Ezra Klein: belief

Transcript context

…You know full well Steven Teles’s work on kludgeocracy. We have at least 50 years of the kludge that is just accumulating. Everyone in government knows about this. It’s not some secret. Various administrations have tried to address it. Al Gore did a bit — that was fine, but it didn’t really stop it. I don’t see that there’s any other recipe besides quite a bit of disruption. Again, there’ll be future administrations to sort it out. Like the New Deal agencies — they weren’t so great to begin with. They didn’t have experience or data or staffing, but over time, pieces fell into place. Maybe the options are just more and more Steven Teles’s kludgeocracy or we take some chances today and do some things that actually hurt. Then over an 8- to 12-year period sort it out with AI and most of all, with future administrations, I don’t really see what the alternative is. Well, I think there are two questions here. Let’s say there’s a good version of this and a bad version of this. I’ll outline the way I see both. Let me start with a good version of this. If I was saying what I hope the story of this period will ultimately be, I have to describe it as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, which I think is a little bit of what you’re saying. My critique of Democrats is, they became culturally process- and bureaucracy-obsessed. They saw the state and inside their own agencies, inside things they, in theory, run, they were anything a lawyer said you had to take as holy writ. No matter how off the wall or stringent the interpretation of what was clearly a looser original statute was, it was careful. Every process had to be followed to a T. Democrats, in theory, the party of government, cannot run government effectively because of some of the reasons you just described and some of the reasons I just described. Then in comes Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and if they have proven anything, it is that a lot of the things that previous administrations — by the way, Democratic and Republican — treated as inviolable were just not. They weren’t real. They were norms, not rules, norms not laws. It is clear that some of the firings were illegal. Clearly not all of them. It is clear that some of the withholding of money is illegal. My gut is, having seen the five-four decision the other day at the Supreme Court which went against the Trump administration — but it was a five-four decision — it’s not going to be all of it. There is a lesson that is being taught here by Musk, which I think liberals have to look at very uncomfortably, which is that things that they treated as facts of the system that could not be in any way altered and then used as excuses for low-performing government services for genuinely . . . Probably what Elon Musk is calling waste and what I would call waste are not the same thing, but there is what I would think of as a lot of waste. They allowed a civil service system to emerge and evolve that everybody knows is crazy. Everybody knows it’s crazy. Here comes Musk and Trump — antithesis. I don’t think they’re trying to make things work. I don’t think it’s zero-based budgeting. I don’t think they’re holding things to a standard. I think they’ve cut off huge amounts of lifesaving work. I think they are creating a lot of risk in parts of the system that could really blow up. I think what they want is control, not a working government. No, I’m not defending —…

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