Red Tape Podcast, Episode 11 – Who is Running the Government? Budgets, Congress, and Chaos (Live Recording)

Red Tape is the newest R Street podcast about the country’s biggest problems and the surprising ways that governments (and regular people) often get in the way of solving them. It was produced in partnership with Pod People. Listen wherever you find podcasts, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and learn more about the podcast here.

This episode was recorded live.

Episode description: What happens when Washington Post Columnist Megan McArdle and R Street Expert Nan Swift try to figure out who is running the government? A live episode of Red Tape!

On this episode, co-hosts Kelli Pierce has a live, wide-ranging conversation about budgets, Congress, power, and the government as part of the R Street Institute’s 2025 Real Solutions Summit. (The conversation begins with co-hosts Pierce and Shoshana Weissmann talking briefly about if social media really runs the government before they are joined by Swift and McArdle.)

The 2025 Real Solutions Summit brought together leaders in public policy, media, philanthropy, and the private sector who believe our best days are still ahead if we can unleash American innovation, bolster competition, and safeguard individual liberty. Learn more at: ⁠https://www.rstreet.org/summit2025/

This is an uncorrected AI-generated transcript. Please refer to the audio for accuracy.

Episode transcript:

Kelli Pierce:

Well, hello everyone. Welcome to the very first Live Red Tape podcast episode. I am Kelli Pierce and this is my co-host, the world famous Shoshana Weissmann. Hello. Thanks for having me. Yes, absolutely. Clap for hers. She’s amazing. Kello, what the hell? I think the US is in a very interesting place right now.

Shoshana Weissmann (00:28):

Right now. Just right now.

Kelli Pierce (00:30):

I mean it kind of always is because nostalgia is a hell of a drug, right?

Shoshana Weissmann (00:34):

It really is. The member varies.

Kelli Pierce (00:36):

Yeah, but I mean honestly, I do think the 2024 election was kind of unique, right? I don’t know if you saw this meme that was circulating at the time and it was like an American flag at the top, and I think it said something to the effect of, have you tried turning it off and back on again?

Shoshana Weissmann (00:54):

Yeah. Have you tried turning it on and off again? That’s the meme for that.

Kelli Pierce (00:57):

Yeah, so it was just like, I don’t know. I don’t know how to explain the 2024 election other than we ended up Reelecting a game show host for president of the United States, and for most of it he was kind of running against this, I don’t know, kind of grandfatherly type guy that probably watches game shows and gets angry at the TV when he can’t follow things

Shoshana Weissmann (01:22):

And Biden Lean. So I mean, his team leaned into so much with social media and they were following that, and Trump’s team obviously does a lot with social media, so it’s great that X formerly Twitter is kind of where all our policy is coming from.

Kelli Pierce (01:36):

No, it does seem like we’re living in Twitter. Oh my gosh. The speaking of Twitter, since we’re living in Twitter in real life, who would you choose to be from Twitter in the president’s cabinet? Just the top three maybe.

Shoshana Weissmann (01:51):

I think if I’m choosing three, I think it’s like Scotland sitcom I think has to, not me. I don’t want to. Good choice. Jarvis, if you guys are familiar with Jarvis, he’s good. He’s a little nuts, but that’s right for Twitter. And then I think the obvious last one is three year Letterman.

Kelli Pierce (02:09):

Oh, absolutely. So who would they be? How would

Shoshana Weissmann (02:13):

Jarvis be? I guess Scott would have to be high up. He would’ve to be able to save a lot of stuff. So Commerce or something like that. That’s good. Trust. Were Letterman, I mean Department of Financing, waterbeds. You got to get that under control. And then Jarvis, I guess I could see him at OPM. I think OPM would be the right role for him to just get stuff in line, communicate. But what about for you?

Kelli Pierce (02:40):

So I would go with three year Letterman as well, obviously, obviously, but I would put him Secretary of State because I mean he can get into battles, right? With foreign leaders on Twitter.

Shoshana Weissmann (02:53):

Yeah. Could you imagine him versus the head of Iran on Twitter? That would be great.

Kelli Pierce (02:58):

That be great. I know we kind of need his services at the moment possibly, even though he’s not active right now, but I totally would put Weird Al at Doge.

Shoshana Weissmann (03:08):

Oh, I thought you were going to say Darth. I was thinking if you’re not active accounts, I’m thinking Darth.

Kelli Pierce (03:13):

No, no. Honestly, I don’t know if you’ve seen weird AL’S social media over the years. No. Oh, it’s the best. It’s like him doing corrections of grammar on street signs and stuff like that. That’s

Shoshana Weissmann (03:25):

Amazing.

Kelli Pierce (03:25):

Yeah, it’s like that’s the person you would need at Doge and I think I love that. For me, lastly, just to do the top three, probably Mary Catherine Ham at education.

Shoshana Weissmann (03:34):

Oh yeah, yeah. But that’s too wholesome. She would do too good a job, I feel like.

Kelli Pierce (03:39):

I know, but she didn’t have someone right. With some sort of competence. Right.

Shoshana Weissmann (03:44):

That’s fair. I picked scom.

Kelli Pierce (03:46):

Yeah, true. So it kind of just make you wonder though, I mean we like to joke about Twitter, but who’s actually running the government?

Shoshana Weissmann (03:57):

I have to assume the Doge dog is somewhere around there. We’ve had a lot of talk of Doge, but we’ve never seen the dog. I assume at least someone on his team owns that kind of dog.

Kelli Pierce (04:10):

You think he’s doing a good job right now?

Shoshana Weissmann (04:11):

The dog.

Kelli Pierce (04:12):

The dog, yeah.

Shoshana Weissmann (04:14):

I haven’t really seen much that’s helping dogs one way or the other. He’s not delivering to his constituency.

Kelli Pierce (04:20):

Oh man. I think you actually need to get in there and reform everything now.

Shoshana Weissmann (04:26):

Yeah, I’m just going to jump in. Someone’s going to let me or appoint me. That’ll go great for them.

Kelli Pierce (04:30):

Yeah, no, you can get into Twitter battles. I think the president would love it.

Shoshana Weissmann (04:33):

Yeah, that’s true. I guess if there’s any place for me to do it, it’s not Congress, it’s not Senate. It’s going to be like the executive branch.

Kelli Pierce (04:41):

Well, I think we have two people as well who could also answer this question

Shoshana Weissmann (04:45):

Better than me.

Kelli Pierce (04:46):

Well that’s debatable. Okay. We have the lovely Nan Swift and Megan McArdle here, so we wanted to bring them up on stage

Shoshana Weissmann (04:56):

And I’m going to go off,

Nan Swift (05:08):

I have thoughts on animals running the government. I’m sure

Megan McArdle (05:11):

You do. You’re doing a pretty good job for a dog.

Nan Swift (05:14):

I

Megan McArdle (05:14):

Mean grading on a curve.

Nan Swift (05:17):

There’s so many municipalities that have elected cats or dogs into these important positions and I would like to do a survey of how they’re doing budget wise. Maybe that is a process reform we haven’t considered yet.

Megan McArdle (05:35):

I mean the stake budget’s going to go way up, but other than that,

Kelli Pierce (05:39):

I can get behind that. We’ll just introduce you ladies. Of course. We need no introduction, but N Swift, our resident fellow in the governance program here at R Street and Megan McArdle, a columnist with the Washington Post. Thank you ladies for joining us today.

Megan McArdle (05:55):

Thanks for having me.

Kelli Pierce (05:56):

Well, our question is really who is running the government, but I want to take a little bit of a step back and we just didn’t arrive here in the year 2025. A lot of things have led to where we are right now and I’m kind of curious to get your take on what are maybe the three biggest structural issues we’re facing in the United States.

Megan McArdle (06:19):

I mean, number one, we are spending way more money than we are taking in tax revenue and no one seems to have a plan to fix that, which is related to number two. Congress has stopped working and political polarization is up, and those two things are indeed related. I think number three, we have not figured out how to build an economy that feels like it works for everyone at the moment. You are seeing this huge backlash, I think largely driven by social media, not so much by any particular person on social media, but just the sheer fact that social media has destroyed all the old gatekeepers who helped to maintain a kind of level of social consensus that now that just doesn’t exist.

Nan Swift (07:09):

How about you Nan? That’s a very, very smart answer. Mine is less so and a lot more esoteric. I think some of the structural problems we have right now are in the mindset that people are coming from one, there’s kind of this just idea of perceived scarcity that everything is a zero sum game and if someone else has something that means I don’t, and that’s the end of it and we’ve taken it off the shelf and more. There will never be more of anything, nothing multiplies. And we see this reflected in trade policy and the way we treat immigrants, the way we do housing, the way people complain about billionaires and trillionaires. It’s a really pervasive mindset issue. Along the same lines is a lack of patience and people just having no appreciation for the scope and breadth of history

Kelli Pierce (08:22):

And

Nan Swift (08:22):

That this moment is so fleeting and any big changes that we can appreciate now came out of years and years and years and years if not decades of work. And if we don’t get that instantly, then that’s just no good and we’re going to take our ball and go home and shake the dust from our sandals and salt everything with salt and who knows what else? Just people aren’t patient and don’t appreciate how small we are in a really profound way. And I also think there’s this, yeah, just if, yeah, I think I have two structural,

Kelli Pierce (09:10):

Hey, we accept two. Those are my new one. Absolutely. I want to piggyback off what you guys have been touching on, which it does kind of seem like we’re in this terminally online culture left and and that is just absolutely poisoning our political discourse. I don’t know, just from the day-to-day, I don’t know if you guys have seen that as well or experienced that because you guys have been in Washington

Megan McArdle (09:34):

A lot longer than me. Have I experienced the toxic online culture just a little bit. I believe there was the one time, yes, I think so. This is a vaguely amusing story or perhaps not. Some years ago when my grandmother was dying, one of my relatives who went slightly crazy, my mother was the executive of the estate and my relative who shall remain nameless started sending my email, my mother some disturbing emails that escalated into there was one a day and then there was seven a day and then there was the world would be better placed without you in it. My mother was understandably extremely freaked out and she was like, should I go to the police? Should I file a restraining order? And she was very upset and I’m just desperately trying to calm my mother down. So I’m like, mom, mom, mom. I get death threats all the time.

(10:28):

They never do anything. So fun fact, kids don’t try this at home because it turns out the words, mom, I get death threats all the time. Do not in any way make mothers calmer. They do make them not focused on their own problems, but it really is true. I think we weigh overweight the importance of this discourse and we too much time and we spend too much time participating in it. And I have a theory about why or one reason that it’s so nasty. I mean there’s all of the kind of standard things. It’s depersonalizing, it’s easy to, you don’t pick up any nuance on what people are saying, so it’s easy to load the worst possible interpretation on it. But I also think there is this thing and what has become clear to me over the course of my writing career, which is now sadly into its third decade, which means that I am getting old, is that a lot of people are literally just seeking out reasons to be angry and they’re angry at you if you do not provide them reasons to be angry.

(11:37):

I will frequently get people who will email me, why aren’t you writing whenever I write anything that Why aren’t you writing about Trump’s executive orders or whatever? I will say, did you look at our page which has nine articles of Trump’s executive orders? And I did not feel like my 10th one saying the same thing as the other nine. Also, I have just frankly run out of ways to say Trump is bad and terrible and please do not elect this man. Again, I used them all up during the first Trump administration and I think it’s because when you’re angry, if you think about it and if you think about the kind of gentle pleasure of getting mildly irritated with your friends, you’re like, can you believe that guy in the cab and what he said and you were not in any way going to affect the outcome of that engagement.

(12:31):

It is over. It has passed. But there is something enjoyable about that, and I think this is because when you are angry, first of all, it binds groups of people together when we’re all angry at the same person. We don’t just feel angry. We feel a bond with other people as Orwell sort of really most vividly memorialized in the two minutes hate in 1984. But the other thing is when you’re angry, you are not anxious, you are not sad, you are not worried about your own mortality, you are not thinking about the ways in which you have failed your children or any other kind of negative rate. It crowds every other emotion out. And so if you are anxious or sad or worried about your job or whatever, then being angry is a really pleasant substitute. The problem is that it of course also crowds out any positive emotions and it makes you an angry person that other people don’t want to be around in real life.

(13:21):

I think it is addictive. That thing of, I have found something to be mad about. All of my other anxieties have trickled away and that you really have to try to discipline yourself off of it. I do think that eventually we’re going to develop social technology to handle this. Every communications technology has led to massive social disruption. The printing press is obvious, but also the telegraph and the telephone and radio famously used by Hitler and fascists to build these and the Soviet Union, and it takes some time to develop the social technology to handle those disruptions and to use them in a healthy way. I think we’ll get there, but we are definitely not there yet.

Nan Swift (14:04):

I want to say I don’t think it’s all bad.

Megan McArdle (14:09):

Are you kidding? Social media is great. I learned. I learned there was a guy, it turned out he was a primatologist and there was this meme going around, can a hundred men fight one gorilla?

Nan Swift (14:21):

Yes.

Megan McArdle (14:22):

And he was like, it turns out I am qualified to answer this question. And it also turns out he’s out in the woods looking at bears with some bear people, so they’re now debating which animals could, how many men could defeat a polar bear. And it was amazing. Never leaving Twitter. This is high quality content, but

Nan Swift (14:42):

It’s not like that. I’ve actually been able to observe up close and personal, a really interesting phenomenon online with my mother, and it’s not a crazy scary story, it’s that on Facebook, my mom reconnected with her graduating class and it was huge. It was over a thousand people, just enormous. A lot of them were people that she wasn’t necessarily close to or really new at the time, but she discovered that they’re all really nice that everywhere else on her social media feeds, it’s anger. It’s stuff that she cannot believe. This is what my friend really thinks about people who are slightly different than her and the worst things that we all know, but of all places on her little public school year of what, 1970 Facebook group, everyone is really nice and they discuss politics, but nicely what? So it’s not like, oh, we’ve taken this off the table That is, it’s a healthier place than her church. It’s amazing. And she just like every day she’s like, I can’t believe it. I can’t believe, and I’m part of this. And it has been such a wonderful thing in her life to realize this and now to have a lot more friends at a time when most people aren’t accruing relationships like that.

Megan McArdle (16:18):

And I think that also, I mean we way overestimate how much any of that is real. So we spent part of the year in Boston last year and our neighbor, I’m pretty sure he voted for Trump and I’m pretty sure he knows I I wrote it in the Washington Post, but I’ll tell you, when the smoke alarm in my dad’s house went off, he was over there with the fire department getting it taken care of was calling us to let us know that a window was open. That’s what real people are like with other people. It’s online. When I go out, when people talk about how all Americans hate each other, when I go out into the real world, I do not see all Americans acting like they hate each other. I see almost all Americans acting like they are fine, upstanding, decent human beings with fundamentally pro-social instincts.

(17:17):

And so I think we should not the loudest voices on social media sometimes perhaps including mine, look, negativity sells the algorithm. Like I said, it drives engagement, but that’s not how most people are, even if they’re angry on social media. And one of the really funny experiences I’ve had both on both sides of it, I remember I wrote a really mean book review of Barry Lynn’s book on offshoring for the New York Sun in 2003. And when I was writing it, I wasn’t thinking about him. I was just starting in the business. I wasn’t thinking about him as a human being who had spent two years writing this book. I was like, he is a big important person who’s written a book and it’s really fun to be mean about it. I’m like, I still disagree with his thesis, although I think it is, there are some, I take the arguments more seriously than I did 20 years ago, but then I ended up at New America as a fellow and he was there and the first time at the first meeting he was like, we should have lunch.

(18:21):

I was like, oh yeah, we should have lunch. How? But never, never, because he clearly did not know. And then he came up to me two weeks later at the next meeting and I was like, I remember who you are. And I felt so bad, but I have also been on the other side of that where people will write me these totally insane emails and I’ll just write back and I’ll be like, and they will have some grain of a point. I’ll right back and I’ll be like, look, I understand you feel this way. I understand you’re mad. Here’s where I’m coming from. And sometimes they’ll just be like, you are an even worse human being than I thought. How dare you argue with me? But a lot of times they’ll be like, oh, oh, right, you’re a person and I’m now in communication with you. I’m really sorry that was totally inappropriate. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m ashamed of myself, which is what I said to Barry Lynn or should have if I didn’t, I now don’t remember, but if I didn’t say it, this is my apology to Barry Lynn and that is healthy that people, when the minute they start seeing you as a person rather than this abstraction, not every single one of them because yes, some people are indeed just psychopaths, but most of them will actually start behaving a lot more decently.

Nan Swift (19:33):

I’m afraid of the indecent in-person behavior that we’ve seen especially during the last election though like language and signage in the Bible belt and other very conservative areas where people of faith have no problem putting in F Biden flag on their giant truck or a sign in their yard and do the rules or our faith just suddenly not apply there. I’ve been shocked to see how it’s leached over in a new kind of unnerving way.

Megan McArdle (20:15):

Oh yeah. To be clear, I think it does in affect real life, but even with the signage, it’s a sign. It is less likely Now. Some people would just like some people when George Bush lost the election and I was like, okay, well he’s done Let it go. People were like, no going to the White House to chant na nah, nah, nah. They had to including some friends of mine, which I just thought was gratuitous. He lost the election, his party lost the election, he’s gone. You can be gracious, which is an instinct that’s increasingly missing in our politics, but it’s unlikely that most of those people, if they were in front of someone who voted for Biden would just be like F Biden and you, right? They would be, would you like some more home fries? Right? It’s like

Kelli Pierce (21:03):

That episode of the Golden Girls would Dorothy’s absolutely preparing to just rip into George HW Bush and he comes to her front door and she just freezes in real life. She could not get those words out, that kind of

Megan McArdle (21:16):

Thing. And that is pretty common because mostly it’s hard to be rude to people and that’s a fundamentally good instinct with some potential downsides. Sometimes you got to say the thing that people don’t want to hear, but I think you never have to say it in the forms of F Biden or F Trump

Kelli Pierce (21:33):

Or anything. No, not at all. But I think people’s genuine frustrations though are not only channeled in an unhealthy way online, but they don’t understand that we, the people still control the United States and also my outlet for this might not be the federal level. My problem might actually be a state level or a local level, and it seems like one of the structural problems for me in the United States is a lack of civics education of where to take your problem.

Megan McArdle (22:00):

I also think a big problem, and speaking as a journalist, an enormous problem that must be solved immediately is the collapse of my industry and specifically the collapse of local news, the internet reward scale. And so what we are converging toward is something much more like Britain has already, which is a small number of large ideologically sorted media outlets rather than a small number. There’s some offsetting, right? We’re getting podcasts and talk radio and YouTube streamers and all that, but in terms of who’s doing the day-to-day, day in day out reporting, which is really expensive and time consuming to do, it’s being done at the national level and that means that, and also the podcast on YouTube, those things also scale. And so what it’s doing is pushing people all of the stories up to the national level. And so it’s actually harder to know what’s happening at the local level, much less to figure out which city counselor you should lobby to fix some problem.

Kelli Pierce (23:05):

Yeah, definitely. I can think of also, we talk a lot about trade that’s been in the news quite a bit. The president has zeroed in on trade deficits and that kind of thing, and it kind of gets lost in the shuffle that a lot of times your problems might be, or what’s keeping you from, let’s say starting a manufacturing business might not be actually federal rules. It might be state rules. I know that certainly happened with my family. We had actually a manufacturing business and the state of California put in rule after rule after rule after rule, which had nothing really to do with health and safety, even though they claimed it did. And what do you know? We’re not manufacturing anymore. And so my understood that yes, it was the state of California that was the problem. I don’t know today that

Megan McArdle (23:50):

Necessarily, but the workers who lost the jobs might not have understood that, right. Much less. Exactly.

Kelli Pierce (23:55):

Yeah. And then of course then everyone has to have an outlet for their anger and it’s not necessarily your friend at the bar anymore. Now it’s like we’re going to pilly any sort of public official online.

Megan McArdle (24:09):

I mean, I think scapegoating is just a natural tendency in part because it’s so much more satisfying than there is a complex series of problems, many of which are unintended consequences of good things we wanted to do, right? It’s much more satisfying. This is why conspiracy theories are so compelling. It is so much more satisfying to think, not that we live in a complex world of scarcity and trade-offs, but that there is a shadowy group of people who are doing all these terrible things. Because if that’s true, even if you think, I mean it is frightening that there is a large and shadowy and apparently incredibly competent group of people wrecking everything. Theoretically you could get those people, make them stop and then everything would be fine. Whereas if it’s just, wow, all this governing stuff is super hard, it doesn’t offer the same scope for easy solutions.

Nan Swift (25:04):

This is where my plan to have Google Run, everything comes into play.

Kelli Pierce (25:09):

Interesting.

Nan Swift (25:09):

They know what I want before I do. Just give it to them. We all

Kelli Pierce (25:14):

Retire. But it also, as you’re saying Megan, about kind of the nuances just getting lost because when you’re wanting to have a proposal, someone will take online, let’s say a very small sliver and say, this is just absolutely wrong. Now we have to go and tank the bill and march on Washington over essentially nothing. And I think Nan, you’ve kind of seen that dynamic change a little bit,

Nan Swift (25:43):

But that

Megan McArdle (25:44):

Was a very telling side.

Nan Swift (25:47):

Yeah, I can’t tell you how many times we’ve been really close to an actually good reform, but if there was the smallest chance that someone somewhere could use this in a way that we don’t like, even if that way is not necessarily illegal, then therefore we’re walking. I was lucky enough to work for a time under Senator Enzi, RIP, he always talked about the 80 and 20% just put aside the 20% where we disagree and focus on the 80% where we agree. I also think it’s the 80% that’s actually achievable that that would do something practical where we agree that we could move forward on. He didn’t view compromise as giving up, but we both get a thing out of this and I really would like to see a whole lot more of that, but that’s one reason why we need more former accountants in Congress.

Megan McArdle (26:58):

Yes. Well, earlier today, Ja saw Jonah Goldberg asked what his unpopular opinion was, and my unpopular opinion is that we have too much transparency, which is not something that you normally see people say, and also too much good government that I think that the reforms that were meant totally benignly who could be against more democracy, who could be against, but the primary reforms that led to a very small number of highly motivated voters deciding who the parties would nominate rather than people who cared about winning the general election and had good insights as to how that might be possible outside of your highly polarized district, but also putting cameras in Congress. I personally love this. I basically kept cable for five extra years so I could get C-span. I’m probably the only customer in the United States who has ever done this, but it means that everyone is performing.

(28:02):

And then all of these activist groups which have gotten so good at generating these, are you going to be dinged by this guy for something that increases taxes by $1, but that’s a tax hike, or are you going to be dinged for this thing that slightly increases the clearances around abortion clinics, but now you’re restricting abortion, whatever it is you are going to. These groups have such granular transparency, and of course voters aren’t following the whole thing. No one can read these bills. I remembered when Nancy Pelosi famously in the Affordable Care Act was said, we have to pass the bill d find what’s in it, and people made fun of that. But if you’ve ever tried to read a bill, it’s not a readable document like amends section 2 38 of the Transparency Act of 1924 to read subsection eight, clause 24 to read. And rather than but, and you’re like, okay,

Nan Swift (29:05):

I can remember side note trying to read the bill with you and a whole host of other healthcare experts around the time we all had a listserv and people chose different chunks of the pages to read and shared notes between organizations and across experts and opinion leaders and stuff so that we could digest the bill in a pre super online time. Gosh, that just takes me back to,

Kelli Pierce (29:39):

We had

Nan Swift (29:40):

Google Docs.

Kelli Pierce (29:41):

If you had AI at that point,

Megan McArdle (29:42):

Although my fear about AI is right, it’s actually going to make it much easier to understand what legislation says, but in the same way that the word processor made it easier to write clear legislation and also let the, I won’t say the word, let those people write longer bills that are more confusing. I worry that ai, it’s going to be like, wow, now I can understand what regulations mean. And they’re like, okay, right now I got AI too. Let’s see,

Nan Swift (30:10):

Justin, a match had a couple recommendations for this. One was to use more plain language in bills, but also to include the text of what you’re changing. We call these red lines and the docs exist. If you aren’t a hill person or a former Hill person, you just don’t get to see ’em. But we could make those public.

Megan McArdle (30:35):

We could publish those. Just

Kelli Pierce (30:37):

Hit go. But another issue that is also brought up around the bills quite a bit is that Congress is not really legislating. They’re just kind of pushing it off to the bureaucrats. I know that we’ve got a Supreme Court case that kind of upended a lot of that, but do we see any way that that is going to change at all?

Megan McArdle (30:58):

I think they’re probably going to have to start writing clearer bills, right? There’s just less discretion now for the agencies to fill the spot. I mean, this may be, actually, I should say this is probably completely wishful thinking on my part because I can’t make Congress do anything and neither can anyone else they could write, make things be good in cran. This is the new law, and the bureaucracy would have to do with that, what it could. But I think they should write Clara bills and I think they should write more. But I also do think that we should give our bureaucrats more discretion, which is not something you hear a lot of libertarians say.

Kelli Pierce (31:36):

Not at all.

Megan McArdle (31:36):

No, not unlimited discretion, right? But right now, the idea is that we want them to be like robots. They should make no judgments whatsoever. There should never be any possibility of abusing their power. My favorite story about this is that I was talking to someone who had gone into a cabinet level position in state government from the private sector, and so he walks into the office on day one. He is like, okay, well let’s get the team together, order some sandwiches. We’ll sit down at noon and have lunch and chat. And the secretary was like, oh, no, you can’t have sandwiches. Sandwiches are for overtime, right? It’s like this phenomenal waste of resources to be quibbling about the damn sandwiches. And there is a flow chart, which you can see on Jen Polka, this amazing substack of when you can order sandwiches, there is a decision making process have a reasonable thing.

(32:38):

They should not be ordering caviar sandwiches for lunch every day and that kind of discretion or the kind of discretion to just make some trade-offs, not citing power lines, all the rest of it. Instead, what we do is they have to follow these hard rules and then we’re going to litigate the hell out of it. And then 25 years in the future, we will have built one inch of power line while we’re having blackouts and that we need to shift in a bunch of directions. We need to review the ways in which we’ve empowered people to file too many and too weak lawsuits. But we also need to review the ways that we have tried to hamstring bureaucrats until they can’t make decisions about say IT procurement or other things, and accept that that might mean that occasionally someone in the government manages to funnel a contract to their friend, but right now they’re just funneling contracts to the same five companies because those are the companies that know how to work the rules.

(33:39):

And that’s actually worse. Give them some discretion and then make them accountable for the results. And I think part of the thing, and part of the reason Congress doesn’t work is that they don’t want to be accountable for the results. The more transparency we’ve gotten, the more they’re like, oh my gosh, I can’t do anything. If I did something, someone would be mad. What if I just sat here and the president wrote some executive orders? They prefer it or the Supreme Court did it. And that’s what everyone prefers because they don’t want to be accountable for results. Well,

Nan Swift (34:09):

And I have to admit, I used to be part of the problem when it comes to nailing these guys to the wall when they did the smallest thing that I didn’t like.

Megan McArdle (34:19):

The first step is admitting you have a problem.

Nan Swift (34:22):

Well, as a grassroots organizer, and we would use the most inflammatory language possible to get our members upset about the thing. And also now we’re going to primary you and all the rest. And so when I went to a different organization, I basically had a religious experience after a vote did go the way I wanted. And I marched down to our VP office and I was like, I need five brand because I’m going to roll calls into all their district offices. They won’t be able to operate. They’re never going to cross me again. And Pete, national Taxpayers Union, great guy, he said the most amazing thing. He said, what if we want to work with them again? And that had never occurred to me, ever. And he is like, we can do your horrible plan, but if you want to work with them again, and it was just like, oh, oh, there’s a really different way that we could do this. And it’s changed everything. It’s changed how I go about my work, my day to day, how I think about people, all of it. It was just day and night to think, oh, I might want to work with them on something else.

Megan McArdle (35:51):

And I think that this is something I’ve been thinking a lot about in our politics is that so few people now are playing like they’re in a repeat game. You watch what their conservatives now are doing and they’re like, we’re going to create all these awesome new powers and we’re going to really screw all those people. They’re going to drive their women before you. What is it? Drive the men before you murder their babies. Here are the limitations of their women, something like that. And it’s like, well, eventually you’re going to lose an election and then all the powers you’ve created are going to them, and they’re also going to be really mad and all your institutions are just as vulnerable. And I also see it on the democratic side is like, what do I want to do? I want to destroy those people. I want to make it illegal to be those people.

(36:39):

I am going to make sure none of them ever has a good job above the level of janitor for the rest of their lives and that thing. And it’s not just in poly. I think the Trump administration has made this look more blatantly as a government thing. And that obviously carries very special worries because the government has guns and your local, the activist Google, who conservatives like to complain about did not have guns. And that is a very major difference. But that said, I will say that I saw even starting under the Obama administration, a lot of conservatives becoming religious conservatives, especially becoming increasingly convinced and not entirely unreasonable unreasonably, so that the end game was that it would be impossible to have traditional religious beliefs around sexuality and have a job that required a college degree. That company after company was just going to, and the cancellation campaigns against businesses and all the rest of it was like, sure, you can work in a junkyard and we’ll leave you alone, but if you aspire to anything more, we’re going to shut your school down.

(37:57):

And I was actually just rereading this amazing piece by Mark Tushnet. It was a law professor wrote in May of 2016 in which he was writing ending defensive crouch liberalism. And the argument was just basically because he was assuming Hillary was going to win because Trump had sealed the nomination. And so it was just like, how many ways can we screw conservatives, undo every legal, and some of that is just what happens. You think you’re going to get control of the court, you get a lot of plans for stuff. But it went beyond that. It was like how we attack their institutions using the power of the court. How do we make it just to hell with the social conservatives? You lost the culture war. We won, and that mindset had already taken hold. I certainly, and you saw it play out in a lot of liberal institutions peaking in 2020. And guys, you’re all in a repeat game. You’re going to be around a long time and the wheel goes round and round and sooner or later, the fly on top is going to be the fly on the bottom. So prepare for that moment rather than trying to maximize this moment. And I am not sure I see signs of healing yet, but I hope they’re coming soon because

Nan Swift (39:18):

One of the few things that Congress does do, I wouldn’t say they accomplish it, but it’s something that they do with their time is try to undo the previous guy, and that’s all they do. It’s a total obsession because we took our ball and went home when we had the chance to be at the table and decisions were made, and it’s both sides. And other people also put up obstacles to keep them from the

Megan McArdle (39:45):

Table. Yeah, I mean, the other side is not often inviting them in with Bounciest banquet impossible compromises

Nan Swift (39:54):

When there’s no attempt and no conversation when you’re sitting at different tables. And then, so we just get these wild swings and this isn’t, I mean, I’m not going to get the most wonderful outcome I want in terms of a limited government piece of policy out of a compromised piece of legislation, but it’s going to be a lot better for everyone for the rules to just stay kind of the same for a while, even if the rules aren’t perfect. Business and individuals and families know what to do and how to work within the rules. But when the rules are different one day to the next and one year to the next, you can’t plan. It’s only just a system for maximal frustration.

Kelli Pierce (40:45):

Well, I think also at the end of the day, the people are in control of the government, but I think we’ve had a decades long experience and probably in Hyperdrive in the last probably 20 years or something, of running a lot of things through the executive, and that’s not been such a good outcome for

Megan McArdle (41:03):

Everybody. Oh, I mean, I 100% agree with that, but I also think at this point it is the workaround of the fact that Congress does not want to legislate, right? They don’t want to pass a normal budget. They don’t want to do anything they could be held accountable for. Well, the government has to do stuff, and I was against what Obama did on immigration, not I was against the result, but I was against doing it by executive order. I was in fact against student loan forgiveness and also against it by executive order. And I’m against many, many of Trump’s executive order innovations. But part of that is the fact that if he went to Congress and tried to get a law, Congress would be like, it’s too hard. I can, and that is the natural result because voters do want stuff to happen. And so they will ratify that if Congress doesn’t do its job,

Nan Swift (41:58):

Congress now is making a point of actively shooting themselves in the foot to make it harder to do things if they ever wanted to. Looking at additional cuts to the ledge branch, which has fewer and fewer resources to take care of larger and larger swaths of people in their districts than ever had been intended to do more and more types of work and cover more issues than we ever thought those staff could and would do, cutting the budgets of the watchdog agencies. So they’re really just cutting themselves off at the feet and trying to do their jobs. No legs

Kelli Pierce (42:44):

We’re coming up against time. So I do want to end with this one question, which is, despite everything that we’ve talked about right now, what gives you a sense of optimism for the future?

Megan McArdle (42:58):

Look, America has a lot of problems right now, and we have more bearing down upon us in the form of an entitlement crisis. But that said, I am heartened both by the great Adam Smith. There’s a lot of ruin in a nation. It is always tempting when you’re living it to be like, this is the end, everything’s going to hell. But you look back at our nation’s history and it includes a lot of much worse moments than what we’re experiencing now from the Red Scare to the Palmer raids, to chattel slavery, to the Trail of Tears, America did some really awful stuff and also managed to do some pretty amazing stuff coming up on our 250th birthday of being a steadily improving, well, not steadily, but mostly improving, mostly moving in the right direction of greater liberty and justice for all. I think when there are setbacks, there are real setbacks.

(44:00):

But I think that for me, first of all, I genuinely do when I go out into America and I’m not online dealing with people who are also spending too much time online, what I see is great. What I see is people who are raising families and trying to do good for the world and being nice people and having friends and so forth. And obviously there are some people with problems, but I see communities that are looking for the best that they can do for each other. And I think that’s what America is. It’s not just the crazy online people, but I also think this is that you can’t, I can’t fix the entitlement crisis. I’m pretty sure that whatever solution we settle on is not going to be the one that I would’ve designed. But what I can do, and I can’t fix Donald Trump by whom I am appalled, but what I can control is my reaction to Donald Trump. And I think that the let’s all collectively freak out for four years approach that was pioneered by many people in the establishment during the first Trump administration has turned out to be an abysmal failure, as you will notice by the fact that he is president now.

(45:17):

And that what we can control is we can lean into actually trying to fix stuff. We can lean into not complaining about how terrible everything is, but what would work and being normal about how we criticize him and treating, even though I think he is in many ways terribly abnormal treating, working on the stuff that are normal complaints. If you don’t like that, he’s cutting Medicaid, complain about that. If you don’t like that, he’s deporting people without due process complaint about that. But do not start on the dark night of fascism is descending over the land because people, those arguments don’t, I mean, among other things, it’s not effective. I think it is also polarizing and then just makes the other side even more crazy and vice versa, when the woke liberals are going to come and make all your kids trans, that does not actually solve a problem for America, but just try to be normal, right? Normal America, healthy America, it starts with you. You are part of America, be the change you want to see.

Nan Swift (46:24):

I would second everything that Megan just said, but the things, and I’ve really, really been thinking about this the last couple days because things my counselor says are things like what Megan said. You can only control your reaction, Nan. Also, you need these books on optimism. Don’t talk about it next time. So I was really, really thinking about this and I realized the things that give me real hope and joy are when I see how immeasurably creative people are when it comes to finding solutions to so many problems, whether it’s policy wise, cultural, physical, health things, the environment, especially the things we’ve been talking about all day. We have it all within ourselves to make things better. It’s amazing and there’s just no end to what people can do just by virtue of being people and the way our brains and everything else are made.

(47:36):

And that just astonishes me and that gives me optimism. I’d like to just tell you about this park not far from where I live. That brings me so much joy and optimism. So it’s called Clemmy John Tree. Some of you may know of this amazing park. It’s out in Fairfax County. The name is for three children of the family who made it so it’s private and local and I love it. And it was not a big government thing because government would’ve never made something this amazing and beautiful, and it is the coolest park you’ve ever seen, and it’s so inclusive. There’s even a swing for wheelchair users and they can get to all parts of it. And half of the activities are something that also teaches you something. So this isn’t just a maze, it’s also learning about the comparative distances between the planets and our place in the solar system and the intentionality, the creativity, and overall the beauty behind it just fills me with joy. And I’m like, if that’s possible,

Megan McArdle (48:50):

If

Nan Swift (48:50):

Anything is.

Megan McArdle (48:51):

I love something that John Collison, who is the co-founder of Stripe with his brother, said that now that he has built a very large and successful business, every time he goes out into the world and he sees things, he’s just stunned by how much competence it took to do anything to make a building, to make little cream filled sandwiches that are the same every time you buy. I was just talking to someone the other night who’s now dating a guy whose life is making jam and coaching cookie companies on how to make jam. That feels like every little thing we do is not. It is both the culmination of thousands of years of human beings figuring stuff out. And it is also the culmination of someone who did a job excellently. And everything in your life is filled. And mostly because most of the American economy is domestic, it is mostly filled with your fellow Americans who did something excellently.

(49:54):

Everything you see, every building, every restaurant meal, everything. And that is amazing. We should be in awe. We live as John Collison said, in a Museum of excellence, and we should be marveling at it all the time. And that is what, instead of accentuate the positive, but just look around and see how amazing it is that human beings figured out how to suspend this giant roof over our heads instead of huddling in a little cave. That is, we are an amazing species and we are an amazing country, and I think we will only continue to get more amazing still,

Kelli Pierce (50:37):

And I will end it there. Thank you so much, Nan Swift and Megan. Thank you.