Ezra Klein: belief

Transcript context

…I think it’s not always clear to them. Then, my hope is that the next administration — if this all doesn’t blow up in our faces in a truly terrible way — is able to do synthesis, which is to not try to destroy the federal government, but to take the lesson of DOGE seriously. That a lot of what liberals, a lot of what the establishment was treating as “It just has to be this way. These are the rules, these are the processes. There’s nothing to be done about it.” No, it actually seems you can do quite a lot of it. I’ve thought a lot about the payment systems and the Treasury privacy data. How many social insurance programs work poorly because they couldn’t get any access to that data? I’ve heard about this a lot in the design of systems beforehand, and this turned out to not be the case. You could get access to the data if you really wanted it. There’s no reason we needed to have the software procurement systems that led to healthcare.gov. We just didn’t. And it is true that then over time, this has been adapted somewhat in that area. USDS, US Digital Service, and 18F were significant there, and they’ve destroyed them. There was a lot you could do. That, I think, is the good version, where what we’ve had is a fire, and it’ll do things that I am very unhappy about, but it will also open the way to something that is not as relentlessly and illogically bureaucratized as the way government was run under, say, the Biden administration, and is not as destructive and corrupted as what we’re seeing under Trump and Musk. I think the bad version of “there’s no choice, but we have to come in and do something like this” is that they actually don’t know what they’re doing. This isn’t zero-based budgeting. They don’t know who they’re firing. They don’t really know what the people do. They’ve not evaluated things on a cost-benefit scale. They’re trying to use loopholes. And it does turn out that the system manages a lot of risk. Most of the risk it manages in any given year — it’s going to be fine if you don’t have anybody there managing it. But when things do go wrong, when you do roll snake eyes — and you always do, eventually — it’s going to turn out we really needed some of this. You see them freaking out about this on the daily, basically. They go fire all these people who are on nuclear safety and don’t even realize they’ve done it, and then are desperately trying to get back in touch with them to come back so we don’t have huge problems in the nuclear system. Or Musk saying that he didn’t mean to turn off all the payments on the Ebola work, but it turns out they did, and then saying that he turned it back on. In fact, you talk to people on the ground there, and he didn’t. So, I’m worried about risk exploding, which is why I wouldn’t have wanted to see it done this way. hen saying that he turned it back on. In fact, you talk to people on the ground there, and he didn’t. So, I’m worried about risk exploding, which is why I wouldn’t have wanted to see it done this way. I think that people who are in my position — and I think people care about effective government — really need to look with some anger and shame about the way in which the people who believe in government basically gave up on government reform and left that to this kind of process. If we think steady-state — when I look at the private sector, it seems to me large foundations, charitable foundations — they’re not better run than smaller ones, on average. If someone says, “Five years from now, we could have a USAID that maybe even gives away more money, is more effective, and total personnel is 300 or 400 people plus AGI,” that seems entirely plausible to me and actually a good goal. Could you imagine supporting a future vision for USAID with 350 employees plus AGI? Way, way less with the US-based contractors, get rid of that part of the law — that’s just domestic wealth, corporate cronyism welfare — and give away more money and have way fewer people. Why isn’t that a good vision?…

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