Enforcing the law, fighting wildfires, and more — when they were suddenly labeled, quote, 'blockers,' a term for people the department viewed as standing in their way. With us now, New York Times best-selling author, his new book is titled 'Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State.' I quickly, in a minute, I want to quickly get to this and the debate we're having about AI and the so-called doomers standing in the way of those who are on top of Mount Olympus telling us how things are going to work out. But what I'm struck by here, Michael, is the fact that when I talk to people on the inside throughout this entire process, at the beginning, you're just not going to believe this, Joe. I know you guys balance the budget and you're proud of that. You're not going to believe. We're going to save one to two trillion
you are not going to touch. The other stuff is going to be much more important to Americans than you're suggesting right now. But they went in there and ended up — it just ended up being a catastrophe. Talk about your interest in this and talk about how far short of their goal they came.
So it wasn't just DOGE I was interested in. I think DOGE was just one piece of the Trump administration's assault on the civil service. DOGE is the beginning of the book, but they, you know, they fade away. DOGE, you know — the interesting thing about DOGE is Elon Musk is supposed to be so smart, but it never made sense. I mean, as you say, if all you're attacking is 15% of the budget, you're not going to cut $2 trillion out of the federal deficit. I mean, just not the math. So what was — what were they doing? Either he didn't know what he was doing, or he was doing something else. And I think like DOGE was kind of the artillery strike before the invasion, and that what they were really — what was really going on was a massive power grab. I mean, in that — in the chaos, they eliminated inspectors general. They seized all kinds of agencies that they probably didn't have the right to seize. They established that like — that this two-million-person civil service, which previously took an oath to the Constitution and served the people, was going to be a loyalist operation that served a single person. I mean, that was the — that was the push, was all in that direction. And that's what interested me, because I thought like, if you change the environment that much, if you take this thing that was once this way and you turn it into this loyalist operation, everything that happens in it is going to be different. You know, all the incentives for the people inside of it are going to be different. And so what happens to like the basic functions of government? What happens? What happens to public safety? What happens to like long-term science research? What happens to — what happens to like data and information collection? You take these. And so that was the premise. And you go out and you find people who are doing critical things, like, I don't know, preventing your tax returns from being weaponized by the White House, and you find, oh my God, this person no longer has a job. You know, it's a fundamental shift in how we govern ourselves, and I don't think it's got enough attention.
No. Yeah, and of course, attacking the very government — it's government that oversaw the American century. This whole idea that we're going to bring a CEO in, they know — you know how to run a company, and bureaucrats in Washington are just such idiots. I've seen it time and time again. CEOs come to Washington, D.C., and almost every single one, the people of them get devoured. But I'm wondering, does this teach us a lesson finally? You know, my pet peeve is, oh, we need Washington outsiders. We don't say that about brain surgeons. We need somebody who's — who's an outsider who's never done an operation on a brain before. Our car mechanics, our general contractors, our dentists. But this whole idea, we're going to bring Elon Musk in who knows absolutely nothing about Washington, D.C., or we're going to bring Donald Trump in who just says, 'I alone can fix it,' that has absolutely no idea how to work with Congress, no idea how to work with the bureaucracy. Does this book — after you read this book, does it explain why it's important to actually talk about where we have knowledge, experience, and wisdom inside the government?
Yeah, in between the lines and directly. You know what I — what I find interesting is the conversations that aren't happening. I mean, these people, the civil service just generally, the stories don't get told, and the stories can be amazing. I mean, just amazing. I mean, movie-like caliber stories. The stories don't get told, and we don't — but and they're also the thing that never gets kind of asked is like, who should be running these places? Like it's — it's like Howard Lutnick is nominated to be Secretary of Commerce. What — what qualifications does he have to be Secretary of Commerce? It's almost not fair to Howard Lutnick because this goes on. This has been going on for a while. But — but it's like we seem to think like whether — whether you were or were not on the Epstein list is more important than have you run an organization like this? Do you know what's inside of it? Do you understand the Weather Service, which is inside of it? Do you understand NIST, which is inside of it? Do you have any kind of plan for it? That conversation just doesn't happen. I think like basic like tests of character and qualifications for the people who run the various agencies in the government is a really good idea. And Trump has just taken — that's been a problem for a long time. I think Trump is just — he's taking it to an extreme. And the whole Musk thing, I don't know what Elon Musk thought he was doing. I mean, it does — it only makes sense if you think of it. I mean, even people closest to him don't know what he's thinking. Because you're right, the numbers don't add up. But if what he was doing was trying to create enough disruption so that they would make room for this power grab, or if what he was doing was all he really wanted was to have a friend in NASA because SpaceX is what he cared about, then it makes sense. But, I mean, look, what has happened? He was all about — he said the budget deficit. National debt's gone up $3.5 trillion in the last two years. It makes no sense.
Yeah, I mean, that was a charade, obviously, that we're going to bring down the budget deficit with DOGE. What you do in this book so well is humanize this too, because you find — and anyone could go find it, go to your post office or wherever — people who have made careers of working for the government, people who are proud of working for the government, who have done a good job working for the government, people who are important to the government being pushed out. And you highlight a woman named Kathleen Walters, right, as one example of that.
Well, she — she was the human being between your tax return and the White House. I mean, she was the privacy officer of the IRS. And she was asked right away to hand over the file of the tax returns of undocumented workers. There's a special database, so they're assigned a number because you don't get Social Security numbers, so they can pay taxes. They've paid hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes over the last 30 years, and there's been an understanding that those tax returns are as sacred, as protected, just like our tax returns. ICE didn't know where to find undocumented workers. The tax returns had the most — the most recent home addresses, and it was clearly against the law to hand them over. But — but you know, they came for her. They came for her. They got her. And you think about this — I mean, this is a larger conversation about how we handle data. But — but she knew that what she was doing, she had an oath to the Constitution. She had an oath to — she made an oath to obey the law, and this was a violation of the law. And not only that, it was — it was a sin. It was like, you know, the last time that this sort of thing happened was in World War II when the census data was used to round up Japanese Americans, but that was legal. This is like a similar sort of thing and illegal. And the — that this — this attempt to break the norms and break the rules and sort of change the nature of the government is, I mean, it's a big story. And so she, anyway, she got washed — she got labeled a blocker and she got labeled a blocker and washed out.
