Leia Figure: So that’s actually a really good question, and it’s one that I’ve thought about for quite some time. I guess if it’s not boring, I’d like to read this quote from Scott Cooper, director of OPM and former managing partner of Andreessen Horowitz, to remind everyone where people are coming from in this current administration. He posted on X late last month and it was part of a Reuters report. So he posted, “True, DOGE may no longer have centralized leadership under USDS, but DOGE’s principles are alive and well, deregulation, eliminating fraud, waste and abuse, restructuring the federal workforce, etc., etc.” Which is exactly the same thing they’ve been saying this whole time, but it’s all smoke and mirrors, right? It’s like, oh no, no, well, DOGE just doesn’t exist anymore. Elon Musk has no character leading it, something Elon Musk himself said last month on a podcast with Joe Rogan. He says, “Yeah, once I’m gone, they can’t pick anyone, but don’t worry, the DOGE is still there.” So people fall for it and “DOGE is gone now.” And I want, they’re literally telling us that it’s not.
Joe Schiffer: I think one thing that honestly seems true is that it’s harder and harder to distinguish where DOGE stops and the Trump administration begins because they’ve infiltrated different parts of government and DOGE policies, what you call, deregulation, spending cuts, zero-based budgeting, have they really become some kind of table admin stakes?
Leia Figure: I think that is such a good point. And to be honest, towards the end of Elon Musk’s reign, something that keeps coming up is not necessarily that the Trump administration disagrees with DOGE’s policies at all. It was that they didn’t really agree with how Musk was going about it. They didn’t like that he was stepping on Treasury Secretary Scott Besant and fighting outside the Oval Office. It was bad optics and it didn’t help the Trump administration even look like it was on top.