Leah Feiger: So it is a actually good query really, and it is one which I’ve considered for fairly a while. I believe if it isn’t annoying, I wish to learn this quote from Scott Kupor, the director of OPM and the previous managing accomplice at Andreessen Horowitz, to be clear, simply to remind everybody the place persons are coming from on this present administration. He posted this on X late final month, and this was a part of Reuter’s reporting. So he posts, “The reality is, DOGE could not have centralized management beneath USDS anymore, however the ideas of DOGE stay alive and properly, deregulation, eliminating fraud, waste and abuse, reshaping the federal workforce, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.” Which is the very same, the factor that they have been saying this whole time, but it surely’s all smoke and mirrors, proper? It is like, oh no, no, properly, DOGE does not precisely exist anymore. There is not any Elon Musk character main it, which Elon Musk himself mentioned on the podcast with Joe Rogan final month as properly. He is like, “Yeah, as soon as I left, they weren’t capable of choose on anybody, however don’t fret, DOGE remains to be there.” So it feels wild to observe individuals fall for this and go like, “DOGE is gone now.” And I am like, they’re actually telling us that it isn’t.
Zoë Schiffer: I believe one factor that does really feel actually true is that it’s tougher and tougher to distinguish the place DOGE stops and the Trump administration begins as a result of they’ve infiltrated so many alternative components of presidency and the DOGE ethos, what you are speaking about, deregulation, price cuttings, zero-based budgeting, these have actually develop into form of desk stakes for the admin, proper?
Leah Feiger: I believe that is such a great level. And actually, by the top of Elon Musk’s reign, one thing that saved developing wasn’t essentially that the Trump administration did not agree with DOGE’s ethos in any respect. It was that they did not actually agree with how Musk was going about it. They did not like that he was stepping on Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and having fights exterior of the Oval Workplace. That was unhealthy optics and that additionally wasn’t serving to the Trump administration even appear like they have been on high of it.
