress. So usually, if that's the case and he's imbued with the reach of the president, then that means that his role is one of advisement and that the president then would have to sign into order or present to Congress the recommendations of Doge into his own advisement to Congress. Congress would then have to vote on it. Now, I believe that's what has to happen.
Speaker 1:However, there are over 50 lawsuits against the Trump administration right now and their initiatives, and so those are halting that process and so those are halting that process, and there's been some disagreement on the two sides of the aisle recently with respect to the ability of the courts to challenge the executive branch. Jd Vance is quoted as saying that he doesn't think that federal judges have the ability to eliminate the actual power of the executive branch. As a well-qualified attorney, I would assume that he'd have some frame of reference for what he's talking about. But, of course, if you address legal scholars at Harvard and other places, they're apt to point out that federal courts do is the process, and it's a check and a balance. I don't know what Vance has in mind when he says something like that, but his boss doesn't share his opinions. President Trump said they're going to comply with the courts they always have and he's going to go the appropriate routes of challenging the federal injunctions. That's that. So we've got USAID. That has been, I think, completely halted right now and is up on the chopping block. We've got the I think DOJA's next heading toward the military to see what is really a redundant role, and he says his fundamental aim is to identify low productivity roles or no productivity roles and either transition them into high productivity roles or get them eliminated, and either transition them into high productivity roles or get them eliminated. And so he's at the DOE right now.
Speaker 1:As I'd mentioned, there's around 4,400 employees at the Department of Education, and Trump would like to eliminate the department. By that he means return those services to the state. That means that money would most likely be block granted to the states and the states would then arbitrate the provision of education at the state level. And it should be noted for people who are worried about that, not that this will fully abate your worries, but most of what takes place in the education in America does already happen through the state, at least at the level of a K through 12. Anything that goes on in a public school is mostly mediated by the state, and this is simply a matter of diverting funding, although there is the question as to what would happen with the decentralization of things like inquiries into unjust practices and anti-discrimination initiatives and so forth that the DOE has taken up since its instantiation in, I believe, the late 1970s? Those are debates ongoing and in that case, president Trump would definitely need the agreement of Congress to eliminate the DOE. He cannot simply disband that. So there are things that are going on right now that are very reasonable and, as I'd mentioned, there are things that are concerning. I've just stated a number of them.
Speaker 1:Where the Trump administration could really improve again is in their optics and in their outreach to the American public. Instead of characterizing federal workers as lazy and so forth and saying that they're going to have to substantiate to the administration that they were not double employed for a period of time and all that, why not say we value hard work and we really want people to be as productive and efficient as they can be, and that's what we're looking to accomplish here. In classic Trump style, he does that, but he also peppers in these kind of jabs, and that's characteristic of him. Some people like that. I happen to not think that's very effective. I think it's much more effective to take a statesman-like position, because it greases the skids for your initiatives.
Speaker 1:The White House insists that Doge is quote extremely transparent, unquote, but I'm not so sure that it has been. You can find the people who are working under Musk, these sort of young geniuses we might say from X and SpaceX and the Boring Corporation, but he wasn't very open about that in the press conference and nobody asked him. By the way, I think that's important information to know who's doing the work on the ground. I also think it's a little strange that the agency, or at least Musk, has said that he's now going to look into members of Congress who have accrued wealth over their years in service or years in Congress, and that he had made mention of they may be very good stock investors. He's alluding to insider trading there with respect to people like Dianne Feinstein and all the rest who have had access to major movement and things like the Dow and then have miraculously had very successful investing patterns.
Speaker 1:Now you can be on the right side of the issue, which is that you shouldn't have members of Congress able to do legalized insider trading. I agree with you there. But what position is it of Musk's to look into that? This is a special appointee. This is not some sort of IRS task force, who has the authority to look into the financial records of US citizens. That's odd. That's not clear to me how he would gain that authority. These are members of Congress, but they're still citizens with their own private financials, and to get those financial records, it would seem to me that there would need to be several legal hurdles that would have to be lapsed through.
Speaker 1:Of course, one criticism from people on the Democrat side is that the world's richest person should not be in charge of slashing funds that could potentially be seen to benefit the poorest of people, and they also themselves allude to the idea that he's somehow benefiting from this. You can look at it that way. You could also look at it as the world's richest person has the least to gain from this kind of activity, that it's more of an act of benevolence on his end to try to do what he does best, which is efficiency, and exact that at the level of government for the benefit of the taxpayers. Obscene wealth has no motivation to have personal gain from anything like this, so I don't see that as a credible argument, although, again, optics weird. Why not have a desk where you're sitting down in a proper suit to address the American people and speak in a way that is not alarming to those who didn't vote for you, and try to bring people into the initiative. Try to gather people on your side by way of inviting them to the agenda. I think that the administration would be much more successful in doing it that way.
Speaker 1:And how much longer is this going to go on? I think the White House has asked Doge to render its final report by June of next year, june of 2026. I would anticipate that the large-scale news cycle on this is going to continue for some time, but drops off after the majority of the public-facing work from Doge concludes and they go to writing policy and budget proposals, and I would think that would probably happen somewhere in Q3 or 4, probably Q4 of this year, so they can be ready for Q1 of next year and start getting proposals together. Okay, so that's a brief on Doge and I'll have more coming to you. Take care.
