Ezra Klein: belief

Transcript context

…The consultants is what everyone thinks about. But I think you would not want that. This is something I talk about in the book, I think you’d actually want to insource a lot of what the government does. Look, the reason I’m being squirrelly at this moment — I’ll give you a non-squirrelly answer now — is because I don’t like the way Musk is doing it. If you had asked me three months ago — and I believe today what I believed three months ago — I would’ve said the civil service rules we have are archaic. They make it much too difficult to hire and fire. They make it much too difficult to reorganize systems. It actually is the case — say what you will about whether or not you think what they’re doing is a good idea — it is the case that it used to be much more in the president’s power to reorganize, create, fold agencies, subagencies, et cetera. We have, I think, made it too hard by a lot to restructure and manage the administrative state. The thing that I would like to do is create much more flexibility and much more power with the people we call bureaucrats. I would like people to have much more agency, much more ability to actually hire and fire. I would not want to do it indiscriminately. The idea that just everybody in the federal workforce is probably bad, and on the margin, getting rid of any of them for any reason is probably good — it’s just not an idea I share. The thing where they fired all the probationary employees — that was disproportionately young people and people who had just had promotions. The federal workforce — I’m not sure that’s happening by the way. I know it’s been in the media, but —…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.