Leah Feiger: This is a really good question and one I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I guess if it’s not annoying, I’d like to read this quote from Scott Kupor, director of OPM and former managing partner at Andreessen Horowitz, just to be clear and just to remind everyone where the people in the current administration are coming from. He posted this on X overdue last month and it was part of a Reuters report. Therefore, he writes, “It is true that DOGE may no longer have centralized leadership within the USDS, but the principles of DOGE remain alive and well, deregulation, elimination of fraud, waste and abuse, transformation of the federal workforce, and so on, and so on, and so on.” It’s the exact same thing, the same thing they’ve been saying all along, but it’s all smoke and mirrors, isn’t it? It’s like, oh no, no, well, DOGE doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s not run by any Elon Musk character, as Elon Musk himself said last month on a podcast with Joe Rogan. He said, “Yeah, when I left, they couldn’t pick on anyone, but don’t worry, DOGE is still there.” So it’s weird to see people fall for it and say, “DOGE doesn’t exist anymore.” And I said, they’re literally telling us that’s not the case.
Zoë Schiffer: I think one of the things that really rings true is that it’s getting harder and harder to distinguish where DOGE ends and the Trump administration begins because it has infiltrated so many different parts of the government and the DOGE ethos, what you’re talking about, deregulation, cost cutting, zero-based budgeting – that’s really become stakes for the administrator, right?
Leah Feiger: I think that’s a very good point. And honestly, something kept coming up towards the end of Elon Musk’s reign that didn’t necessarily mean that the Trump administration didn’t agree with the DOGE ethos at all. The point was that they didn’t fully agree with Musk’s approach to this issue. They didn’t like that he stomped on Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and got into fights outside the Oval Office. It was bad optics, and it also didn’t aid the Trump administration look like it was on top.