Leah Feiger: So it is a actually good query really, and it is one which I’ve considered for fairly a while. I feel if it isn’t annoying, I wish to learn this quote from Scott Kupor, the director of OPM and the previous managing companion at Andreessen Horowitz, to be clear, simply to remind everybody the place individuals 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 might not have centralized management below USDS anymore, however the ideas of DOGE stay alive and nicely, 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 complete time, however it’s all smoke and mirrors, proper? It is like, oh no, no, nicely, 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 nicely. He is like, “Yeah, as soon as I left, they weren’t capable of decide on anybody, however don’t be concerned, 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 feel one factor that does really feel truthfully true is that it’s more durable and more durable to distinguish the place DOGE stops and the Trump administration begins as a result of they’ve infiltrated so many various elements of presidency and the DOGE ethos, what you are speaking about, deregulation, value cuttings, zero-based budgeting, these have actually change into sort of desk stakes for the admin, proper?
Leah Feiger: I feel that is such level. And truthfully, by the top of Elon Musk’s reign, one thing that saved arising 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 dangerous optics and that additionally wasn’t serving to the Trump administration even appear like they had been on prime of it.
