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Welcome back to Washington Journal.
We're joined now by Max Steyer.
He is President and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service to discuss the federal workforce and the cuts over this past year.
Max, welcome back to the program.
Thank you so much, Mimi.
It's great to be here.
Remind us of your mission and your funding for the partnership.
Absolutely.
Mission really straightforward, and that is we believe in better government, stronger democracy.
Our theory of the case is having a well-run government, both the federal level and state and local level, is fundamental to our democracy.
It's a non-partisan issue.
No matter what policy position you want to pursue, having public institutions that can deliver good results to the public is essential.
Our funding comes from government, so we do fee-for-service work from traditional foundations, individuals, company sponsorship.
We are, again, a non-partisan nonprofit, so a challenging issue for all nonprofits, but we work to make sure we can get to double bottom line, achieve our mission, and have the resources to be able to get stuff done.
And what would you say is the state of the federal workforce right now?
Not good.
Worse, certainly in my lifetime and probably well beyond that.
You know, we just had important data released from the Office of Personnel Management that shows net 10% decrease in the federal workforce, not exactly over the full year of the first year of the Trump second term.
But the issue isn't numbers.
The really more prominent problem is the way those folks were chased away from our government and who was chased away.
A good example, we've had challenge for a while getting young people in our government, and we saw a drop of a full percentage point in those under the age of 30.
So now we're looking at closer to 8% under the age of 30 rather than 9% over the course of a single year.
You had a third of the food safety inspectors, Department of Agriculture leave.
You had a quarter of the IT management from Social Security Administration.
Defense Department had the largest number of people leave.
I mean, you basically saw a hurricane go through our government, and the damage was non-planned, idiosyncratic, and profound.
The argument, though, Max, is that that hurricane, as you call it, had to go through the federal government because there were so many extra people.
It was so bloated and so inefficient.
And a couple of thoughts on that, just to look at the data.
Actually, the size of the federal workforce is the same as it was in the 1960s.
I'm talking absolute size.
Our country has grown a great deal since then, and the responsibilities of our government has as well.
You could imagine a world in which you did see a 10% reduction in the staff that was smart and that didn't reduce the actual capability of our government.
That's not what happened here.
It was not the right people.
Again, as I mentioned, it was disproportionately young people, disproportionately people with tech savvy, those that were willing to speak truth to power, those that represented positions that the current administration doesn't like, as opposed to not being quality people.
These were not the right people to let go, and any smart leader would have understood that.
The easiest way to understand it is Russ Vogt walking in said, I want to traumatize the workforce.
I've never in my entire life seen a manager who you would ever want to hire say that he wanted to traumatize his workforce.
It's what they did, and they chased away great talent in doing so.
If you'd like to join our conversation with Max Steyer at the Partnership for Public Service, you can start giving us a call now.
Lines are bipartisan.
Democrats are on 202748-8000.
Republicans 202-748-8001.
And Independents 202-748-8002.
We also have a line set aside for federal workers.
That line is 202-748-8003.
So if you're currently in the federal government or if you were laid off or took early retirement, took the fork in the road, do give us a call on that line and share your experience with us.
Max, the OPM, the Office of Personnel Management, has released some data.
And you can see this at data.opm.gov.
It shows the federal civilian workforce over time.
This is a chart that goes back to 2015, essentially showing that it had gone up and then back down to those 2015 levels.
It talks about each agency and how many people work for each agency, etc.
What are your thoughts on data coming from the OPM and if they have been transparent with that data?
Yeah, look, I mean, starting point, you know, kudos to Scott Cooper, the OPM director and OPM, for putting this data out.
It is so important when the administration is making changes and really important changes, providing that information is vital.
And they did it here.
That's not been the case in many other instances across our government where we've seen huge change, often harms to our government and the data needed to understand it hidden.
So this is actually unusual for this administration and definitely to be celebrated.
And thanks to the whole OPM team for doing that.
The story it tells, as I just outlined, is not a good one.
You're right that you can imagine a world in which coming back down to 2015 levels or below even might be a good way to save resources.
That is not what happened here.
This was unplanned.
I mean, again, I use the metaphor of Hurricane.
You can think of Godzilla.
Across the board, the people who were let go were not the right ones, and no planning was done to make sure that was the case.
Even look at some of the individual numbers.
When you think about the very first people that the president fired, it was the inspector general, 17 inspector generals whose job it is to find waste, fraud, and abuse.
They're responsible for saving billions and billions of dollars for the American taxpayer.
And he let them go.
And why?
You know, not because they did their job poorly.
There was no cause here.
It's because he didn't want anyone looking over his shoulder.
He didn't want anyone second-guessing his choices.
He didn't want to have the oversight that Congress wanted and that the American people should want.
So again, it's how it was done more than anything else that people should be troubled by.
And the future doesn't bode well either because what I see coming forward in 2026 is not necessarily the continuation of massive firings, but a change in a system so that the people who are restocking the federal workforce are those that are loyalists as opposed to those that have the best quality capabilities that can work on behalf of the American people.
We're seeing a critical change in the way our government is run.
It is now moving back to the spoil system away from nonpartisan experts being in our government to instead those that are willing to do whatever this president wants, no matter the law or the constitution, both at the political and the career level.
That's not what our system should be designed to do.
It's bad for the American people, and we're going to have corruption and incompetence as a result.
Let's put some numbers up on the screen for everybody.
These are reductions in the federal workforce in 2025.
There were more than 322,000 employees that left the federal workforce during that year.
Every federal agency was impacted.
As far as the percentage of the workforce, it was the Department of Education, HUD, and Treasury saw the most cuts.
But in terms of raw numbers, it was the Defense Department, Veterans Affairs, Treasury, and HHS was impacted the most.
And Max, just in terms of the impact that this has on the American people, I know during the shutdown that happened towards the end of last year, there were callers that called in and said, you know what, the government's been shut down.
I haven't seen any impact to my life.
I'm just fine.
As far as I'm concerned, keep it shut down.
Right.
And, you know, the most important thing with respect to the shutdown, and frankly, there is a risk that we may see another shutdown, I think hopefully unlikely at the end of this month.
But the reality is that it's really a misnomer.
It's not really a shutdown.
Three-quarters of the federal budget is mandatory.
So most of what government does, in fact, did not get interrupted.
And even amongst the quarter that remains of the budget, much of that continued on because the president has a lot of discretion to decide what can continue irrespective of a shutdown.
So, you know, if our government truly stopped, we would see chaos in the streets.
It would be the end of our country as we know it.
We've never seen that, at least not so far.
But what we are seeing is a degradation of services.
So that 10% cut, and again, that's 10% as an overall number, but a third of the food safety inspectors that are gone, what does that mean?
We will have more people getting sick from foodborne illnesses.
What does it mean that a quarter of the IT management at Social Security Administration are gone?
It will mean that people are not going to get their benefits in the same way that they had before.
They're going to wait longer, which is already happening.
The big cuts at the VA you described, our veterans are going to receive less good treatment.
Biggest cut of all in terms of absolute numbers, the Defense Department.
What sense does that make when you have a president saying he wants to double the Defense Department budget at the same time in which he's let go, fired, or constructively fired more people from the Defense Department than any place else?
This is terrible management.
This is a terrible stewardship of the public's resources.
And what I'm saying is not a partisan issue.
What I'm describing is a return to a 19th century idea that our government is there for the benefit of those who got elected as opposed to the American public.
And Republican and Democratic presidents for 140 years pushed back against that notion.
They made different choices, but they were all committed to the public good.
Americans should understand that this change is not partisan and it's bad for them.
And just a small correction, Max, it's not a doubling of the defense budget.
It's 50%, which is still substantial, but it is not the doubling.
Mary in Massachusetts Independent Line, you're on with Max Dyer.
Hi, thank you for taking my call.
I actually have a question and then two comments.
I don't know if I can do all of them.
The question is, How many government contractors were there in the 1960s versus today?
And then my father was a lifelong Democrat, worked for the federal government, was a comp troller, and he would often get complain about the federal waste back in the 80s and the 90s.
And he would end up having to leave his position and take another position in the government to keep his security.
But that was a big problem.
And I personally have been dealing with the U.S. Patent Office, and there's a lot of waste in the U.S. Patent Office because it's not streamlined.
Half of the people don't talk to the other departments.
There's hundreds of departments in there, and nobody seems to know anything half the time.
So the amount of waste that happens in the U.S. Patent Office is also something that should be considered.
And not to mention the Obama Events Act has created a big problem where only multinational and multinational corporations and multinational law firms are really benefiting and not the independent inventor.
So there are some issues that we need to look at.
All right.
Thank you for taking my call.
Go ahead, Max.
Excellent.
Well, look, the contractor question is a really, really important one.
And people mistake, I think, the size of the federal workforce for the size of the federal government.
They're not the same things.
I mentioned that the federal workforce has effectively been the same size prior to Trump as it was in the late 1960s.
Our federal government obviously increased its size enormously.
Organizations typically measure their size by their budget, not by the headcount.
In the federal government's case, the headcount is especially deceiving because, as you just really, your question suggests, the number of contractors is really, in fact, much larger than the number of direct federal employees.
So we've seen huge increases in federal contractors.
There's not good data on that.
There's a gentleman named Paul Light who did the best work on this some years ago.
And there's a senator who tried to get agencies to give this information to them and they could not.
So big issue looking at contractors, not just contractors, but also grantees.
And there's important work that could and should be done to make sure that that is more efficiently done.
Oftentimes, contractors are used because the system is too difficult to actually hire the talent you need inside the government itself.
So lots and lots of opportunity for improvements there, which comes to your second point, and that is the amount of waste that exists in our government already.
It is large.
There's no question about it.
I think it's important to understand that you can accept that proposition.
You can do something about it, but not the way this administration is doing it.
I mentioned earlier the firing at the very front end of the 17 inspector generals.
That did not help in addressing waste, fraud, and abuse.
In fact, it increased it.
Choosing people, again, on the basis of loyalty, especially at the top, you look at the senior most people in this administration, many of whom have a bunch of different jobs.
They're not, in fact, working as good managers of the organizations they run.
They don't have the qualifications.
They don't have the commitment to the public good.
And that means more waste, not less.
So 100% with you that we should see substantial reform in our government.
What is happening right now is taking us actually in the wrong direction rather than in one that can address these issues that you rightly flag.
Paul in Leola, Pennsylvania, Independent Line.
Good morning, Paul.
Thank you so much.
So I agree with you that the president's tactics and approach are not always kosher or, you know, not always seem to be the right way to do things.
And full disclosure, I voted for the president the first two times, and I didn't even vote for him the last time.
I voted for Kamala just because of this kind of chaos.
You know, it's just kind of sick of the Trump way.
However, we voted for him and he is our president.
Our deficit and our debt are crazy.
I mean, we're approaching 40 trillion in debt.
Our deficit is, what, 1.8 trillion a year for the last couple of years.
It's so easy to nitpick.
And I haven't heard you say, sir, how you would do it if you were president.
I am so happy that our president is trying to cut waste.
And so how would you legally do it if you were president, sir?
Sir, how would you cut the deficit?
Let's get that answer for you, Paul.
Hey, it's an excellent question.
And in fact, my organization, the Partnership for Public Service, has a major initiative, government in the new era, which is directly trying to address what you are describing.
And so let me quickly run through a few things and then maybe we'll tell me when I have to stop.
First and foremost, you have to start from the proposition that our government is actually there for the public good rather than the interests of the leaders of the day.
And that has been the consensus, Republican, Democratic, Independent view for 140 years.
We need to get back to that.
Otherwise, you do see corruption and bad choices that are a real problem.
Number two, we have 4,000 political leaders in our system right now that are unmanaged.
None of them have specific qualifications they have to meet.
None of them have performance plans.
None of them have any accountability at all.
So again, one change that I would argue for is whether they're political or career, you need to have people managed.
You'll never have that career workforce actively accountable and doing its job well if the four or five layers above them have no management.
And so changing the way we actually lead our government is the second piece that I would push for for reform.
Number three, I think we need to look at our government as an enterprise.
It's a legacy government that hasn't kept up with the world around it.
The problem set of today needs multi-agency, multi-level government, multi-sector responses, but it's not organized to do so.
So we need to actually move towards an enterprise perspective of solving problems.
Number four, AI and technology is clearly going to be a force for opportunity.
It has to be done responsibly.
But actually ensuring that we invest appropriately in the knowledge and capability of the federal workforce, including political appointees, to use those forces for improved performance would be a huge improvement where we are right now.
And five would be we need to focus on success, not just problem.
We have a lot of architecture and government that is admiring problems rather than looking for the solutions.
And that creates risk aversion, which is a problem too.
As fast as I can do it, five things.
All right.
Not bad there, Max.
Edward, Burbank, California, Independent Line.
Go ahead, Edward.
Yeah, can you hear me?
Okay.
Yes, we can.
Okay, so regarding this Doge activity, I think number one, we've got a president who wants to run the government as if it were his personal company.
You can see that in everything that he does.
He wants to run the world as if it was his personal company.
Now, I worked for 30 years in corporate America, 15 years in banks as a salesperson and a manager, and then 15 years in a brokerage firm as a compliance officer.
I went through several mergers, lost my job a couple of times, but the reduction in forces was based on performance and or duplication.
It was not someone just coming in and saying, you're out, you're out, you're out.
I did terminate people based on performance in compliance.
I was auditing offices to determine whether they were following policy, procedure, and guidelines.
But it wasn't just coming in and saying, hey, you're out.
Now, I think if they were going to do Doge, they should have started with the executive branch, the Congress, and the Judicial Supreme Court to reduce the waste, fraud, and abuse and duplication and waste.
But they started with the federal government because they want to be the untouchables and not be looked at to see how improper many of what they do is.
Thank you very much.
Amy, can I jump in?
Yes, please.
Okay, so I think you put your finger on something absolutely critical here.
I do think the president sees no difference between running his private business and running the United States government, and he should.
The reality is that when you're serving as president of the United States, you really are supposed to be serving the American public rather than your private interests.
And there are constitutional limitations on what you can and cannot do.
You know, this president just gave an interview in which he said he sees no restraint on himself other than what he chooses not to do.
And that's not how our system is supposed to work.
To begin with, again, presidents are supposed to be looking after the public good.
He isn't running Trump International.
He's running the United States government.
We should all wish him success because he's the airplane pilot for all of us here.
But we have to have a set of expectations that include that his choices are for our good rather than his own good.
And that is not what we're seeing.
It's not the very explicit choice that he's made.
So that is the starting point.
You can actually use business principles to run our government a lot better, but you cannot run our government like a business.
It's not the same thing.
The purpose is not the same thing.
The constraints are not the same thing.
Just seeing the government shutdown is a good example of that.
Your board of directors, if you think of Congress that way, doesn't operate in that way.
So it's a different proposition.
You also need different skills.
And we're not seeing that understanding here at all.
And that's a problem.
Clifton in Albany, New York, Democrat.
Good morning, Clifton.
Good morning.
Yes, when we have a president that banks up six companies, you could see that he doesn't know how to run a business.
He just hires people and ensure he doesn't pay the highest wages.
And he went out and had all those people fired.
Right there, I see, I'm 80 years old.
I've been around a while working for several companies and retired after 35 years.
So I've seen a lot of ways companies cooperate.
I would have gone out and gotten former hired executives or bosses and bring them into the department.
I wouldn't have locked the doors and isolated everybody, sent people in who know nothing about the jobs.
I've gotten tired people, brought them in and say, where do you see the efficiency and the inefficiency before I would fire people?
His priorities are so wrong.
He could give $50,000 to people to join ISIS who he has no idea what their education is, experience, IQs.
And yet he's making all these big decisions in our Congress and the useless Supreme Court just sit back and let him destroy this country.
The German chancellor said it's sad that the fascist supporters are letting him get away with this.
He's making the whole world unstable because nobody looks and trusts the United States.
All right, Max.
So again, I think, you know, your experience is meaningful here.
And I agree with you that when you're thinking about how you want to run an organization, there are a couple of things that you need.
You need people who have experience.
Experience does matter.
And Doge certainly suffered from bringing people in who had no true understanding of the context they were operating in.
I think you need competence and character.
And I think that second piece is equally important, especially when you're dealing with public institutions.
The character piece is even more important than in any other context.
And we have not seen that.
I mean, if you look at the leadership choices, you know, to name names, you know, the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegset, and the list goes on and on.
These are not people who have run major, huge organizations.
They don't have the experience.
And frankly, they don't have the character in that they're not committed ultimately to the constitutional order and to the good of the public.
They are responsive to the person who put them there, and that's it.
That is not how our system should run.
So I think your prior experience is important.
It has not been well represented in the way our president has operated to date.
I hope that there was some important learning from Doge, but I'm not seeing it.
And I think that's the other piece that is critical here: which is you have an administration that fundamentally will never admit that it made a mistake, that assumes that whatever it does is right because they did it.
And in today's world, that is, you know, a recipe for driving off the cliff.
We have a lot of challenges.
There's a lot of new problems that are out there.
You need to be able to rely on good information.
And this administration is shutting the door on it.
It kills the messenger when it gets information that it doesn't like.
And as a result, it's creating a situation in which it will not get important data to be able to choose better when difficult issues come and arise.
So, again, this is terrible management.
It's not the way our government should be run.
So, Max, about a month ago, Elon Musk gave an interview on the Katie Miller podcast.
And this is a headline from Axios that says, Musk says Doge was only somewhat successful and wouldn't do it again.
What was your reaction to that?
My reaction was, you know, easy for him to say, and there's an awful lot of pain that our country and many, many, many thousands of federal employees have had to experience.
It's, you know, all well and good for him to say wouldn't have done it again and maybe not so successful, but he has created an incredible amount of harm.
You know, there are again legitimate questions about how much you want to invest, as an example, in international development.
They had no business shutting down a federal agency like USAID that had been created by Congress, set up by law, but they did that.
And if you look at numbers that came out of the Gates Foundation, there may be 200,000 children globally that are no longer alive as a result of that.
These are very, very real consequences internationally, domestically.
We don't have the full accounting for all of them, but they're really, really bad.
So, what I would say is, you know, own up to, you know, it's what I would say to my kids: own up to your mistake and make good on it.
And that I have not seen.
He has not made good on it.
There's a lot of investment to the prior caller's points about the need to make our government better.
I'd love to see Elon Musk actually do this the right way and invest in improving the capabilities of the United States workforce, improving, truly improving the technology backbone.
He's not taking responsibility for fixing what he's broken, and that to me would be the right response.
Let's talk to Dennis, a Republican in Ohio.
You're on the air, Dennis.
Okay, I want to say something about your present guest.
I disagree 100% with what he's saying.
He is strictly taking a liberal point of view on everything.
He's 100% wrong about Donald Trump.
Trump brought in people that were all good people.
They all had a lot of common sense.
And that's all they needed.
That's all our founding fathers wanted them to have was common sense and a good background.
They're all good people, and I think that he's irritating all of them unfairly.
That's one thing.
The other thing is, I think everybody should go on the web that has access to the website to the internet, should go to gods5stones.com.
That's gods5stones.com.
It has a secret to the problems we're having with our voting registration right now.
I'll discuss time there.
I think it's very important.
Everybody goes to God.
Let's take up that first point that President Trump has nominated and placed people in power that are good people and that they have common sense.
So, you know, I even start with the very first point, which is the proposition that everything that I've said is liberal.
And it's so important to understand that it is absolutely appropriate for people to fight over the policy directions of our government.
But I don't see it as liberal or conservative to argue that our government should be well run and should be ultimately there for the public good rather than the interests of those that are in power at the moment.
And that proposition is one, as I said earlier, that we've had consensus amongst Republicans and Democrats for 140 years.
And Donald Trump is turning that on its head.
So critical for me, whatever one may think about the choices that I believe should be for good management of our government, it's not about liberal or conservative.
So in terms of the nature of the people that the president is selecting, I think you just have to look down the list.
Is Pete Hegseth really the best person one can imagine, either with respect to his competence or his character to run the Defense Department?
Is Kash Patel the best person for the FBI?
Is Robert Kennedy the best person for HHS?
I mean, you're looking at a set of folk who have not had just the most basic experience running large organizations.
They don't have the core substantive expertise.
They have demonstrated, you know, lots of mistakes already in terms of what they have done.
You know, if you look at Pete Heckseth, if he had been an enlisted man, he would have been let go a long time ago for the things that he's done already.
The record speaks for itself.
But most importantly, I think you have to look at this question not just of competence, but of character.
They are making choices that are fundamentally about what the president is asking for.
Look at the news of the day.
They're now investigating the Federal Reserve and Jerome Powell.
And it is, you know, using our Justice Department, again, not to pursue the evidence, but rather to go after perceived political enemies or folks that you want to push in a particular direction.
That is true weaponization of government power.
It is wrong.
It is dangerous for our system of government, and it's going to result in bad things for the American people.
I think, you know, Mr. Powell's response is the appropriate one, but he shouldn't have to make it.
The folks at the Justice Department should not be doing that kind of prosecution.
And it's the nature of the people that the president has selected that is putting us in this position.
Arielle in White House, Tennessee, Independent Line.
Good morning.
Good morning.
I have a question and possibly two comments.
I am currently working in the private sector in corporate America.
And I also have relatives that work in the public sector where they are seeing possibly It looks like this administration is looking to more so move the federal help jobs into the use of AI.
So I would like to know what do you think the projections are within the workforce given AI in this administration and what is the foreseeable future with that.
As we know, Secure 2.0 is, it looks like an administrative approach. to help with social security in the future.
So I would like to also know your thoughts on that.
And my last comment is, I think what we have to remember, regardless of who's in office, it's a job to serve the people in addition to the legislative and the judicial branches.
So it's not really about how we personally feel about President Trump.
Most average Americans wouldn't even have access to a guy with his access to wealth, I'll say.
So it's not about how we personally feel about him or any candidate.
It's about how good he is or how fit he is to serve we the people.
Thank you.
100% agree with your last point.
Ultimately, it should be a calling.
It's an extraordinary opportunity for public servants to be able to have critical purpose to serve the American public.
And I think that is the most important quality that we should be nurturing in both our political and our career leaders across the government.
Now, your points about AI, I think, are very important.
We at the partnership have a whole center on government AI.
And the reason why we do is that we do think it's a fundamental opportunity for our government to better serve the American public.
It's already transforming a lot in our country.
There's certainly much, much more to come.
And the public sector has actually a dual opportunity here.
The first is as a consumer of AI and your question about what it might mean for employment in government, it's going to have significant implications.
And one hopes that you have good leaders who are AI literate, which is an area that we're very focused on, so that they're making smart choices about how to deploy AI that does two things.
One, improves the performance of federal agencies and does it responsibly in a way that is consistent with the values of our country.
But the second piece is equally important that our government is not only an important consumer of AI, but it's also a regulator of AI and said it should.
It set the ground rules for how not just the public sector, but our country writ large uses AI.
Any technology can be used for good or for evil.
And you obviously want to minimize the harm that it might cause and ensure that it can actually generate the best return for the public.
It's difficult to really predict in terms of numbers what this might mean for the federal government.
You are seeing some private sector companies find ways to reduce their labor force through AI and you see other companies that are simply improving their actual delivery of performance through AI and using their talent in different ways.
And I think there'll be some mix of that in the federal government if it's done smartly.
One of the biggest challenges in the federal space is you have frequent turnover of leadership, so you rarely have sort of long-term focus on management issues.
And that is something we need to change in order to really harness in a smart way the forces of AI.
Let's talk to Steve, a Republican in Highland Park, Illinois.
Hi, Steve.
On the air.
Hi, good morning.
Mr. Steyer, I just have one question.
What part of $38 trillion in national debt don't you understand?
You're advocating for keeping a big federal government workforce.
We cannot afford this.
Okay.
And what did our grandfathers and great-grandfathers do before all these departments were existed and all these federal workers were doing all the great work for the people?
You know, maybe we should get back to looking in the mirror to solving our problems rather than to looking to government.
You know, we all wake up in the morning with problems.
You know, the ones that look to government to solve them have a problem.
And we just can't afford it.
You know, everything Elon Musk said is true.
This is unsustainable.
You know, before Trump gets out, it's going to go over $40 trillion.
So this is just, this is why gold is $4,600 an ounce.
Okay.
Thank you.
Thank you.
So you asked the question, what don't I understand at $38 trillion?
It scares me.
But you said something else, which is before Trump is gone, it's going to be over $40 trillion.
So what you're saying is that what Trump has done so far is actually not addressing the problem in any way, shape, or form.
It's not, again, the size of the workforce.
There are legitimate questions about size of government, which are not the same things.
You said, what is your fathers or grandfathers did before we had all these agencies?
Actually, as I said, in the 1960s, the federal workforce is exact the same size as it was before Trump arrived.
So it's even smaller today than it was then.
So it's not the size of the workforce.
Anyone who runs an organization well understands it's a question about effectiveness.
It's a question about do you have the right talent to get the job done?
It's about choices and prioritization.
It's not about, you know, mindlessly firing people like a third of the food safety inspectors at the Department of Agriculture.
So what I'm defending is the notion that there's a good way to change our government, and that is not what has happened so far.
Ian in Great Falls, Virginia, Independent Line, you're on the air.
Hello, hi there.
Thanks.
I am a graduate of the Excellent Government program that's part of a partnership for public service.
And I have managed quite a large amount of federal funding through my work as a civilian.
And I have never seen even a whiff of fraud from the years I've been involved.
I think it would be helpful to reframe kind of this phrase fraud, waste, and abuse, because there's really not much fraud at all that is perpetrated by the government.
Most of the fraud is against the government or misuse of programs or like we're seeing in Minnesota right now.
And there's a lot of infrastructure to try and stop that.
And the inspector general has played a huge role.
I'm really hoping that AI and some of these programs can play a better role.
Unfortunately, I think the Doge effort really just disrupted and disrupted many investments.
It did not really stop any sort of spending at all.
It just reallocated spending to different priorities.
And back to this idea of fraud, waste, and abuse.
I mean, if there's fraud, we need to prosecute fraud.
The waste and abuse is a lot more nebulous because people have different priorities.
Before this program, there was a man who said, you know, we needed to have the $1.5 trillion budget because that's how capitalism works.
Well, you know, that's debatable because any industry is going to be great if you're throwing trillions of dollars at it.
And thank you so much.
All right.
Last comment, Max.
Okay.
Well, thank you, first of all, for your service.
Very important to get great people in our government at the end of the day.
It's a knowledge-based environment, so getting public servants who are committed to the public good, who have the capability, matter a lot.
I agree with you, the issues here are less about fraud.
There is fraud, and I agree with you that typically it's not happening on the inside of government, although occasionally it is.
But again, you know, you saw a drop of 4,000 lawyers in the Justice Department who are prosecutors to go after fraud who were fired essentially.
We're making the wrong choices.
The inspector generals are a great example of that.
If we're trying to deal with waste, you need to have really smart, capable leaders who are rewarded for actually focusing on these management issues, and they're not, and certainly not with this administration.