From WXXI news.

This is connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Our connection this hour was made with the creation of Dodge, the Department of Government Efficiency, a new Trump administration office that was so obsessed with efficiency that it needed two directors, Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, were tasked with running Doge.

Although Ramaswamy was tossed off the ship within days.

Musk has made quite a show of, in his words, taking a chainsaw to the federal government.

Here are some of what he has either done or proposed in the first week.

Musk proposed that all federal regulations in all sectors be eliminated.

He says we are overregulated and we should toss out all regulations.

And if it turns out some are important, we could bring them back in later.

He sent an email to all federal employees, offering them the right to resign their position and still be paid until this September.

A small number took this offer, and some have subsequently been told that the government would actually not keep paying them.

Musk has promised to cut $2 trillion trillion with a T. And undeniably, Doge has turned up some curious expenditures.

But the biggest sources of federal spending come in the military and in Medicare and Medicaid.

President Trump said on the campaign trail, the United States would continue to boost its military, although he is starting to signal a willingness to cut in that department.

Trump says Medicare won't be touched at all.

Last night, Republicans pushed forward a budget plan that could include significant cuts to Medicaid, although that final bill is not done yet.

What Musk and Doge have highlighted are smaller expenditures in the bigger picture of the budget, relatively.

In one press release, the Doge team claimed to have cut a program that cost $8 billion and later had to concede that, oops, well, the program actually cost $8 million, not billion.

An NPR analysis found that of the first $55 billion in claimed Doge cuts, the actual cuts were less than a third of that total.

Musk has gone after Social Security, claiming that we are paying millions of dead people.

Turns out he didn't spend even probably half an hour to find out that while there is always fraud or mistakes in Social Security, we're not actually paying 150 year old Social Security.

The new database contains a record of every person who has ever been assigned to Social Security number.

There are people in the system who have died but don't have a date of death recorded because they lived long before electronic records were established.

And just because they're in the system does not mean they're getting paid.

An eight year analysis starting in 2015 found that the Social Security Administration does make some mistakes.

Sometimes overpaying living recipients to the tune of around $8 billion a year out of a $1 trillion Social Security outlay.

Some of the mistakes are underpaying or not paying people who actually qualify.

With Musk wielding his chainsaw at CPAC.

I started reading the reactions from prominent libertarians.

After all, libertarians have been arguing for years that we need a significant reduction in the federal workforce and in the budget that major cuts are long overdue, that we can have more freedom with less government.

And yet, most of what I was reading from libertarians was real concern, concern at the haphazard approach that could, some are writing, end up tainting the very idea of cutting the federal government when they believe real cuts are needed.

This hour, let's get that libertarian perspective.

If they were in charge of Doge.

What are they going to take the chainsaw to?

What is what is Doge getting right?

What is it getting wrong?

What are the consequences?

My guest this hour is Kevin Wilson, who's the former chair of the Monroe County Libertarian Party.

He's the host of a Free Solution podcast.

Welcome back to the program.

All right.

Thanks for having me again, Evan.

Well, I'm going to give you the keys to dodge.

You're in charge now.

Although I like the idea that they needed two directors at first.

Did you enjoy that?

Yeah.

Maybe a third kind of.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Tell them.

No no no no no, not a third.

Just you.

You're just you're in charge.

You're going to take us through how this happens in a moment.

But first let me peel back and just ask you what you make so far of what you're seeing with Doge.

It's a mixed bag.

and I want to kind of back up to say, like, let's let's talk about the scope of the problem, right?

In terms of a government spending.

We in the year 2000, at the end of the Clinton administration, we had $5.6 trillion in debt.

Right.

And not that, that not not the annual budget, but that's not a deficit.

The debt exactly.

Deficit being what we're overspending every year.

Debt being what we have already overspent.

Yeah.

by the end of the Bush administration, it was $10 trillion.

By the end of the Obama administration, it was $19.5 trillion.

By the end of the first Trump administration, it was $26.9 trillion.

And by the end of the Biden administration, it was $35.46 trillion.

And that number is kind of hard to conceive of, right?

A trillion is is so big.

It's hard for people to like, really visualize it.

But just to give you an idea of the scale, 1,000,000,000 seconds ago was about 35 years ago.

1,000,000,000,000 seconds ago was 31,688 years ago.

I have to fact check that.

Are you sure about that?

And someone on the internet wrote that out when I was looking it up last night.

Right.

Because it's never run.

No, no, the DNS server.

But but like, the point is trillion is a big it is hard to get really hard to get your head around the scale of the amount of spending that's happening.

Right.

It's not that like any level, spending is illegitimate.

I'm not in the libertarian camp.

That's fully anarchist, but I do think that that level of debt is unsustainable because that debt service now takes up nearly, nearly $1 trillion a year in our spending.

It's 13% of the federal budget just servicing that debt.

That's a lot of money.

That's just going towards that and that's going to get bigger.

It's going to keep getting unless something dramatic happens.

Exactly.

Okay.

So so I want to say like this is this is something that we absolutely need to do something about.

And I was somewhat hopeful that, Elon and Vivek were engaging in this project to maybe take our spending seriously.

and there seems to be kind of multiple goals of this one is to like, okay, let's cut back some of the spending.

Let's see the ways that we can do that.

Let's cut back on waste, fraud and abuse.

It seems like a noble goal.

Let's make the government more efficient.

And that's a project that has been going on for a while, but seems to have gotten stuck.

There's, you know what the US digital service was doing previously, trying to introduce efficiencies into the government that started on the Obama administration.

They were finding some things, and that's where Doge is now housed currently under the former US Digital Services.

and so it's worthwhile to try to, to find those efficiencies, to make government more effective in delivering the services that it's going to do and to figure out what areas do we not need to maybe have government services and to figure out, like, can we reduce the amount of money that we're overpaying year over year?

So are there instances so far that you look at what Doge has done or turned up and say, exactly, this is a problem?

Yeah, sure.

I mean, there's a lot of it's really small stuff, right?

There's stuff like, okay, we're overpaying for software licenses.

Great.

Yeah.

You know, we don't need to do that.

That adds up to a few, you know, 100,000.

There are some instances of fraud, although they've been exaggerated.

The Social Security thing, like there's already been studies put out by, with the center for Responsible Federal Budget, like talking about Social Security fraud.

There is some level of that.

There's that has been done.

Okay.

It's going to take some money to fix.

But yeah, that's a thing worth fixing.

We should clean up the Social Security database.

There's things like, just basic like budget controls.

They say, okay, these budget controls that, like the private sector uses to try to categorize and track spending are in place across all government agencies, which is why things like that, the military often or the Pentagon often fails its audits year after year.

That's a problem.

We should fix that and figure out what exactly is the government spending on which things and how much and where, like it should be totally unacceptable to fail audits.

And and if DOJ's can accomplish some of that, that's great.

Okay.

And but I think part tell me if I'm wrong here.

Part of the way I see the idea about cuts is two fold.

Or there's maybe two different goals.

The first would be let's actually carefully go through line by line, and let's value any place where we can turn up either fraud or just waste or clumsiness or inefficiency.

Even if it's 100,000 bucks here, 5 million here, a billion there.

In the context of a massive federal budget.

That may be small fries, but it matters.

And we shouldn't just throw that money away like, oh, I don't know if we can save, you know, $500 billion.

That's still real money.

Oh, are you sure?

I mean, 500 billion, but it doesn't it doesn't solve the bigger problem.

But it's real money.

And I don't think people should be too glib about that, because I've seen a bit of that was like, oh, it's only like, you know, a few percent of the budget that's there still matters.

And we have to take and and we have to tackle the bigger problem.

So that's where I thought you would be.

My expectation was that libertarians are not in the camp that say, hey, they're only going after the small targets, they're going after small fries.

They turned up 8 million here.

They turned up 5 million there.

That's nothing in the federal budget.

Most of the libertarians I hear say, you're right that it's not a big dent at all in the federal budget.

But you're wrong to say we shouldn't care.

Yeah, we should look for efficiency, smart government everywhere, and not just scoff if they're not immediately going after Medicare, Medicaid, the military budget, which are the big expenditures.

Is that fair?

Yeah, that's totally fair.

Right.

And again, you know, those those expenses, Social Security, Medicaid, defense, interest under that, VA services, income security, that's 91% of the budget.

So they're really going after mostly the other, like 9%.

Yes, relatively, the small potatoes.

And if they're going to be serious about cutting $2 trillion, they're going to have to, I would think, go after the big targets, which Donald Trump has sort of said they won't do.

No.

And how do you cut $2 trillion if you're not going to go after the big targets?

Yeah, I mean, you either have to again, reduce the amount of outlays they're going with those or you have to raise taxes like those.

Those are the only two options.

And I think there's unfortunately not a lot of political appetite to do either of those things, because people want they want to be able to get their benefits, understandably.

And they also don't want to pay taxes.

I don't want to pay like more in taxes either.

But like, there has to be someone who comes into the room.

Some adults in the Democrat and Republican parties, ideally, who say, okay, we have to be serious about doing something about this.

And either, yes, you have to raise your taxes to pay for the services that you want, or we have to no longer have these services.

Yeah.

And so when I think about the possible consequences of the DOJ's doing, I'm going to give you a hypothetical.

Take me through your thoughts on one hypothetical is that the Republicans pass another major tax cut, which looks like they're about to do, they are vague on possible entitlement cuts.

knowing that a big cut to Medicaid would not be popular.

So maybe that gets whittled down or taken out.

And so what we end up with is DOJ's claiming, well, we found all of these efficiencies and we've cut all the stuff.

but they over they oversell what they're claiming, which we've already seen them do or they misunderstand what they are targeting.

And so what you end up with is a, a clumsy, at best dodge effort that doesn't actually reduce a whole lot of expenditure.

Another major tax cut.

And at the end of this, an even bigger increase in the deficit and debt.

Is that possible?

that that is entirely possible.

And that's the that's the worry, right?

The worry is that this project, which makes a big show of cutting the budget, doesn't actually accomplish its goals, is going to end up making the government less efficient and is going to harm the long term project of trying to tackle, the problem of, debt, politically for, for many generations to come or many years to come at least.

Okay.

Oh, no.

Go ahead.

Finish thought.

No.

And so and part of this too is the thing to keep in mind is that DOJ's only has limited power to actually cut spending in the first place, because the executive branch does not control spending.

That that's another.

Oh, yeah.

Just because you've read the Constitution, you think I know a typical libertarian.

I did not bring my pocket constitution to waive around today.

But but but yes, that is that is part of it.

Right.

Like so there are ways for the executive branch to suggest cuts.

But because of the, Impoundment Control Act in passed in the 60s under the 70s during the Nixon administration, the executive very clearly can't do that.

They can do what's called a rescission.

They can say, hey, we don't want to spend this money.

We don't think it's going to be useful.

Congress, can you just confirm that it's okay to not spend this money?

Rand Paul, to his credit, tried to do that and it failed, I think like 74 to 26.

It was kind of overwhelmingly didn't pass.

So there's no appetite in the Senate for doing that.

And then the budget bill, the House, Concurrent Resolution 14, which doesn't actually specify the budget, but kind of suggest a budget target has us, adding to the debt.

It raises the debt ceiling by $4 trillion.

It's going to add another $300 billion a year to the deficit.

So, again, the money that we're overspending each year, the only Republican to vote no on that was Thomas Massie.

So no, Congress doesn't have any appetite to again be adults in this situation and actually tackle the problem that the Republicans and Democrats aren't serious about taking care of this problem.

And if they were, we'd see that reflected in Congress again.

Donald Trump could say, Congress, you need to do something about this.

We need to be serious about cutting our spending.

Here's our suggestion for areas to cut spending.

go at it.

But that didn't happen.

Yeah.

And what about the argument that says, though what you're describing is just political death?

Because that's partially why anybody in Congress does or doesn't do anything.

They're always thinking about the next election.

And I tend to think that when Donald Trump in the white House, the official white House social media accounts, put out the the picture of Donald Trump wearing a crown with the phrase long live the King.

I think they know how to troll people.

Yeah, yeah.

I also, even though I think that's trolling, I don't think it's healthy trolling.

I don't think it is something to think is funny, or smirk at the notion of an executive with that much concentrated power.

And yet we see we see Mike Johnson, we see Speaker Johnson saying, we're not actually ceding power.

We're just doing it differently, which just looks like we're ceding power.

I mean, like, it's a really sort of a very weak Congress right now.

And they don't believe that they could get through the big cuts that you're talking about because they don't think politically they could do it.

I, I don't think it's unfair to say that, I also think that this is a problem that goes beyond just the current Republican Congress.

Nancy Pelosi is happy to pass stuff off to, Barack Obama when the Democrats in Congress needed political cover.

was willing to do that with Joe Biden as well.

That's what happened with the student loan stuff.

why Joe Biden do that through executive order?

Because Congress didn't have the appetite to do that, even though Congress recognized like, oh, we're the ones who are supposed to do it.

They never did anything about that.

Right.

so so this is this is a longstanding problem, and it's frankly a crisis of being in a constitutional republic that we can't ask our representatives to make hard choices, on behalf of the political public, to decide what the priority is in terms of spending and taxation.

It's it's it's a big problem.

And we're moving more and more towards a authoritarian style governance system where all the powers and invested in the executive.

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely tilting that way.

And this white House is gleeful about that.

It's also interesting to watch.

You mentioned Massie is one of the few congressional Republican voices who is not jumping in line with everything that's kind of being pushed that way.

But there's also just looking at the cabinet, looking at the votes for who Donald Trump nominated.

It's people who are retiring, like Mitch McConnell who decided, well, I can vote no, right?

Because I don't have another election.

Nothing to lose.

Is that an argument for term limits?

I think there's a decent argument for term limits.

I mean, in theory, that's what the Senate's supposed to be overall.

Right?

The reason we give Senator six year terms is because they have a little bit of insulation from those, you know, kind of short term reactions to politically unpopular votes, right?

Like you get six years because then you look, you're supposed to be looking at the long term health of the United.

Absolutely.

As a steward of the United States in the U.S. Senate position.

But they're still not doing that either.

It's so politically unpopular to, like, cut spending or raise taxes that they're just frozen, and they'd rather just divert that, blame elsewhere.

Yeah.

I mean, even the Republicans who won in 2024, who have six years, they have another presidential cycle and then another midterm until their next election, and they all got in line with every single cabinet pick, even the ones who have six years.

Yeah.

And you have members of Congress.

You've got the Speaker of Congress saying the president, you have the cabinet that he wants whatever he wants.

Where did advise and consent go?

So I bring all this up to say that when you, as a libertarian, want to see these significant cuts and these changes to the way the federal government works, I appreciate at least the fact that that you acknowledge there's still supposed to be a process here and the process is broken.

Yeah, it is broken.

And that's why, like, there's, you know, I want to make sure I represent this viewpoint.

because I did ask, what do you think of this?

and some people, like, I think what they were just doing is great.

And the reason why they think it's great is because, like, I don't, they say, I don't care if it's like a little bit like murky on the constitutional side, because this has been a problem for so long that Congress has failed to address.

And it's such an existential crisis for the United States that doing something here is better than, like, doing nothing.

and I don't really share that point of view, but I want to make sure I get that out there, because there are folks who are saying, like me saying, like, I watch you go through Congress and this isn't constitutional.

And like, the judges are going to stop some of this, that like the way they see that, the way they see me saying this is like, oh, I need to fill out the right paperwork while my house is on fire.

Okay.

Yeah.

And so you can understand intellectually their argument, the issue I have with that argument is it presumes that what DOJ's doing is actually thoughtful, that wise.

Yes.

And so in our second half hour, I'm going to ask Kevin Wilson, who's my guest for the hour, the former chair of the Monroe County Libertarian Party and host of a free Solution podcast.

How you would attack that kind of work?

because in some sense, there is some urgency.

You got to move fast in another sense, when you do it the way they've described now, like when I heard Elon Musk say, we should just cut all regulations tomorrow, eliminate them all, and then we'll find out which ones were really needed.

I don't know that that's a very adult way of thinking.

I mean, if you think we're overregulated, I don't know a whole lot of people who disagree or could find regulation.

That and even some Democrats might argue, yes, there's some regulations that are not a good idea that are really restrictive, hamper growth, etc.

but this a notion of just burn everything and then see what still, you know, what might be still standing is I don't know that there's a good model for that.

There's some risk that, I mean, I get I sort of get intellectually why people are at that point where like, it's so stilted, it's so broken, it's so immovable, like there's like, are we going to set up another commission to review this for another five years?

You know, another thing is going to happen, I get that.

And again, I, I am sympathetic to that.

But I also think that preserving the constitutional order is also very important.

And we have to evaluate these cuts and, and regulation changes on the merits themselves.

Right.

Having action itself is not valuable.

The thing that we're trying to do is cut spending, make government more efficient, and make sure that government is less of a burden on individuals and businesses in this country.

I would argue that the evidence shows that government can be very, very slow, stuck in blue ribbon commissions, stuck in environmental review, and nothing gets done.

And that frustration that people feel can be very reasonable.

I would also argue that there are instances in recent years where there is an understanding that that old order cannot hold.

And here's two very different examples.

The first is the Biden administration in 2021 touts this billions upon billions of dollars for broadband, and by the end of Joe Biden's term, almost nothing was done.

I mean, almost nothing was done in a full presidential term in a first year major project for broadband.

And that is hard to believe when you look at that.

That's what makes people cynical about the government's management of anything.

Then you look at Pennsylvania that had the is it I-95?

Is that what was the that's a stretch of highway collapse.

And governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, said, we cannot get bogged down in another environmental review or everyone needs to study this for the next five years.

And they rebuilt it in like 11 days.

And everybody was like, I didn't know you could do that.

Yeah, like, well, it turns out like you can still do that.

And this is two different Democratic administrations, one stuck in the morass of not getting something done, and another saying it is not acceptable to move this slow anymore.

And so I think within the confines of government, it's still there are still ways to do things.

There's still ways to build things.

There's still ways to accomplish things that don't require blowing up a constitution because.

Right.

Frustrated.

Right.

I mean, there are legal things you could do both through Congress and through like the regulation, administrative, state.

One of the good things that Trump's doing is, is starting to move back on the the Nepa stuff.

So the National Environmental Protection Act and that that's the type of thing that Josh Shapiro was talking about.

Like, you have to do all these studies, you can get vetoed by different groups who have various objections.

it takes years to get anything done.

It's part of what's bogging down the California High-Speed rail, too, which has cost tens of billions of dollars in overrun.

And so that types that there's starting to be an appetite on this.

It's been there on the Republican side, Democrat side, I'm seeing a little bit more of this among, like the new liberals, the kind of yimby type folks who said, let's just figure out ways to build stuff.

The biggest impediment to trusting Democratic administrations is how much money we're spending to accomplish absolutely nothing.

It mentioned the broadband thing.

There's also the electric charging stations that we keep funding, but almost nothing gets built.

That's right.

you know, there's, the chip tax also took a lot of money before we saw anything happening.

Like, so there's all these different situations where it's like, we have spent how many hundreds of billions of dollars trying to accomplish something.

You have nothing to show for it.

Like, yeah, no wonder, like, no wonder we're in so much debt.

And then you were telling.

And then what ends up happening is we end up saying, oh, we don't have enough money for this project.

We need to have more.

And if you're a voter like, I don't understand why you would accept that.

So yeah, Democrats and Republicans need to change.

So if we're going to spend that money guy, by God, we better at least build something out of it.

Yeah, I understand that point of view.

Now I want to listen to two clips and then we're going to pivot.

And our second half hour we're going to put Kevin in charge of the whole government.

which is he's been waiting for years for one of the reasons that I look at what Doge is doing and think, set aside all the analysis that says they're they're not really understanding what they're looking at, and they're they're overselling what efficiencies or savings there are.

But it's so politically tinged.

And these two clips, I think, give it away.

The first clip comes from Fox Fox's Jesse Waters, who host a primetime show.

And since the election, since the administration took over and in January, about a month ago, he he's been doing these nightly reports on who got dodged and he's laughing about it.

And, you know, more people get doge today and the Doge chainsaws come in.

And, you know, now liberals are crying about Doge.

And this is Jesse Waters talking about, part of the story recently in which Elon Musk said, we're going to email everybody and say, tell us five things you did in the last week.

And if you don't respond, you're out of here.

Let's listen.

What did you do last week?

If you work for the federal government, you can't answer that.

By midnight, you might be getting Doge.

This weekend.

Every DC bureaucrat got this message in their inbox.

Please reply to this email with five bullets of what you accomplished last week with a deadline.

And if you don't answer, that's kind of your answer.

I thought it was great because we have people that don't show up to work, and nobody even knows if they work for the government.

So by asking the question, tell us what you did this week.

What he's doing is saying, are you actually working?

And then if you don't answer like you're sort of semi fired or you're fired because a lot of people are not answering because they don't even exist.

I can tell you what I did last week.

I worked on a federal holiday plug.

Danny's new book, push Those Dividend checks.

You're welcome.

Shutdown Jessica on the five politely and sold some Fox merch charging now I came up with that in five minutes.

If I had 48 hours like those federal workers do, it would have been even better.

Not Jesse Waters and Fox just kind of laughing at the people getting Doge.

All those lazy people, those worthless people.

Good riddance.

Until he got a text from a friend, listen to him change his tune about Doge.

In this second clip, he was a 20 year veteran of the US military.

He was one of these guys in one of these elite units, killed a lot of bad guys, put his life on the line, and now he punched out after 20 years and working for the Pentagon.

And he's only been there a few months, so he's probationary, and he just found out he's probably going to get laid off.

It's going to get dodged.

And he texted me and he said, Jesse, you know, this isn't good.

I'm upset.

This is really sad.

And this guy is not a die consultant.

This guy's not a climate consultant.

You know, this guy is a veteran.

So when you're talking about those young people, veterans should get priority.

Because if you're going to go out there and kill enemies and put your life on the line for this country, you shouldn't be in the same category as people that are doing die now.

Harold and his ilk like to talk about the slash and burn corporate ethos.

We just need to be a little bit less callous with the way, Harold, we talk about dodging people.

Okay?

I just want to I want that to sink in.

We need to be less callous, says the guy who spent a month laughing in the face of anybody who, quote, got dodged because he just assumed that they must all be climate activists or die workers until it's his friend.

And I don't think this is a healthy way to look at what is going on here.

I don't think this is a mature, adult way to evaluate how the federal government is operating.

Probably not.

But but I like the way Dodge approaches this.

And I'll say there's there's a contingent of Republicans, libertarians, etc.

who like seeing this, who who have that similarity that like, if all we get out of this is some bureaucrats cry, then it's mission accomplished.

And I've seen that like and I'm like, I don't think that's that's a good way to run a government that's not necessarily going to save us money or make us more efficient, or just getting stuck in the culture wars.

Yeah, it's just a culture war thing.

Right?

And so like to me, I'm like, I don't I don't see how that that's really accomplishing anything other than being spiteful.

that's that's not a good way to be.

That's not the virtue.

We need to, again, make sure that we continue to have a successful constitutional republic.

Well, and if you're Jesse Waters or if your people were laughing about Doge, clearly you think that anybody who works for the federal government in any capacity and which, by the way, most federal workers don't work in DC.

You think they're all just laughing their way to the bank, laughing at taxpayers expense, adding nothing of value to society until it's someone you know.

It's your daughter, it's your friend Chris, this veteran.

And then, well, clearly those people shouldn't get dodged.

And all I'm arguing is if we're going to do a review of what the federal government is doing, don't just assume anybody works for the federal government is corrupt or idiotic or whatever.

And I understand there may be some hard decisions to be made, including if you want to do it this way.

Jesse Waters might be your friend, I don't know, but now he wants special privilege for veterans.

He does want I, which he criticizes for privileging certain groups over others, but he wants a plan to privilege people in the veterans group that he thinks deserve that privilege over others.

Sure, everyone wants to protect their own group, and I would be remiss if I didn't say there are absolutely people who like the federal bureaucracy who, like, probably should be let go, who really aren't doing anything.

There's going to be a lot of that.

There's going to be a lot that an organization.

there's an interesting book that that talks about government efficiency.

It's, called Recoding America by Jennifer Palka.

And she has a couple of stories in there where, like the people talking about the VA, where they're like, oh, yeah, it takes it takes a couple minutes for us to like, load all these forms.

We have to manually view PDFs and we we don't really have a database just looking through that.

And while the forms may take a while to load, we can actually make a cup of coffee between having to load each form.

We have to look through a bunch of them to get stuff approved.

And then oh.

So we should do something about the latency problem.

They said, well, we don't have a latency problem because we redefined latency as taking less than, or more than two minutes to load.

What, that.

Okay, so you just redefined the problem.

It takes two minutes to load a single form step having a database.

And the result of that is that veterans aren't getting care anymore.

Yeah.

Bureaucrats like that get rid of them like that.

That's the type of stuff I want DOJ's to fix.

Like if that's your attitude, if you like do not care about service, you're willing to take up massive amounts of time and make sure that, like the beneficiaries of these services that we're paying for or taking on debt for aren't even getting those is lose, lose, lose in that situation.

Yeah, those folks need to go.

what Musk said, by the way, with the emails are going to come back from the federal workers.

You're supposed to describe what they did in the last week.

He's going to give them because there's, I don't know, millions upon millions of federal employees, as you know, and so they don't have enough managers to read everybody's emails.

So his team is going to create an AI program, feed the answers in, and then I will advise them on who should get fired.

Right.

I don't know if that's popular either.

No, I you know, I kind of suspected like it could be like an interesting project, but like, the thing is it's it's not necessarily the best way to roll it out.

Like, I'm fine with creating more systems of accountability.

Like, that's understandable.

Like, to me, I work at an agency, we have to track my time by 15 minutes, reporting back exactly what deliverables I accomplished through a project management system like, and I know some agencies do do some of that, right.

They get measured on like the calls they they take and cases they resolve, etc.

there are ways of setting reasonable, goals and providing accountability to the American people.

Sending the email without seemingly the understanding and consent of like all the departments because you had cash Patel again Trump guy who's selling his FBI.

Please don't respond to this yet.

Nick.

you had several agencies saying that.

No, that please, please don't comply with this.

You can't do that.

We're wait for further guidance.

These are Trump appointees, and then they're still not.

Yeah.

Tulsi Gabbard, was was another one who said, don't comply with this national security issues fair.

This wasn't rolled out.

Well, there are ways of being able to ride accountability.

Sending out an email this this again feels just trollish.

That that's all it is.

It's just a way to look like you were doing something without actually accomplishing anything.

And that I find frustrating.

All right, so after this break, we'll take some of your feedback.

And then Kevin will describe if if you're going to take this on seriously, I'm wondering what's the timeline that you think is realistic it do you have an idea in your mind of how much of the federal workforce can or should be cut?

And then if you're going to look at the bulk of where the federal budget is, do we do you think as a libertarian we need to reduce military spending?

I feel like I know where you might be on that one.

Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security.

So let's talk about all that on the other side of this only break, Kevin Wilson, former chair of the Monroe County Libertarian Party and host of a Free Solution podcast, is my guest.

Coming up in our second hour, a new film seeks to tell the story of homelessness with the message that homelessness can happen to anyone, anywhere.

Many decades into the fight against homelessness in Rochester.

We still have a major problem with it and a lot of misunderstandings about what causes it.

We'll talk about it next hour on connections.

Support for your public radio station comes from our members and from Excel.

Is Blue Cross Blue Shield believing that everyone deserves to be cared for and to live well through community investments, partnerships, and education.

Excel US Blue Cross Blue Shield is working to address health inequities more at Accelerate bcbs.com.

This is connections.

I'm Evan Dawson and this is Allison Rochester on the phone first.

Hello Alice.

Go ahead.

Hi.

I've been listening to the program and also talking with my kid at the same time.

And one thing that seems to be there hasn't entered the conversation yet, but is kind of high on our minds is the fact that things like, you know, cutting all regulations, firing half of the IRS and so forth seem to have more to do with further enriching the ultra wealthy at the expense of everybody else, not just monetarily, but in terms of national security, people's lives, people's health and so forth.

And I can't help feeling like a whole lot of the rest is more like a smokescreen covering that central interest.

And just given the actual data out there, it could support either one.

And, and there's not enough attention given to the fact that there is an alternate possibility of what they're actually trying to do.

Well, Alice, you're implying that Tesla has been given subsidies by the government in the past.

Oh, sure.

I'm implying that there's a large pattern.

I'm I'm being cheeky.

That is one small example.

I mean, your larger point, though, is who benefits from these moves and what is it actually about?

I haven't seen any doge headlines saying that we're going to stop subsidies for Tesla or for large companies like that.

There's a chance there's some conflicts of interest there.

Just do you think she has a point?

I think there's something to that.

Right.

yeah.

I don't know, like, if it's specifically to benefit billionaires generally or anything, but, like, there's there's definitely conflicts of interest, like Elon Musk has contracts with Tesla.

the State Department seems like they're buying some Tesla vehicles.

The there's contracts with SpaceX.

and, you know, several other things.

So so there's a concern there.

And I think the broader concern is, is this a distraction for other stuff that's going on.

Right.

Like there's you know, I've seen that and I don't really know how to address this out.

So I kind of want to stay focused on this.

But like I've seen other people say like, oh, well, this is just a distraction from the fact that Trump fired all of his lawyers with military.

And what is he doing there?

Is it nefarious?

Might, you know, maybe, I don't know, it's tough for me to speculate on that stuff without evidence.

But, you know, if you see evidence of, hey, lots of people are getting enriched and, like, I think we'll see a lot of this with tariffs.

tariffs specifically are ripe for corruption.

There's a lot of opportunities for exemptions.

you'll maybe see stuff like, I think there should be reform so that contract reviews for government spending should go quicker.

Right.

Because some of these things can take years to get through.

And by the time a contract for like, you know, new technology gets through like it's already outdated, but what you might see is you might see, hey, these are being handed out to Donald Trump's donors and friends and that's a concern.

And that's something that we need to keep a close eye on.

Alice, thank you for the phone call.

I'm going to read a few emails in a moment.

Here.

Let me start, because some of the emails address some of what I think Kevin is going to talk about here.

So if you are in charge, what's a realistic way of going about this that looks substantive to your view as a libertarian?

so there there are quite a few things that we can like, talk about if we want to talk about, like the the overall federal budget, again, like things that we have to reduce, we have to reduce military spending.

I was interested when I saw that talking about like, we're going to do an 8% court year over year, like, okay, that's that's interesting to me.

Now, Congress isn't on board.

And then apparently the Department of Defense has told Congress to increase spending.

So we're kind of getting a mixed message there, unfortunately.

But okay, if we're going to like, talk seriously about like, we need to scale back a military footprint or reduce spending, that that's a serious thing that we could do and figure out, like, what do we actually need to, like maintain our military presence in the safety of the American people?

All right.

Great.

Let's start there.

Other things I'm going to drill down to, like the programs within programs.

Right.

Let's talk about like USAID, right.

Plan things that I would be fine getting rid of.

Like right away.

There are the programs that seem to have accomplished some of our good things, like prep fire.

Right.

Which is an age program started by the George W Bush administration.

and it seems to have saved many, many lives.

Okay.

Let's say ideologically, I don't want to fund that with the U.S government.

Okay.

So do we just cut it right away or do we say, okay, we're going to cut off your funding in three years.

You have that amount of time to go find grant funding from elsewhere to continue this program.

Right.

Like there are ways that you could do this.

There are ways that you could spin off programs to like still to to not like pull, pull the rug out from them totally, but to like win things down and that's generally the way I'd like to do things.

There's some services that the government provides that I think probably could be privatized.

I'll give you another example to that.

within the FAA, the, the air traffic controllers, we could probably not have those air traffic controllers be government employees.

There's a bunch of problems with them right now in terms of, like their hiring processes and quality control.

Canada does not have government air traffic controllers.

The UK does not have government air traffic controllers.

Germany, New Zealand, Australia.

They don't have government air traffic controllers.

It's the United States that.

So looking at our peer nations, we could probably wind that down.

But if you said, okay, we're going to cut off them overnight, there's a chance that that might cause some problems.

So like the practical libertarian to me says yes.

Like we could we could offload some of that government spending in some of these areas.

But I know that like there's dependencies on these programs and if you cut them off overnight, it's going to cause problems.

And chances are the next time someone else is in power, they're going to just load all that money back up and rebuild it again, and it's going to end up being more expensive in the process.

So generally, my approach to this stuff is if we want to cut it, if it's not essential, wind it down, make a timeline, make a plan to do so.

Okay.

on the subjects of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, what do you think?

So on on Social Security, I, I think that we should transition that to a program where, there is either, an incentive for like a privately held account, right.

This is something that Australia does.

They transitioned off their government, social security system.

There's still some like, subsidies involved there, but basically there's, still something that comes out of your paycheck.

There's there's strong incentives to do this.

And you get, like a, like A41 cake type of equivalent, or you have a retirement account equivalent that you're still saving it to.

But the point of that is that you own it.

The government can't take it.

It's just yours.

It just exists out there.

The government, you're not, you're not in a system where the government, is worried about future payers into that system to be able to meet its current obligations.

So moving towards a system that winds that down, I think is really important.

Other countries have already done this.

We're not even going to be, you know, entering new territory with this.

We should wind that down.

So that cuts out a big liability that we have.

And Donald Trump going to remove some of the taxes from Social Security is kind of a problem too.

It's going to jeopardize that fund sooner.

Again, people depend on this.

I get that people depend on this.

I get that people don't want their Social Security touched.

However, if it crashes out in, you know, 8 to 10 years, what's that going to do to the people who depended on this?

And that's what will happen as soon as the Social Security Trust Fund runs out.

If Congress doesn't do something, either raise taxes or reduce benefits, or change the age you get paid, there's going to be immediate drop off in benefits.

I mean, I've been hearing that my whole life, though, haven't you?

If I, I have I my my whole short in Social Security still paying people.

It is they bumped it back a couple times.

But you know they will eventually run out of money like the math doesn't.

So it so in your view it's not really it's not going to stay solvent.

It's not efficient.

It's not the right way to do it.

So change the system.

What do you make of some of the Doge?

You know, Musk even has Donald Trump out there saying that we've got 300 year olds getting paid and all this stuff that this wild stuff that he's saying that I mean, there's there's a little bit of that.

I think the estimate was, there's one I saw that was somewhere between like 200,015 million.

It's not there's there's money, the fraudulent money being.

Oh, yeah, it's something like 0.9 to 1.0%.

yeah.

Fraud or mistaken money.

Yeah.

It is worth cleaning up the database is worth cleaning up the fraud.

however, that is not the.

That's not the reason that we're insolvent.

Our social security, we're insolvent.

Social security because people are living longer than they were when the program was created.

And we haven't made enough adjustments to that system where we have more people paying in than taking out.

And that fundamentally is unsustainable.

I mean, it's macabre, optimistic, maybe, that the United States, unlike most other Western countries, has actually seen a slight downturn in our life expectancy in recent years.

Now we're getting really dark.

That's not what we want.

We want something life.

We want long, successful lives.

Yeah.

And my like, what I would hope to see happen is that like, this is something when you get your own money, you have your own money, you're able to, you know, have support in retirement.

And there's ways of being able to build that without having to rely on a system that is like mathematically unsustainable.

Okay.

Medicaid, Medicare.

I mean, with those, like, there does need to be some level of reform, in those.

And I'm like, there's some interesting things that could come out of like the if the RFC, Health and Human Services department because he talks about like, well, we need to take another look at the, the American Medical Association and their requirements for billing.

And, and there's there's a lot of complicated stuff that's going to be needed to sort through.

And we need to figure out like generally like what makes sense to pay for Medicare, Medicaid are like the biggest drivers, of medical costs.

They kind of set the bar for like what we pay for medical services.

And, you know, there needs to be some level of give and take in terms of like, what are these things pay for?

What can doctors and hospitals charge?

And they'll charge what they think they can get away with charging that.

That's that's part of it.

Right.

Like I don't I can't like exactly blame them for that.

They're going to charge what they think they can get away with.

I but, you know, there needs to be some level of negotiation between them, insurance companies about lowering medical cost.

And I think that's really where it has to go.

Now, know again, the libertarian means like, well, is that a legitimate program?

You know, should we continue these long term?

I don't know, I'm just trying to look at like, how can we reduce this, like right now, in a way that is politically possible?

I think it's hard to do a lot politically at all.

No, it is, it is.

But but but again, I, I hope that I think we can make progress on these things.

There's kind of a position again, I could stand up here and say, yep, let's let's abolish it right away.

But like, I'm sorry, 95% of the folks listening, I'm like, yeah, that's not that's not going to work, man.

That's that's that's not possible.

But like if we start talking about, okay, how can we take a significant chunk out of these programs by like doing some reform, lowering costs, you know, like re understanding, like how these things are covered and benefits re understanding, like how we approach health care generally.

That's something that we we have to do in is probably more politically possible than be sitting up here and saying like, yeah, let's just get rid of it, because that's not going to happen.

do you want to see the the latest proposed round of tax cuts that, the Republicans are considering go through?

I would always love to lower taxes.

However, we we don't really have the money to do that.

Again, if I'm concerned about the debt and I am concerned about the debt, then like, we probably can't, really lower taxes, but they claim it's not going to blow hole in the deficit because it's going to restart new investment and new revenues.

New tax revenues.

Yeah.

There's there's it's the trickle down idea.

Right, right.

The the goal is right.

Like this is going to create so much growth that like it'll make us taxes pay for itself.

The problem is that doesn't always quite work.

And I think like the area where we could actually get some growth, as we talked about through Nepa reform like that would probably create some things.

There is an executive order, that the Trump administration issued on on February 19th, talking about deregulation, where they're going to go through and based on like, what regulations are constitutional, considering like the the recent, Chevron, Supreme Court decision that was overturned, can we get rid of some regulations that are just costing money, not really providing the benefits that people are hoping and are just grinding any ability to do business or operate to a halt, that there's a lot of hours that get spent complying with regulations, both on the government employee side and on the business side and on the individual side.

And yeah, I think that would be a real win to like take a serious look at those.

Now, do we just clear House and, you know, get rid of all those overnight.

Nope.

Nope.

That might create some problems.

But I think we should like look at like how do we sunset regulations and say, okay, they have to get renewed every 510 years.

There has to be a review process to figure out.

Like, does it still make sense given what we're trying to do?

And yeah, we think about that.

And on the technology side, like people are working with decades old, outdated stuff that they're trying to comply with, and it's costing a ton of money driving project overruns.

And we're not actually getting the delivery of the services that we're promised anyway, which again, maybe we don't need it, but like and if we're going to pay for it, we better be at least getting something out of it.

Well, let me get Jeff in Rochester.

I'll read some emails as well here in a moment.

Hey, Jeff, go ahead.

So my my question is, just like when they, they cut the word equity, oh.

Because of Dei.

And they talked about all the other places where it shows up where it needs to be then, that now those things are off line because the word shows up out of context, and that hurts things the same way.

Relation is that you're, you know, the Gus was just saying regulation in and of itself isn't necessarily a bad thing.

But then again, it is a good thing if it stagnates when, a recent, Republican congressman took all these cut and kind of in a mocking way, said, you know, all of these piecemeal cuts, he broke it down in ours against the debt.

It's like, this just saves us like a half an hour of interest payments.

And this thing saves us a week of interest payments.

What is the, the libertarian stance on going after, subsidies for the oil companies that we're still propping up that are making money hand over fist, but yet we're still subsidizing them.

And this to the tune of billions of dollars, which takes a huge chunk towards balancing a budget.

What are his thoughts?

Yeah, I ain't going to answer that.

Yeah, yeah.

Let me just jump in here, Jeff.

Go ahead.

yeah.

Jeff, get rid of the subsidies and of statement.

that was easy.

A true free money.

You want to see real market competition?

Yeah.

No, I think we should get rid of the subsidies.

I think that we should not be subsidizing oil companies.

Certainly.

Yeah, but I generally don't like subsidies of any kind.

if we can absolutely avoid them.

Great.

You know, and I think there's some like.

Well, let's, change the energy policy real quick, like.

Yeah, some people are saying, oh, we can't have wind energy, we can't have solar, and you can't nuclear energy without subsidies.

Like I think we could.

I think like we have to do some other reforms along with that, though.

We have to make it easier to do those project and not have them bogged down in years and years of red tape in order to make them profitable within a free market system.

Jeff, thank you for the phone call, John says.

I would love to hear your guest speak to the level of access to personal information that Musk has gained through Doge.

It seems there's no real substantive output to these efforts other than staying in the news cycle continually.

While we have no transparency about what Musk has and what he might do with it.

Yeah, that's that's a concern.

I mean, certainly like, there's, there's problems with like, okay, these folks having that background checks, you know, they, you know, we don't know like what they're really messing with.

That's right.

I mean that to be fair though, that there have been problems where there will be OPM data breaches previously too, with everyone who is following all the rules and was vetted.

And we're doing this like, again, it's not great.

I'm I'm a bit uncomfortable with it.

but but we have some serious problems with government privacy that that predate Doge.

Charles says when when people are horrified that government workers would be asked what they did this week, please inform them that when I worked for Delphi every night at the conclusion of my shift, I sent an email that detailed exactly how many fuel injectors I tested and exactly which test stands in exactly which labs.

Now that Delphi no longer exists, I do the same for another company.

And he says, no, I've not experienced a disruption in any VA services.

And, so Charles is talking about, you know, there's a lot of saying, well, veterans are going to be impacted by this.

The VA is going to be hurting because Doge is going to be slicing services.

And he's saying so far he hasn't seen any disruption there.

And he thinks people should not be complaining about having to describe what they do for work.

What do you think?

Well, so in terms of, describing what you do for work.

Yeah, that's fine.

Again, I said that before I do the same thing, I have to track what I do down to 15 minutes, like billable gets clients like.

So I get that.

And government workers should have some level of accountability too.

But like, does it make sense for like a retail worker and a National Park Service park to like, send an email, like with what they did?

No, that doesn't make any sense.

So this is going to take many, many hours of time for people to comply for and it isn't always appropriate for every single position.

I think like you need to how I would have approached this, and how I think I've seen other people would actually management experience approach.

This is like, okay, talk to the department heads, talk to everyone.

How do we ensure accountability?

Give the directive out to managers like you need to have like accountability in X, Y and Z areas.

Like let's talk about like creating actual metrics and KPIs that they need to follow down to every employee and figuring out, like who's actually doing their work and who isn't, hold managers who aren't holding their employees accountable.

Like that's that's what a lot of organizations are effective do.

And it's possible to do that here too.

And I'll just say to Charles, I mean, clearly Elon Musk's email was less about the actually tracking efficiencies and more just about a culture war dunking.

Yeah.

You know, all these lazy workers, we're going to make them tell us what they do because, you know, they suck.

I mean, that's kind of the tone of it.

And that's why I'm waiting to see a more adult approach to this.

But, let me just conclude with this.

Tom writes and says, what an excellent show.

Thank you.

So Kevin Wilson, tell Tom and others where they can hear you elsewhere.

All right.

You can find me on a free solution podcast or on Twitter at Kevin Wilson.

RC, thank you for being with us again.

It's nice to talk to you.

Thanks for having again.

He's going to come back with some frequency.

Really interesting conversation with the former chair of the Monroe County Libertarian Party.

More connections coming up.

The.

This program is a production of Sky Public Radio.

The views expressed do not necessarily represent those of this station, its staff, management or underwriters.

The broadcast is meant for the private use of our audience.

Any rebroadcast or use in another medium, without express written consent of Sky is strictly prohibited.

Connections with Evan Dawson is available as a podcast.

Just click on the connections link at WXXI news.org.