Elon Musk’s unceasing attempts to access the data and information systems of the federal government range so widely, and are so unprecedented and unpredictable, that government computing experts believe the effort has spun out of control. This week, we spoke with four federal-government IT professionals—all experienced contractors and civil servants who have built, modified, or maintained the kind of technological infrastructure that Musk’s inexperienced employees at his newly created Department of Government Efficiency are attempting to access. In our conversations, each expert was unequivocal: They are terrified and struggling to articulate the scale of the crisis.

Even if the president of the United States, the head of the executive branch, supports (and, importantly, understands) these efforts by DOGE, these experts told us, they would still consider Musk’s campaign to be a reckless and dangerous breach of the complex systems that keep America running. Federal IT systems facilitate operations as varied as sending payments from the Treasury Department and making sure that airplanes stay in the air, the sources told us.

Based on what has been reported, DOGE representatives have obtained or requested access to certain systems at the U.S. Treasury, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Office of Personnel Management, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with eyes toward others, including the Federal Aviation Administration. “This is the largest data breach and the largest IT security breach in our country’s history—at least that’s publicly known,” one contractor who has worked on classified information-security systems at numerous government agencies told us this week. “You can’t un-ring this bell. Once these DOGE guys have access to these data systems, they can ostensibly do with it what they want.”

[Read: If DOGE goes nuclear]

What exactly they want is unclear. And much remains unknown about what, exactly, is happening here. The contractor emphasized that nobody yet knows which information DOGE has access to, or what it plans to do with it. Spokespeople for the White House, and Musk himself, did not respond to emailed requests for comment. Some reports have revealed the scope of DOGE’s incursions at individual agencies; still, it has been difficult to see the broader context of DOGE’s ambition.

The four experts laid out the implications of giving untrained individuals access to the technological infrastructure that controls the country. Their message is unambiguous: These are not systems you tamper with lightly. Musk and his crew could act deliberately to extract sensitive data, alter fundamental aspects of how these systems operate, or provide further access to unvetted actors. Or they may act with carelessness or incompetence, breaking the systems altogether. Given the scope of what these systems do, key government services might stop working properly, citizens could be harmed, and the damage might be difficult or impossible to undo. As one administrator for a federal agency with deep knowledge about the government’s IT operations told us, “I don’t think the public quite understands the level of danger.”

Each of our four sources, three of whom requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal, made three points very clear: These systems are immense, they are complex, and they are critical. A single program run by the FAA to help air-traffic controllers, En Route Automation Modernization, contains nearly 2 million lines of code; an average iPhone app, for comparison, has about 50,000. The Treasury Department disburses trillions of dollars in payments per year.

Many systems and databases in a given agency feed into others, but access to them is restricted. Employees, contractors, civil-service government workers, and political appointees have strict controls on what they can access and limited visibility into the system as a whole. This is by design, as even the most mundane government databases can contain highly sensitive personal information. A security-clearance database such as those used by the Department of Justice or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, one contractor told us, could include information about a person’s mental-health or sexual history, as well as disclosures about any information that a foreign government could use to blackmail them.

Even if DOGE has not tapped into these particular databases, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the group has accessed sensitive personnel data at OPM. Mother Jones also reported on Wednesday that an effort may be under way to effectively give Musk control over IT for the entire federal government, broadening his access to these agencies. Trump has said that Musk is acting only with his permission. “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval,” he said to reporters recently. “And we will give him the approval where appropriate. Where it’s not appropriate, we won’t.” The specter of what DOGE might do with that approval is still keeping the government employees we spoke with up at night. With relatively basic “read only” access, Musk’s people could easily find individuals in databases or clone entire servers and transfer that secure information somewhere else. Even if Musk eventually loses access to these systems—owing to a temporary court order such as the one approved yesterday, say—whatever data he siphons now could be his forever.

[Read: Trump advisers stopped Musk from hiring a noncitizen at DOGE]

With a higher level of access—“write access”—a motivated person may be able to put their own code into the system, potentially without any oversight. The possibilities here are staggering. One could alter the data these systems process, or they could change the way the software operates—without any of the testing that would normally accompany changes to a critical system. Still another level of access, administrator privileges, could grant the broad ability to control a system, including hiding evidence of other alterations. “They could change or manipulate treasury data directly in the database with no way for people to audit or capture it,” one contractor told us. “We’d have very little way to know it even happened.”

The specific levels of access that Musk and his team have remain unclear and likely vary between agencies. On Tuesday, the Treasury said that DOGE had been given “read only” access to the department’s federal payment system, though Wired then reported that one member of DOGE was able to write code on the system. Any focus on access tiers, for that matter, may actually simplify the problem at hand. These systems aren’t just complex at the code level—they are multifaceted in their architecture. Systems can have subsystems; each of these can have their own permission structures. It’s hard to talk about any agency’s tech infrastructure as monolithic. It’s less a database than it is a Russian nesting doll of databases, the experts said.

Musk’s efforts represent a dramatic shift in the way the government’s business has traditionally been conducted. Previously, security protocols were so strict that a contractor plugging a non-government-issued computer into an ethernet port in a government agency office was considered a major security violation. Contrast that with DOGE’s incursion. CNN reported yesterday that a 23-year-old former SpaceX intern without a background check was given a basic, low tier of access to Department of Energy IT systems, despite objections from department lawyers and information experts. “That these guys, who may not even have clearances, are just pulling up and plugging in their own servers is madness,” one source told us, referring to an allegation that DOGE had connected its own server at OPM. “It’s really hard to find good analogies for how big of a deal this is.” The simple fact that Musk loyalists are in the building with their own computers is the heart of the problem—and helps explain why activities ostensibly authorized by the president are widely viewed as a catastrophic data breach.

The four systems professionals we spoke with do not know what damage might already have been done. “The longer this goes on, the greater the risk of potential fatal compromise increases,” Scott Cory, a former CIO for an agency in the HHS, told us. At the Treasury, this could mean stopping payments to government organizations or outside contracts it doesn’t want to pay. It could also mean diverting funds to other recipients. Or gumming up the works in the attempt to do those, or other, things.

In the FAA, even a small systems disruption could cause mass grounding of flights, a halt in global shipping, or worse, downed planes. For instance, the agency oversees the Traffic Flow Management System, which calculates the overall demand for airspace in U.S. airports and which airlines depend on. “Going into these systems without an in-depth understanding of how they work both individually and interconnectedly is a recipe for disaster that will result in death and economic harm to our nation,” one FAA employee who has nearly a decade of experience with its system architecture told us. “‘Upgrading’ a system of which you know nothing about is a good way to break it, and breaking air travel is a worst-case scenario with consequences that will ripple out into all aspects of civilian life. It could easily get to a place where you can’t guarantee the safety of flights taking off and landing.” Nevertheless, on Wednesday Musk posted that “the DOGE team will aim to make rapid safety upgrades to the air traffic control system.”

Even if DOGE members are looking to modernize these systems, they may find themselves flummoxed. The government is big and old and complicated. One former official with experience in government IT systems, including at the Treasury, told us that old could mean that the systems were installed in 1962, 1992, or 2012. They might use a combination of software written in different programming languages: a little COBOL in the 1970s, a bit of Java in the 1990s. Knowledge about one system doesn’t give anyone—including Musk’s DOGE workers, some of whom were not even alive for Y2K—the ability to make intricate changes to another.

[Read: The “rapid unscheduled disassembly” of the United States government]

The internet economy, characterized by youth and disruption, favors inventing new systems and disposing of old ones. And the nation’s computer systems, like its roads and bridges, could certainly benefit from upgrades. But old computers don’t necessarily make for bad infrastructure, and government infrastructure isn’t always old anyway. The former Treasury official told us that mainframes—and COBOL, the ancient programming language they often run—are really good for what they do, such as batch processing for financial transactions.

Like the FAA employee, the payment-systems expert also fears that the most likely result of DOGE activity on federal systems will be breaking them, especially because of incompetence and lack of proper care. DOGE, he observed, may be prepared to view or hoover up data, but it doesn’t appear to be prepared to carry out savvy and effective alterations to how the system operates. This should perhaps be reassuring. “If you were going to organize a heist of the U.S. Treasury,” he said, “why in the world would you bring a handful of college students?” They would be useless. Your crew would need, at a minimum, a couple of guys with a decade or two of experience with COBOL, he said.

Unless, of course, you had the confidence that you could figure anything out, including a lumbering government system you don’t respect in the first place. That interpretation of DOGE’s theory of self seems both likely and even more scary, at the Treasury, the FAA, and beyond. Would they even know what to do after logging in to such a machine? we asked. “No, they’d have no idea,” the payment expert said. “The sanguine thing to think about is that the code in these systems and the process and functions they manage are unbelievably complicated,” Scott Cory said. “You’d have to be extremely knowledgeable if you were going into these systems and wanting to make changes with an impact on functionality.”

But DOGE workers could try anyway. Mainframe computers have a keyboard and display, unlike the cloud-computing servers in data centers. According to the former Treasury IT expert, someone who could get into the room and had credentials for the system could access it and, via the same machine or a networked one, probably also deploy software changes to it. It’s far more likely that they would break, rather than improve, a Treasury disbursement system in so doing, one source told us. “The volume of information they deal with [at the Treasury] is absolutely enormous, well beyond what anyone would deal with at SpaceX,” the source said. Even a small alteration to a part of the system that has to do with the distribution of funds could wreak havoc, preventing those funds from being distributed or distributing them wrongly, for example. “It’s like walking into a nuclear reactor and deciding to handle some plutonium.”

DOGE is many things—a dismantling of the federal government, a political project to flex power and punish perceived enemies—but it is also the logical end point of a strain of thought that’s become popular in Silicon Valley during the boom times of Big Tech and easy money: that building software and writing code aren’t just dominant skills for the 21st century, but proof of competence in any realm. In a post on X this week, John Shedletsky, a developer and an early employee at the popular gaming platform Roblox, summed up the philosophy nicely: “Silicon Valley built the modern world. Why shouldn’t we run it?”

This attitude disgusted one of the officials we spoke with. “There’s this bizarre belief that being able to do things with computers means you have to be super smart about everything else.” Silicon Valley may have built the computational part of the modern world, but the rest of that world—the money, the airplanes, the roads, and the waterways—still exists. Knowing something, even a lot, about computers guarantees no knowledge about the world beyond them.

“I’d like to think that this is all so massive and complex that they won’t succeed in whatever it is they’re trying to do,” one of the experts told us. “But I wouldn’t want to wager that outcome against their egos.”

This week, CIA personnel came to a “fork in the road.” That’s the official euphemism for a buyout that the Trump administration has offered federal government employees, among them the more than 20,000 who work for the intelligence agency. But many longtime officers and new recruits really do feel like they are at a crossroads as they ask themselves whether they still want their jobs, or will be able to keep them.

The buyout, part of a legally dubious proposal called “deferred resignation,” is ostensibly an attempt to cut government spending by reducing the number of employees. But another objective is plainly visible: The president suspects that the CIA harbors people who oppose his policies and might try to undermine them. The buyout is one way to weed these people out. But it’s a strategy that reflects a misunderstanding of how the CIA actually works—and a drawdown that could leave the country exposed at a time of heightened global risk. The measures the administration is taking to thin the ranks further risk doing the very thing that Donald Trump claims he wants to stop: politicizing the intelligence community.

[Read: Purging the government could backfire spectacularly]

The CIA wasn’t initially among the government agencies offered the buyout, which excluded “positions related to … national security.” But John Ratcliffe, the new CIA director, asked the White House to make the offer available, “believing it would pave the way for a more aggressive spy agency,” according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported about it.

Ratcliffe has said many times that CIA employees aren’t “aggressive” enough. What exactly he means by this can be hard to pin down, but generally Ratcliffe—who was the director of national intelligence in the first Trump administration—seems to think that the CIA has “subordinated the truth,” as he once wrote, to the political biases and preferences of unaccountable analysts, most consequentially those studying China. He has said that he personally saw officers pulling punches or altering analysis to comport with “the company line” that the country did not pose as significant a threat to the United States as Trump claimed during his first term. He has also said that the agency is too hidebound and bureaucratic, an assessment that surely some, and perhaps many, CIA officers would agree with.

In his first written message to the entire workforce as CIA director, Ratcliffe said the agency needed to rededicate itself to its core mission of international espionage, people who read his note told me. He largely repeated remarks from his Senate confirmation hearing last month, when he promised that the CIA “will collect intelligence—especially human intelligence—in every corner of the globe, no matter how dark or difficult.”

This was an odd thing to emphasize, given that the CIA literally does this every day, and has since its inception more than 75 years ago. But Ratcliffe argues that the agency has lost its focus and is drifting away from its apolitical ethos. He promised “a strict adherence to the CIA’s mission … never allowing political or personal biases to cloud our judgement [sic] or infect our products.” Addressing personnel, Ratcliffe said, “If all of this sounds like what you signed up for, then buckle up and get ready to make a difference. If it doesn’t, then it’s time to find a new line of work. ”

Here was another curious exhortation, because risky and dangerous spying in the service of presidents, regardless of party, is exactly what people who work for the CIA signed up for. Presumably many of them also thought they were making a difference. When Ratcliffe talks about stamping out bias, many will presume he’s talking to people who wish Trump weren’t the president. And surely there are many. But CIA officers are trained to subordinate their own political views and do their job regardless of who sits in the White House. Ratcliffe appears to think that for a lot of intelligence officers, that’s just lip service, and his broader critique of political bias aligns neatly with Trump’s own long-held suspicions.  

So now those who don’t want to buckle up are being invited to get out. Ratcliffe addressed the buyout yesterday when he held his first “all-hands,” a town-hall meeting in an auditorium at headquarters known as the “Bubble.” The gathering was uncontentious, people who heard his remarks told me. Ratcliffe said he wanted CIA officers to have the same opportunity as other federal employees to leave if they decided that they could not work for the Trump administration. Those who were on board with the administration’s vision—which he described as countering China and protecting the United States from terrorists—were welcome to stay.

[Theodore Roosevelt: An object lesson in civil service reform]

In a written statement, a CIA spokesperson described the buyout offer as “part of a holistic strategy to infuse the Agency with renewed energy, provide opportunities for rising leaders to emerge, and better position the CIA to deliver on its mission.” But the agency exists to support the president’s policies—any president’s policies—and moves with the political tides. Presidents come and go. CIA officers salute (metaphorically) and carry out their orders. At the town-hall meeting, Ratcliffe “highlighted his determination to rebuild the Agency’s trust with the President,” a CIA official said. Trump’s feelings are no secret, but to hear the new director articulate them to the nation’s most important intelligence agency was still remarkable: The president doesn’t really trust you.

Trump’s attacks on the CIA are not new, and most officers sweated them out through the president’s first four years in office. But some are wondering if they can do it again—not because of their political beliefs, but because of what they see transpiring at other agencies in the first few weeks of the new administration. Some have told me that they’re watching events at the FBI—where Trump is rooting out agents who worked on criminal investigations of his conduct—and the wholesale demonization of USAID, and they wonder if this is a preview of things to come at Langley.

Holly Berkley Fletcher, who worked as a senior Africa analyst, resigned in December, having decided before the election to bring her 19-year career to a close. “Watching all of this feels like a massive betrayal,” she told me. CIA officers “give up elements of their privacy and personal freedom, curtail their political activities, and constrain their speech in the workplace in order to function as a team, with mission always at the center of what they do. Diversity of all kinds, including political diversity, has always been CIA’s strength in accomplishing that.”

Trump is not likely to simply shut down the CIA. But he could gut it. And buyouts aren’t the only means to that end. Two officers told me they are considering early retirement, an option that could be attractive for people who are financially prepared to leave the government after decades of service and would collect a pension. And the Trump administration has taken other steps that might push out people who joined very recently.

The White House demanded the names of all officers under probationary status, meaning that they have worked for the CIA for two years or less, people familiar with this process told me. Those new employees don’t yet have full civil-service protections, which could make them easier to fire than those who do. The agency plans to review their qualifications to ensure that they are aligned with the mission. Presumably they will be; the CIA hired them for a reason. But the obvious and troubling implication is that people who joined while Joe Biden was president are at greater risk of losing their job.

Demanding a list of names in this way (as first reported by The New York Times) is unconventional and risky. Foreign governments labor diligently to learn the identities of anyone working at the CIA. To protect the information while complying with the White House’s directive, the probationary officers were identified by only their first name and the first initial of their last name. Those names were delivered to the Office of Personnel Management, which has been effectively taken over by Elon Musk and his staff.

[Listen: Purge now, pay later]

Reducing the number of CIA employees at a moment when the United States faces such formidable challengers as Russia, Iran, China, and international drug cartels “is potentially a big mistake,” Marc Polymeropoulos, a former operations officer who worked in the Middle East and on Russia, told me. “This may have a significant impact on CIA’s core mission of recruiting and handling agents. Replacing case officers with years of street experience, tradecraft training, and hard-target language skills is exceedingly difficult if many indeed walk out the door.”

To train officers to work in the field takes years. Polymeropoulos worries that getting rid of the newest officers, who are the next generation in the pipeline, could set back the work of espionage. “This is not reform, which is for sure needed,” he said. “This is more of a sledgehammer.”

And surely U.S. adversaries are taking notes, Fletcher, the Africa analyst, told me—just as the CIA would be if an adversary’s intelligence service were in such disarray.

“Our adversaries could not have scripted things better, and they are no doubt celebrating the chaos, fear, and division permeating the agency right now,” Fletcher told me. “As a former CIA officer, I am heartbroken. As an American citizen, I am terrified.”

Elon Musk is not the president, but it does appear that he—a foreign-born, unelected billionaire who was not confirmed by Congress—is exercising profound influence over the federal government of the United States, seizing control of information, payments systems, and personnel management. It is nothing short of an administrative coup.

As the head of an improvised team within the Trump administration with completely ambiguous power (the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, in reference to a meme about a Shiba Inu), Musk has managed quite a lot in the two weeks since Inauguration Day. He has barged into at least one government building and made plans to end leases or sell some of them (three leases have been terminated so far, according to Stephen Ehikian, the General Services Administration’s acting administrator). He has called in employees from Tesla and the Boring Company to oversee broad workforce cuts, including at the Office of Personnel Management (one of Musk’s appointed advisers, according to Wired, is just 21 years old, while another graduated from high school last year). During this time, OPM staffers, presumably affiliated with DOGE, reportedly set up an “on-premise” email server that may be vulnerable to hacking and able to collect data on government employees—one that a lawsuit brought by two federal workers argues violates the E-Government Act of 2002 (there has not yet been a response to the complaint). Musk’s people have also reportedly gained access to the Treasury’s payments system—used to disburse more than $5 trillion to Americans each year (a national-security risk, according to Senator Ron Wyden, a democrat from Oregon)—as well as computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of civil servants. (They subsequently locked some senior employees out of those systems, according to Reuters.) Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Over the weekend, the Trump administration put two senior staffers at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) on administrative leave—staffers who, according to CNN, had tried to thwart Musk’s staff’s attempts to access sensitive and classified information. Musk posted on X yesterday that “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.” USAID staffers were barred from entering the unit’s headquarters today.

This is called “flooding the zone.” Taken in aggregate, these actions are overwhelming. But Musk’s political project with DOGE is actually quite straightforward: The world’s richest man appears to be indiscriminately dismantling the government with an eye toward consolidating power and punishing his political enemies.

Two days before the 2024 election, I wrote that Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter was going to be the blueprint for his potential tenure at DOGE. Unfortunately, I was right—he’s running the exact same playbook. But it’s worth keeping in mind that there are two ways of measuring success for Musk’s projects: first, whether the organizations themselves benefit under his leadership, and second, whether Musk himself gets something out of the arrangement. Musk’s stewardship of X has been a financial nightmare. He has alienated advertisers, tanked revenue and user growth, and saddled investment banks with debt from the purchase that they’ll need to sell off. Yet Musk’s own influence and net worth have grown considerably during this time. His fanboys and the MAGA faithful don’t care that X is a flailing business, because Musk did deliver on giving liberals their supposed comeuppance by de-verifying accounts and reinstating banned trolls. He turned the platform into a conspiratorial superfund site, has boosted right-wing accounts and talking points, and helped elect Donald Trump as president. Musk’s purchase is a success in their eyes because he succeeded in turning X into a political weapon.

[Read: Musk’s Twitter is the blueprint for a MAGA government]

The same thing is happening right now with DOGE. Musk and his Silicon Valley acolytes are acting on a long-held fantasy of approaching the federal government like a software company and running it like a venture-backed tech start-up during the days of zero-percent interest rates. Here’s the problem: The federal government is not a software company. “The stakes are wildly different,” a former senior Twitter executive told me recently. This person, who requested anonymity because they worked closely with Musk during his takeover and fear retribution, argued that Musk seems incapable of recognizing the limits of his own knowledge. When I asked them to describe Musk’s managerial strategy, they borrowed a term of art from SpaceX’s own rocket mishaps: “This is a rapid unscheduled disassembly of government services.”

The theory that the government is inefficient is not altogether incorrect. I recently spoke with Robert Gordon, formerly the deputy assistant to the president for economic mobility in the Biden administration, to get a sense of how intricate government agencies are and what it would take to reform them. Gordon, who has spent time in the Office of Management and Budget and as the assistant secretary responsible for grants policy at the Department of Health and Human Services, was quick to note that we desperately need to simplify processes within the federal government to allow workers to execute more quickly and develop more agile technology, such as the Direct File product that the IRS recently made to allow Americans to file taxes for free. “No doubt the government could do more here,” he told me. “But it requires incredibly specific approaches, implemented in a thoughtful way. It requires paying enormous attention to detail, not blowing shit up.” Musk and DOGE have instead operated with a “vast carelessness,” Gordon wrote in a Substack post last week. “This government cannot trouble itself to plan for the biggest things, the funds that thousands of organizations use to serve millions of people,” he wrote. “It has swept up civil servants in a vortex of confusion and fear.” Musk wrote today on X that the Treasury team that built Direct File no longer exists. “That group has been deleted,” he said.

[Read: The American people deserve DOGE]

Among Gordon’s biggest concerns is that DOGE’s slapdash cuts will remove key links in the bureaucratic chain that make the government function. Even simple-sounding procedures—allocating government funds in a crisis like, say, a pandemic—require coordination among teams of civil servants across multiple government offices. “All of this is done by back-office types,” Gordon told me. “There are so many people in that process, and it matters enormously how good they are.” That this system is inefficient is frustrating, Gordon said, but he worries that the chaos caused by Musk’s efforts will halt any possibility of reform. “If you want to make this system better, you need to create space for civil servants who know what they’re doing to do that work,” he told me. “What’s very likely to happen now because of this pressure is that the most competent people on that chain are at super-high risk of saying, I gave it my best shot; I don’t need this and quit, because they can get better jobs. That’s what I see happening.”

Of course, the so-called tech right does not agree. As the political scientist Henry Farrell wrote this past weekend, “The fact that none of the DOGE people actually understand how government functions is a feature, not a bug. If you understand the workings of the federal bureaucracy, you are almost certainly part of the problem, not the solution.” But this reasoning is not usually compatible with the reality of managing complex organizations. As the former Twitter exec told me, after Musk took over the platform, his people enthusiastically championed ideas that seasoned employees with knowledge of the company had already researched and rejected: “It wasn’t that we hadn’t thought about new ways, say, to do verification or handle bots, but we rejected them on the basis of research and data. There was a huge contrast between the methodical approach and Musk’s rapid-fire whims.”

When Musk barged into Twitter in 2022 as its new CEO, his strategy was “decision making by vibes,” according to the former exec I spoke with. Those vibes were often dictated by the sycophants in Musk’s orbit. The executive described Musk as surprisingly receptive to ideas when presented with facts and data, but said that few in his inner circle questioned or spoke frankly with him: “And so, in the absence of rational decision making, we got the vibes-based, yes-man approach.”

The former executive did point to a meaningful difference between X and DOGE, however: The government is big and complex. This may be an asset during an assault. “Even if you try to take a flamethrower to the government, the destruction won’t be quick. There’ll be legal challenges and congressional fights, and in the months and weeks, it’ll be individuals who keep essential services running,” they said. The government workers who know what they’re doing may still be able to make positive incremental change from within.

[Read: There really is a deep state]

It’s a rousing, hopeful notion. But I fear that the focus on the particulars of this unqualified assault on our government is like looking at X’s bottom line, in that it obscures Musk’s real ambitions. What are DOGE’s metrics for success? If X is our guide, health, functionality, and sustainability are incidental and able to be sacrificed. The end game for Musk seems to be just as it was with Twitter: seize a polarized, inefficient institution; fuse his identity with it; and then use it to punish his enemies and reward his friends. DOGE is a moon-shot program to turn the government into Musk’s personal political weapon.

He did not receive a single vote. He did not get confirmed. He does not receive a government paycheck.

The world’s richest man has declared war on the federal government and, in a matter of days, has moved to slash its size and reach, while gaining access to some of its most sensitive secrets. He has shaped the public discourse by wielding the powerful social-media site he controls and has threatened to use his fortune to bankroll electoral challenges to anyone who opposes him.

Elon Musk’s influence appears unchecked, triggering cries of alarm from those who worry about conflicts of interest, security clearances, and a broad, ill-defined mandate. But the Republican-controlled Congress has shown no desire so far to rein Musk in. There has never been a private citizen like him.

“I think Elon is doing a good job. He’s a big cost-cutter,” Donald Trump told reporters last night after stepping off Air Force One returning to Washington from Palm Beach. “Sometimes we won’t agree with it and we’ll not go where he wants to go. But I think he’s doing a great job. He’s a smart guy. Very smart. And he’s very much into cutting the budget of our federal budget.”

Musk’s assault on the government unfolded rapidly in recent days, as he used his role as the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to slash spending. His stated goal: cut $500 billion in annual spending. DOGE has limited powers. It is not an actual government agency—one can only be created by an act of Congress; Musk’s task force was set up through a presidential executive order. And Congress has the authority to set spending.

[Read: Elon Musk has appointed himself king of the world]

His own role remains murky: A White House official told me today that Musk is working for Trump as a “special government employee,” formalizing a position in the administration but allowing him to sidestep federal disclosure rules. Musk is not being paid, the official said.

Musk lacks legal authority, but he is close to power. At times working from the White House campus, Musk plainly enjoys his position as the president’s most influential adviser. Trump famously turns on aides he believes eclipse him. But by his own account, he remains enamored of Musk, seeming to relish the fact that the world’s wealthiest person is working for him, the White House official told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity to relay private conversations. Trump, the official said, also believes that Musk has shown a willingness to take public pushback for controversial actions, allowing the president himself to avoid blame.

Over the weekend, Musk set his sights on the U.S. Agency for International Development, declaring in a series of tweets, without evidence, that USAID is “a criminal organization” that is “evil” and “must die.” The Trump administration, adopting a transactional, “America First” view of global engagement, has subjected the agency—the world’s largest provider of food assistance—to aid freezes, personnel purges, and mass confusion. Musk in recent days became the would-be executioner. In an X Spaces live chat early this morning, he said he had discussed USAID’s future with Trump “in detail, and he agreed that we should shut it down.”

“And so we’re shutting it down,” Musk said.

Hours later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he was assuming the role of acting director of the agency, which he said the White House wants to fold into the State Department. USAID’s proponents have long seen it as a useful tool of American soft power that acted as a bulwark against China and Russia; its apparent demise was cheered by former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who wrote on X that Musk was making a “smart move” to “plug USAID’s Deep Throat. Let’s hope notorious Deep State doesn’t swallow him whole.”

Musk might not succeed in kneecapping the agency. Several Democrats denounced the plan to move it to the State Department, arguing that Congress established USAID as a separate agency and that moving or closing it would take a subsequent act of Congress. But Republicans on the Hill were muted, seemingly willing to sacrifice their power as a co-equal branch of government to appease Musk and Trump.

[Read: What Elon Musk really wants]

GOP lawmakers also do not seem to object to Musk’s installation of former staffers from Tesla, X, and the Boring Company at several agencies, including the Office of Personnel Management, which essentially handles federal human resources, and the General Services Administration, which manages government real estate. Some of Musk’s lead aides, according to Wired, are between 19 and 24 years old. (When a user on X later posted the names of those aides, Musk replied, “You have committed a crime,” and suspended the account.)

Over the weekend, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent granted DOGE staffers access to the system that sends out money on behalf of the entire federal government, ceding to Musk—whose wealth is estimated at more than $325 billion—a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit federal spending. That move ended a standoff with a top Treasury official, a career civil servant named David Lebryk, who was put on leave and then suddenly retired after he had tried to prevent Musk’s lieutenants from getting into the department’s payment system.

“The only way to stop fraud and waste of taxpayer money is to follow the payment flows and pause suspicious transactions for review. Obviously,” Musk posted today on X. “Naturally, this causes those who have been aiding, abetting and receiving fraudulent payments very upset. Too bad.”

The department, in a process run by civil servants, disbursed more than $5 trillion in fiscal year 2023. Access to the payment system is tightly held because it includes sensitive personal information about the millions of Americans who receive Social Security checks, tax refunds, and other payments from the federal government. Moreover, two of Musk’s companies—Tesla and SpaceX—have more than $15 billion in government contracts, and according to some Democrats, he might now have access to information about competitor businesses, creating conflicts of interest. Musk also has business interests overseas, including in China.

A group of Senate and House Democrats has vowed a court battle over Musk’s access to the payment system. “Elon Musk, you may have illegally seized power over the financial payments systems of the Treasury, but you don’t control the money of the American people,” Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland said at a news conference today outside of USAID headquarters in Washington. “The U.S. Congress does that under Article 1 of the Constitution. We don’t have a fourth branch of government called ‘Elon Musk.’”

[Read: Purging the government could backfire spectacularly]

But this morning Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., released a letter he wrote to Musk declaring that his office would “pursue any and all legal action against anyone” who tried to impede DOGE’s work.

Last week, Musk was the driving force behind an email from the Office of Personnel Management with the subject line “Fork in the Road,” demanding that millions of federal employees accept massive workplace changes or resign. The White House official told me that Musk came up with the email subject line, which was also the language he used in an email to Twitter employees shortly after he purchased the company in 2022.

After taking over Twitter and rebranding it as X, Musk demolished the company’s value and sparked a mass exodus of users. But it gave him a powerful political platform—which he is also now using to try to influence European elections—and there are signs that business is improving. The site brought in $25 million in political advertising revenue in 2024, mostly from Republicans, and The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Amazon—owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns the dominant newspaper in the nation’s capital—was increasing its spending on X.

Last week, the only news story that competed with Trump’s takeover of the nation’s capital was the collision between a military aircraft and a civilian jet that killed 67 people. The National Transportation Safety Board took the lead on the investigation, as it always does. But as the nation looked for news on the devastating tragedy, the first major airline crash in the United States in 15 years, the government agency made clear where the American people would need to turn: “All NTSB updates about news conferences or other investigative information will be posted to this X account. We will not be distributing information via email.”

Donald Trump threatening to annex Canada? It was an absurd situation. I briefly considered recycling an old joke of mine about merging all of the High Plains states into a single province of South Saskatchewan. But as I toyed with it, the joke soured. The president of the United States was bellowing aggression against fellow democracies. The situation was simultaneously too stupid for serious journalism and too shameful for wisecracks.

In this second Trump presidency, many of us are baffled by how to respond. The former Trump strategist Steve Bannon memorably described Trump’s method as “flood the zone with shit.” Try to screen all the flow, and you will rapidly exhaust yourself and desensitize your audience. Ignore the flood, and soon you’re immersed in the stuff neck-deep.

The first Trump term was very different.

[Read: It’s not amateur hour anymore]

More than a million people demonstrated against him on January 21, 2017, many more than had attended his inauguration the day before. On January 27, Trump issued an executive order purporting to ban Muslims from entering the United States. Thousands of people thronged airports across the nation to protest. About a hundred were arrested. In less formal ways, civic-minded Americans also rallied against the new administration. They read and viewed more news, and paid for it at record levels, too. Trump reviled one news organization more than any other: the “failing New York Times.” In 2017 alone, the company’s revenues from digital subscriptions climbed 46 percent, pushing total company revenues above $1 billion.

Meanwhile, the administration bumbled from fiasco to fiasco. Within the first week, Trump’s choice of national security adviser lied to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian government, setting in motion his early resignation and then criminal indictment. Trump that same week summoned then–FBI Director James Comey to dinner to pressure him to end the bureau’s investigation of Trump-Russia connections. The demand would lead to Comey’s firing, the appointment of a special counsel, and the prosecution and conviction of important Trump allies such as Paul Manafort.

First-term Trump knew what he wanted: unlimited personal power. But he did not know how to achieve it, and an insufficient number of those around him was willing and able to help him. The senior administration officials who supported Trump’s autocratic ambitions lacked bureaucratic competence; the officials who possessed the bureaucratic competence did not support his ambitions. That’s one reason it took Trump more than a year—until March 2018—to impose the first major round of the tariffs that he wanted but his top economic adviser opposed.

First-term Trump also lacked reliable partners in Congress. Then–Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and then–Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell struck devil’s bargains with Trump to achieve their own agendas: tax cuts, judicial appointments, the attempted repeal of Obamacare. But they were not his men. They overlooked his corruption, but also imposed limits on what he could do. In 2019, Trump tried to name two personal loyalists to the Federal Reserve Board. McConnell’s Senate rejected them.

[Read: Donald Trump’s first year as president: a recap]

Second-term Trump is very different. He has moved rapidly to consolidate power. Even before he took office, the Department of Justice preemptively stopped all legal actions against him for his attempted seizure of power on January 6, 2021. As soon as he was inaugurated, Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of all of those convicted for the violent attack on Congress. He then announced investigations of the lawyers who had acted to enforce the law against him.

Trump has moved rapidly to oust independent civil servants, beginning with 17 nonpartisan inspectors general. He moved fast to install loyalists atop the two most important federal management agencies, the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management. His administration is united in claiming power to refuse to spend funds already appropriated by Congress and to ignore laws that constrain the absolute power of the executive branch. The whole Trump team, not only the president personally, is testing another important tool of power: stopping congressionally approved grants to states, to ensure that he is funding supporters and punishing opponents. The Trump administration retreated from the test after two days of uproar—but how permanently, who can say?

Trump’s administration has launched large-scale immigration raids in Democratic cities and commenced legal action against local officials who stand in the way. The administration has stopped all international humanitarian aid, cutting off Ukraine. Trump is backed, not undercut, by senior national-security officials in his threats of territorial aggression against Greenland, Panama, and Canada. The Republican platform and congressional budget-writers approve Trump’s musings about replacing tax revenues with hoped-for windfalls from tariffs. Even his seemingly juvenile move to rename the Gulf of Mexico was immediately endorsed by his Department of the Interior. The absurd act carries an underlying serious message: The Trump administration stands behind its president’s high-handed rewriting of rules, even the most established and uncontroversial.

Looming ahead are even more crucial acts of consolidation, including the appointment of an FBI director who has proclaimed his willingness to use the federal police force as a tool of presidential personal power.

Trump’s opponents seem dazed, disoriented, and defeated. Despite the GOP’s slender majorities in both chambers of Congress, and despite Trump’s own low approval rating, the new White House for the moment carries all before it. There have been no mass protests. The demand for news and information—so voracious in 2017—has diminished, if not vanished. Audiences have dwindled; once-mighty news organizations are dismissing hundreds of journalists and staff.

[Read: It’s already different]

Compared with eight years ago, Trump is winning more and his opponents are resisting less.

What’s changed?

Four major things.

First, this time Trump is not arriving in power alone. He and the Republican mainstream have merged, a convergence symbolized by the highly detailed Project 2025 plan written for Trump by the Heritage Foundation. Trump disavowed the plan during the campaign. He was lying when he did so. Now its authors are his most effective henchmen, and unlike the situation he faced in 2017, Trump can now combine expertise and loyalty in the same body of staffers.

Second, this time Trump’s opponents feel beaten in a way that they did not after 2016. That year, Hillary Clinton received nearly 3 million more votes than Trump. Clinton’s popular-vote advantage had no legal meaning. The office of the president is won or lost according to the arcane rules of the Electoral College, not by direct vote-counting. Politically, though, the popular vote matters a lot—that’s why Trump confected all those silly lies about his supposedly historic victory in 2016 and his allegedly enormous crowd size at the 2017 Inauguration. Back then, Democrats felt outmaneuvered but not out-voted. By contrast, Kamala Harris’s unqualified loss in 2024 has crushed morale. Democrats are divided, criticizing one another for their loss, not yet uniting to sound the alarm about how Trump is using his victory.

Third, Trump owes many of his early successes to previous Democratic mistakes. On issue after issue—immigration enforcement, crime and public order, race and gender—Democratic governments over the past eight years have drifted away from the mainstream of American public opinion. The drift is best symbolized by that notorious answer Harris gave to a 2019 questionnaire asking whether she favored taxpayer-funded gender-transition operations for undocumented immigrants and federal prisoners. Her related response in an interview with a progressive group was like some kind of smart-aleck word puzzle: How many unpopular hot-button issues can be crammed into a single sentence? Harris believed that punching every one of those buttons was necessary to be a viable progressive in the 2019–20 cycle. She, and America, paid the price in 2024.

A real quandary arises here. The best-organized Democratic interest groups want to fight Trump on the worst possible issues; the Democrats who want to fight on smarter issues tend to be less organized to fight. Until that conundrum is solved, Democrats are disabled and Trump is empowered.

[Read: Why Democrats are losing the culture war]

Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the workforce? Not popular.

Hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers entering the United States with little way to expel them if they are ultimately refused (as almost all of them will be)? Even less popular.

Create a rift between the United States and Israel? Very unpopular.

Trans athletes competing in girls’ and women’s sports? Wildly unpopular.

These are bad fights for Democrats to have. For that very reason, they are the fights that Trump Republicans want to start. Dangerously and unfortunately, they are also the fights that some of the most active of Democratic factions seek to have.

The fourth difference between 2017 and 2025 is the difference in the information space in which American politics is conducted. In 2017, politically minded Americans used platforms like Facebook and Twitter to share links to news sources. Some of those sources were deceptive or outright fake, but even fake news at least replicated the form and style of actual news.

Since then, new platforms have risen to dominance, especially among younger Americans and those less connected to politics. These new platforms are far more effective at detecting and manipulating user bias, fear, and anger. They are personality-powered, offering affirmation and bonding as their proofs of truth.

For pro-Trump Republicans, this new information space is marvelously congenial. They love and hate based on personal recommendations, and will flit from issue to issue as their preferred “influencers” command. Such a movement centered on celebrity and charismatic leadership has no problem with the fact that its favorite media spread disinformation and distrust. In fact, it’s useful. Trump has in effect adapted a slogan from Mussolini: “Trump is always right.” Its corollary is: “Only Trump is right.” Nothing important is lost from a Trump point of view if right-wing media encourage their users to despise science, law, and other forms of expertise.

[Read: Trump is speaking like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini]

The anti-Trump coalition, however, is all about institutions. It depends on media that promote understanding of, and respect for, the work that institutions do. The new-media age is inherently inhospitable to institutionalists, and deeply demoralizing for them. Before they can organize to resist Trump, they must build new ways of communicating that adapt to contemporary technology but do not succumb to that technology’s politically destructive tendencies.

All of the above takes time. But it all can be done and must be done.

The second Trump administration has opened purposeful and strong. Its opponents have opened confused and weak. But today’s brutal reality can be tomorrow’s fading memory.

The second-term Trump synthesis does not even pretend to have an economic agenda for middle-class people. The predictable next round of tax cuts will disfavor them. The ensuing deficits will keep mortgage rates high. The tariffs and immigration crackdowns will raise consumer prices. Trump is offering nothing to help with the cost of health care and college.

Trump using James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” as his walk-on song, staffing his administration with accused abuser of women upon accused abuser of women, and relying heavily on reactionary anti-woman gender politics as his political message and messengers: All of that will exact a political price in weeks and months ahead.

Trump himself will lead and epitomize an administration of rake-offs and graft. He may succeed in sabotaging laws designed to prevent and punish corruption in high offices. He won’t be able to suppress awareness of his corruption.

The second-term Trump world will bubble with threats to U.S. security. Trump is determined to make each of them worse by fracturing our alliances in both the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific regions. The worst threat of all is that Trump will be drawn into military action inside Mexico, without the cooperation of the Mexican authorities. Trump’s project to brand drug cartels as international terrorist organizations has legal implications that Trump supporters refuse to consider. Right now, the cartels have powerful incentives not to commit violence against U.S. citizens or on U.S. territory. Yet Trump is poised on the verge of actions that could change the cartels’ calculus and import Mexico’s criminal violence north of the border on a huge scale.

[Read: What’s guiding Trump’s early moves]

Trump won the election of 2024, but still failed to break 50 percent of the vote. His hold on Congress could slip at any time. His plans to foster voter-ID laws and gerrymandering to disenfranchise Democrats will collide with the new reality of American politics that these measures will harm his prospects more than his opponents’: Trump does best among the most disaffiliated Americans, whereas Democrats are widening their lead among those Americans who follow politics closely and vote most often.

The most immediate task for the anti-Trump coalition in these early months of 2025 is to avoid more mistakes. President Joe Biden ended his presidency by listening to advice to grant clemency to thousands of drug offenders, including heinous murderers. Who offered that advice? Don’t listen to them anymore! Fight Trump where he’s most vulnerable, not where progressive interest groups are most isolated and most dogmatic. Build unity from the center, rather than indulge the factionalism of the ultra-left.

A great many Americans despise Trump for the basic reason that he’s a very nasty person who speaks in demeaning ways and does cruel things. The movement to stop him should look and sound and act nice. If you get reprimanded for “respectability politics,” or caricatured as “cringe,” or scolded for appealing to suburban “wine moms,” that’s when you’ll know you’re doing it right.

The MAGA elite feels and fears the weight of American democracy. It knows that democratic accountability and action will grind down its authoritarian aspirations and corrupt schemes. The MAGA elite’s best plan for success is to persuade the American majority to abandon hope and surrender the fight. Its most useful allies are the extremists who have too often misled the great American center into doomed leftward detours.

November 2024 was bad. January and February 2025 are worse. The story is not over yet—unless you agree to lay down in despair the pen that can write the remainder of the story.

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In politics, compromising with one’s ideological opponents is like walking a tightrope while both your allies and foes jeer at you. Democrats, now the out-group facing a Republican trifecta, will have to decide when to fight nominations, laws, and executive orders and when to step into that circus ring.

Jennifer Pahlka, a former Obama administration official and an author of a new report on government reform, kicked up a storm some weeks ago when she encouraged Democrats to work with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

“We do need to talk about government reform, and while I’m sorry the conditions are quite a bit less than ideal, I think it’s time we admitted they were always going to be. Democrats did not do this work,” Pahlka wrote.

Pahlka was in part responding to arguments by people like Leah Greenberg, a co-founder and co-executive director of the progressive group Indivisible, who scolded Democrats for promising to work with DOGE: “Democrats should be planning to fight these corrupt plutocrats, not offering to work with them.”

On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I explore whether liberals can actually find any common ground with DOGE and whether Pahlka’s focus on what she calls “state capacity” actually explains government dysfunction. (This episode was recorded earlier this month and references Vivek Ramaswamy’s involvement with DOGE, before it was reported that he would no longer be a part of it.)

“It’s an uncomfortable position to be in because it’s not like I have a crystal ball to know what Musk and Ramaswamy are going to do. And I may disagree with some of what they do, or maybe a lot of what they do, but they’ve really kind of moved the Overton window and the conversation about this inefficiency, the sludge. And I think that’s valuable, frankly, and I want Democrats to kind of get in the game of that reduction,” Pahlka tells me.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: While 75 percent of Democrats tell Pew that they prefer a bigger government providing more services, fewer than a quarter of Republicans say the same. This divide is a persistent feature of modern American politics and can make it seem like government-reform efforts—like civil-service reform and getting rid of costly, inefficient regulations—are the purview of the Republican Party.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy certainly think so. They aim to cut $2 trillion from the roughly $6 trillion federal budget under the banner of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. This could be a nearly impossible feat, seeing as discretionary spending by the federal government was only $1.7 trillion in 2023. Perhaps realizing this conundrum, Musk and Ramaswamy have negotiated against themselves and revised the number to $1 trillion or $500 billion. We’ll see.

[Music]

Demsas: I’m a bit tired of how reasonable-sounding concerns around government efficiency and effectiveness get shoehorned into a witch hunt for government waste. There are serious problems with how the federal government’s processes and regulations harm economic growth and the effectiveness of important social-welfare programs. I’m skeptical that focusing on budget cuts does much to change that, but I’m also frustrated that it seems the only political actors talking about this seriously are on the right.

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

My guest today is Jennifer Pahlka, a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center and founder of Code for America. She worked in the Obama administration as deputy chief technology officer, and her recent book, Recoding America, argues that the federal government is hobbled by its inability to implement its stated priorities.

Jennifer has a message to people across the political spectrum: If you want government to work, you need to reform it. In that vein, she’s much more optimistic than I on the potential for good-government types to work with DOGE and the Trump administration.

Demsas: Jen, welcome to the show.

Jennifer Pahlka: Thanks so much for having me.

Demsas: I am so excited to have this conversation. I feel like me and you—our work has been in conversation for years now, and we’ve been at some of the same conferences and things. So I’m really excited to dive in.

Pahlka: Me too.

Demsas: So you’re someone who has worked in government and now works trying to make government better. Give us the liberal case for government reform.

Pahlka: Well, I feel like liberals talk about government reform. I’m not sure they necessarily need to be sold on it so much. I think the kind of reform that we need today is a little bit of a hard pill for liberals to swallow, because we need government to sort of be faster, a little bit less process oriented and more outcome oriented. And there has been a pattern, I think, of liberals being very fond of process, of additional rules and regulations, for all the right reasons.

And with great success, right? I mean, the environmental movement really cleaned the air and our water, and that was through regulations. The civil service went from being a place where you would get a job because you were someone’s friend or you’d given money to a campaign, to a professional place. And those are all rules and regulations that have made government better and fairer and made our country better.

But we’re kind of at a point where there have been so many of them, and they’ve stacked on top of each other so much that we’re just moving very slowly. And so the kind of reform I’m talking about now does involve some things like maybe reducing, especially, regulation on government itself—reducing procedures and moving a little faster. And that is the part that liberals need to be convinced about, let’s say.

Demsas: You have a new report out with the Niskanen Center called “The How We Need Now: A Capacity Agenda for 2025 and Beyond.” What’s the main takeaway? What are you trying to solve here?

Pahlka: We’re really trying to help people understand that when you think about government reform, it just seems so big and impossible. So we’re trying to break it down and say, Actually, there are specific things that you could do if you want a government—and this could be, you know, we wrote it for federal government, but you could use it for state or local government as well—if you want government to be able to do what it says it’s going to do, to achieve its policy goals.

And so those things come in four buckets, you know—four pillars. The first thing is: You need to be able to hire the right people and fire the wrong ones. The second is: You have to reduce the procedural bloat. We’ve also talked about that as reducing the administrative burden on public servants—in addition to on the public, but we’re really talking about on public servants—so that you get more public servants focused on outcomes and less on process and compliance. The third thing is: You need to invest in digital and data infrastructure to enable all of this. And there’s a bunch the federal government could be doing at the start of the Trump administration to do that, including getting the United States Digital Service funded again and the Technology Modernization Fund funded again.

And then last, and the one I’m most interested in, is that we need to close the loop between policy and implementation. And what I mean by that is: Right now it functions as this sort of waterfall process, where you have a law, and then maybe it gets handed off to an agency to write regs, and then, you know, into the implementation phase. And it doesn’t ever sort of circle back and say, Is this working? What are we learning? What needs to be adjusted?

And especially in the era of Loper Bright, this decision from the Supreme Court that’s really going to change how the executive-branch agencies relate to Congress, we have kind of an opportunity to rethink that relationship. And I think we should rethink it along the lines of creating feedback loops that let us adjust along the way so that we actually get the outcomes that the laws and policies that we pass intend.

Demsas: I think you’re right when you talk in the abstract. Like, most people, liberal or conservative, would say, Yeah, you know, red tape is bad, and the government should definitely update technology, and, you know, it’d be good if we had a government that worked efficiently. And then when you get into the actual policy prescriptions and the trade-offs, things become more controversial, particularly when you’re talking about civil-service reform and regulatory reform.

So one of the third rails has long been hiring and firing. I want you to talk to us a little bit about what’s broken in that space and how you would change it, and I’d also like you to talk to us about the story of Jack Cable.

Pahlka: Oh, gosh. Jack, yeah. Well, first of all, what’s not broken? So, you know, we had the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, which established these Merit System Principles. They are very good. If you read them, you are very likely to agree with them. They talk about integrity and fairness and, you know, promoting people on the basis of merit. They’re called the Merit System Principles. And I think they are a strong foundation for our civil-service system.

The problem is that (A) that was 1978, and so we’ve had many years now for those things to be operationalized with a lot more ornaments that have been attached to them, right? It’s not just those principles. It’s the regulation and the guidance and the operating manuals and the processes and the forms that have derived from those that have really, I think at this point, kind of perverted their intent.

So for instance, we say we’re going to hire on the basis of merit. We also say we’re going to hire in a way that’s nonbiased. Well, what happens is that you have HR managers who kind of control the process of selecting a candidate. What they do—I’ll give you sort of the very specifics of how this works in 90 percent of cases. This is not the accepted services, and it’s not political appointees, but open-to-the-public, competitive jobs. They get, like, a big pool of resumes, and they have to down select. The first down select they do is by looking for exact matches between the language on the resume or cover letter and what’s in the job description.

Demsas: So if you copy-paste the job description into your resume, that’s, like, points?

Pahlka: Yes, and I have a friend of mine who’s in my book—I actually originally interviewed her about this. I didn’t put that in the book. But she was looking at a resume that had not just been copied and pasted, but copied and pasted and not reformatted. Like, that part was in a different font.

Demsas: Oh my god.

Pahlka: Like, the same font, right? And she points this out to the HR manager, and they’re like, Yeah, that means that this person’s the most qualified, because it’s the exact same language. And she’s like, This person is clearly unqualified because they didn’t even know to reformat. And this is not an outlier. Like, this happens a lot.

So first they’re looking for these exact matches. And then they take everybody who was really close in language—and also, by the way, who has something called a government resume, which is different from a private-sector resume, and you have to know that somehow, magically, before you apply. Then from that pool, they send everyone a self-assessment questionnaire, and everybody who marks themselves as master, and I literally mean master—I think that’s the top rating in a lot of these—they make the next down select, so they move on to the next pool.

Demsas: Wait—so if you just say that I’m a master at this, like, without any double-checking, you just get to move forward?

Pahlka: I mean, somebody could send me a self-assessment saying, Are you a master programmer in Python? And I would just be like, Yes, and I would move into that pool. Nobody checks it. It’s actually worse—not just that no one checks it; it’s that the HR people will tell you that subject-matter experts (SMEs) are not allowed to be in that part of the process.

I mean, there are processes that do include them, and I can get to that, but you can’t have SMEs look at these resumes and exert their judgment, because they may introduce bias into the process. Now, again, I think the idea of keeping bias out is something I agree with, and I’m going to assume you agree with, and most people agree with. But that’s not actually keeping bias out, right? That’s what I mean about sort of a perversion of the intent.

But anyway, so you have this now smaller pool of people who are great at cutting and pasting and great at, you know, self-aggrandizement—or really what it is, is they just know what to do. They know how to play the game. And then from that list, you apply veterans’ preference. In other words, any veterans in that pool float to the top, and that’s the “cert,” which is just the name for the list the HR manager gives to the hiring manager. That’s the cert that the hiring manager is supposed to choose from. So this is not consistent, to me, in my mind, with Merit System Principles of fairness, and not bias, and certainly not merit.

And so what you are looking at when you see that kind of behavior is a system that’s designed to be completely defensible from the critique of your judgment, because you have exercised no judgment at all. And I understand why people defend them and do these processes to be defensible, but I think, in the end, they come up actually indefensible.

So I learned about this process, in part, through a young man named Jack Cable. I was on the Defense Innovation Board at the time, and he won the Hack the [Air Force] contest. So all these security researchers from around the country come together, and, you know, they’re looking at bugs and security bugs and Pentagon software. This young man wins the whole contest. He’s the best out of the group.

And of course, you know, the people at the Defense Digital Service and other parts of the Department of Defense say, Great. We need this guy on our team. He applies with a resume that lists his programming languages and the frameworks that he is expert in, and he is cut in the first batch because he did not cut and paste. And the people reviewing his resume see this sort of gobbledygook of programming languages—they’re not technical people. They’re not even sort of supposed to know what those are, and so he gets cut.

And it’s not just that—then the Pentagon folks intervene and try to get him hired something like 10 different times. He does eventually get hired, but even with these interventions from people in power, and sort of as it escalated with increasing levels of power in the Pentagon, this very talented security researcher continues to get cut from the process before hiring managers ever see his resume.

Demsas: Wow.

Pahlka: Oh, and one more thing: He’s told by the HR people along the way—he’s quite young—they say, Go work at Best Buy selling TVs for a year, and then you’ll be qualified for this job.

Demsas: Wow. And I feel like in that time period—obviously, this is an exceptional case where a lot of people took effort to try to get him hired. But, you know, private-sector processes are much faster than this. And what’s most likely to happen is you get all of these top performers going into the private sector.

Pahlka: Oh absolutely. And I mean, it’s just a testament to his commitment that he stuck through it. And that young man has actually stayed in government. It’s amazing. He’s done some really wonderful work.

Demsas: So there’s that part of the government reform that you talk about, which is about hiring and firing. I mean, obviously, we only touched on it a little bit. But the other part of it that you focus on a lot is around regulatory reform. And one of the laws that you’ve pointed out is the Paperwork Reduction Act. Can you walk us through how that act hobbles government?

Pahlka: Yes. I will say, we’ve had some good progress on PRA, and I should also mention that we’ve had some good progress on that assessment problem. The [Fair] Chance to Compete Act passed both houses of Congress, and it actually directs agencies to stop using those self-assessments.

I have high hopes for it, but I also will say: There was an executive order saying that under Trump. Biden renewed that executive order. And it hasn’t really gotten the agencies to change their practices yet. So there is an implementation issue, I think, and we’re going to really have to watch if the [Fair] Chance to Compete Act does what we hope it does.

Demsas: Wait—if both Trump and Biden issued the executive orders, why aren’t the agencies doing it?

Pahlka: It’s very hard to change the practices of agencies, even under direct order.

Demsas: Yeah. Mechanistically, though, what’s going on? Are there people who are just refusing to change? Or, like, what’s happening?

Pahlka: Well, it wasn’t in statute. I don’t think there was a timeline or a deadline for it. I think if you really read the language and translate it into, you know, what’s practical, it’s sort of more encouragement. I mean, it does direct them, but there’s sort of very little teeth in it.

Government moves slowly. HR people move particularly slowly. I mean, until you fix some other problems—like how detailed it is, how many rules you have to comply with in order to use a subject-matter expert in that process—it actually is, like, enormous amounts of time to run a hiring process using real assessments.

Demsas: So tell us about the Paperwork Reduction Act. What is it doing, and how is it preventing government from acting quickly and nimbly?

Pahlka: So there’s sort of the general level of it, which is just: It’s a lot of work to comply with. So imagine you’re charged with implementing the CHIPS and Science Act, for instance, and you want to stand up a form to allow companies to express their initial interest or even apply. You want to know early on what kinds of projects might companies, you know, bring to the Department of Commerce, to apply for funding under CHIPS.

Well, you can design the form. There’s going to be a lot of process and a lot of stakeholders that want to look at it. You don’t get to write something up and throw it up on the internet. But once you’ve done all that work for your internal agency stakeholders and sometimes cross-agency stakeholders, then your form, because it’s an information collection, is subject to review by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the White House.

And so you’ve got to sort of do all this pretty heavyweight documentation of your form and why you’re asking these particular questions, and you submit it to them. And because that process needs review by people—there’s only so many people in OIRA, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs—and because the process requires two separate times that you post it to the Federal Register, get comments from the public, respond to those comments, then potentially do a revision, then post it again, get comments, respond to those comments. And those time periods are designated in statute—I think it’s 30 days the first one and 60 days the second one—like, right there, that’s at least a month, but more because you have to do all the lead-up and then follow-up.

The average time to get through—or actually, I think it’s the minimum time to get through—a standard PRA review is nine months. And that’s just to get one form up. And it can be longer. Now, there is a fast-track process. If you get a fast-tracked application, that runs out in six months. So in six months, you’ll have to do it all over again. When you’re supposed to have moved on to the next phase of your project, you’re kind of going back to zero.

And there’s certainly value in a centralized office knowing all the things that agencies are asking the public, or companies, or anybody who would be filling out a form. And there’s absolutely value in knowing, like, Oh we have this data here. Maybe we shouldn’t be asking for it. Maybe we can get it from another agency. That would be, like, the best use of this kind of centralized function. But we have let this become quite a heavyweight process that really slows agencies down.

Demsas: You’ve outlined quite a few things in your public research and writing around how you think government—both whether we’re talking about Congress but also the executive branch—should reform in order to make things more efficient. You know, some of these things are just common-sense requirements to make hiring practices align with things that people think are good, like merit.

But most people who are talking about this, I think, are often on the right. And increasingly, I think this conversation is being brought up by people like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are heading the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, for President-Elect Donald Trump.

You wrote, recently, a piece for your Substack called “Bringing Elon to a Knife Fight,” where you said that you support Democrats, like Congressman Ro Khanna, for pledging to work with DOGE. Why is that?

Pahlka: Well, I did say that until we know more about what they’re going to do, I think we should take an open stance. It’s very hard to know what they’re going to do. But ultimately, I said that because, as much as I may disagree with the policy goals of the administration that Musk and Ramaswamy are serving, there is so much work that needs to be done to subtract from government instead of constantly adding to it, to make it easier to get stuff done in government. I mean, people talk about regulation always as, you know, we’re regulating companies so they can’t, you know, pollute a stream. That’s wonderful.

There’s also enormous regulation on government itself, like the Paperwork Reduction Act, or like these hiring practices that really keep us from being able to serve the public in the way that we need to. And so it’s an uncomfortable position to be in because it’s not like I have any crystal ball to know what Musk and Ramaswamy are going to do. And I may disagree with some of what they do, or maybe a lot of what they do, but they’ve really kind of moved the Overton window and the conversation about this inefficiency, the sludge.

And I think that’s valuable, frankly, and I want Democrats to kind of get in the game of that reduction. And I think that if some of what they do is the wrong thing to do, but they shake government up in a way and maybe even pull some stuff out, we may be able to build back things that are kind of right-sized, the right-size procedures—not no procedure, not no process, but maybe not the heavyweight process that we have today.

Demsas: The thing I hear you saying here is, sort of, what I hear from people who have given up on their own side doing the right thing. And this is, I guess, reflected in the end of your piece, where you write, “We can wish that the government efficiency agenda were in the hands of someone else, but let’s not pretend that change was going to come from Democrats if they’d only had another term, and let’s not delude ourselves that change was ever going to happen politely, neatly, carefully.”

So, I mean, part of what it sounds like you’re saying is, Yeah, nobody wants this version of government efficiency, but there’s no other way it’s going to happen. Why is that the case? Like, why do you think the Democrats have been so unwilling to engage on this issue? I mean, you’re a Democrat. You worked in a Democratic administration, and you’ve talked to many other Democrats who have very similar views to you. Why is this such a third rail for them?

Pahlka: I’m not sure I know the exact answer to that. I think if you want to look at the Biden administration, in particular, you know—they went in with a big set of policy goals, and they actually achieved a lot of them. The four big bills are legislative accomplishments, significant legislative accomplishments. So they went for the what, but they neglected the how. And I think in their minds, it’s like, You’re going to do one or the other.

I think they should have paid equal attention to the how, to cleaning out the pipes so that the what could get through them faster. And that speed has clearly been a real problem. I mean, we’re writing now about the amount of money that could be clawed back because it didn’t get through those pipes, so really, really reducing Biden’s legacy. The frustration of not having that many electric-car chargers that were promised under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law—all that stuff is due to this lack of focus on the how, and I don’t think it was a binary choice. I think Biden’s team could have said, We’re going to spend as much energy on the how as we are on the what.

But I do think there’s something about the way the Democrats, of course, want to be thoughtful and considered and hear all voices. And if you are thoughtful and considered and hear all voices, you tend to add policy and procedure and ways of looping everybody in. And that, actually, you know, adds instead of subtracts. Just naturally that’s sort of what happens. And in some ways, the destruction from which you can hopefully rebuild kind of needs to be done by somebody who kind of doesn’t care about that, in a certain way.

Demsas: I wonder, though, because it feels that, you know, two different theories of government reform—I worry about being [them] conflated, right?

So let’s take the DOGE theory, the Vivek-Elon theory. They presuppose that there are all these bureaucrats that are not really needed and all of these wasteful programs. And in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, they essentially have this idea that the executive branch has wildly overstepped its small-d democratic authority by being allowed to interpret laws that Congress passes as they’re implementing them.

And if that’s your theory of government reform—if your theory of government reform is that there’s just all these people who are dead weight, who are clogging up the process—then their answer, which is “mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy,” is reasonable.

But as I understand it, your theory of government reform is very different. It’s that you need a capable and nimble executive branch in order to deliver on priorities like—I don’t know—providing health care to poor children. But in order to do that, you actually need a highly competent, well-paid, expensive labor pool and a good deal of it.

And so to me, it feels like, while both of these things can call themselves government-efficiency complaints—while they’re both motivated by a concern about the costs put on both private actors, individual citizens, and other government entities—they’re actually, fundamentally, two different political projects. So how do you see these things working together?

Pahlka: I agree. I have a very different view of it, and there’s some part of me that just thinks that if Elon and Vivek come in and spend any amount of time, if they don’t just get bored or frustrated and wander off, they’re gonna learn this. And they may have a different set of values, but I think it’s hard to miss it when you get into government that there are a lot of incredibly smart, talented, creative, dedicated people doing really amazing work. And you just fall in love with them once you actually get in the door. It’s from a distance that they look like, you know, these unaccountable, lazy bureaucrats. Up close, they’re pretty impressive.

But I think where I would put a little nuance on what you just said is that I do think we need this incredible workforce. And I think we’ve done a bad job of balancing between what I, in my very fancy language, call “go energy” and “stop energy.” So you have more people doing various forms of compliance and safeguards than you have the people trying to build something and get it out the door. And somebody I worked with at one point said, It’s like we’ve got six people building this product and at least 60 people telling us all the things we can’t do.

Now, those people who are saying, You can’t do that, are not dumb. They are not lazy. I mean, there are, of course, a few bad apples in government, and we can talk about that. I’m not saying everyone’s perfect. But you have people who, in fact, are—because they’re good, and because they really know the law, and because they really feel like it is their job to protect the public using this law, policy, and regulation—are very zealous in telling builders what they can’t do. And you have the very well-intentioned stop energy that overwhelms the people who have sort of go-energy jobs.

And I’m a little biased because I work with people a lot who do technology. They’re doing things like trying to get that form up, you know, trying to make sure that veterans can get their benefits. They are focused on, Can we get this application up so they can apply? Can we get the check to them? Can we get them their health care? Like, the actual outcome.

And a lot of people’s job isn’t to focus on the outcome but to make sure that all these things have been complied with, and they can do their job very well, and it slows the people who are outcome focused down. And it’s not their job, necessarily, to—you know, they’re not supposed to do their job less well. It is the job of leadership, of [the Office of Personnel Management], of the White House, of Congress, to look around and say, Why do we have so many people saying no, no, no? Oh because we put all these rules in place, and we’ve developed a culture of risk aversion that means we’re really, really focused on making sure nobody breaks any rules, at the expense of getting the job done. Leadership needs to balance the workforce between go energy and stop energy, and really take a hard look, if you’re going to add a regulation, you’re going to add a rule, Okay, what is the cost of adding that to the actual outcome that the American public expects?

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: Jen and I hash out the difference between political will and what she calls state capacity.

[Break]

Demsas: One phrase that you use a lot, and this is included in your recent report with the Niskanen Center, is state capacity. Can you define that for us?

Pahlka: Well, I didn’t even know the term until after my book came out and people were like, This is a state-capacity book. But I have since learned it’s an academic term that simply means the ability of a government—at any level and any government—to achieve its policy goals. So it is essentially, like I said, the how to the what.

Demsas: Yeah, this is a term that I think I first heard in the development-economics, development-political-science space. And it’s most commonly used to talk about the ability for these developing nations to effectuate their political priorities.

So for instance, like: Can a country collect taxes? Can it maintain the monopoly on the use of violence? These are core questions of state capacity because if you can’t collect taxes, you can’t run programs, you can’t have a police force that enforces laws. Like, there’s very little you can do on top of that, right? You can’t run a CHIPS program if you can’t do those things to begin with.

Why does this sort of idea—and how does this sort of idea—apply in the American context, where we have the ability to collect taxes? We have, relative to the rest of the world, like, a high degree of monopoly on the use of legitimate force. It’s contained within the state. What is the purpose of applying this term here?

Pahlka: Well, I mean, since you brought up applying taxes, the individual master file at the IRS, which holds all of the data about tax returns from individuals and families since the ’60s, is written in assembly code. There are vanishingly few people in the world who know what that code looks like. And it’s pretty robust. It’s lasted a long time. But, like, you’re going to run out of the human understanding of how that thing works, and you’re going to have a crisis at some point.

That’s not a crisis now, but we also don’t collect a lot of taxes. We have a serious unenforcement policy. We’re leaving a lot of money on the table because we have not empowered the IRS to be very successful. So we’re certainly not like a third-world state or an emerging state in that regard. But we are kind of going backwards in some areas.

And there’s a million examples of this, but I think that it is sort of shocking to people that state capacity is now a big concern for the United States, when it used to be that we only thought about it in relation to the countries that we would fund through the World Bank, or whatever. But national defense is a really great example of this. I mean, we keep spending more and more money, and it is not at all clear that we are getting more deterrence or more security. In fact, my thesis there is that we’re just spending too much money, not because—we shouldn’t cut spending because we want to be less secure.

But go talk to anybody in the Department of Defense. Pretty much everyone will tell you, like, unless there’s some shock to the system, we’re not going to change how we do stuff. And the way we do stuff takes decades, and we have to be able to move faster because, you know, we’re spending, I think it’s, like—what are we up to—almost a trillion dollars on national defense. And yet we seem to get less secure every year because the more money you put in a system like that, the more people double down on these very heavyweight ways of operating that are not what we need today.

Demsas: So I want to push you here a bit because this is a place—I’ve brought up to other people: I feel like the application of state capacity sometimes doesn’t feel like it fits well, and that, sometimes, what’s actually happening is that this is just a question of political will. It’s not that the government can’t accomplish what it tries to do. It’s that it actually has competing priorities, and there are trade-offs it’s unwilling to make.

One place where people have talked a lot about regulation that is holding government back is the National Environmental Policy Act. This is a piece of legislation from the 1970s that requires that the government study the environmental impact of its major actions. And it’s often talked about that it takes years to compile an environmental-impact statement, so it can take years and years in order to get a permit for, you know, a big energy project.

But something interesting happened, and this is a stat that was surfaced by Brian Potter in his Substack, “Construction Physics.” I’m reading from it: In 2009, after the Great Recession and Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, there were “over 190,000 projects, totaling $300 billion worth of stimulus funds, [that] were required to have NEPA reviews before the projects could begin. After the passage of [the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act], categorical exclusions were completed at a rate of more than 400 per day, and 670 environmental impact statements were completed over the next 7 months.”

So essentially, these EISs, the environmental-impact statements that often take years to complete, all of a sudden are being completed over the course of a few weeks—670 over the course of seven months is just astronomical compared to what we usually see.

And this is an example where nothing changed about the state capacity. They didn’t change anything about the legal environment. They didn’t change anything about the number of people working in government and whether they were more qualified. The HR processes didn’t change in this time period.

What happened is that the federal government was like, We’re in an emergency space. We need to get a bunch of stimulus dollars out the door, because we’re in a free-fall recession, and we’re worried about mass unemployment. And then, all of a sudden, all of these things that seemed like state-capacity issues, that seemed like these big constraints on government, actually just disappeared, because everyone wanted them to happen.

So is it the case that the government can’t do what it wants? Or is it that there’s a lot of competing priorities, and in times of nonemergency, we’re actually not aligned on what government wants to do?

Pahlka: Well, I mean, I think COVID is another good example of when government just does it, right? Or Josh Shapiro’s getting I-95 open again. I can’t disagree with you on that. Absolutely. I will say, I remember that too, and we just looked into it, and it’s not exactly apples to apples there, so I’d just like to put a little bit of an asterisk on it.

But I think your point is valid, but it does, then, beg the question, right? So we only have 47 electric-vehicle chargers out of the money that came out of the, you know, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. I guess it was also a bill that funded the BEAD Program for broadband-internet access, and we have zero connections from that.

Are you saying, then, that Democrats didn’t want to see those things implemented? Because I do think it is a matter of will. But we are seeing places where the political will seems to be there, but it seems to sort of stop after the law is passed.

I think I’ve also shared this with you before, but, like, I got into this through working with cities and states on benefits delivery, and we were looking at SNAP uptake. And I was in California, and it was just shocking to me that California, which had a ton of money and spent hundreds of millions of dollars on IT systems for people to apply for SNAP online, had the second-lowest rate of participation in the program in the entire country. Only Wyoming was worse than California.

Is that a political-will problem? It’s, like, a really blue state, very pro-welfare. But it kind of couldn’t get out of its own way. It so overscoped these systems that it took about almost an hour to apply online. You couldn’t do it on a mobile phone. It’s just all these ways in which they created a system which is hard to use. But it’s really clear to me that they didn’t intend to do that. They just had too much process in the way and less of a focus on the outcome.

So I do think it’s a political will, but it has to be political will to follow the thing all the way through to the outcome, to care as much about the implementation as you do about the legislative win or the money that you put into it. We’re really good at money and rules, and those things do not necessarily translate to the outcomes that we promised people. So that will has to move.

Demsas: Yeah. But I think what I’m saying is: I think this may be a case of revealed preferences, right? Like you asked me, Does this mean that Democrats didn’t really care about getting broadband out? And I don’t want to make that kind of a strong claim. I think if they could push a button, and there was rural broadband for every single person in rural America, they would have pushed the button.

But the question government asks, and government policies ask, which you’ve written about extensively, is not just: Hey—do you wish this thing existed? It’s, When you’re forced to make trade-offs between whether to push out broadband or make it easier for contractors that are different from the ones you usually go to to get access to this program, which do you choose between? If you’re going to choose between actually getting out broadband and following the most onerous environmental regulations that exist, which thing are you choosing?

And over and over again, you see, as you mentioned before, liberals choosing this process, choosing this kind of way of delaying implementation in order not to follow some shoddy or quicker, maybe more error-prone system. And in doing so, they end up not getting to the outcomes. And to me, I feel like that actually is a situation where we’re seeing what Democrats actually want, which is really clear when you look at infrastructure projects.

I mean, this is what I think is the story of California high-speed rail, where you talked to so many people, where I bet a lot of people would love for there to be high-speed rail between San Francisco and L.A. I don’t think they’re lying about wanting that to exist. But when you talk to people who are working in that program or who are working trying to implement it, and you say, Okay, well, you need to not let every single local government fleece this project for whatever priority they have on the ground, and no one wants to do that. So I’m left with the conclusion that yes, they want high-speed rail but not if it means angering a single person within the Democratic Party.

Pahlka: I completely agree with that. It’s a little bit what I was saying about, like, you kind of need a big disruptor, someone who doesn’t care, to get stuff done sometimes. I wish it weren’t Elon, necessarily. But if you’ve created a system in which you have to make everybody happy, eventually people will be so frustrated they’ll let somebody, you know, give the job to somebody who doesn’t care if he makes anybody happy.

Demsas: One of the objections I hear sometimes from liberals about making government more efficient is that all of these layers of procedure are to protect and prevent against authoritarian impulses. So yes, it’s frustrating and annoying that we have to follow all of these rules, and that there are all these government watchdogs that might sue if you don’t cross your t’s and dot your i’s. And that is annoying when you’re trying to get good policy done. But when you have someone like Donald Trump, for instance, get elected, you’ll be really happy that all of these procedures and layers of government exist. How do you respond to that?

Pahlka: Well, they’re not wrong, of course. And we just talked about trade-offs. This is exactly a trade-off conversation. The reality is that I believe that our lack of results and the slowness of government played a part, maybe not be the leading part, in driving people towards wanting someone who claims, I alone can fix it, right? Who claims to be able to bust through all that red tape.

Now, in reality, did he bust through a lot of red tape in his first administration? Well, he claimed to roll back a lot of regulations, but his team really didn’t do that much on that front. But it is a trade-off you make. I am not extreme on either end, but I do think we need a middle ground where we are looking at where safeguards and processes and procedures and the ability to sue are kind of right-sized, where there are some protections.

But where we are right now is: The extra-extra-large version of protections, which has slowed us down enough that it has driven this force in our society for, like, none, which is the pendulum swinging. I just wish the pendulum would settle a little bit in the middle. But that’s a trade-off we need to make. And we have to, as you say, piss some people off in order to get that, because you’re gonna have to say no to some people to get the job done.

Demsas: I feel like the analogy I’ve used a lot is to the filibuster—

Pahlka: Yes.

Demsas: —which I think that a lot of liberals were worried about when this was being debated more openly. If you get rid of the filibuster, that means Republicans will be able to pass their policies as well.

And I think the thing that’s interesting about this is, one, it’s the question of democracy—like, small-d democracy. Do you want the government to be able to do things such that the public can actually evaluate them? Versus someone who gets into office, and they can’t actually enact a bunch of their priorities. So it’s actually quite unclear what signal you’re supposed to be sending as a voter.

But also secondly, I think there’s, like, an asymmetry here, where if you are a small-c conservative, versus a lower-l liberal, you have different sorts of desires from government. Like, there are a lot more active policies that are trying to be passed by people who are liberal, who are progressive. And so there’s kind of an asymmetry of what gets constrained in that kind of a paradigm.

And so I think that it’s hard because you look at the looming potential changes in a Trump administration, and you think, like, Well, it’s really good that there are all these different ways of constraining this. But in the long run, there’s just this larger question here about whether it’s democratic at all to have that happen. Like, if people are electing an executive, how exactly are we supposed to evaluate that work if after four years, so many of the policies that they promised, whether they’re harmful or whether they’re good, don’t actually get passed?

Pahlka: It’s such a hard question. And yeah, I kind of want to stand on—as uncomfortable as this is—if you think state capacity is important to the country, you kind of have to be okay with people who you, let’s softly say, don’t agree with having it. But we’re in this sort of thermostatic nature of elections right now, and I have no crystal ball, but if the Democrats were to get the White House back in four years or even take back Congress in two years, you really don’t want them to be dealing with this huge incapacity once again, or at least I don’t. And that’s just a tough pill to swallow, but I think it’s one we have to swallow, again in the sense of making trade-offs. I agree—it’s much like the filibuster.

You could also say the Administrative Procedures Act is a lot like the filibuster. It needs to be reformed for all the reasons you mentioned when you talked about NEPA to be able to get these, you know, big infrastructure projects built, because it creates such a huge surface area for attack by minority interests. And if you were to do that today, you would really empower Trump to do a lot of what he couldn’t do last time, and that’s really problematic.

But the reality is it’s not going to get repealed today. Like, if you started working on that now, maybe it would happen at the end of the administration and benefit the Democrats. Now, I know that’s sort of like a Pollyannaish view of it, but at the end of the day, it kind of just does need to get reformed if we’re going to be able to govern at all.

And you used the word democracy, right? If we have the system in which we vote for elected officials, and then they go through that messy political process to say—well, let’s use the example of housing, right—to say, This area needs more housing. We’re going to build more housing, and then a bunch of people who have an interest in having that housing not be built can stop it, is that democracy? We have thwarted the will of what the democratic process actually came up with.

Demsas: Well, Jen, always our last and final question: What is an idea that you had that you thought was good at the time but ended up being only good on paper?

Pahlka: I love this question. You asked it of a guest a couple of episodes ago who answered, “small plates,” which just made me laugh so hard. And now I’m just not ever going to order a small plate at a restaurant again. So I’m just co-signing that.

But I guess my more original answer would be: When I started working with local governments, I really had this sense that more data was better. It was kind of shocking. Sometimes you’d go in there, and you were just like, You’re not making decisions based on data. How awful. We need more. We need more. And then over time, I realized there’s a human aspect to this that we neglect. So there became this whole trend of doing data dashboards for local governments. And then, like, no one looks at them really. They were sort of a lot of work for, in some cases, not much return, depending on the human and cultural and, you know, organizational infrastructure into which they were inserted.

But I also really saw, when I was working on the unemployment-insurance crisis during the pandemic, the ways that a lot of leaders see data as a grade that they’re getting, not a compass that they can use to steer the ship where they need to go. And I really changed my view on, like, what kinds of data are good in, like, a governing context, in a performance-management context, and really now sort of see it as good only if it’s introduced in the right ways and if the people who are supposed to be using it as a compass actually are empowered and encouraged to do that.

[Music]

Demsas: Well, Jen, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Pahlka: Thank you so much, Jerusalem. This was fun.

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.