- Are Donald Trump and Elon Musk dismantling the Deep State or doing something else?

This week on "Firing Line."

- The people voted for major government reform.

And that's what people are gonna get.

They're gonna get what they voted for.

- We've already found billions of dollars of abuse, incompetence, and corruption.

- [Margaret] Some people are saying that Trump's newly-established Department of Government Efficiency is moving fast and breaking things.

- We have this unelected branch of government, which is the bureaucracy.

So it's just something we've gotta fix.

- [Margaret] But will this blitz on the bureaucracy really make government more efficient?

- So Musk is right, in my view, that it's broken, but he's not really focusing on fixing it.

- [Margaret] Attorney and author Philip Howard has championed the cause of government efficiency for decades, with books including "The Death of Common Sense."

- Well, the tragically-missed opportunity here is that Elon Musk could have done us a lot of good.

- [Margaret] Will Marshall is the founder and president of the Progressive Policy Institute, and has recently written that Democrats need a DOGE of their own.

I sat down with these two reform advocates before a student audience at Hofstra University to discuss what DOGE is getting right, what it's getting wrong, and whether America is careening toward a constitutional crisis.

- [Announcer] "Firing Line" with Margaret Hoover is made possible, in part, by Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, the Fairweather Foundation, Peter and Mary Kalikow, Cliff and Laurel Asness, the Meadowlark Foundation, and by the following.

Corporate funding is provided by Stephens Inc. - Philip Howard and Will Marshall, welcome to Hofstra University, and this episode of "Firing Line."

- Thank you.

- Listen, Philip, in November, you called in the Wall Street Journal for Elon Musk, not to hobble government, but to make it work again.

Since Trump established the Department of Government Efficiency, Musk has moved to gut USAID, gained access to Treasury payment systems, and has worked to eliminate the employment of tens of thousands of federal workers.

You have spent your life thinking, and writing, and talking about how to make government work better.

Is this what you had in mind?

- No.

Musk is focusing on cutting what government does that he thinks is stupid.

He's not focusing on changing and improving how government works, which I think is the bigger opportunity.

Most of Americans think government needs major overhaul.

So Musk is right, in my view, that it's broken, but he's not really focusing on fixing it.

Efficiency means actually being responsive and delivering the goods to the public that the public needs.

- How do you know he's not focused on fixing it?

- Because that's not what he's doing.

He's focused on cutting costs, cutting people, which I don't think is actually going to add up to much in the way of cost.

Whereas, for example, if he changed the way the Defense Department procured new weaponry, he could save, pick a number, a third of the money that's spent, by getting rid of all the red tape processes that take years and deliver poor products with too much delay.

- Will, you have recently written in The Hill that Democrats need a plan for fixing government that's their own.

You said, quote, "Before Democrats dismiss DOGE as just MAGA trollery, it's fair to ask, what is their plan for making government more efficient and effective?

Inexplicably, that plank is missing from the platform of the party that believes in active government."

Should Democrats have their own version of DOGE?

- Absolutely, or not DOGE, they should absolutely have their own plan to make government work better.

The public demand for that is palpable and it's nothing new.

We all know that trust in government's been tanking, really since the '60s.

21% of people trust the federal government to do the right thing most of the time.

So to not have a set of ideas that is responsive to a public that wants deep change in government is a sort of political malpractice.

- Given the speed and ruthlessness, perhaps efficiency, at which DOGE is operating, or which Elon Musk is operating, will there be a government to reform?

(Will chuckles) - Yeah.

- When he's finished.

- It'll survive, I mean, what's happening now is that there are lawsuits proliferating all over the landscape.

There're gonna be a million checkpoints here, and I think this is going to slow down.

But this is the shock and awe phase, and I think we're gonna pass through it pretty quickly because reality is beginning to intrude.

These are real lives, these are real functions.

We have deep investments here.

I'm a government reformer, but this is not the way to go about it.

Elon Musk is a great entrepreneur, but this isn't the private sector, this is the government, and it's not an optional thing.

I don't have to buy a Tesla, but I've gotta get services from my government.

- This isn't something you can change, in my view, by pruning the jungle.

You can't just clip, here and there, the red tape.

You actually have to go back to a system which the framers contemplated in the Constitution, where law provides a framework of goals, and principles, and accountability, and checks and balances, but real people make choices, and they're politically accountable.

Today in Washington, you can't find a real person who has authority to give a permit.

And that's the reason we never get permits.

- How did we end up in a place where it was the process that hamstrung us?

- It was a change in legal philosophy.

We came out of the '60s feeling guilty for lots of good reasons.

We woke up to racism, pollution, lots of other things.

So we wanted to create a system where there were no more abuses of authority, and it just doesn't work.

Now you have no authority, and so you have a government that's increasingly paralyzed by the kind of stuff that Will's written about and others, by this red tape state.

And the goal is not to, in my view, to get rid of government.

The goal is actually to pull it back so we can do it, pull the law back so it can do its job.

- Your solution is for government to unshackle itself from laws and regulations to empower individuals to make decisions and use their judgment.

- Within the framework of law.

And courts would only get involved when an official transgresses those boundaries.

- So then, how are individuals held accountable?

- Well, any way you want, but by someone.

- For their judgment.

- By someone above them.

- No, no, no, that's where we get hamstrung by this process, right?

Because there's so much process, and the process is ultimately what takes any sort of agency away from individuals to make these decisions.

- That's right.

So if you go to a, say to give a permit for a transmission line, you can't have 16 agencies bickering over whether to give the permit.

One agency has to have the authority to make the decision, and that's subject to the approval of the White House in a democracy.

Today, you get 16 agencies bickering about it around the table, and it goes on for years.

- And it's unclear who has the ultimate authority.

- Well, no one has the ultimate authority.

- Well, so then isn't this what Musk is trying to fix?

And how do you keep Musk?

I mean, if the idea is to give an individual the authority to make the decision, isn't that what Musk is doing?

- Well, Musk is taking the authority himself to tear apart agencies, but he's not trying to change the operating structure to give anybody else the authority.

The problem with government is that the people inside it have been disempowered by all this process and all these procedures.

They're also not accountable, by the way.

So the American public is.

- Musk has a bad theory.

The theory is that there's waste everywhere, there's abuse, there's fraud.

He calls AID, our foreign aid agency, a criminal organization.

Now I have my criticisms of AID, they could be reformed, should be, but they're basically doing good humanitarian work around most of the world, they're not a criminal organization.

But why does this freelance billionaire get to come and superimpose his judgements on what's working and what's not?

There's no theory of change here.

There's no good analysis of where we're failing.

It's just he's bringing the entrepreneur's methodology, which is I'm gonna cut everything by 60%, wipe the slate clean, and we're gonna start over, and that'll yield efficiencies.

It's not the way it works in the public sector.

- Right, and what's, where's the vision for the day after these changes?

How's government gonna work better after Musk finishes going through all these agencies?

And so again, I think what's missing here is not the diagnosis that it's broken.

It is broken, it is paralyzed, and broken, and wasteful, and not delivering things.

But the proper cure is to actually let it do its job.

Pull back the red tape, let there be permits, let Defense Department officials use their judgment and be accountable up the chain of authority for whether they do a good job or not.

- We have fetishized process, and legal obstacles, and veto points, and everybody having their say.

And it all adds up to a retreat from the exercise of public authority.

But that's not what Musk is talking about.

He's just getting rid of whole agencies he doesn't happen to like.

It's all on a whim, there's no analysis, there's no predicate being laid for any of these changes.

- Both of you have been critical of certain processes, review processes.

One of them is environmental review processes.

You've both written about how environmental review processes actually have inhibited government efficiency, and in doing so, have actually made outcomes for the environment worse.

How do you account for environmental priorities in a more efficient way that doesn't inhibit a project from actually moving forward?

- Well, I mean, the problem here is more political.

We have a lot of folks on the Democratic side who do not want to take away the permitting.

They don't want to relax the permitting process because they think that's their best protection against environmentally ruinous things.

But what they don't understand is that if you can't upgrade and modernize your energy grid, you're building in higher pollution.

You're not laying the framework for a cleaner grid.

And that's happening all over the country.

It's not just the grid, it's everything on the environmental side.

- Well, delays are bad for the environment.

We need new transmission lines to take power from the solar, wind farms in the Midwest to Chicago.

Well, you can't get a permit for it.

And every permit is not, it's not a question of legal compliance, it's a question of trade-offs.

Are the benefits of the transmission line worth the harm of cutting through a pristine forest?

That's not a legal question, that's a political question.

- And it's a judgment question.

- It's a judgment call.

And we've, and so the purpose of environmental review, as it was initially enacted, was to have a few months of review in dozens of pages that would alert the public to the fact that there are these issues that are political in nature that are gonna be decided.

Instead, it's become this years-long, no pebble left unturned kind of process that virtually never, never ends.

And we have to make trade off judgements in order for the country to move forward.

- You've written, Philip, that, quote, "Rebuilding government requires not just a wrecking ball, but trust."

Polls suggests that Musk is losing the public's trust.

In a recent YouGov poll, only 13% of Americans, and 26% of Republicans, said they want Musk to have a lot of influence in the Trump administration.

So can an initiative like DOGE survive if it doesn't have the trust of the American people, Philip?

- One, no, and two, it also can't survive if he doesn't have the trust of people who work for government.

One of the biggest problems in government today is if you make a decision to give a permit, there's always somebody who doesn't like it.

- Yeah.

- So they will attack you.

So in my view, what senior civil servants need is, not to live in fear, but to have cover for important decisions.

They need to be, to feel that the people in charge, Musk or whomever, will actually protect them when they make decisions.

And so no organization works in an atmosphere of distrust, whether it's government or society.

- We need radical disruptors.

We need 'em in the entrepreneurial sectors of our economy, that's what we want.

But that's not what we, that's not how you fix government's problems, for the reasons we just talked about.

And Elon Musk doesn't really know what he's trying to do.

He wants to cut $2 trillion in spending.

Well, that's a nice goal.

If you got rid of every single federal employee, 2.3 million of them, you would cut 5% of public spending and you wouldn't come anywhere near that goal.

So he doesn't even really have an understanding, I think, of the end game.

The end game seems to be here just disruption for its own sake, sowing fear, telling employees they're no longer wanted, tell 'em to stay home, sort of putting down whole agencies as worthless.

And again, pretending that the problem is waste, fraud, and abuse, which is a really kind of simple-minded understanding of what's wrong with government.

He thinks that there's just waste in large quantities lying around that he's gonna excise through this radical surgery.

- There's one area with hundreds of billions of dollars in savings that requires major overhaul, which is in the healthcare administration area.

And if Musk and Trump really wanted to save big amounts of money, they would simplify the healthcare reimbursement and regulatory system, because 30% of the healthcare dollar goes to administration, which is over $1 million per every American doctor in red tape.

That system is crazy.

And it needs to be completely, basically replaced.

- Well, there is waste all across the government, okay.

But it isn't sitting there in large piles that you can just go into a room and find.

You have, it's like Elaine Kamarck, who was the re-inventor-in-chief for Bill Clinton, said, "It's like fat marbled in the steak."

And so the point is, you have to go and find it.

And the people that know where it is are the people who work in government.

So if you go in there and you attack them and say they're worthless, and they're idiots, and they have to get going and pack up, and we're gonna shut their agency down because we don't need it, and everything they've been doing for 15 years is worthless, well, they're not gonna be very cooperative to you.

So if you were serious about trying to find pockets of waste, or even fraud, these are the people that could help you find it.

So again, it's just a marker of seriousness to me.

If you were serious about changing government, you wouldn't go about it by attacking everybody in sight.

- As Will said, it can't be done by just by amputation.

It needs to be done somewhat more surgically.

And I will say that the biggest supporters of my somewhat radical reform efforts have been the senior civil servants.

They want more authority to manage the civil servants below them.

They want more authority to cut through the process and get permits.

They actually want to do these things.

And they exist in this red tape jungle that doesn't allow them to.

- Why do you think that is?

Why do you think they are the ones who are most eager to see reform?

- These are the senior executive service, which are the top civil servants, are people who have generally devoted their lives to public service and are experts in specific areas.

And they actually get, their life work is making.

- You're saying they're serious people.

- These agencies happen and deliver the goods, and they can't do what they feel is necessary.

- Over the course of American history, there have been several attempts to reform government, starting in 1883 with the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act that established the modern civil service.

And there was the Taft Commission, there were two Hoover Commissions, the Grace Commission under Ronald Reagan's presidency, and then of course, the National Performance Review, in which you participated, and you both contributed under President Clinton's presidency.

What can Elon Musk learn, if he wanted to learn from American history, from these previous efforts?

- Well, what I would hope he would learn is that he's right that periodically government has to be reorganized to look at if it's meeting its goals and to change how it meets its goal.

What's happened through history is, actually, you've had changes in operating philosophy over the years.

The last real change in philosophy was in the 1960s.

- So what was the change in that governing philosophy, Phil?

- The change in philosophy was don't trust anyone to use their judgment, because human judgment is fallible.

And we need to create a new system that will guarantee that all choices are correct.

Let everyone who complains have a hearing.

And the result of that is paralysis.

So I think the solution is to actually change our operating philosophy and go back to the one that the framers contemplated, which is one based on human responsibility.

Law sets goals, law sets guardrails, law sets a hierarchy of authority to make sure that people don't do stupid things, but people make decisions.

Law can't govern.

And we've created this massive system over the, only in the last 50 years, on the premise that actually we can make government into a kind of a software program.

- Will, do you agree with Phil's diagnosis of the governing philosophy that changed in the '60s.

- I think I partially agree with it.

It clearly did.

We got a lot more liberal process-oriented attempts to protect citizens against abuses of government power, which was, government was getting bigger, and it was intruding itself in more parts of American life.

And in the '60s, we radically expanded government under the Great Society, and we have been doing that ever since.

And so it just became a more intrusive thing with tentacles everywhere.

And that just built this kind of resistance, has built antagonism from the public that now saw government trying to do too much, trying to spend too much, and trying to direct them too much.

And so I do think it has to do with the scope of government's responsibilities, and we need to have a serious conversation about that.

- We have a question from one of our Hofstra University students, Mark Lussier.

- Hello, my name is Mark, I'm from Connecticut, and one of my senators, Chris Murphy, said that we are in the midst of a constitutional crisis.

I wanna know if you agree, and the step, and I also want to know the steps that the other two branches can take to address that, and their odds of succeeding at addressing it.

- Are we in a constitutional crisis?

Let me add to that, actually.

Where are the other branches of government?

We know that the judiciary is exerting itself, but why couldn't these reforms be legislated and then signed in by the executive branch?

- That's a very good question.

- Are we in a constitutional crisis?

- Oh, yes, we are.

I mean, I wrote a piece this week about ruling by decree.

It's un-American, there's no basis for it in American history and no basis for it in the Constitution.

The president can't just make policy willy nilly across the whole scope of what federal government does.

That's why the courts are getting involved.

We've got a raft of lawsuits.

I think a lot of this is gonna slow down.

But the point is the courts are doing their job.

Who's not doing its job is Congress, and it's because it's under Republican control.

He's got them absolutely cowed, and they're not raising objection to his taking over the power of the purse, which is clearly delegated to the legislative branch.

So yes, that's a crisis.

- Phil, do you think we're in a crisis?

- Well, we're certainly building towards one, and now we have Trump saying that maybe the courts don't have authority.

And if they really disavow court rulings, then we will have a constitutional crisis.

- Do you have anything you wanna follow up on with, Mark?

I wanna make sure you're fully answered because you had a couple of different questions.

- Actually, one piece was what's the likelihood of them succeeding and like being able to address those concerns of a crisis, if we get to that point?

- Well, hey Phil, you said we're getting there.

You think we're there, you said we're getting there, especially if they just defy the court orders, then we'll be there.

- Right.

- So then what?

- Well, here's what scares me.

Suppose he defies the courts, in other words, the court's are the only thing that are, is the only source of resistance now to Trump's imperial will.

What if he just says, "No, I'm not gonna do what the court's prescribed."

The other possibility is that the higher courts, the Supreme Court, might side with him on some of these issues.

- Well, you know, I do think they're gray areas, and I've written about this in large arguments and such about the scope of executive power.

But whatever gray areas there are, you still have to respect the rule of law in this country.

And I believe that the rule of law is a foundation that most Americans believe in, and that once you abandon it or disavow it, then we really are in trouble as a society, and we have to sort of come together and do something different.

- Let me ask you both this.

In 1990, William F. Buckley Jr's original "Firing Line" hosted a debate that was titled, "Government Is Not the Solution, It's the Problem."

And of course, borrowing from Ronald Reagan's line, listen to this defense of government from none other than George McGovern.

- This debate proposition reminds me of Groucho Marx's observation that marriage is the chief cause of divorce.

(audience laughs) The answer is not to abolish marriage, but to strive for better marriages.

And so it is with government.

Government has caused some problems, no question about that.

And I've spoken out against some of those problems.

But it has also come up with some inspired solutions.

- Right, so the question is, is DOGE's attempt to fix government an example of getting rid of divorce by abolishing marriage?

- I'd say, so far, yes.

And while it's true that, and Musk is right, the government isn't working very well, to the point that government is the problem, government should get out of people's daily lives.

I mean, much of the resentment that got Trump elected was government telling people how to talk, how to get along in the workplace, how you run the local school.

And I do think government is the problem when it gets in our daily lives.

But I think government, in a crowded, global, really fearful environment of warring powers and such, government is incredibly important to make government strong.

We can't be strong abroad if we're weak at home.

So we need to make government work better, not get rid of it.

- Will.

- Well, you know, the problem with what Mr. McGovern said is that it's not about whether you like government or you dislike government.

I mean, it's a necessary evil, as Jefferson said, we're gonna have it.

And so the question is how can you make it a better servant of the popular will, but also how you constrain what it does so that it doesn't try to do everything, which when it tries to do that, it doesn't do anything well.

- Last question to both of you.

If you had one piece of advice you would offer to Elon Musk to get it right, if there were still an opportunity for him to correct course, what would it be?

- I'd say focus on how government makes decisions.

If you can streamline government decisions, give people authority to take responsibility, you will save countless billions, probably hundreds of billions of dollars, and make government much more responsive to public needs.

- Will.

- Well, the tragically-missed opportunity here is that Elon Musk could have done us a lot of good.

If Trump had sent him over to the Pentagon, for example, and said, "Modernize this.

Let's get software, let's get modern IT, let's get AI working."

This is something he actually knows how to do.

And what he's been set on is tasks that he doesn't know how to do, doesn't understand even how to define the problems properly.

- Okay, so that's your analysis.

What's your advice for Elon Musk?

- Go back to the private sector and leave us a alone, please.

- All right, all right.

(laughs) With that, Will Marshall and Phil Howard, thank you for joining me on "Firing Line," here at Hofstra University.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

(audience applauds) - [Announcer] "Firing Line," with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, the Fairweather Foundation, Peter and Mary Kalikow, Cliff and Laurel Asness, the Meadowlark Foundation, and by the following.

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