President Trump has focused much of his first two months in office on slashing the federal bureaucracy – an effort that has already been met with lawsuits and protests. Andrew Cockburn is Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine, and he joins us to talk about why reigning in federal agencies has been a challenge for previous administrations – and if the Department of Government Efficiency has figured out how to do it.
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] Whether the implement of choice is a scalpel or a chainsaw. U.S. presidents have been pledging for decades to cut wasteful government spending. But even when those promises were kept, they’ve often come with an asterisk. From KERA in Dallas. This is Think I’m Krys Boyd. Ronald Reagan vowed to cut waste and improve efficiency, but the federal workforce expanded by hundreds of thousands of positions during his tenure, and the federal debt nearly tripled. Bill Clinton cut staff jobs within agencies, but his efforts added to the number of federal private contractors on the payroll. So it’s worth asking is about half of Americans cheer the cuts enacted by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, while the other half look on with concern or dismay. How much will the structures of federal bureaucracy change under the second Trump administration? Journalist Andrew Cockburn has been looking into this for Harper’s Magazine, where he is the Washington editor. His article about this is titled “Rage Against the Machine.” Andrew, welcome back to Think.
Andrew Cockburn [00:01:03] Hey, great to be with you.
Krys Boyd [00:01:04] President Trump has been a vocal opponent of what he calls the deep state since at least his first term in office. That term sounds so menacing. Is the deep state really just another way of saying federal bureaucracy, or does it mean something else?
Andrew Cockburn [00:01:19] Well, I think you can expand it a bit to include the federal bureaucracy, but also associated elements like the whole Washington universe of think tanks and commentators, you know, lobbyists. It’s the, you know, the machine. I guess you can think of other terms for it. But yeah, I think it’s a, you know, it’s a fair term to use.
Krys Boyd [00:01:44] Is there significant evidence of some coordinated effort within the federal bureaucracy or the deep state to specifically countervailing Trump’s orders to particular agencies?
Andrew Cockburn [00:01:57] Well, yes. In particular, you know, certainly. You see, with all the lost count number, the number of lawsuits that have been mounted, that have been filed against, against various Trump’s initiatives. And I’d also say you were talking about actions, the deep state, the whole effort against his foreign policy, particularly with regard to Ukraine, I can see. Well, I’ve certainly heard people in Washington talk about, you know, the initiative with the Europeans and maybe elements in the military as well. I’m sure about that. Again, to kind of, you know, to counteract his desire to do a deal with Putin. So, yeah, I’d say the deep state is certainly up and running hard against Trump.
Krys Boyd [00:02:45] Why did some of Trump’s attempts to weaken the administrative state in his first term not succeed to his satisfaction?
Andrew Cockburn [00:02:54] Well, he didn’t really know with which buttons to push. He had no idea, really idea how the government worked. He’d never bothered to learn. And it’s true, as he complains himself, that he because he was surprised to become president, that he even so succumbed to pressure and appointed a lot of establishment types to to leading posts, you know, to like, you know, corporate lawyer Christopher Wray at the FBI, General Mattis to be secretary of Defense Tillerson, the Exxon executive to be secretary of state, and so on. You know, and he determined this time he wasn’t going to make that mistake. So he appointed people. He felt a personal, you know, had an ongoing connection to, like Mr. Stag Seth, who we come to know through, you know, appearing on Access Fox TV show, Cash Patel, who’d been a the defender of of his during the whole Russiagate imbroglio and so forth. So I think he thought, and most sorry, I should have started with this Elon Musk. The the Joker in every sense of the word in this and this can’t go wrong. And I think he thought on things that were that he can get his way.
Krys Boyd [00:04:18] We’ll talk plenty about Elon Musk in this conversation. But I do want to note, I mean, despite his big talk in the first term, Trump actually deported fewer people than in either of Barack Obama’s two terms were deported. He also failed to kill the Affordable Care Act and replace it, as promised, with something much better. You know, you noted that this time around, the president is surrounded by people who appear willing to do whatever he says is their reason to think things will be fundamentally different this time.
Andrew Cockburn [00:04:49] I’m thinking in the end, no. That being said, we have a particular wild card, as I said with Musk. I don’t think I or anyone else really had counted on this very strange individual being getting, getting the power that he has. And he is sort of, I think, rather demented approach to solving sort of willy nilly and very sort of haphazard and ill considered way, sort of big chunks of the bureaucracy. The problem is. But now what? I’m, you know, what I’m hearing and you’re probably hearing too, is essentially the bureaucracies come to a halt. It’s impossible not to get a decision on anything in Washington in the agency, because they’re all too terrified to to take the initiative to sign anything that might cost them their jobs. And the problem is that, you know, Trump, to carry out his agenda, he needs a functioning machine, and if the machine isn’t functioning, then nothing really will happen. So I think in the end, the federal government will start to move. You know, we’ll we’ll run back into action. We’re having suffered a lot of damage, thanks mostly to Musk plus a lot of these court cases, you know, already, you know, showing that showing affects the decision by the judge in San Francisco that the order to terminate all probationary workers was illegal. That’s already having an effect. The you know, agencies are rehiring people. So I’m thinking that in the end will Trump 2.0 won’t in the end be that different from Trump the first time around?
Krys Boyd [00:06:45] And the president, you note, is not impervious to public criticism, talk about he thought about pulling all U.S. troops from Afghanistan in the interregnum between the 2020 elections and Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021. Why didn’t that happen?
Andrew Cockburn [00:07:05] Because the deep state rose up in revolt. As I said, you know, he issued the order. He was you know, he issued a decision memorandum saying all uniform troops should be out of Afghanistan by I think in the end, it was January 15th, certainly by the inauguration. And the Joint Chiefs rushed round to the White House. The Congress rose up in an uproar. Mitch McConnell was all on the phone all the time, and he backed down. So that’s what led to the person who actually helped him write that, that memorandum, retired Colonel Douglas McGregor said there was a Trump presidency. There never was a Trump administration. So he you know, he’s had a has a history of upholding or at least of changing course when the pressure against him, against his course of action gets too strong. So now, you know, now it’s really being put to the test. He’s taken these incredible initiatives. Particularly with the tariffs announced yesterday and coming into effect today. And we’ll see how that goes.
Krys Boyd [00:08:15] I’m very curious about how these tariffs will read to ordinary Americans who already felt as if things were too expensive that they had to buy on a regular basis.
Andrew Cockburn [00:08:26] Well, I think they’re going to read badly. I mean, he you know, he’s betting that somehow it’ll be a replay of the McKinley era when president McKinley in the 1890s impose stiff tariffs. But also he perhaps I don’t even remember knows this or not that McKinley actually reversed reverse course later on. I think ordinary Americans are going to react very badly. You know, they in all sorts of ways. I mean, one of the things we’re told that one of the things that data points that Trump has a lot of a great deal of attention to is the stock market. The stock market is is a derby today. I think that’s going to have a big impact on him. So, you know, since he’s you know, he’s justified these tariffs on the grounds to stop the flow of fentanyl. I think it’d be quite easy for him to declare victory and announce that he’s choked off supplies of fentanyl and that all the tariffs can be reduced or release robust. You know, he you know, he can be nimble is quite capable of turning putting around.
Krys Boyd [00:09:38] The president did make some big changes in his first term to the departments of state and education. But you point out these agencies were mostly able to continue functioning as they had before. Is that to say those changes amounted to political theater?
Andrew Cockburn [00:09:55] Well, I don’t know. They were the theater that we intended them as theater. It was sort of, era of frivolity about it as, I think better way to put it. I mean, they didn’t really know what the Department of Education does or did, and the bureaucracy there was able to quite successfully resist. Is initiatives the same with the Department of State? You know, they did empty out a lot of offices and, you know, Boston had a lot of them back could. So. You know, we have to look at the future assuming. I mean Trump has I’ve got the number of days now. But he really has until 2026 or year 2027 where it’s quite likely he’ll lose. The Republicans will lose the house to get all this done. And, you know, all these sweeping changes he’s made, a lot of them can be reversed fairly quickly and I think probably will be.
Krys Boyd [00:10:54] I read an analysis that said some GOP lawmakers maybe like the way Elon Musk is making changes that they have been unable to support publicly for fear of alienating voters within their districts, like cuts that they thought were a good idea but would have cost them their seats if they’d gone on record to vote for them. Does that sound like a reasonable hypothesis to you?
Andrew Cockburn [00:11:15] Well, it’s reasonable, except, as we’ve seen in the town halls, you know, people are already getting quite angry. And when you start to sort of cut payments to farmers, you know, like, for instance, all the farmers invested on the basis of the Inflation Reduction Act, they were, you know, promised that if they invested money now, they would get it back later. Now that being told they’re not going to get it back later, They’re very angry about that. The VA cuts which are impacting veterans, that’s you know, already you’ve seen plenty of video of people protesting angrily town halls. I don’t think there’s too many. Well, there are some of course, some sort of libertarian end end of the Republican Party who think this is all still a great idea. But I think their pretty few.
Krys Boyd [00:12:07] Is this where, if you’ll pardon the pun, Andrew, where the buck stops, you know, people who have supported President Trump through all kinds of different, in some cases, rather outrageous propositions, if they feel the effect on their own bottom line or their own ability to function in their businesses or in their careers. Is this where Trump starts to lose support from people who have otherwise been in his corner all the way?
Andrew Cockburn [00:12:37] Yes. I mean, not not totally. The hardcore will always be there, but you think about why people supported Trump. A lot of it has been, you know, just because the system doesn’t deliver. You know that there is a lot of, you know, government is inefficient in a lot of areas. So, you know, there was sort of, you know, I put a lot of it down to frustration that somehow their lives, you know, badly affected all the things they need to get done. Don’t happen because of inefficiency in government and run. But, you know, this is all being settled on to make government more efficient. Is it, as it turns out, fairly rapidly the government is becoming less efficient quite quickly. I think, you know, that’s definitely a recipe for losing support.
Krys Boyd [00:13:29] Andrew, I want to get some background here. I mean, President Trump is hardly the first in his job to look at the size and the scope of the federal bureaucracy and see an opportunity to make cuts. Ronald Reagan is certainly remembered and in some corners of politics, revered for this. How did the federal budget and workforce change in the Reagan era?
Andrew Cockburn [00:13:51] It zoomed. You know, but Reagan, you know, he made all that. He had all this rhetoric about, you know, cutting this and cutting that. And, you know, he sneering at the work of government workers. You remember, he used to say, the most frightening was the English with your I’m from the government and I’m here to help. But instead of which actually increased the deficit, increased, you know, it really went nowhere. I mean, a lot of that went into the into the military, into the into and doing his big sort of military expansion. But across the board, really, you know, everything that happened ran counter to what he’d promised. So that was Reagan.
Krys Boyd [00:14:34] Bill Clinton came along later and did cut a lot of workers from the official government payrolls, but many of those people ended up doing the same work for the same agencies, but as private contractors.
Andrew Cockburn [00:14:47] Oh that’s right. Well, you know, the big thing was I’ll, you know, he commissioned in Clinton, delegated toAl Gore the whole reinventing government initiative and Gore did. You know, they worked very hard. And they was, you know, unlike what Musk is doing, you know, they’ll see it of his pants. You know, there was a you know, he had a big staff and labored away. But what happened was, as I as you just quoted, you know, a lot of the men up working for less pay, less job security in this private contract take the same job. I’m thinking of other people, you know, working at the lower end, like sort of office cleaners and so forth. It was suddenly working for some cleaning company. But generally, you know, there was a lot It was basically led to the wholesale privatization of government. Suddenly, you know, across the board and then and suddenly in defense and in huge, huge areas, including the even the Department of Justice, suddenly things that had been done in-house were now contracted out of the house. And how did the the government and this certainly didn’t lead to less money being spent. But it was, you know, a lot a lot of it was going to for profit corporations. So I don’t know if you really that was considered a great reform and is still sort of held by people, but I don’t really consider it not much of an improvement, but rather the contrary.
Krys Boyd [00:16:18] How did Donald Rumsfeld try to cut costs when he was defense secretary under President George W. Bush?
Andrew Cockburn [00:16:26] Rumsfeld had all sorts of dreams that he was going to transform the military, transform its whole culture can transform the way you know it did everything. And you know that he was very enamored of, you know, networking and lots of sort of buzzwords. And again, it really, really went nowhere. He didn’t he wasn’t able to despite body sort of, you know, his party’s record as a successful business executive. It didn’t really work. I mean, he managed to cancel basically one major defense contract, which is for an Army artillery piece, the Crusader. And that took an incredible battle just to get that done. And as I quoted the piece, you know, on the September the 10th, 2001, he made this bitter speech to the Pentagon workforce saying that they were the greatest threat to national security. And it was a sort of a very angry, defiant loser’s speech. But, you know, in a way it should do for him and unfortunately for everyone else. The next day was 9/11, so you had a whole new role to play. But he, you know, it was if anyone you know, he that’s why I, I repeated that story and you know reminded people of that to to show when you get people like Hegseth who had infinite less knowledge of the way the defense system works than Norman Rockwell did, who, after all, been secretary of defense once before. Changing a bureaucracy is a very, very hard thing to do. I mean, you can bar people, you can insult people, you can remove who you think you are, the the main offenders. But somehow the creature has it has a fantastic survival instinct. That’s why I, I’m betting on, well, as we said earlier, the deep state.
Krys Boyd [00:18:23] So you don’t think the culture of the U.S. military as it existed, you know, as late as 2024 will be permanently altered by the changes that have happened, the firings and the declarations about trans soldiers and that sort of thing.
Andrew Cockburn [00:18:41] Not really. You know, you think what the you know, what is the basic culture of the of the defense problem. What it’s become over the years is, you know, a giant money machine. Now we’re seeing changes there as the tech companies like Palantir and Anduril and Silicon Valley sort of make bids to become an integral part of the the military industrial complex, which have been being quite successful in doing. And but it’s still the objectives are going to remain the same. I do you know, you’re not going to see you know, supposing I mean I would think I will start to take it more seriously if suddenly Haig said, oh, you know, who’s ever in charge said, okay, no more revolving door if you retire as a, you know, a senior officer. You cannot go and work for a defense contractor, which used to be, you know, 50 years ago that was the custom. Didn’t happen. Nowadays, if he did that, if he said, okay, well, let me give you a particular example. There’s a thing called the the director, director of Operational Test of Efficiency, which is things set up by Congress in the 1980s created an office that all weapons should be operationally tested before you went ahead and bought them, actually. So they actually worked operationally. Now, the military has always hated that and has been making great efforts to emasculated and would really like to abolish it if the Trump is in charge of the Defense Department said, not only we’re not going to abolish DoD, but we’re going to strengthen it to, you know, make it fulfill its original mandate and all, you know, all projected programs will have to undergo rigorous operational testing. Then I’d start to believe them. But on the contrary, that’s not happening. They’re pushing ahead with contracts, major contracts for which there’s no realistic test program at all. So as I say, I see I’ve yet to see any sign of any fundamental change. So, you know, I think that’s my view.
Krys Boyd [00:20:55] One noteworthy back and forth between the departing first Trump administration and the incoming Biden administration. And now the second Trump administration involves changes to something called schedule F. This is something that is like familiar to every federal employee, but not necessarily to those of us working outside government. What exactly is schedule F?
Andrew Cockburn [00:21:16] What it’s really and it’s it’s an issue, an initiative to give the president of the, you know, the executive more power to hire and fire people in the bureaucracy. In. This was a major point. Well, as you said, I think Trump sort of tried it. At the end of his first term, Biden quickly reversed it. Next, the rule that hadn’t really come into operation. And Trump has revived it. It’s, you know, it’s a this is you can find any figure you like as to how many people this would actually affect. I mean, yeah, at the moment there are four, I think roughly 5000 jobs in the, in the, in the civil service, which are presidential appointees, which they are nowhere near filling anyway. And you know, take your choice. I mean, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 people could be potentially affected by schedule F. What’s interesting is that the original projection. I mean, the intent of Project 2025 was to target the senior executive service. That’s the higher year of the civil service. They really wanted to target them and sort of make people in those positions who, you know, would strip them of the civil service protection and make them, you know, executive presidential appointees. But what’s happened because of Musk is that the whole sort of middle ranks of the, of the civil service have been affected. As I said earlier, they’re all terrified, so no one’s doing it. It’s ironic that Musk is demanding them, demanding that they you have to submit, you know, things saying what they did last week because actually, no one’s doing anything because they’re too frightened to do anything, because, you know, that might get them in trouble and get them fired. So it’s, you know, by using. You know, a bludgeon, not a scalpel. They’ve effectively sort of thrown so much sand in the, you know, mixing a lot of metaphors here. But to shut down the machine that instinctually effectively coming to a hold and you know, Trump wants to be the, you know, the the executive power, according to article two of the Constitution, he’s got to have an executive to administer. And so, you know, at the moment, there is no effectively there’s no executive.
Krys Boyd [00:24:01] I mean, just from a practical standpoint, is it possible to staff federal agencies with enough high level managers that exclusively and specifically support Donald Trump? Like, are there enough people interested in doing those jobs who have the kind of ideological priorities that the president wants.
Andrew Cockburn [00:24:24] I’m not sure. I’m not up to date onthe precise count of, you know, people that are permitted anyway to a point with or without schedule F, but it’s still very low. I think they’ve hardly, you know, I’ve written to, to a couple of weeks ago they certainly that there was one presidential appointee at the to the Department of Justice that was the the attorney general, Pam Bondi. I know various agencies, interior commerce. They haven’t gotten very far. So they are having trouble finding people. I see, you know, it’s very hard to. It’s not like there’s this whole sort of willing, you know, ideologically motivated work force or, you know, work force in waiting on the wings. I mean, the those I say, well, even think about the think about justice. You know, we do have a very well organized machine in the form of the Federalist Society, which, you know, is aim in life is to, you know, is to have a whole ideologically attuned sort of workforce, you know, that have been trained up and recruited in the law schools and, you know, fed into the machine at various levels over the years. So they should be doing very well with that. But so far they haven’t found anyone. I mean, they of that many people know I shouldn’t say anyone. You know, all these prosecutors office like the Southern District of New York, you know, with all the resignations, they’re all still limping along. So the you know, as I said them, the machine is definitely ground to a halt at the moment in terms of not just to the people who are there too terrified to do anything, but in terms of, you know, putting in the people they sort of dreamt of, you know, bringing on stage to, to do the job, they seem to be having a lot of trouble there.
Krys Boyd [00:26:18] I mean, as you’ve described it, the federal bureaucracy has traditionally been fairly durable, despite opponents on both the left and the right taking swings at it. Why is pledging to cut the federal work workforce off in such a great selling point with voters?
Andrew Cockburn [00:26:33] Well, yeah, it’s you know, it’s been a been a populist, very popular populist theme. I mean, I, I was interested to note that George Wallace, the, you know, the notorious segregationist governor of Alabama when he ran for president in 1968, a central theme of his campaign was against pointy headed bureaucrats. You know, people, you know, anyone in the space frustration at the DMV or is having a run around with some welfare agency or with the USDA? You know, plenty of people find plenty of reason to dislike just like bureaucrats I was being. It was very politically, very successful. Reagan absolutely ran on it, as I said, with his sneers at government workers. So it’s endured, you know, and Clinton too, on a bipartisan basis. Bush did it. You know, Obama pledged to bring more efficiency into government. It’s always a popular theme, but it’s as I say, it’s always run into the sand. It’s, you know, because in the end, you need a government. And, you know, government is made up of humans and humans that can’t always operate, you know, on a super efficient way.
Krys Boyd [00:27:53] So in other words, it’s it’s the federal bureaucracy itself may be standing up in its own defense, but it’s also the fact that Americans want the services that federal bureaucracy, efficiently or not, can provide.
Andrew Cockburn [00:28:06] Yeah, I think it’s exactly what’s the right way to put it that way. You know, it’s not that they don’t want them there. In the end, they think about it. They want them to, you know, be efficient to sort of, you know, answer the phone when you go into a Social Security office to have someone there. You know, a lot of the there have been a lot of problems with Social Security, for example, because of, you know, working from home, the whole effect of Covid, the Covid lockdowns was, you know, going to a lot of offices and there’s no one there or, you know, you have to try and get someone on the phone to answer the all problem. So, you know, that’s it’s really I, I guess what I’m working towards is people want an efficient government and when it isn’t efficient, they, you know, it takes the form that people’s reaction takes the form of resentment against bureaucrats. And whereas Trump sort of or and Musk sort of recall that or prior to that. And I do think, as you suggested earlier, quite a strong reaction.
Krys Boyd [00:29:09] The president appears to be using this 900 page document called Project 2025, as a playbook for gutting federal agencies. This was created by the Heritage Foundation. Has the Heritage Foundation given a rationale for why it wants these changes?
Andrew Cockburn [00:29:26] It was really I mean, it was a reaction to Trump’s first term. Well, you know, as we discussed, despite all the sort of promises, nothing much happened. And this was the game plan for making sure that didn’t happen again. So that’s what it really grew out of. And, you know, that’s what. But as I said, you know that because in the end there’s a sort of frivolity about it. You know, unleashing Musk and and waving his silly chainsaw and things like that. It’s, you know, I think it’s sort of it’s going off the rails.
Krys Boyd [00:30:04] I have to ask you, Andrew, are the problems we have with government inefficiencies inherent in all large bureaucracies around the world? Or is there something? Uniquely American, about the fact that agencies seem to cost a lot and never quite accomplish as much as everybody might want?
Andrew Cockburn [00:30:22] Well, you certainly have the same complaints you need. You know, for instance, that, for example, in Europe, which are much more highly regulated societies. And here I know growing up in Britain, but it’s not you know, the bureaucracies don’t have to be inefficient. I’ve been actually I’ve found, for instance, the social I mean, they vary in degree, like Social Security generally works, but it has worked pretty well here in terms of delivering benefits. The National Health Service in England used to work well. It still works better than you’d think from reading the papers. I think, you know, in the end it’s it’s in you inherited, you know, trying to sort of administer a society is very hard. You know, and you, you have to rely on fallible creatures, ie human beings. So, you know, all of whom have internal agendas. You know, a bureaucracy principally wants to preserve itself and defend itself and increase its, you know, increase its influence and certainly its budget. So, you know that always that will always happen. You know, people can attempt to improve that. I mean, it certainly can be improved. You certainly you don’t want a, for example, a, a very corrupt bureaucracy. I mean, I don’t think the bureaucracy here has been corrupt. I think there are exceptions in certain parts of the in particularly in defense, as I’ve written about a lot over the years. And that’s I think I’m trying to think of a succinct answer to your question. I would say it’s inevitable, but, you know, it is. It’s always to a degree.
Krys Boyd [00:32:17] Let’s assume that Elon Musk and his chainsaw remain plugged in and in favor in the White House. Can DOGE get anywhere close to eliminating the federal budget deficit?
Andrew Cockburn [00:32:30] That I doubt. You know, for already we’ve seen plenty of reports that they claim savings. You know, the like they claim to have saved money on contracts that are already over. They put out something saying they’d saved 8 billion on like it was now 8 billion on some particular program, but it turned out to be 8 million. You know that they it’s such a sort of swingeing, thoughtless attack by these group of, you know, Musk employees who, you know, spend a few weeks poring over the computers of various agencies and like, you know what? Cut this out. That. I don’t think so. Oh, it’s, you know, the deficits, you know, slated to increase. Anyway, I didn’t see any sign that will be reduced. And certainly looking at overall, you know, seeing very strong demands for an increase in defense. I mean, Hegseth initially it sounded like they were going to he was demanding an 8% cut across the board from various services in the Pentagon. Then it turned out I didn’t really mean 8% cut. He meant an 8% redeployment, i.e. 8% taken out of things he didn’t like. Or you know, that the administration doesn’t like, not just, you know, die, but other things. I think, like Seth doesn’t like the whole aircraft carrier program, for example, and be deployed in the into the things that they, they do like, like more and more drones, more and more, you know, autonomous vehicles which hypersonic weapons, all of which will have huge problems and development. And already there is calls from Congress or a $200 billion increase in the defense budget, so on. You know, on that score alone, whatever DOGE does, you’re not going to see a significant reduction in the the overall government budget or in the deficit. And therefore in the defense, the.
Krys Boyd [00:34:31] Military budgets aside, I’m curious about the fallout for private contractors, which are, after all, job creators, which we love in this country. What might the effect be on them? For all these private companies that have been doing business with federal agencies?
Andrew Cockburn [00:34:49] Well, they may suffer. You know, that the big consulting firms like Deloitte, Leidos, Booz Allen, they’re all lobbying furiously to, you know, to say why? Why what they do is entirely unnecessary. So we’ll see what happens with that. And I, I’m, I’m betting that probably they won’t suffer too much because, you know, they have very formidable resources in Washington. You know one of the areas I mean, that’s going to be whether it’s going to be an employment explosion is on K Street as everyone lobbies up to defend their slice of the budget or to try and expand it and, you know, try and gain influence at court, trying to influence Musk, trying to influence Trump. So I think the contract state I really doubt is going to contract that much or at all.
Krys Boyd [00:35:52] You note in the piece, I mean, the contractor state might be the real deep state. How much power do these companies have to determine what services the American people receive and how they’re carried out.
Andrew Cockburn [00:36:04] Well, a huge amount. I mean, they as I said, you know, a huge proportion of the of the federal budget goes to contractors, not to the civil service. I mean, Daniel Bryan, I quoted Daniel Bryan, who’s the executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, who has been banging the drum on this for years. She she said that you could fire the entire federal workforce and still won’t make much of an impact on the deficit. So they, you know, they have taken on or been assigned a huge part of governmental functions. I mean, huge proportion of that was going to big Washington contracting firms. And then by a phone call Uncle Joe. Come on. No one ever had. Which was bring billions of dollars a year for capacity building, whatever that means. So, yeah, there will will be some hub in various areas, but again, they become so integral to the functioning of government that it’s it’s hard to see them going away. For example, I subscribe to a there’s a thing called simply hard, which is what you can see where jobs what jobs are on offer in various areas. While I look at it, it depends. And I’m particularly interested just to do with a story I did years ago. Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, which has a is he is the site of a huge operation sort of monitoring all drone videos and surveillance videos and NSA intercepts and so that in this might be a fusion center for all, but And just every day I get an email to the old Madigan email saying what jobs are being, you know, are going there. And it’s all you know from intelligence analyst, systems analyst systems, the whole functioning of that enormous multi-billion dollar machine is all in the hands of, you know, Leidos and Booz Allen. And, you know, it’s an interesting little insight into how much you know, what’s considered a key part of our system is and the contract is. So it’s, you know, that’s that’s not going to go away. This is a project, a bit of a did.
Krys Boyd [00:38:37] We talk about the government as this kind of big impersonal thing. But of course it’s made up especially, you know, bureaucratic government of, of regular people. You know, they they may live in our homes or in our neighborhoods. What is the likely effect, Andrew, of this moment in which virtually all federal workers Can’t help but see themselves positioned in opposition to the administration that employs them.
Andrew Cockburn [00:39:02] Well, in various ways, I mean, we, as I had mentioned earlier, the town halls, when, you know, congressmen go out to meet their constituents, there have been not just in the but certainly in the Washington area. But I mean, whether or not that many Republicans to be shouted at, but still further out beyond Washington, you know, there’s been very angry reaction. Turns out that a lot of people, including a lot of people who voted for Trump, you know, are federal employees who are now very angry that they’re being assaulted in this sort of haphazard, very, you know, quite cruel fashion. So that’s, you know, that’s certainly one effect. It’s, you know, it’s it’s suddenly when, you know, what I probably do to hit stores time of, you know, friends, neighbors, relatives, you know, so and so he works for the USDA. Just applied last week. So and so work for you know, commerce you know and a contract with Commerce. He got fired. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen. She doesn’t know what’s going to happen. Everyone’s on tenterhooks. It’s this will ripple across society in quite a major way and we’ll have a fairly rapidly, I would say, a pronounced political effect.
Krys Boyd [00:40:17] What sort of conflict might we expect Elon Musk to encounter among, like actual cabinet secretaries who were selected by President Trump, whose departments he is trying to hamstring?
Andrew Cockburn [00:40:29] Well, we’ve already seen a bit of that when, you know, he put out his first sort of demand that all government employees should report what they did last week. And basically all the national security agencies told, you know, the cabinet director, the bosses told them not to respond. And he said, I’ll say Gabbard for the intelligence community. Kash Patel for the FBI. That was an early sign, I think. I think it was going to be more of that. I mean, Trump at the moment, you know, he’s very he remaining staunch with Moscow and almost surprisingly so I mean, it’s I think there’s an element of sort of cunning there that he can be, you know, bad cop, good cop. You know, the mosque takes a lot of the heat. But again, if and when they grow, which they probably will go grow more assertive, you know, get more control, command of their own agencies. There’s going to be a lot of pushback. And Trump you know, Trump has a record. What he likes to do is to sort of set his, you know, his lieutenants against each other. I quoted in my piece Trump’s former late friend Jeffrey Epstein, who was very close to Trump, he told journalist Michael Wolff, you know how that was Trump’s M.O. was to sort of set people against each other, which is, you know, all all the greats do that to a certain extent, solidifies around their own position.
Krys Boyd [00:42:06] To the extent that, as we’ve discussed, previous presidents in modern history have attempted to shrink the bureaucratic workforce, or at least the budgets of federal agencies. Why do you think the current Trump administration push is ringing such alarm bells for people who oppose it?
Andrew Cockburn [00:42:21] Well, it’s very you know, it’s my it’s so aggressive and so sort of loud and, you know, particularly personified by Musk, this sort of weird creature who seems to have this extraordinary amount of power. It makes people it is a it is very unsettling. Plus, you know, Trump’s assertions, you know, he seems. Well, there’s the fear that even if court judgments Go against them, he’ll just ignore them. You know, like Marcus tried to do. I try and calm people’s fears about that. I noticed that it’s interesting remark by Senator Kennedy of, you know, it was a very right wing Republican, but someone sort of some government I can’t remember the Office of Legal Counsel said, well, you know, we don’t like a court judgment. We don’t have to obey. And Senator Kennedy spoke up and said, don’t even think of defying, you know, a court, a court order of, you know, defying the rule of law was that effect I think they’ll bring, even in the Republican Senate, a very angry reaction. If they really started doing that, they really started defying the court. So, I mean, I think I should say in parenthesis, it’s a sad day when we have to depend on a bunch of unelected judges to try and, you know, to enforce, you know, the Democratic will. But that’s the way we think things seem to be. You know, obviously, the speculation about the Supreme Court. It’s still not clear. I mean, again, maybe I’m being pollyannaish. I don’t really see them even in this Roberts court going overboard or waving through a, you know, a flouting of the the rule of law.
Krys Boyd [00:44:21] Journalist Andrew Cockburn is Washington editor at Harper’s Magazine. His article is titled “Rage Against the Machine.” Andrew, thanks very much for making time to talk.
Andrew Cockburn [00:44:30] Hey, I enjoyed it. Thank you.
Krys Boyd [00:44:32] Think is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram and all podcast platforms. Our website is think.kera.org. I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
