Where DOGE Is Taking Us
31:04 Share

Business taxes was stressing about all the time and all the money you spent on your taxes. This is my bill. Now business taxes is a TurboTax small business expert who does your taxes for you and offers year round advice at no additional cost so you can keep more money in your business. Now this is taxes into it. TurboTax get an expert now on TurboTax dot com slash business only available with TurboTax live full service.

I'm Leon Nafok, and I'm the host of Slow Burn, Watergate. Before I started working on this show, everything I knew about Watergate came from the movie All the President's Men. Do you remember how it ends? Woodward and Bernstein are sitting with their typewriters, clacking away. And then there's this rapid montage of newspaper stories about campaign aides and White House officials getting convicted of crimes, about audio tapes coming out that prove Nixon's involvement in the cover-up. The last story we see is Nixon resigns. It takes a little over a minute in the movie.

In real life, it took about two years. Five men were arrested early Saturday while trying to install eavesdropping equipment. It's known as the Watergate incident. What was it like to experience those two years in real time? What were people thinking and feeling as the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters went from a weird little caper to a constitutional crisis that brought down the president?

The downfall of Richard Nixon was stranger, wilder, and more exciting than you can imagine. Over the course of eight episodes, this show is going to capture what it was like to live through the greatest political scandal of the 20th century. With today's headlines once again full of corruption, collusion, and dirty tricks, it's time for another look at the gate that started it all. Subscribe to Slow Burn now, wherever you get your podcasts. Over the past week, thousands of federal employees at the Department of Health and Human Services were waiting for the hammer to drop.

They knew that some kind of announcement, likely a layoff, was coming. Then, on Tuesday, it happened. People were waking up to emails in their inbox saying that they no longer have a job. They're being placed on leave. McKenna Kelly writes about politics for Wired.com.

And the other thing is that, you know, when you're at some of these offices, specifically that are HHS offices in places like Cincinnati or Pittsburgh, people don't necessarily live in those cities and they do a lot of commuting. And so people show up to these buildings, they badge in and their badge doesn't let them in. Right. And a lot of people ended up finding out that way. So people were actually walking up to the building, like putting their pass out and nothing? Yep. Nothing. Nothing.

McKenna also heard from workers who had their badge access mistakenly turned off or mistakenly left on. It's all part of a plan to cut some 10,000 employees from jobs at HHS, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, and more through large-scale reductions in force, or RIFs. Within HHS and its smaller agencies, no one seems to know how large the RIFs will be.

A lot of these workers at these agencies are still trying to crowdsource exactly what every agency at HHS looks like because they haven't really heard anything from their managers or leadership. And they're still awaiting marching orders for what happens going forward.

How quickly do you think Americans are going to feel some of these cuts? That's the thing that hit me this week reporting on this. One of the things that one of my sources pointed out to me on Tuesday in the hours after those emails went out was that, especially at the CDC, a lot of these are like people who quietly make the world work, our country work, that we don't normally take note of. But when they're gone, we're likely to miss them terribly.

Today on the show, how the layoffs of thousands of public health workers mark a new phase in Donald Trump and Elon Musk's evisceration of the federal government. I'm Lizzie O'Leary, and you're listening to What Next TBD, a show about technology, power, and how the future will be determined. Stick around.

This podcast is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy. Just drop in some details about yourself and see if you're eligible to save money when you bundle your home and auto policies. The process only takes minutes and it could mean hundreds more in your pocket. Visit Progressive.com after this episode to see if you could save. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.

If you've always had a curiosity and fascination with technology and the minds behind it that are actively shaping our future, tune in to Tech Unheard.

Thank you.

All while sharing a few entertaining anecdotes of success and failure along the way. In the first Tech Unheard podcast, Renee speaks with Jensen Wong, the CEO of NVIDIA, and they dive into Jensen's journey, the future of AI, and how NVIDIA's unique culture of relentless innovation and ambition continues to push the boundaries of technology. Tech Unheard allows you to listen in on technology's most inspiring leaders in a totally unscripted way.

Tune in to Tech Unheard from ARM and NPM, wherever you get your podcasts.

Can you run me through the list you've been compiling of the kinds of programs and work that are affected by these cuts? Yeah, just at the CDC, a lot of folks in what is known as the Division of Environmental Health Science and Practice, that's where a lot of the lead studies happen, population health, the HIV prevention groups, which when we talked to doctors about those cuts being made, there was one that explicitly said people are going to die as a result of this.

And then another one that really stands out is the Division of Reproductive Health, which was essentially gutted, does a lot of work and study on IVF, on fertility, on women's health care. That has just been completely gutted, it sounds like, from the folks that I've been talking to there.

Center for Injury Prevention and Control, NIOSH, the occupational health branch, they saw a lot of cuts and they do a lot of research into how to prevent injuries for firefighters, people who are working and throwing themselves in dangerous places every day. And they have seen dramatic cuts too. And it's

It's hard because I don't even think everyone understands exactly what all has been cut and what will be viable into the future.

One of the things that I want to understand is the relationship between RFK Jr., the agency head, and DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Who is directing these layoffs? Is it the agency? Is it DOGE? Are they working hand in hand? How does that work? You and everyone else wants to know this question, the answer to this question. Because when I talk to folks working at HHS, these plans were very tightly held because

They didn't really hear anything from the secretary's office. They didn't really hear anything from Doge people. And that's why the anxiety over the last week has been so high, because they really had no idea what was going to happen. Now, looking at other agencies that have faced rifts or other firings, I'm thinking like,

Well, of course, Doge owns USDS, now the United States Digital Service. But other things like the General Services Administration, there are folks from Doge who I keep hearing are living in the GSA building and having a lot of effect on what it is that the administrator's office does and playing a big role in firings and different ways that the agency will operate in the future. So I would assume...

that it's very heavy-handed from DOGE with maybe some criticism or some help from HHS. But, you know, the way that these plans have been discussed and kept away from folks has made the whole firing system incredibly opaque. How quickly do you think we'll be able to identify the effects of these layoffs? When you and your colleagues have been reporting on them, what do people say are the near-term concerns and then also the farther-term ones?

I think with a lot of these cuts that were made prior to HHS, like at agencies like GSA, CFPB, people were beginning to feel a little bit of it. Like for the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, that happened like in February, early February when those cuts were happening.

And all the technologists investigating big tech were taken away and like, okay, that's something that's happening and it's important to happen. But it's not when you're going out to the grocery store, living your average life, that's not affecting you. Whereas now when we see even people who, I don't know, are looking for information on IVF and fertility or just all of these things, we're getting to the point where I think

And

One of the things that's really striking to me listening to you is that a lot of the public rationale for this or even the rationale to the workers themselves is lacking. Is there anything that HHS or the folks at Doge are saying, hey, this is why we're doing this?

I haven't heard anything beyond the line that we've been hearing for months now, which is we are finding waste, fraud, and abuse. And of course, even identifying fraud takes much longer than just a couple of weeks, right? And so at this point, it's basically whatever Doge or new HHS leadership believes to be a waste of taxpayer money and a waste of, I guess, time and resources.

At the same time as the HHS cuts, Doge staffers have also been inside the Social Security Administration. McKenna reported on their plan to change the agency's code base, which runs on the computer language COBOL. Safely rewriting that code would probably take years. Doge wants to do it in months. I wonder if you could explain that, because it's one of those wonky things that's incredibly important.

Yeah, I did a lot of reporting on legacy government systems during 2020 in the pandemic, because I had friends who are logging into these state unemployment systems, and not being able to apply for unemployment. They were, you know, in these huge queues. And then when they called, you know, over the phone, they didn't reach anyone. I was like, okay, so what's happening here? And it's because similar to what's happening at the Social Security Administration, which is

There is a legacy system using languages like COBOL, which are 50 plus years old. Yes, COBOL stands for Common Business Oriented Language, and it's like the granddaddy of computer languages. Right. And so you have banks and government agencies that know that they want to modernize and put it on some new modern coding language because it actually is a bit of a risk to continue using it because all of the people who know how to write COBOL...

are retiring. And a lot of them are retiring with these, you know, these early retirement options that Doge is giving them. So you're even having more of these folks leaving as a result. And so everyone knows that the government code base, these legacy systems need to be modernized.

But these are processes that take multiple years if they even do them, right, and even decide that it's a good idea. The last SSA system update when they were deciding, you know, to modernize was in 2017, and they said it was going to take at least five years. Well, when you talk to Steve Davis and folks at Doge. Steve Davis, one of Elon Musk's long-term lieutenants. Yes. These folks have been saying that they want to do this in a matter of weeks.

Everyone I've spoken to thinks this is like just a huge bad idea. The way that it's been described to me is like, okay, you can use AI to, I guess, rewrite COBOL into something more modern, whether that's Rust or Java or something else. Maybe you can do that fairly quickly, but the problem is how do you test it?

Because you need to test for all of these possible edge cases where people could be overpaid, underpaid, not receive payments at all. And then even SSA wouldn't even be notified about that because these systems being as old as they are, they are patchworked together. I was talking to someone at SSA who was doing work in the office of the chief information officer, which is like the big, you know, IT head in the agency. And they were saying that

that SSA has 3,600 apps that it uses when a typical person who answers the phones or does work with people one-on-one about their social security benefits, sometimes they'll touch 70 different apps, which means that those connections that call together, right, those need to be tested as well.

You could totally renovate COBOL and the legacy system, but then you also need to change the way that all these different apps connect to that legacy system as well, because it is a mess. And once you get in there, it's kind of just known in the modernization space at banks or whatever. Once you really dig in, you're going to find out that it's a lot messier behind, you know, on the back end than you could ever imagine.

I mean, it's kind of like I'm trying to translate here from computer programming languages to an analogy that people might understand. It feels like you're rewiring the electrical system of a house, but you need the house to function at the same time. And I guess a question I have for you is, do the people doing this work at Doge think

Do they understand that the stakes are potentially Americans not getting their Social Security?

don't know if they do. Because everyone that I talk to who's worked at SSA and some, you know, as a technologist or in some, you know, technological capacity, this is like not even something that they would consider. Like this is like doing it in a matter of weeks is... Because the risk is too great? The risk is too great. And the way that I like to describe it is that you can have all these teenage kids coming right out of high school, out of college. You can bring them to Twitter or X and have

them redo all kinds of stuff there. Worst thing that happens, Twitter's down for a couple hours and people don't get to post for a little bit. And you can do that sprint and that quick stuff because the risk is so low. They don't do that in government because the risk is so high. And if they could do that and do it in like a sprint in a week with all these engineers, they would have done it already if it was possible.

whether it was the United States Digital Service or 18F, which was a technological branch inside of GSA. These people have been coming in for private industry and working on this stuff for 10 years at least at this point, right? And so if they didn't figure it out, I have a hard time believing that some 20-year-olds will. When we come back, what Doge and the Trump administration want from all of these cuts. This episode is brought to you by Discover.

It's smart to always have a few financial goals. And here's a really smart one you can set. Earning cash back on what you buy every day. With Discover, you can. Get this. Discover automatically matches all the cash back you've earned at the end of your first year. Seriously, all of it. Discover trusts you to make smart decisions. After all, you listen to this show. See terms at discover.com slash credit card.

This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Forget the frustration of picking commerce platforms when you switch your business to Shopify, the global commerce platform that supercharges your selling wherever you sell. With Shopify, you'll harness the same intuitive features, trusted apps, and powerful analytics used by the world's leading brands. Sign up today for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash tech, all lowercase. That's shopify.com slash tech.

This episode is brought to you by Indeed. When your computer breaks, you don't wait for it to magically start working again. You fix the problem. So why wait to hire the people your company desperately needs? Use Indeed's sponsored jobs to hire top talent fast. And even better, you only pay for results. There's no need to wait. Speed up your hiring with a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply.

When you and I last spoke in February, we were really in the early days of this. Staffers at different agencies were just noticing people from Doge showing up. You know, they were taking videos on their phones of unidentified young men coming into the building.

I wonder how you would describe the stage that we're in now, this sort of next iteration of Doge, of reductions in force, of just generalized, I don't know, upheaval. Yeah, I feel like we're in some kind of transition period. Phase one of Doge was...

like attack and conquer, it felt like. You send in a strike force of like three or four young men to gain access to all of these systems and then go through, you know, firings and contracts and whatever.

you know, cutting off spending. Agencies that have already felt rifts or are expecting them. I've been speaking to folks this week a lot at the Social Security Administration, at the IRS, and other agencies. And what I'm hearing from folks is this feels like the calm before the storm.

where the next step feels like something that no one really can predict. But we've seen these Doge folks gain all of this unfettered access to data and government systems. And soon, in what I'm hearing from folks, soon everyone is thinking we're going to figure out what all that is for. What is all that for?

It's a good question. Is it just to conduct rifts? Possibly. They could be taking data, you know, just employee data and using that to help them, I guess, decide who to fire. But there's the data is so incredibly valuable, right? Like at IRS, it's like tax processing systems and like all this stuff, information on what could possibly be competitors to Elon Musk's companies at things like the FCC or the FTC or the CFPB.

But, you know, it feels like there's a bigger project going on. And when you speak to, you know, federal workers, a lot of them are afraid that this is an effort to, you know, privatize the federal government. One of the conversations that comes up a lot when we talk about Doge and when we talk about these cuts is, oh, well, efficiency. Like no one is disputing the idea that government should run efficiently. Right.

But these are wholesale elimination of large groups of workers and arms of the federal government. How do the Doge people describe what they are doing? Because I feel like this is a situation where we need to be really clear about what exactly is happening.

Their idea of efficiency is something – they take it from private industry and not from government. So they come in, they want to strip everything to its parts and see what is actually needed. Their definition of what is necessary is certainly different than folks who have been in government for a very long time.

And so for them, efficiency is people being super on mission, you know, on brand with Doge and like wanting to stay up all night fixing all these things for the government and making things work with new tools, whether that's AI or all kinds of things. And the same way that we're seeing this happen in private industry right now where folks are, even in our work as journalists, seeing all these blog sites just become AI written slop.

That's kind of what I see them doing as well. It's kind of a private equity handbook. And that's the attack plan. And it's never been done before in government. And so it's really exhibit A in running this kind of strategy.

There have been a number of lawsuits filed attempting to block Doge's access to sensitive government data. On Tuesday, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reinstate some of the probationary federal employees that were fired from a bunch of different federal agencies. How are those lawsuits affecting what is happening or are they?

Boy, is it confusing for people working at these agencies. CFPB, for example, Elon was tweeting about like, rest in peace CFPB, delete CFPB. And then they're all forced on essentially administrative leave. And then over the last few weeks, they've been asked to come back. They still, for a lot of folks, they haven't gotten a lot of guidance about what it is that they're supposed to be doing.

is it having any effect on what Doge is doing specifically if it's changing their strategy for taking over these agencies? I don't think so. Uh, because they are continuing to fight every last detail in court. There was a filing this week that I think stands out to me about the social security administration. Um,

And they don't even want to release the names of the doge workers. They want to put the doge worker names under seal that are working at SSA. We've reported their names. We reported them. They are out there and they're still fighting tooth and nail on every single inch of all of these lawsuits.

So are we going so far as to say that Doge is ignoring court orders or is this just a situation where they are appealing and appealing and appealing and eventually all of these things are going to end up in front of the Supreme Court? That does seem to be the case. If they're not listening to court orders, then.

We still need to find out. There are some questions, especially the Social Security Administration and the lawsuit that the AFL-CIO has against them has been, okay, so what kind of, like, they're asking for this very non-anonymized, detailed data on every person, you know, who's in the Social Security system. Which would include undocumented immigrants. Exactly.

And they're asking for all of this data. They've said that they no longer have access to it. But, you know, at this point, unless, you know, we figure out we can look behind the back end and see what's happening, I guess we have to take them at their word. And that's been the case for a lot of lawsuits across the board. All of this is made a little more complicated by some reporting from Politico and others that the Trump administration is preparing for Elon Musk to leave Washington, go back to his companies.

He is also a special government employee, so he was supposed to do that under ethics law. And I guess I wonder, what would that mean for Doge? If Elon leaves, does it even matter since his lieutenants are still there?

So Elon's group of Silicon Valley people who either know him or know someone who knows him and is part of this group of people who have infiltrated all these agencies, they're there. They've been hired in many cases as full-time employees at these agencies. So it's not as if they're under some kind of timeline to be in and out like Elon is.

Elon is technically already not supposed to be the administrator of Doge. He is just a senior advisor to the president, which means he has a nice little office where he can play Diablo 4 or whatever on his gaming PC and then like bug the president in the Oval Office and like say things. That's technically what he's supposed to be doing. But we all know he's acting in some kind of directive manner here.

with Doge. And I think he can do the same thing after he leaves, even if he's like more focused on Tesla or more focused on SpaceX. What is the advice that he continues to give the president and the administration? It's going to come over on X. It's going to be on X posts. And in many ways, I feel like that's kind of, it has similar weight to what his formal position is in the administration as well.

You know, I was covering Washington in 2005 when George W. Bush tried to privatize Social Security and was met with immediate backlash from members of Congress, from the public. People said, no, this is a government service that I love and depend on. And what is striking to me right now is that

I do not see the same widespread backlash to what is happening at Social Security, at HHS. I wonder if you think it's coming based on what you've seen. Yeah, I think a good example is I was watching a video of an operational meeting at SSA this week.

The acting commissioner, Leland Dudek, was there and he was demanding all of this data from the people who work under him about wait times and outages. Because over the last week, maybe two weeks, there have been so many outages at SSA. People who are trying to log on and download their statements, all this kind of stuff, or even just use the service, make an account. There was a brief moment when the Social Security Administration website just wasn't working.

Exactly. And this is really upsetting people who now I heard were driving hours to their regional social security offices to get help, who are calling people. The phone lines are like

The data that they showed was just like multiple times higher than what they normally expect at this time of year. And I think, you know, Dudek felt in that meeting that I was watching that he needed to respond more.

And so I think that pressure is starting to surmount. What all it will take to maybe slow things down has yet to be seen. Over and over, I'm hearing you talk about privatization and running a business. And, you know, as we have said, as you have said before, so much of this comes from Elon's playbook when he took over Twitter. And yet there is such a key difference between customers and

and constituents, customers, and citizens. Does that difference matter to Doge? If the difference mattered to Doge at all, I think they would be listening more to the folks who have been at these agencies for a long time or who were trying to do the work that they were doing before. Um,

I don't know if that's just pure ignorance or if it's egotistical from them who think they can just do things better. But yeah, if the difference mattered to them, I think their approach would be different than what it is now. McKenna Kelly, thank you so much for your consistently excellent reporting and for coming on. Of course. Glad to be back.

McKenna Kelly is a politics reporter at Wired. And that is it for our show today. What Next TBD is produced by Patrick Fort. Our show is edited by Evan Campbell. Slate is run by Hilary Fry. And TBD is part of the larger What Next family.

And if you're looking for something else that is great to listen to, you should subscribe to Slate Plus. You'll get access to more TBD stories, including today's episode of The Discourse, where you can hear all about what happened after we launched our meme coin and very briefly got rich. We'll be back on Sunday with another episode about why Wall Street just can't quit Elon Musk. I'm Lizzie O'Leary. Thanks so much for listening.