He chose the first four of eight off the face of Mount Rushmore.
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt.
In addition, Mr. Boston chose 24 distinct leadership traits he says were exhibited by these presidents.
The other four presidents, by the way, included in his best leadership category are FDR, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan.
71-year-old Talmadge Boston lives in Dallas, Texas.
Lawyer and historian Talmadge Boston with his book, How the Best Did It: Leadership Lessons from Our Top Presidents.
On this episode of Book Notes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb.
BookNotes Plus is available on the C-SPAN Now free mobile app or wherever you get your podcasts.
A discussion taking a look at the incoming Trump administration and efforts to make government more efficient with John Hart.
He's the CEO of Open the Books joining us now.
Thanks for giving us your time.
You bet.
It's a pleasure to be on.
Before we go into the discussion, a little bit about Open the Books for those who aren't familiar with it.
How do you describe it to other people?
Yeah, Open the Books is a transparency organization.
We started about 13 years ago, and we came about in part through a law that I helped work on when I was in the Senate working for Senator Tom Coburn.
And there was a bill that we passed in 2006 with Barack Obama, and Coburn and Obama met in 2004.
And it's called the Federal Funding Accountability Transparency Act that put all federal spending online.
And the hope that Coburn and Obama had is that would create an ecosystem of organizations that would take that data and make use of it and make sense of it.
So Open the Books is an organization that did that.
Adam Anjievsky was a co-founder.
He was a good friend of this program.
He passed away unexpectedly.
Sorry to hear that.
I appreciate that.
And so I recently took over just three weeks ago.
So I know the issue well.
Again, I've worked on the bill that helped create Open the Books.
But we're a first principles organization.
I think transparency is a building block of a free society.
If you remember from science class, carbon is a building block of life.
Transparency, when you connect it to things like freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, it brings those principles to life.
So what we're trying to do is really reinvigorate what we think of as a free society through transparency.
For the people watching, how easy is it to get information about what the government spends, what the government does, et cetera?
Well, that's a great question.
Well, think about it.
It's become a lot easier because we forced the government to put all federal spending online.
But our organization tries to put every dime online in real time at all levels of government.
So it can be easy, but it can be very, very difficult.
A lot of localities will play hide the ball with spending and send us forms and files that are impossible to search.
So we have a very get the data team that makes sense of that information.
And on the federal level, when you start to go down the contractor, subcontractor level, it gets more and more difficult.
So what we try to do is we're like the James Webb Space Telescope.
We zoom in on an area of spending and bring all those things to light and help the American people understand what government's doing with their money.
We'll talk about some of those specifics in a little bit, but to this idea of spending or at least making government efficient, what do you think of the names that have emerged at the head of this, Elon Musk, Nvive, Ramaswathy, and what they've been tasked to do?
Well, frankly, I'm ecstatic that they're doing this.
You know, Coburn was on the Simpson Bowles Debt Commission.
That came about after the financial crisis of 2007, 2008.
There was a quest to find a grand bargain to deal with our long-term entitlement problems.
And at that time, our debt to GDP ratio was about 90% or 100%.
Now it's 120%.
We're spending more on interest on the national debt than we are on defense.
So there's a real national security threat to the spending we have.
And back 40 years ago, President Reagan put the Grace Commission together, found that one out of every three tax dollars wasn't being spent efficiently.
And Congress has not done a good job of bringing that down.
Coburn helped bring it down for a two-year period with his colleagues in the Senate to 2012-2013.
That was the first real spending cut since the end of the Korean War.
He got rid of earmarks, but a lot of that work has been undone.
So we need to tackle that looming fiscal problem we have.
What do you think about the specific approaches that they plan for, taking a look at the minutiae, taking a look at the workforce size itself, and what ultimately ends up for the taxpayer as far as will services be impacted?
Will other things be impacted because of the shrinking of government, so to speak?
Well, I think, you know, actually services I think will get better.
You know, one of the key findings that we were able to pull out of GAO, we forced GAOs to do an annual report on duplication.
And one of their key statements was: if you downsize and streamline government in the right way, you improve the quality of services because you make it easier for government to even communicate with itself.
So I'm very optimistic that we can have fairly dramatic downsizing of government and improve the quality of services.
And I view this, this is not a demolition project, this is a restoration project.
I think we're in a 1989 moment in the United States, where that was the year the Berlin Wall came down.
This could be the year the bureaucratic wall comes down that separates the people from the government.
And we've been on a 100-year path of increasing spending since Woodrow Wilson, really.
So this could be the end of an era and the move back to restoring our founders' vision of limited government.
You said this is not a demolition project.
And I think a lot of people have the perspective that the approach that Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramislaw might have might just do just that.
Well, I just disagree with that.
I think what we've seen is Congress has really outsourced a lot of their decision-making to what's called the administrative state.
So Republicans tend to describe it as the deep state.
And I think that's the deep state is real.
There are people within the federal agencies that will obstruct and don't want to support the president's agenda, even though that's their job is to do that.
But we also have what I call the default state.
We've just been doing things a certain way for decades.
And it's going to be very helpful to have people on the outside who have, you know, Elon Musk is a historically significant figure.
So to have him apply his expertise, you know, I wish we would have had that when I was working in the Senate with Coburn.
That would have been very helpful to have his outside counsel supporting the work we were doing.
So I think it's going to be a very positive trend.
Yeah, of course there's going to be people that are upset.
And that's why we're having, that's why our organization is so important because our job is to bring the spending to light and let the public have a free and open fight about what is in their interest.
The gentleman put out an op-ed this week about what they hope to do and it reads in part like this.
We are assisting the Trump transition team to identify and hire a lean team of small government crusaders including some of the sharpest technical and legal minds.
The team will work with the new administration, with the White House Office of Management and Budget.
The two will advise us.
Doge, as it's known, is every step to pursue three major kinds of reform, regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions, and cost savings.
We will focus particularly on the driving change to executive action based on existing legislation rather than passing new laws.
Those three approaches, regulatory, administrative, and cost savings.
You look a lot into that world.
What are they facing as they hope to do that?
Yeah, I think if you look at just the duplication of the federal government, there are different buckets you can find significant savings pretty quickly.
One is duplication, that's about $100 billion.
And then improper payments and fraud in Medicare, Medicaid, that's about $100 billion.
And then there's a lot of just questionable, wasteful, silly spending.
You know, the Bridges to Nowhere, Shrimp on a Treadmill, Cats, or drag shows in Ecuador.
And you can get another significant block of savings in that category.
So their focus right now, and again, I would caution everything we're seeing.
They've been very forthright and public about what they want to do, but President Trump hasn't even taken office yet.
And so I think Doge is going to be a work in progress.
We don't fully know the scope of what they're going to do other than their charges to come out in 2026.
But you also have to keep in mind that we already have a standing debt commission in this country.
It's called the United States Congress.
And Congress is going to get to have a say on what they want to do.
So my feeling is Musk and Vivek are going to put pressure on Congress to act.
And it's in Congress's interest to act now and not wait on their report.
And that's what the founders intended: there would be a competition, the separation of powers to have a discussion of what is the best optimal size and scope of government.
This is John Hart joining us, open the books.
He serves as their CEO.
And if you want to ask him questions about this idea of efficiency and the work of their organization, 2027 48-8000 for Democrats, 202748-8001 for Republicans.
Independents, 202-748-8002.
Federal workers, if you want to give your thoughts too, 202-748-8003 is how you do that.
You can always text us at that same number, 202-748-8003.
You talked a little bit about your work with Senator Coburn on this from what your experience was.
What challenges might these two face?
I know it's a different kind of situation, but clearly you probably have lessons learned from these efforts.
What challenges do you think they face?
Well, I think every dollar in the federal government is protected by a special interest or a constituency.
So every dollar of savings is going to be a fight for them.
And I describe, you know, serving in the arena is a little bit like swimming in the ocean.
Like you can study swimming in the ocean, you can read about it, but until you're there and do it, you don't quite understand the currents.
And there's really two currents at work here: there's the surface-level current, and then there's the undertow and the undercurrent.
So there are two trends on the surface and below that are going to really help Elon and Vivek.
One is that we've had a political realignment in this country.
So the GOP is now the working class party.
So one of the hurdles that we faced was the left would argue that anything we would do to reduce spending would be harmful to low-income Americans, to working class people.
So now the base for the working class is with the GOP.
So the people advocating for those savings are now on that side.
So that's going to be a very helpful dynamic.
And then secondly, I think we've seen over the past, really in the digital age, that we're living through the biggest disruption and change in information technology since the printing press.
So power is moving away from centralized institutions, whether it's the media, whether it's political parties, and this administrative state, this fourth branch of government, power is going to be flowing away from that.
So those are two big trends that I think bode well for the chances of Doge to do, to make significant savings.
We have some calls lined up for you.
Let's hear from Iris.
Iris is on our independent line in Michigan for John Hart of Open the Books.
Iris, good morning.
Go ahead.
Good morning, Pedro.
Good morning, America.
Sir, is there anything in the writings and the laws of this country that allow one man to come to office and remake the way America works by establishing sanctuary cities for people who are coming here and just move all over the place?
I cannot believe what I saw when I first saw that list of sanctuary cities.
It was like the whole country was a sanctuary.
Is that legal?
Is that what they call constitutional?
Could you please tell us?
Thank you.
I'd appreciate it.
Thank you.
Well, yeah, I don't think this whole idea of sanctuary cities, I mean, one of the key priorities of the administration is going to be getting our immigration system under control.
And, you know, they're going to prioritize removing people who have illegal immigrants who have broken the law.
And there's a big question of, well, how much deportation can they do effectively in a short period of time?
So I think that's going to be the priority, and that's how they're going to go after these immigrants and sanctuary cities.
Republican line, Michael in Florida, Clearwater Beach.
Hi.
Yes, good morning.
Thank you for taking my call.
Real quick.
My call is about the unionization of government employees, which I guess makes it harder to get some of these people out of these jobs.
But it also flies in the face of the taxpayer who's paying for these employees.
Washington, D.C. voted about 90-some-odd percent Democrat.
It happens in a lot of big cities.
So the unions and the government become in bed together.
And the taxpayer is paying the bills.
We vote.
And they're more or less leaning in a fashion that helps the Democrats.
And it's kind of a payoff.
It's a pay-for-play scheme.
I'd like to see these unions eliminated.
What's your opinion on how that affects this particular problem we're looking at with the budget?
Well, yeah, there's going to be a very significant debate on something called Schedule F, which is a new classification of federal employees that the Trump administration wants to put in.
And the designation is any bureaucrat that has a policymaking role should be subject to firing from the administration.
So if they go through with that, they could eliminate a significant part of the workforce.
And we've done deep dives on all the agencies.
So if you think about EPA, for example, there are 14,000 staff at the EPA.
And we found that since 2018, we spent $100 million on 223 public affairs officers.
And why is that?
I mean, that seems like a large number.
But in Coburn's office, we had two PR staffers, me and one other assistant.
And so I think the caller is getting at is that there are these protections to keep these people in place that are probably inappropriate.
And the administration is absolutely going to go after that.
You used the word bureaucrat.
Does everybody fall under that category when it comes to a federal employee working day in and day out for the government?
Well, no, I think, you know, that's a great question.
What's happened with the administrative state is Congress has not wanted to take responsibility for decision-making authority.
And so when they outsource that, it's a heads-eye-win, tails-you-lose game, where if the, quote, bureaucrats make a decision they like, the members of Congress takes credit for it.
If they make a decision they don't like, they blame the bureaucrats.
So I think what Trump is trying to do is this is not an executive power grab.
I think the biggest problem in Washington is not executive overreach.
It's legislative underreach.
And by downsizing the administrative state, the president is actually moving power out of the executive branch and putting the onus back on Congress to own these decisions and own this responsibility.
And one of the cases that Vivekan and Elon have highlighted is EPA versus West Virginia.
So back when that was decided, some members of Congress blasted the Supreme Court on the Democratic side and said that this is a death sentence for the planet because it took away power from the EPA to regulate power plants.
And never before has one branch of government been more mad at another for giving their power back.
So the founders want this jealousy and this rivalry between the branches.
And that's what I think this Doge project is going to help restore.
I guess it's a scenario, but do you see an instance, is this going to be more of a workforce reduction in order to save, or do you see elimination of whole departments?
And do you think that's a good idea?
I think it's going to be both.
I think the sequencing that I think they have laid out is they're going to start with executive orders.
And so the purpose of this op-ed that they wrote is to prepare the, is to lay the groundwork for those executive orders.
They're just saying they have legal action in the US.
To say they have legal action, and they can take fairly dramatic steps, I think, to do that.
And that would be upheld.
And then Congress is going to look at that and think: okay, well, if we're going to pass appropriations bills, maybe we shouldn't provide the same level of funding if we're not going to have the same size of workforce.