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 for Our Top Presidents on this episode of Book Notes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb.
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We're joined now by Senior Research Fellow at the George Mason University Mercatus Center, Veronique DeRougie.
Welcome to the program.
Thank you for having me.
So we're talking about efficiency and this new Department of Government Efficiency.
Can you explain to us what the goals are?
So the goals is, and like the theory behind it, is that we have an enormous debt problem, which we have.
We're on a very unsustainable trajectory and something needs to be done.
But Congress has been unwilling to really do much on that front for decades.
And so they're creating this department and they're going to be, they say, cutting $2 trillion, whether it's annually or 10 years, it's unclear.
They're also going to work with Congress to find areas to cut, but in ways that can be done through the executive powers.
So Elon Musk has said he wants to cut $2 trillion from the federal government.
That's about one-third of total spending.
The budget's about $6 trillion.
He's called for a 75% cut in federal work, the federal workforce.
Let's talk about both those things.
The $2 trillion.
Can that be done just through cutting federal workers?
No.
No, it can't.
I mean, so.
So, would that have to go into entitlements or?
So, I mean, I think we need to back up a little bit.
Like, first, the question is: can they actually do it without going through Congress?
Right?
I'm not a lawyer, but I think there are questions about this.
I think it's a very untested theory.
I think along some margins, there's some things that they could do through executive power, no doubt.
Like what?
Give us an example.
Well, I mean, I assume they can, well, they think they can direct Congress or even the agencies to not enforce some regulations and to prioritize others.
I assume they can do some of that.
So there are things that they can do, and they certainly can work with Congress to figure out what needs to be cut.
75% of the workforce, I don't know that this can be done through the executive power or that it's even the right way to think about this.
What do you think is the right way to think about it?
So, like, leaving aside, like, first, I think working with Congress is the most important thing because the power of the string, the power of spending resides with Congress.
So, that to me seems really important.
And I absolutely agree with what is driving them, which is Congress has failed to do its job and doesn't really want to do its job because the incentives are against actually doing their job.
But the way I would try to think about it is first, there are two main ways.
The first one is thinking about the long term.
We're on an unsustainable path because of a few programs.
And I would work on making these, there are really three programs.
It's like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
And there are ways to actually put these programs on a sustainable path that actually preserves the benefits for those who need it the most, right?
But that's the long term.
It can be done by making reforms that are not drastic, but that actually make these programs more efficient.
And then there's making the government more efficient itself.
And along these lines, I would think about, for instance, what are the programs that the federal government is doing now and that it shouldn't do?
For instance, should we be subsidizing so many private companies?
Is it the role of the government to do this?
Subsidizing what?
Private companies.
Explain that.
Through subsidies.
For instance, green energies, but even fossil fuel energy, export subsidies for Boeing clients.
There's just lots of things that the federal government, even small business loans to companies that end up competing in a very competitive industry like restaurants, restaurants who could be competing next to each other with one who has a government loan, meaning like much preferable borrowing terms than others.
Should the government be doing this?
And if the answer is no, I would work on reducing this across the board, not just for specific, for specific programs that you don't like, or like explain to the public why, what's the logic, what is driving this move to reduce subsidies to the private sector.
And then the other big part is like the government, the federal government is doing a lot of things that are really purely state and local functions.
And I would work on reducing this by devolving some of these functions to the state.
I want to play something for you and get your reaction to it.
This is Elaine Kmark.
She led a government efficiency project in the Clinton administration.
And she's talking about DOGE and that the goals are not realistic.
The federal government each year spends about $6.1 trillion.
Most of that money, more than half, is spent on what's called mandatory spending.
That means it's Social Security payments, it's Medicare payments, it's retirement payments for veterans, etc.
So you can't touch that unless you want to raise a great big political stink, which guess what?
I don't think Trump really wants to do.
I mean, I don't think he's going to be wild about cutting Social Security payments or anything like that.
So that takes more than half out of there.
Then you've got interest on the debt, and then you've got $1.7 trillion left for what we call discretionary spending.
That is the military.
That is the FAA.
That is the Justice Department.
That is the Education Department.
That's HUD.
That's all the rest of the government.
Now, Musk has said, and Ramaswamy have said they want to cut $2 trillion.
Well, that's more than the entire federal discretionary spending.
So what you have to ask them is, what are you going to cut?
What are you going to do without?
And this is where the devil is in the details.
Do you think, Elaine, I've heard some folks say, you know, what you should really target is the regulatory state, that if you really target that, you're going to find some good meat, plenty of government waste, duplication, inefficiency.
What do you make of that argument?
Well, but it's not in the regulatory personnel.
I mean, that's where this goes a little fluey.
We should be looking at regulations.
There is no doubt.
There's no doubt that we should take a look at permitting and all this stuff.
But that doesn't cut bureaucrats.
That doesn't save money.
The number of people who are involved in administering the regulatory state is really small.
It's bupkus compared to the money that's in the federal government.
That's a different exercise than cutting the government.
And I think until you understand that, we did that twice.
We did that with federal regulations and we did that with internal agency regulations.
It's a very good thing to do.
They did a little of this in the Bush administration.
They did some of this in the Obama administration.
So it's a very good thing to do.
But it doesn't save you $2 trillion and it doesn't cut 80% of the workforce.
What do you think?
Do you agree with that?
No, I agree with the fact that I think it's unrealistic to think that they're going to be cutting $2 trillion or even that it's a sound goal because politically it would be so difficult and so disruptive.
That said, I will disagree on one important fact, which is it is true that most of the money is on Medicare, Social Security, and Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
That is absolutely true, but it's not true that we can't do anything about it.
In fact, if Congress doesn't do anything about it, legally by law, benefits, for instance, for Social Security, when the trust fund dries out will be cut by 21%.
So Congress is going to have to do something to make sure it preserves benefits for lower-income beneficiaries.
Because the 21% cut across the board would be very, very, very painful.
It's also not right to say that these programs, because they're on the mandatory side, shouldn't be cut because they are the driver of our future debt.
If Congress, what Congress decides to do when the trust fund expires is to pay all the benefits the way they are with borrowing, it means we're going to have just for Social Security and Medicare to borrow $115 trillion.
Just to give a perspective, this is almost four times more than we've borrowed in the entire history of the United States in just 30 years.
Who's going to be lending us all that money?
So it's correct to say all of the money is in these programs.
It is also correct to say that we have the last two years, the inflation, the rise of interest payment on the debt have made the problem even harder because we cannot default on these interest payments and they represent a bigger and bigger, bigger part of the problem.
But I don't think it's right to say, well, we just simply can't touch these programs.
Now, the question is whether you can do it through the way they want to do it and whether you get at it just by firing people.
And I think there's just, that's, I don't think you can address this question this way.
But there's a lot, there's a lot we can do.
They have an enormous microphone and they're bringing attention to the fact that we have a big problem.
And that's the beginning of a conversation.
And we are talking about federal spending and the new Department of Government Efficiency.
If you would like to join our conversation with Veronique DeRuger of George Mason University Mercatus Center, you can do so.
Our lines are Democrats, 202-748-8000.
It's 202-748-8001 if you're a Republican and 202-748-8002 if you're an Independent.
We also have a line set aside for federal workers.
You can call us on 202-748-8003.
Use that line also for texting.
You mentioned state and local functions that the federal government is doing that you think needs to be offloaded.
Give us some examples of what you mean.
So, for instance, there's a fair amount of the formula that's used, for instance, for Medicaid, where the share, the relative share of the federal government, what it pays in Medicaid compared to the state, that is a formula that hasn't been updated in like 75 years, I believe.
That is something that should be recalibrated because the way it is now, you have a lot of very high-income states that could take on much more of the burden of Medicaid for the people they put on the rolls than they do now.
And basically, the federal government is taking a lot of that burden.
So, there are things like this that could be done to kind of rebalance the share of Medicaid payment going to the states.
Transportation.
Transportation, there's a lot that could be devolved to the states because a lot of the transportation functions are purely state and local function.
They're also private functions, right?
So, things like this.
Education is something that, I mean, it's arguable whether we could actually save a lot of money, but education, lots of subsidy for K-12, that could be done more at the state and local level.
The advantage of this also, which is not, it's not just one about the saving money.
It's also one of actually putting the incentives where they matter the most.
If the states are more responsible for the things that they actually spend, they have an incentive to think about whether this is really a program that is efficient, whether it's serving the population and needs to serve.
So, for instance, on Medicaid, because the federal government takes on so much of the burden of Medicaid for some of these states, they don't have much of an incentive to clear their roles, to rethink their eligibility to do things like this.
So it's not just about the money.
It's about actually thinking about how should we serve the people we say we want to serve.
I want to ask you about a posting you put on X, and you mentioned several things that you would cut or refirm, but you said reform the Department of Defense's entitlement system.
What does that mean?
So, one of the problems, so defense is a core function of the federal government.
It's an important function.
And the Defense Department has pretty much the same problem that the federal government has, which is it has an enormous entitlement pro, I don't want to use entitlement, they have their benefits, the benefits side of the program is actually eating up an enormous and growing share of their budget.
This is for military and civilian workers in the Defense Department.
And so they're going to have, like, a lot of people focus, you know, their attention on weapon system and this and that.
But it's like the scholar from Brookings said, right?
In the end, the part that's growing really fast in the Department of Defense is that part.
And if the amount you give to the Department of Defense isn't growing as fast as that part of the budget, you end up with less money going to the part that's actually about really building defense capabilities.
So I don't know how to do it, but I think this is something that the Department of Defense needs to focus on to actually put itself on a sustainable path too.
And you think that veterans, military veterans, their benefits need to be cut in some way?
That's not my area of expertise, but there are a lot of people who actually look at defense who say this is going to be a growing problem going forward.
How you fix it needs to take under consideration where those dollars are needed the most and how you can reform it without hurting how you cut the fat or how you reduce eligibility without cutting the muscle, right?
I mean, this is the hard part, and this is why it's not done much.
It's because it's really hard to do.
The problem is, do we have a choice going forward?
Can we afford to neglect the federal budget as we have?
And can we stay on this path and do nothing?
And the answer is no.
So something's going to have to be done, and it's going to be hard.
There's no doubt.
Let's talk to callers.
We'll start with David and Randolph, Maine, Republican.
Good morning, David.
Good morning.
I'd like to say back in the, I think it was the early 80s when the government decided to go in and raid Social Security and they took out almost a trillion dollars.
I think it was $400 million the first time and $500 million the second time.
I'm not quite sure, but I think that's what it is.
And I think Marjorie Taylor Greene's going to do a hell of a job at taking care of fraud and abuse in the government, in the Doge.
Thank you for your call.
Thank you.
What do you think?
And also about Marjorie Taylor Greene and what that subcommittee in the House is expected to do.
So I'm not exactly sure.
We haven't seen much, but I want to comment on something that has been said about waste, fraud, and abuse.
I know people like to talk about waste, fraud, and abuse, but we're not going to really balance the budget on the back of waste, fraud, and abuse, in large part because this waste, fraud, and abuse is embedded in programs that are popular with special interest, right?
So it doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything.
So just kind of just throwing away waste, fraud, and abuse as this is a solution of everything doesn't remove the difficulty politically to address this problem.
That said, it doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything.
The Government Accountability Office looks at fraud in the federal government and has identified and has identified between $200 billion and $500 billion of fraud every year in the federal government.
A lot of it in Medicare and Medicaid, right?
It should be a priority.
We shouldn't tolerate fraud.
And the reason why it's there, it's mostly because of neglect, mostly because no one is actually really trying to go after the fraud.
And we need to do something.
But it just, it's not just, it's going to be hard.
It's going to be hard, but it needs to be done.
It's a real issue.
We've got a question for you on text from Sheila in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Could you please ask your guests who sets the interest rate for the government borrowing and why can't that interest rate be lowered to save money?
The global market does.
So basically, the no, no one, you can try to artificially fix it, but ultimately it's not going to work, because if investors think that the U.S.
Has become risky or riskier than it has been, and what they really want to do is to basically get a premium for lending us money, meaning higher interest rates, and they're not able to, they're not going to lend us that Money.
So that's the, we can't have a price control applied to interest rates because it's going to have real consequences.
Let's talk to Pete, New Haven, Connecticut, Independent.
Hi, Pete.
Hi.
Yeah, I'm very concerned about the deficit.
It's over $35 trillion now.
And the interest rate is $1 trillion every year.
So my question is, why do we always come up when somebody's running for president or re-election or the incumbent say that we're going to tax the billionaires more to get the revenue down?
Now, from what I understand, there's 1% of the population of the United States of billionaires.
And they control the whole country with that kind of money.
Why does it never get done to tax the billionaires every time they talk about it?
That's my question.
So the caller is right.
I mean, the debt has just crossed $36 trillion.
Our deficit is $2 trillion.
It's heading to a much higher number.
In the next 10 years, the federal government alone is going to have to borrow another $22 trillion.
I mean, these are like enormous number.
In 30 years, we're heading to 166% of debt to GDP.
It's enormous.
These numbers are not, we can't just fill the gap just by taxing billionaires.
And by the way, our tax codes is already very progressive.
It's just much more progressive than European countries, for instance, because the secret of European countries is that they tax the middle class and lower income people a lot in the way that the U.S. doesn't.
It doesn't mean there's not a lot of money on the revenue side.
We have things that we call tax expenditures.
Tax expenditures are tax breaks that are given to special interest.
Not all of them are to special interest.
Some of them are to prevent double taxation of income.
But there's a lot that can be done.
All these tax breaks that are given to special projects, all the tax, the Inflation Reduction Act has some green energy subsidies that are done through the tax code.
They were supposed to be $300 billion over 10 years.
They're heading to a trillion dollars of tax subsidies through the tax code.
And over $300.
You're saying that those are lost revenues because of those taxes.
Yes.
And $4 trillion over 30 years.
We need to look at that side of revenue.
And by the way, it would do what the gentleman is asking because a lot of the time, these tax subsidies go to big companies who they like those subsidies, but it's not that they need them.
I've studied these type of programs my whole life, and I can tell you a vast majority of the subsidies and the tax breaks and the loan guarantees, they go to companies that are already doing the work, that would be doing the work.
And again, they like it, but this is where we should start first.
On the line for Republicans in Tennessee, William, you're next.
Thank you.
Go ahead, William.
Hi, how are you?
Thank you for your hard study of the economics of government.
I worked for the Los Angeles Air Force as a civilian chef, and they would take ovens out of the kitchen that were working very well and put in Mickey Mouse ovens and just let the good ovens rot on the loading dock.
Government waste is a big part of the problem because we have a huge number of military bases and they waste money like it's going out of style.
All right, William.
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of waste that is happening.
There's a lot of, there's a lack of accountability that is unquestionable in government.
And we should address these issues.
And I'm glad if the Doge is actually bringing attention to these issues of fraud, waste, and abuse.
But again, we're not going to be balancing and addressing our long-term budget or fiscal problem only on the back of waste, fraud, and abuse.
Again, it doesn't mean we shouldn't do it.
We should do it.
But you know what?
The first step, start with the GAO.
They have reports about fraud.
They have reports of improper payment every year, $236 trillion the last time they looked.
And they've been putting out these reports every year and Congress doesn't do anything.
$236 trillion.
$1 billion, sorry.
$2 billion every year.
An improper payment, a vast majority...
Of the government paying companies.
Companies, contractors.
No, this is mostly through programs.
Like the top improper payments go to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and Congress doesn't do anything.
That should be a priority to actually look at how to fix this.
Now, I believe there's probably a technology problem.
There's probably, they lack the ability to track these payments, and maybe that's one way that Doge really can help.
But in a lot of these issues...
But modernizing the technology would be a cost, not...
It would be a cost, but ultimately, listen, we're not going to do anything in one year, right?
It's a long-term project.
And I am glad that these guys are bringing attention to the issue.
And improper payment is something I've been complaining about, and I've been horrified that Congress doesn't do its job and doesn't seem to want to address it.
And so a lot of this goes to people who are over, like it's overpayment.
Like I think it's 76% of it is overpayment.
Very little of it is underpayment.
That said, again, it's wrong for the federal government if someone is eligible for a benefit and they're making a mistake in the wrong direction, they should fix that too.
So it should be a priority.
And the problem that we have is that Congress doesn't do its job.
Congress has really abdicated a lot of the time.
Because it's easier.
I think the incentives are to delegate a lot of the power to the agencies, to the executive branch, and they don't want to take unpopular decisions because voters don't want to hear that there is a problem.
And so, and people don't want to hear that really, ultimately, if we wanted to put the country on a sound fiscal path, it requires to look where the money is and where the money is is Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
This is also the driver of our current and future debt.
And this is important.
Why?
Because we can't, again, we've talked about interest rates.
There is a moment where investors are going to be looking at the U.S. and say, you know what, for all of this debt, we'd like higher interest rates.
Higher interest rates means higher interest payments.
A third of our debt needs to be rolled over every year.
So it means that when interest rates start going up, we feel that pain very quickly because every year we have higher and higher interest payment.
We've seen it in the span of the last three years, right?
We went from over $200 billion in interest payment on the debt to close to a trillion dollars in just the span of three years.
Imagine that in the next 10 years.
So this is why we need to do it.
And the problem is that Congress so far has not signaled that it was ready to be serious.
We see it again with improper payment.
GAO put out this report and they have over 5,000 unused recommendations by the GAO about how to make government more efficient.
Things that could save money on average, it's like they said it's over a span of 10 years or so, but it'd be like $151 billion if you put up all these recommendations.
And GAO is the government accountability office.
Exactly.
They answer to Congress, not the executive branch.
Yes.
But again, these are things that we could do to improve efficiency and save some money, but ultimately to put us on a sustainable path, Congress is going to have to do its job in reforming Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
And they can do it by preserving benefits for those who need it the most.
But they have to be willing to actually even talk about it.
All right.
Let's talk to Barbara in Oklahoma Independent Line.
I can't believe you're letting her filibuster for 10 minutes between calls and talk and lie about our, this is not a tax on the government.
It's a trust fund that Reagan stole from first.
He put a trillion in his budget to the elite.
And now Trump did in his budget.
That was a trillion of our money.
And yeah, and he's going to do it again when he gets in there.
He's going to redo that same tax plan that gives it all to the billionaires and takes away from our, it's a trust.
It is not theirs to take a dime from.
Not one dime should go to them.
And also, I would like to say the border thing, Russia-Russia, all of his cabinet went to prison.
And then he pardoned them all.
They all went to prison.
There was no hoax.
400 and something were indicted.
400 and something.
The hoax was Hillary.
No one indicted there.
Okay, okay, Barbara.
Go ahead.
So the trust is real, right?
It has real assets that were built with taxes collected on workers.
And it was basically the surplus of...
So the way Social Security works is that there's a payroll tax.
We tax people who are working.
And with this, the revenue, we pay current retirees.
And for many years until 2010, there was a surplus.
Basically, there were more revenue collected than benefits paid, and the rest would go to the trust fund.
And ever since 2010, basically there's been a gap between what was collected in Social Security and the payroll tax and what needed to be paid to current workers.
And we've been using basically the assets in the trust fund to pay that gap.
And in 2033, there won't be any assets anymore.
No one is touching this.
I mean, this is just that the reason it's going away because it's being used right now.
And what a lot of people fail to understand is like the money they pay in payroll tax is not going to an account with their name on it.
It's actually going to pay for current retirees.
Now, there is a lot of the tax cuts needs to be expended because it would mean an enormous tax on a lot of people that are going to be very unpopular, but they should be offsets.