Latest / THE DAILY BRIEF / Michael Lewis details how DOGE 'FUNDAMENTALLY SHIFTED' the U.S. government in new book 'Blockers'

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Michael Lewis details how DOGE 'FUNDAMENTALLY SHIFTED' the U.S. government in new book 'Blockers' · THE DAILY BRIEF

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Doing their jobs protecting taxpayer data enforcing the law fighting
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  Speaker 1: wildfires and more when they were suddenly labeled quote blockers
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  Speaker 1: a term for people the department viewed as standing in
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: their way with us now new york times bestselling author
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: michael lewis his new book is titled blockers rebels in
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  Speaker 1: the deep state um i i really i quickly i
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: in a minute i want to quickly get to This
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: and the debate we're having about AI and the so-called
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  Speaker 1: doomers standing in the way of those who are on
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  Speaker 1: top of Mount Olympus telling us how things are going
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  Speaker 1: to work out. But what I'm struck here, Michael, is
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  Speaker 1: by the fact that when I talk to people on
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  Speaker 1: the inside throughout this entire process, at the beginning, you're
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  Speaker 1: just not going to believe this, Joe.
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  Speaker 2: I know you guys balance the budget. You're proud of that.
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  Speaker 2: You're not going to believe.
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  Speaker 1: We're going to save one to two trillion dollars.
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  Speaker 2: And you're going to go, no, you're not. No, you didn't.
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  Speaker 1: And they said they were true believers and say, oh,
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  Speaker 1: you're they didn't call me a blocker, but you're out
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  Speaker 1: of your mind.
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  Speaker 2: It's an old way of wash. I said, you do understand.
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  Speaker 1: Eighty five percent of what we spend money on entitlements,
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  Speaker 1: defense interest.
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  Speaker 2: You're not going to touch that.
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  Speaker 1: And the other stuff's going to be much, much more
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  Speaker 1: important to Americans than you're suggesting right now. But they
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  Speaker 1: weighed in there and ended up it just ended up
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  Speaker 1: being a catastrophe. Talk about your interest in this and
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  Speaker 1: talk about how how far short of their goal they came.
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  Speaker 3: So it wasn't just Doge I was interested in.
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  Speaker 4: I think Doge was just one piece of the Trump
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  Speaker 4: administration's assault on the civil service.
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  Speaker 3: Doge is the beginning of the book, but they, you know,
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  Speaker 3: they fade away.
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  Speaker 4: Doge, You know, the interesting thing about Doge is Elon
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  Speaker 4: Musk is supposed to be so smart, but it never
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  Speaker 4: made sense. I mean, as you say, if all you're
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  Speaker 4: attacking is 15 percent of the budget, you're not going
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  Speaker 4: to cut two trillion dollars out of the federal deficit.
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  Speaker 4: I mean, it's just not the math. So what was
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  Speaker 4: what were they doing? Either he didn't know what he
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  Speaker 4: was doing or he was doing something else.
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  Speaker 3: And I think like.
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  Speaker 4: Doge was kind of the artillery strike before the invasion
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  Speaker 4: and that what they were really what was really going
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  Speaker 4: on was a massive power grab.
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  Speaker 3: I mean, in the chaos, they eliminated inspectors general.
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  Speaker 4: They seized all kinds of agencies that they probably didn't
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  Speaker 4: have the right to seize.
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  Speaker 3: They established that like that.
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  Speaker 4: This two million person civil service previously, you know, which
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  Speaker 4: previously took an oath to the Constitution and serve the people.
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  Speaker 4: was going to be a loyalist operation that served a
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  Speaker 4: single person. I mean, that was the push was all
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  Speaker 4: in that direction. And that's what interested me because I
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  Speaker 4: thought like, if you change the environment that much, if
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  Speaker 4: you take this thing that was once this way and
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  Speaker 4: you turn it into this loyalist operation, Everything that happens
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  Speaker 4: in it is going to be different. All the incentives
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  Speaker 4: for the people inside of it are going to be different.
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  Speaker 4: And so what happens to the basic functions of government?
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  Speaker 4: What happens to public safety? What happens to long-term science research?
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  Speaker 4: What happens to data and information collection?
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  Speaker 3: You take these... And so that was the premise.
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  Speaker 4: And and you you go out and you find people
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  Speaker 4: who are doing critical things like, I don't know, preventing
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  Speaker 4: your tax returns from being weaponized by the White House.
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  Speaker 4: And you find, oh, my God, this person no longer
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  Speaker 4: has a job. You know, it's it's a fundamental shift
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  Speaker 4: in how we govern ourselves.
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  Speaker 3: And I don't think it's gotten enough attention.
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  Speaker 1: No.
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  Speaker 5: Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: And of course, attacking the very government that oversaw the
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  Speaker 1: American century. And and this whole idea that we're going
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  Speaker 1: to bring a CEO and they know how to run
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  Speaker 1: a company and. bureaucrats in Washington are just such idiots.
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  Speaker 1: I've seen it time and time again. CEOs come to Washington, D.C.,
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  Speaker 1: and almost every single one of them gets devoured.
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  Speaker 2: But I'm wondering, does this teach us a lesson finally?
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  Speaker 1: You know, my pet peeve is, oh, we need Washington outside.
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  Speaker 2: We don't say that about brain surgeons.
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  Speaker 1: We need somebody who's an outsider, who's never done an
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  Speaker 1: operation on a brain before, or car mechanics, or our
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  Speaker 1: general contractors, our dentists. But this whole idea, we're going
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  Speaker 1: to bring Elon Musk in who knows absolutely nothing about Washington, D.C.,
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  Speaker 1: or we're going to bring Donald Trump in who just says,
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  Speaker 1: I alone can fix it, that has absolutely no idea
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  Speaker 1: how to work with Congress, no idea how to work
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  Speaker 1: with the bureaucracy. Does this book, after you read this book,
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  Speaker 1: explain why it's important to actually have knowledge, experience, and
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  Speaker 1: wisdom inside the government?
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, in between the lines and directly. I mean, I
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  Speaker 3: think that.
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  Speaker 4: You know what I find interesting is the conversations that
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  Speaker 4: aren't happening. I mean, these people... The civil service, just generally,
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  Speaker 4: the stories don't get told. And the stories can be amazing.
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  Speaker 4: I mean, just amazing. I mean, movie-like caliber stories. The
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  Speaker 4: stories don't get told. And also, the thing that never
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  Speaker 4: gets kind of asked is, like, who should be running
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  Speaker 4: these places?
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  Speaker 3: Like, it's like.
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  Speaker 4: Howard Lutnick is nominated to be Secretary of Commerce. What
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  Speaker 4: qualifications does he have to be Secretary of Commerce? It's
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  Speaker 4: almost not fair to Howard Lutnick because this has been
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  Speaker 4: going on for a while. But we seem to think
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  Speaker 4: whether you were or were not on the Epstein list
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  Speaker 4: is more important than have you run an organization like this?
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  Speaker 4: Do you know what's inside of it? Do you understand
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  Speaker 4: the Weather Service, which is inside of it? Do you
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  Speaker 4: understand NIST, which is inside of it? Do you have
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  Speaker 4: any kind of plan for it? That conversation just doesn't happen.
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  Speaker 3: I think basic....
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  Speaker 4: Tests of character and qualifications for the people who run,
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  Speaker 4: run the various agencies in the government is a really
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  Speaker 4: good idea. And Trump has just taken, it's been, that's
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  Speaker 4: been a problem for a long time. I think Trump
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  Speaker 4: is just, it's, he's taking it to an extreme and,
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  Speaker 4: and the whole must thing, I don't know what Elon
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  Speaker 4: Musk thought he was doing. I mean, it does, it, it,
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  Speaker 4: it only makes sense if you, if you think of it,
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  Speaker 4: I mean, even people closest to him don't know what
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  Speaker 4: he's thinking because he, you're right.
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  Speaker 3: The numbers don't add up.
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  Speaker 4: But if what he was doing was trying to create
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  Speaker 4: enough disruption so that there would make room for this
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  Speaker 4: power grab, or if what he was doing was all
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  Speaker 4: he really wanted was to have a friend in NASA,
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  Speaker 4: because SpaceX is what he cared about, then it makes sense.
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  Speaker 3: But but he was. But I mean, look, what has happened?
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  Speaker 3: He was all about.
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  Speaker 4: He said the budget deficit, the national debt's gone up
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  Speaker 4: three and a half trillion dollars in the last two years.
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  Speaker 4: That makes no sense.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah.
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  Speaker 6: I mean, that was a charade, obviously, that we're going
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  Speaker 6: to bring down the budget deficit with Doge.
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  Speaker 3: What you do in this book.
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  Speaker 6: So well is humanize this, too, because you find, and
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  Speaker 6: anyone could go find it, go to your post office
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  Speaker 6: or wherever, people who have made careers of working for
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  Speaker 6: the government, people who are proud of working for the government,
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  Speaker 6: people who have done a good job working for the government,
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  Speaker 6: people who are important to the government being pushed out.
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  Speaker 6: And you highlight a woman named Kathleen Walters as one
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  Speaker 6: example of that.
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  Speaker 4: Well, she was the human being between your tax return
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  Speaker 4: and the White House. I mean, she was the privacy
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  Speaker 4: office of the IRS. And she was asked right away
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  Speaker 4: to hand over the file of the tax returns of
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  Speaker 4: undocumented workers. There's a special database. They're assigned a number
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  Speaker 4: so they can get Social Security numbers so they can
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  Speaker 4: pay taxes. They've paid hundreds of billions of dollars of
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  Speaker 4: taxes over the last 30 years. And there's been an
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  Speaker 4: understanding that those tax returns are as sacred as they're protected,
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  Speaker 4: just like our tax returns. ICE didn't know where to
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  Speaker 4: find undocumented workers. The tax returns had the most recent
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  Speaker 4: home addresses. And it was clearly against the law to
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  Speaker 4: hand them over. But, you know, they came for them.
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  Speaker 4: They came for them.
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  Speaker 3: They got them.
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  Speaker 4: And you think about this. I mean, this is a
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  Speaker 4: larger conversation about how we handle data. But she knew
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  Speaker 4: that what she was doing, she had an oath to
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  Speaker 4: the Constitution.
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  Speaker 3: She had.
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  Speaker 4: Made an oath to obey the law. And this was
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  Speaker 4: a violation of the law. And not only that, it
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  Speaker 4: was a sin. It was like, you know, the last
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  Speaker 4: time that this sort of thing happened was... in World
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  Speaker 4: War II when the census data was used to round
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  Speaker 4: up Japanese Americans.
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  Speaker 3: But that was legal. This is like a similar sort
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  Speaker 3: of thing and illegal.
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  Speaker 4: And this attempt to kind of break the norms and break.
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  Speaker 3: The rules that....
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  Speaker 4: And sort of change the nature of the government is,
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  Speaker 4: I mean, it's a big story. And so she, anyway,
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  Speaker 4: she got washed out. She got labeled a blocker and she.
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  Speaker 3: Got washed out. About to retire too, wasn't she? Yeah.
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  Speaker 4: But you find, you know, you find people, it's not
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  Speaker 4: just that they're good people who are serving their country.
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  Speaker 4: Some of these people, I mean, these are people doing
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  Speaker 4: unbelievable things. This guy in the middle of the book
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  Speaker 4: who invented a fire science, the science of urban interspace fires.
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  Speaker 3: He did it inside the Department of Commerce.
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  Speaker 4: It's like these fires every year are a bigger and
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  Speaker 4: bigger deal. He is the key to how we're going
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  Speaker 4: to respond. And his science is a person deep. He's
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  Speaker 4: our luck that came in and just starved him like
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  Speaker 4: took away his credit card made it hard but hard
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  Speaker 4: to do his work and he's out And you measure
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  Speaker 4: it's very hard to measure the cost of that because
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  Speaker 4: it gets paid it gets paid decades down the road what.
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  Speaker 5: About the cost of You mentioned the word cost the
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  Speaker 5: cost of people who? who have disappeared from their jobs,
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  Speaker 5: departments being headed by Robert Kennedy, the FBI being headed
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  Speaker 5: by a nitwit.
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  Speaker 3: Stuff like that.
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  Speaker 5: The cost of that, can we ever measure that?
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  Speaker 4: I mean, you feel it, right? You feel it when
• 9:49
  Speaker 4: you can't eat the lettuce, right? That's when you start
• 9:52
  Speaker 4: to know the plane falls out of the sky. I mean,
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  Speaker 4: it's a degradation.
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  Speaker 3: I mean, I think the.
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  Speaker 4: Like this disconnect between Americans' view of their government and
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  Speaker 4: what the government actually does. Americans, I think when they
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  Speaker 4: think of their government, think politics. But all these problems
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  Speaker 4: that the private sector does not want to deal with, and.
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  Speaker 3: There are a lot of them, get dealt with there.
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  Speaker 4: And sometimes they get dealt with well, and sometimes it's inefficient,
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  Speaker 4: and the systems are maddening, And we all have a
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  Speaker 4: big conversation about how the place could run better. But
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  Speaker 4: but the idea that you're just going to kind of
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  Speaker 4: like gut it is is is nuts because it's protecting.
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  Speaker 3: It's all it's essentially in the in the business of prevention.
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  Speaker 2: Right.
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  Speaker 7: You hear about the cuts at the Defense Department and
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  Speaker 7: impacted the way Iran was struck or what do you
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  Speaker 7: what do you with the writing of this book? What
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  Speaker 7: do you feel the most dangerous void has has been
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  Speaker 7: created with?
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  Speaker 3: Getting rid of stuff.
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  Speaker 4: I may answer that in a little bit of a
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  Speaker 4: meta and probably a frustrating way for you. I think
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  Speaker 4: what's being threatened is the very idea of civil service,
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  Speaker 4: the very idea of public service. That it's turning it
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  Speaker 4: into a more cynical operation that serves the narrow interests
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  Speaker 4: of a president. And so you're not going to work there.
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  Speaker 4: You're not serving your country anymore. And if we lose that,
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  Speaker 4: I mean, so many of these people are there. So
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  Speaker 4: many of these people, everybody in this book could make
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  Speaker 4: more money in the private sector. They'd be more famous
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  Speaker 4: in the private sector. They're not after any of that.
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  Speaker 4: They're there because they believe in the country. They're serving
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  Speaker 4: the country. And if you, if you sort of cut
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  Speaker 4: the knees out from under people like that, you're, you're,
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  Speaker 4: you're shifting a value system.
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  Speaker 3: You're like, there's a, there's a, that was the first
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  Speaker 3: thing they did. It is what they did. It is
• 11:36
  Speaker 3: what they did.
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  Speaker 4: And it's, And more generally, I mean, very generally, a
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  Speaker 4: lot of what these people are doing is creating trust.
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  Speaker 4: And it sounds strange to talk about trust in government
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  Speaker 4: because everybody says they don't trust the government, but they
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  Speaker 4: drink the water.
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  Speaker 3: They hold dollar bills. They hold treasury bonds.
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  Speaker 4: They actually, in their behavior, they're making a lot of assumptions,
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  Speaker 4: and the assumptions are they trust.
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  Speaker 3: You're attacking that trust.
• 12:01
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• 12:02
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