Leah Feiger: So it is a actually good query truly, and it is one which I’ve considered for fairly a while. I feel if it isn’t annoying, I need 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 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, however it’s all smoke and mirrors, proper? It is like, oh no, no, properly, DOGE does not precisely exist anymore. There isn’t any Elon Musk character main it, which Elon Musk himself stated on the podcast with Joe Rogan final month as properly. He is like, “Yeah, as soon as I left, they weren’t in a position to decide on anybody, however don’t fret, DOGE remains to be there.” So it feels wild to observe folks 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 actually 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, price cuttings, zero-based budgeting, these have actually change into type of desk stakes for the admin, proper?
Leah Feiger: I feel that is such an excellent level. And actually, by the tip 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 unhealthy optics and that additionally wasn’t serving to the Trump administration even appear like they had been on prime of it.
