Washington does not know how many federal agencies it has

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 2:13:27

   you think about the trajectory that's the most likely and uh what kind of challenges would it be facing yeah so and start by saying again i'm not disclaimer i have to claim i'm not on doge i'm not a member of doge we should say there's about 10 lawyers in the room they're staring no i'm just kidding both the angels and the devils on my shoulder okay so um yeah so i'm not speaking for doge um i'm not in charge of doge um those guys are doing it i'm not doing it but i am you know again i'm i'm volunteering to help as much as i can um and i'm 100 supportive um yeah so look i i i think the way to think i mean the the basic outlines are in public right which is it's a time-limited commission. It's not a formal government agency. It's a time-limited 18-month. In terms of implementation, it will advise the executive branch. And so the implementation

2. 2:14:17

   will happen through the White House. And the president has total attitude on what he wants to implement. And then basically what I think about it is three kind of streams, kind of target sets. And they're related, but different. So money, people, and regulations. And so the headline number, they put the $2 trillion number, and there's already disputes over that and whatever. And there's a whole question there. But then there's the people thing. And the people thing is interesting because you get into these very kind of fascinating questions. And I've been doing this. I won't do this for you as a pop quiz, but I do this for people in government as a pop quiz, and I can stump them every time, which is, A, how many federal agencies are there?

3. 2:14:56

   and the answer is somewhere between 450 and 520 and nobody's quite sure and then the other is how many people work for the federal government um and the answer is you know something on the order i forget but like four million full-time employees and maybe up to 20 million contractors and nobody is quite sure and so there's a large people component to this um and then by the way there's a related component to that which is how many of them are actually in the office and the answer is not many most of the federal buildings are still empty right and so and then there's questions of like? Are people working from home? Are we actually working from home? So there's the people dimension. And of course, the money and the people are connected. And then there's the third, which is the regulation thing, right? And I described earlier how basically our system of government

4. 2:15:36

   is much more now based on regulations than legislation, right? Most of the rules that we all live under are not from a bill that went through Congress. They're from an agency that created a regulation. That turns out to be very, very important. So one is, Elon already described, we want to do, the Doge wants to do broad-based regulatory relief. And Trump has talked about this and basically get the government off people's backs and liberate the American people to be able to do things again. So that's part of it. But there's also something else that's happened, which is very interesting, which was there were a set of Supreme Court decisions about two years ago that went directly after the idea that the executive branch can create regulatory agencies and issue regulations and enforce those regulations without corresponding congressional legislation.

5. 2:16:17

   And most of the federal government that exists this. today, including most of the departments and most of the rules and most of the money and most of the people, most of it is not enforcing laws that Congress passed. Most of it is regulation. And the Supreme Court basically said large parts, you know, large to maybe all of that regulation that did not directly result from a bill that went through Congress the way that the cartoon said that it should, that may not actually be legal. Now, the previous White House, of course, was super in favor of big government, they had no desire to act. They did nothing based on this.

6. 2:16:52

   They didn't pull anything back in. But the new regime, if they choose to, could say, look, the thing that we're doing here is not challenging the laws. We're actually complying with the Supreme Court decision that basically says we have to unwind a lot of this. And we have to unwind the regulations, which are no longer legal, constitutional. We have to unwind the spend and we have to unwind the people. And that's how you get from, basically, you connect the thread from the regulation part back to the money part back to the people part um they have work going on all three of these threads they have i would say incredibly creative ideas on how to deal with this um i'm i i know lots of former government people who 100 of them are super cynical on this topic and they're like this is impossible this could never possibly work and i'm like well i

7. 2:17:33

   can't tell you what the secret plans are but like like blow my mind like and all three of those like they have ideas that are like really quite amazing as you'd expect from you know from from the people involved. And so, um, over the course of the next few months, you know, that'll start to become visible. And then the final thing I would say is, um, this is going to be very different than,