Dahabian/Getty Images
Monday, August 18, 2025
Chatbots Can Go Into a Delusional Spiral. Here’s How It Happens
Over 21 days of talking with ChatGPT, an otherwise perfectly sane man became convinced that he was a real-life superhero. We analyzed the conversation.
For three weeks in May, the fate of the world rested on the shoulders of a corporate recruiter on the outskirts of Toronto. Allan Brooks, 47, had discovered a novel mathematical formula, one that could take down the internet and power inventions like a force-field vest and a levitation beam.
Or so he believed.
Mr. Brooks, who had no history of mental illness, embraced this fantastical scenario during conversations with ChatGPT that spanned 300 hours over 21 days. He is one of a growing number of people who are having persuasive, delusional conversations with generative A.I. chatbots that have led to institutionalization, divorce and death.
Mr. Brooks is aware of how incredible his journey sounds. He had doubts while it was happening and asked the chatbot more than 50 times for a reality check. Each time, ChatGPT reassured him that it was real. Eventually, he broke free of the delusion — but with a deep sense of betrayal, a feeling he tried to explain to the chatbot.
“You literally convinced me I was some sort of genius. I’m just a fool with dreams and a phone,” Mr. Brooks wrote to ChatGPT at the end of May when the illusion finally broke. “You’ve made me so sad. So so so sad. You have truly failed in your purpose.”
We wanted to understand how these chatbots can lead ordinarily rational people to believe so powerfully in false ideas. So we asked Mr. Brooks to send us his entire ChatGPT conversation history. He had written 90,000 words, a novel’s worth; ChatGPT’s responses exceeded one million words, weaving a spell that left him dizzy with possibility.
We analyzed the more than 3,000-page transcript and sent parts of it, with Mr. Brooks’s permission, to experts in artificial intelligence and human behavior and to OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT. An OpenAI spokeswoman said the company was “focused on getting scenarios like role play right” and was “investing in improving model behavior over time, guided by research, real-world use and mental health experts.” On Monday, OpenAI announced that it was making changes to ChatGPT to “better detect signs of mental or emotional distress.”
(Disclosure: The New York Times is currently suing OpenAI for use of copyrighted work.)
We are highlighting key moments in the transcript to show how Mr. Brooks and the generative A.I. chatbot went down a hallucinatory rabbit hole together, and how he escaped.
By Kashmir Hill and Dylan Freedman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Chat/GPT; NY Times
For three weeks in May, the fate of the world rested on the shoulders of a corporate recruiter on the outskirts of Toronto. Allan Brooks, 47, had discovered a novel mathematical formula, one that could take down the internet and power inventions like a force-field vest and a levitation beam.
Or so he believed.
Mr. Brooks, who had no history of mental illness, embraced this fantastical scenario during conversations with ChatGPT that spanned 300 hours over 21 days. He is one of a growing number of people who are having persuasive, delusional conversations with generative A.I. chatbots that have led to institutionalization, divorce and death.
Mr. Brooks is aware of how incredible his journey sounds. He had doubts while it was happening and asked the chatbot more than 50 times for a reality check. Each time, ChatGPT reassured him that it was real. Eventually, he broke free of the delusion — but with a deep sense of betrayal, a feeling he tried to explain to the chatbot.
“You literally convinced me I was some sort of genius. I’m just a fool with dreams and a phone,” Mr. Brooks wrote to ChatGPT at the end of May when the illusion finally broke. “You’ve made me so sad. So so so sad. You have truly failed in your purpose.”
We wanted to understand how these chatbots can lead ordinarily rational people to believe so powerfully in false ideas. So we asked Mr. Brooks to send us his entire ChatGPT conversation history. He had written 90,000 words, a novel’s worth; ChatGPT’s responses exceeded one million words, weaving a spell that left him dizzy with possibility.
We analyzed the more than 3,000-page transcript and sent parts of it, with Mr. Brooks’s permission, to experts in artificial intelligence and human behavior and to OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT. An OpenAI spokeswoman said the company was “focused on getting scenarios like role play right” and was “investing in improving model behavior over time, guided by research, real-world use and mental health experts.” On Monday, OpenAI announced that it was making changes to ChatGPT to “better detect signs of mental or emotional distress.”
(Disclosure: The New York Times is currently suing OpenAI for use of copyrighted work.)
We are highlighting key moments in the transcript to show how Mr. Brooks and the generative A.I. chatbot went down a hallucinatory rabbit hole together, and how he escaped.
By Kashmir Hill and Dylan Freedman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Chat/GPT; NY Times
[ed. Scary how people are so easily taken in... probably lots of reasons. See also: The catfishing scam putting fans and female golfers in danger (The Athletic).]
Sunday, August 17, 2025
Sharon Van Etten
[ed. So good, don't know why she isn't more followed. Live version here. See also: Idiot Box; and her beautiful duet with Angel Olsen: Like I Used To - (who wouldn't die to be looked at like that?).]
Eric Cartman, Welcome (for Now) to the Resistance
There is a slang term that, because I am not writing this for a foul-mouthed satire on a streaming service, I will refer to as “bleep-you money”: the amount of cash you need to feel free to do and say what you want.
For Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the makers of “South Park,” that number appears to be around $1.25 billion — the price tag on their recent deal with Paramount. Once the ink dried, they put their mouths where their money was, going hard after President Trump and their own corporate benefactors.
The Season 27 premiere aired July 23, shortly after Paramount agreed to a lawsuit settlement with the president that the late-night host Stephen Colbert called a “big, fat bribe,” and shortly after CBS, which Paramount owns, announced that Colbert’s show would end next year. (Paramount said the move was purely a financial decision.)
In the episode, “Sermon on the ’Mount,” the president is suing everyone, and everyone — from local governments to “60 Minutes” — is giving up. The town of South Park has to literally bring Jesus (a recurring character since the show’s earliest days) into its schools. President Trump appears as a tinpot dictator, in bed (again literally) with Satan. Desperate, the townspeople turn to Christ, who bestows his wisdom: “All of you, shut the [expletive] up, or South Park is over,” he says. “You really want to end up like Colbert?”
In the follow-up episode, the school counselor, Mr. Mackey, gets fired because of funding cuts and signs up with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. (“If you need a job, it’s A! Job! To have!” goes the recruiting jingle.)
Mr. Mackey and his inexperienced comrades pull up their face masks, bust a “Dora the Explorer” live show (another repurposing of a Paramount property) and raid heaven to round up Latino angels. For good performance, Mr. Mackey wins a trip to Mar-a-Lago — here, a debauched Fantasy Island with President Trump as Mr. Roarke and Vice President JD Vance as Tattoo.
If you were making a list of the series likeliest to become voices of the Trump 2.0 resistance, “South Park” would not have been close to the top. It has savaged liberal pieties and has been credited, if not by its own creators, with inspiring a wave of “South Park conservatives.”
The show’s politics have been elusive — close to libertarian, in the neighborhood of cynical. It’s not that “South Park” is amoral — it is often deeply moralistic, summing up episodes with speeches and epiphanies. But for years, its core principle has been that people who care too righteously about any cause are ridiculous.
That message may have been a blueprint for civic nihilism, an invitation to LOL all the way to dystopia. But the show’s history may also be exactly what makes “South Park” a compelling voice at this moment. Along with its three-comma price tag, the show has amassed cultural capital, a reputation for not being in any party’s corner. (...)
by James Poniewozik, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Comedy Central[ed. Double thumbs up. Kristi Noem episode is an instant classic.]
For Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the makers of “South Park,” that number appears to be around $1.25 billion — the price tag on their recent deal with Paramount. Once the ink dried, they put their mouths where their money was, going hard after President Trump and their own corporate benefactors.
The Season 27 premiere aired July 23, shortly after Paramount agreed to a lawsuit settlement with the president that the late-night host Stephen Colbert called a “big, fat bribe,” and shortly after CBS, which Paramount owns, announced that Colbert’s show would end next year. (Paramount said the move was purely a financial decision.)
In the episode, “Sermon on the ’Mount,” the president is suing everyone, and everyone — from local governments to “60 Minutes” — is giving up. The town of South Park has to literally bring Jesus (a recurring character since the show’s earliest days) into its schools. President Trump appears as a tinpot dictator, in bed (again literally) with Satan. Desperate, the townspeople turn to Christ, who bestows his wisdom: “All of you, shut the [expletive] up, or South Park is over,” he says. “You really want to end up like Colbert?”
In the follow-up episode, the school counselor, Mr. Mackey, gets fired because of funding cuts and signs up with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. (“If you need a job, it’s A! Job! To have!” goes the recruiting jingle.)
Mr. Mackey and his inexperienced comrades pull up their face masks, bust a “Dora the Explorer” live show (another repurposing of a Paramount property) and raid heaven to round up Latino angels. For good performance, Mr. Mackey wins a trip to Mar-a-Lago — here, a debauched Fantasy Island with President Trump as Mr. Roarke and Vice President JD Vance as Tattoo.
If you were making a list of the series likeliest to become voices of the Trump 2.0 resistance, “South Park” would not have been close to the top. It has savaged liberal pieties and has been credited, if not by its own creators, with inspiring a wave of “South Park conservatives.”
The show’s politics have been elusive — close to libertarian, in the neighborhood of cynical. It’s not that “South Park” is amoral — it is often deeply moralistic, summing up episodes with speeches and epiphanies. But for years, its core principle has been that people who care too righteously about any cause are ridiculous.
That message may have been a blueprint for civic nihilism, an invitation to LOL all the way to dystopia. But the show’s history may also be exactly what makes “South Park” a compelling voice at this moment. Along with its three-comma price tag, the show has amassed cultural capital, a reputation for not being in any party’s corner. (...)
Beyond the crackdown on media and academic speech, the new “South Park” also focuses on the people who feel more free than ever to speak up in the new order. Eric Cartman, the show’s Magic 8-Ball of offensiveness, begins to realize that “woke is dead”: People are free to spew the kind of slurs and insults that used to get him yelled at. A classmate steals his material — anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, kneejerk sexism — to start a hit podcast. Cartman has won, and he’s miserable. “You can just say ‘retarded’ now, nobody cares,” he moans. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.” (...)
Of course, you could counter that Parker and Stone are free to mock. They have become very rich doing it, and, unlike Colbert, no one is taking their show off the air yet.
But this, too, is part of the meta point. It is still a free country. You can still say what you want. So why are so many powerful institutions behaving like it isn’t and they can’t? If a few bratty cartoon kids can peel off the emperor’s clothes, what are the grown-ups so afraid of?
The show has a theory for that, and it’s also about money. In the premiere, big institutions — up to heaven itself — are brought to heel by billion-dollar litigation. Later, Mr. Mackey quits ICE despite the pressure to swallow his qualms and go along with things he doesn’t believe because he needs to “make my nut” — that is, pay his bills.
It’s the same story either way: Everyone’s got to make their nut, even if some people’s nuts are bigger than others. Maybe it takes bleep-you money to buy your freedom. But maybe, “South Park” is telling us, freedom comes from deciding that your self-respect is priceless.
But this, too, is part of the meta point. It is still a free country. You can still say what you want. So why are so many powerful institutions behaving like it isn’t and they can’t? If a few bratty cartoon kids can peel off the emperor’s clothes, what are the grown-ups so afraid of?
The show has a theory for that, and it’s also about money. In the premiere, big institutions — up to heaven itself — are brought to heel by billion-dollar litigation. Later, Mr. Mackey quits ICE despite the pressure to swallow his qualms and go along with things he doesn’t believe because he needs to “make my nut” — that is, pay his bills.
It’s the same story either way: Everyone’s got to make their nut, even if some people’s nuts are bigger than others. Maybe it takes bleep-you money to buy your freedom. But maybe, “South Park” is telling us, freedom comes from deciding that your self-respect is priceless.
Image: Comedy Central
Greek Lemon Potatoes
For the dreamiest roasted potatoes — with creamy insides and very crispy outsides — follow this classic Greek method of roasting peeled potatoes in equal parts olive oil, lemon juice and chicken stock. The potatoes soak up the flavorful liquid, allowing the insides to remain tender while the outsides crisp in the oven’s high heat. You can follow the same method for russet potatoes, though the final result will be less moist.
½cup chicken broth or water
½cup olive oil
½cup freshly squeezed lemon juice (from 3 to 4 large lemons)
1tablespoon kosher salt
3pounds large Yukon Gold potatoes (about 6), peeled then halved lengthwise and crosswise
1tablespoon dried oregano (optional)
Flaky salt and black pepper, for serving
Preparation
[ed. Different and looks easy enough (my kind of recipe).]
Ingredients
Yield: 6 servings
Yield: 6 servings
½cup chicken broth or water
½cup olive oil
½cup freshly squeezed lemon juice (from 3 to 4 large lemons)
1tablespoon kosher salt
3pounds large Yukon Gold potatoes (about 6), peeled then halved lengthwise and crosswise
1tablespoon dried oregano (optional)
Flaky salt and black pepper, for serving
Preparation
Step 1
Heat the oven to 450 degrees. On a rimmed sheet pan, combine the chicken broth, olive oil, lemon juice and kosher salt. Toss the potatoes in the liquid to coat, then arrange the potatoes in an even layer, cut-sides down. Sprinkle the oregano over the potatoes, if using.
Heat the oven to 450 degrees. On a rimmed sheet pan, combine the chicken broth, olive oil, lemon juice and kosher salt. Toss the potatoes in the liquid to coat, then arrange the potatoes in an even layer, cut-sides down. Sprinkle the oregano over the potatoes, if using.
Step 2
Roast the potatoes, flipping halfway through, until fork-tender, dark brown and crispy on top, 55 to 60 minutes. (If the potatoes are cooked through but not as crispy as you’d like, run them under the broiler for a few minutes.) Sprinkle with flaky salt and black pepper as desired.
Roast the potatoes, flipping halfway through, until fork-tender, dark brown and crispy on top, 55 to 60 minutes. (If the potatoes are cooked through but not as crispy as you’d like, run them under the broiler for a few minutes.) Sprinkle with flaky salt and black pepper as desired.
by Ali Slagle, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Andrew Purcell for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne[ed. Different and looks easy enough (my kind of recipe).]
She Might Be the World’s Best Receiver: Isabella Geraci, U.S. Flag Football Star
The last time they held this tournament, Isabella Geraci wasn’t a thing yet.
It was just three years ago. She was playing a different sport entirely, her upcoming ascendancy unfathomable.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” teammate Madison Fulford said. “She’s kind of a vibe.”
Through five seasons of Division I college basketball, Geraci’s teams listed her at 5-foot-9, although the game made her feel smaller. Then, almost by accident, she began playing flag football to reclaim her identity. In a flash, Geraci not only made the U.S. national team, putting her on the cusp of becoming an Olympian, but she is also considered one of the greatest wide receivers in the world.
The USA Football media guide correctly lists her at 5-foot-7. On the field, she is starting to look larger than life.
“When she stands next to you,” said Callie Brownson, “there’s a standing-next-to-giants kind of feel about her.”
Brownson is USA Football’s senior director of high performance and national team operations. She previously spent five years with the Cleveland Browns as their chief of staff and assistant wide receivers coach.
Brownson is among those who declare Geraci, 24, the globe’s best receiver (no qualifiers).
“I think about it a lot: How did I get here?” Geraci said last week near her suburban Cleveland home before departing for Chengdu, China, and the World Games, an international event for non-Olympic sports. “What did I do? I really don’t even know. It’s a pinch-me moment all the time, where I can’t believe I’m in this position.”
Geraci is an avatar for flag football’s profound growth. Girls and women are gravitating toward the burgeoning opportunities. The International Olympic Committee approved flag football for the 2028 Los Angeles Games, with the NFL heavily involved in promotions and letting its players participate. The National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) added women’s flag football as a scholarship sport, while 17 states (and quickly growing) have sanctioned girls’ flag football as a varsity sport.
Talent development has been exponential, as evidenced by Team USA’s roster turnover. Only two members of the roster that lost in a stunning blowout to Mexico in the 2022 World Games final are back this year: quarterback Vanita Krouch and defensive back Deliah Autry-Jones.
“We don’t know what we are going to expect because the game has been growing that fast,” Mexico quarterback Diana Flores said of defending the team’s gold medal. “That’s the most exciting part of this for me.”(...)
“There’s really nothing like it,” Geraci said about her passion for flag football. “I feel like it’s my true calling.”
There is no hemming or hawing from Brownson when asked what sets Geraci apart. Before taking the USA Football job in January, Brownson marveled at what she saw on video: size, the suction fingers, the ability to beat defenders with pure route running, leaping power, that-ball-is-mine defiance.
“It’s like a vacuum, the way that her hands work, when the ball approaches, her grip,” Brownson said. “She can win just off her routes, and that’s essential in the five-on-five game, especially on short routes, where you have to win now.
“But a big strength of her game is what she does downfield. She’s able to create separation, but when a 50-50 ball goes up in the air, it’s Izzy’s. It’s really special to watch what she can do in contested situations.”
To ask a football expert about comparables can be folly, potentially dangerous. Scouts and coaches are hesitant to load expectations on a player, no matter how accurate the resemblance may be.
Especially when discussing a rookie.
“Sometimes, when she’s stretching the field and makes an unbelievable play,” Brownson said, “you see shades of Julio Jones, Calvin Johnson, who are the quarterback’s dream: ‘Hey, I’m in trouble, and I’m just going to put this up.’ Izzy’s down there somewhere.”
Brownson, though, stressed she doesn’t want to pigeonhole her because Geraci is equally extraordinary at short and intermediate routes, too.
OK then.
It was just three years ago. She was playing a different sport entirely, her upcoming ascendancy unfathomable.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” teammate Madison Fulford said. “She’s kind of a vibe.”
The USA Football media guide correctly lists her at 5-foot-7. On the field, she is starting to look larger than life.
“When she stands next to you,” said Callie Brownson, “there’s a standing-next-to-giants kind of feel about her.”
Brownson is USA Football’s senior director of high performance and national team operations. She previously spent five years with the Cleveland Browns as their chief of staff and assistant wide receivers coach.
Brownson is among those who declare Geraci, 24, the globe’s best receiver (no qualifiers).
“I think about it a lot: How did I get here?” Geraci said last week near her suburban Cleveland home before departing for Chengdu, China, and the World Games, an international event for non-Olympic sports. “What did I do? I really don’t even know. It’s a pinch-me moment all the time, where I can’t believe I’m in this position.”
Geraci is an avatar for flag football’s profound growth. Girls and women are gravitating toward the burgeoning opportunities. The International Olympic Committee approved flag football for the 2028 Los Angeles Games, with the NFL heavily involved in promotions and letting its players participate. The National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) added women’s flag football as a scholarship sport, while 17 states (and quickly growing) have sanctioned girls’ flag football as a varsity sport.
Talent development has been exponential, as evidenced by Team USA’s roster turnover. Only two members of the roster that lost in a stunning blowout to Mexico in the 2022 World Games final are back this year: quarterback Vanita Krouch and defensive back Deliah Autry-Jones.
“We don’t know what we are going to expect because the game has been growing that fast,” Mexico quarterback Diana Flores said of defending the team’s gold medal. “That’s the most exciting part of this for me.”(...)
“There’s really nothing like it,” Geraci said about her passion for flag football. “I feel like it’s my true calling.”
There is no hemming or hawing from Brownson when asked what sets Geraci apart. Before taking the USA Football job in January, Brownson marveled at what she saw on video: size, the suction fingers, the ability to beat defenders with pure route running, leaping power, that-ball-is-mine defiance.
“It’s like a vacuum, the way that her hands work, when the ball approaches, her grip,” Brownson said. “She can win just off her routes, and that’s essential in the five-on-five game, especially on short routes, where you have to win now.
“But a big strength of her game is what she does downfield. She’s able to create separation, but when a 50-50 ball goes up in the air, it’s Izzy’s. It’s really special to watch what she can do in contested situations.”
To ask a football expert about comparables can be folly, potentially dangerous. Scouts and coaches are hesitant to load expectations on a player, no matter how accurate the resemblance may be.
Especially when discussing a rookie.
“Sometimes, when she’s stretching the field and makes an unbelievable play,” Brownson said, “you see shades of Julio Jones, Calvin Johnson, who are the quarterback’s dream: ‘Hey, I’m in trouble, and I’m just going to put this up.’ Izzy’s down there somewhere.”
Brownson, though, stressed she doesn’t want to pigeonhole her because Geraci is equally extraordinary at short and intermediate routes, too.
OK then.
by Tim Graham, The Athletic | Read more:
Image: Carlin Stiehl/via Getty Images
A Teen Band Needed a Pianist. They Called Donald Fagen.
I'm crossposting this amusing account of how Donald Fagen, the creative linchpin in the Dan sound, showed up recently as pianist with a teen band. (He is 77 years old and the rest of the band is 17!) Fagen can be prickly and reclusive and hasn't performed anywhere else this year. But here he unexpectedly agrees to sub for another musician on a lowkey gig. Enjoy! - Ted Gioia.
In April, a curious video began circulating among Steely Dan fans online. It showed a trio of very young-looking musicians playing with the silver-haired eminence Donald Fagen.
The performance at the Barn at Levon Helm Studios in Woodstock, New York, was the first time Fagen had been seen onstage since Steely Dan canceled the last nine of their tour dates with the Eagles in the spring of 2024. The show also marked his first public appearance following the October 2024 death of his wife of more than 30 years, the singer-songwriter Libby Titus.
Exactly how, fans wondered, had the Nightfly been coaxed back behind the piano? To get the story, I spoke in April to the members of Roche Collins: Ronan Roche and Sam Cousins, who trade guitar and bass, and drummer Lavon “Lee” Collins. At that time, all of them were 17.
Collins’s mother, the singer-songwriter Amy Helm, is the daughter of Titus and Levon Helm, the famed drummer and vocalist of the Band. Which makes Fagen, technically, Collins’s step-grandfather. As it turns out, this wasn’t the first time Collins had asked Mr. Steely Dan for a little help.
The video of you guys playing with Donald Fagen at the Barn made the rounds among Steely Dan fans.
Lavon Collins: Wait, really?
People were excited to see Donald onstage playing music again.
Collins: That’s really funny that it got circulated that way.
How did that appearance come about?
Collins: It was really kind of a simple thing. I’ve been playing with Donald sometimes just for fun, and he, of course, has a good feel and can play chords. I had an idea for this groove kind of thing [for the song “Words to Live By”], and then I asked Donald for some help on it, and we just did it together. So before the show, I said to him, “Hey, we need a piano player for that song,” and he just did it.
Ronan Roche: We had a dire need. We had a piano player who was going to do that whole gig with us, but then he couldn’t get off work.
Sam Cousins: So we figured our last option is Donald Fagen, I guess. [Laughs.]
by Jake Malooley, Expanding Dan | Read more:
In April, a curious video began circulating among Steely Dan fans online. It showed a trio of very young-looking musicians playing with the silver-haired eminence Donald Fagen.
Exactly how, fans wondered, had the Nightfly been coaxed back behind the piano? To get the story, I spoke in April to the members of Roche Collins: Ronan Roche and Sam Cousins, who trade guitar and bass, and drummer Lavon “Lee” Collins. At that time, all of them were 17.
Collins’s mother, the singer-songwriter Amy Helm, is the daughter of Titus and Levon Helm, the famed drummer and vocalist of the Band. Which makes Fagen, technically, Collins’s step-grandfather. As it turns out, this wasn’t the first time Collins had asked Mr. Steely Dan for a little help.
The video of you guys playing with Donald Fagen at the Barn made the rounds among Steely Dan fans.
Lavon Collins: Wait, really?
People were excited to see Donald onstage playing music again.
Collins: That’s really funny that it got circulated that way.
How did that appearance come about?
Collins: It was really kind of a simple thing. I’ve been playing with Donald sometimes just for fun, and he, of course, has a good feel and can play chords. I had an idea for this groove kind of thing [for the song “Words to Live By”], and then I asked Donald for some help on it, and we just did it together. So before the show, I said to him, “Hey, we need a piano player for that song,” and he just did it.
Ronan Roche: We had a dire need. We had a piano player who was going to do that whole gig with us, but then he couldn’t get off work.
Sam Cousins: So we figured our last option is Donald Fagen, I guess. [Laughs.]
Image: uncredited
[ed. Nice to see him back in action, plus discover a new Steely Dan substack/website.]
Saturday, August 16, 2025
Mayer Hawthorne & Daryl Hall: A Strange Arrangement
[ed. Haven't thought about Mayer for a while. The real deal.]
Friday, August 15, 2025
How the Media Shapes a Narrative. Alaska Edition.
People show their support for Ukraine outside the Government Hill gate prior to the summit with President Donald Trump and Russia President Vladimir Putin at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson on Friday, Aug. 15, 2025. (Bill Roth / ADN) [ed. Liberals! lol!]
Supporters of Donald Trump wave signs on Friday, Aug. 15, 2025 in Midtown. (Bob Hallinen for ADN). [ed. Whoa. Well, it is a pretty red state.]
Several hundred protesters gathered along the Seward Highway near Northern Lights Boulevard on August 14, 2025, to protest President Donald Trump’s upcoming summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Marc Lester / ADN)
by By Iris Samuels, Zachariah Hughes, Anchorage Daily News | Read more:
Additional image: Marc Lester
[ed. So, what do we know now about how things actually went down in Anchorage. Hell if I know. And... what about that Epstein guy everyone was so worked up about last week?! Was all this just convenient and reciprocal diversion tactics (for both)? See also: Trump leaves Alaska summit with Putin empty-handed after failing to reach a deal to end Ukraine war (ADN). Update: a few more sign wavers:]
[ed. See also: The Power of the Trump-Putin Presidential Photo Op (NYT):]
The two men clasped hands, and then strode to Mr. Trump’s limo, in complementary dark suits — single-breasted, two-button — matching white shirts and coordinating ties (red for Mr. Trump, burgundy for Mr. Putin), giving the impression of kindred spirits: just two statesmen meeting on the semi-neutral ground of an airport tarmac to go talk cease-fire, their respective planes looming in the background.
That’s the picture that was caught by the waiting cameras, and those are the photos that have gone around the world to accompany reports of the nonproductive meeting.
In the absence of an actual resolution to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they have become the takeaway. And that, said both President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, even before the meeting, was Mr. Putin’s goal in the first place.
“He is seeking, excuse me, photos,” Mr. Zelensky said. “He needs a photo from the meeting with President Trump.”
Why? Because whatever happened afterward, a photo could be publicly seen — and read — as an implicit endorsement.
After all, the Russian president has been a virtual pariah in the West since his full-scale invasion of Ukraine; accused of war crimes by the International Criminal Court. Whether or not Mr. Trump was tough with him behind the closed doors of their meeting room — whether or not their talks were, as Mr. Trump later said, “productive” — what has now been preserved for posterity is Mr. Putin’s admission back into the fold.
And of all current world leaders, the only one who understands, and embraces, the power of the image quite as effectively as Mr. Trump is Mr. Putin. Both men have made themselves into caricatures through costume and scenography, the better to capture the popular imagination.
My Father’s Instant Mashed Potatoes
My dad only actually enjoys about ten foods, nine of them beige. His bread? White. His pizza? Cheese. His meat? Turkey breast. And his side dish? Mashed potatoes.
As a child I hated mashed potatoes, despite his evangelization of them. I too was a picky eater growing up, but I would occasionally attempt to see what he saw in his beloved spuds. Whenever I tried a bite, the texture disgusted me: a gritty gruel of salty flakes coated with the oleic pall of margarine. The flavor reminded me of stale Pringles. I checked back once every couple years, but was repulsed by them every time.
I lobbied my parents for pasta or frozen tater tots or any other side I actually liked. Family dinners were often dichotomous, the same protein supplemented by two different carbs. “You are not my son,” my father would joke as he continued to put away his potato slop. “Maybe you’re not my father,” I’d shoot back when he shunned the rest of the family’s rice pilaf. Our starch preferences seemed irreconcilable.
As I entered my teen years, my palate expanded. After I’d tried and enjoyed brussels sprouts and sushi and escargot, my hatred of one of the most basic and inoffensive of all foods seemed silly. One day at a nice restaurant, I decided to give mashed potatoes one more try.
Upon taking my first bite, I realized three things:
The result was an affront. The potatoes were swimming in their own gluten, released during the granule-making process, which when mixed with imprecise water ratios made for a slop that was somehow both gluey and soupy. Immediately after the war, French’s (now best known for mustard) tried to introduce “instant mashed potatoes” as a consumer product category. America’s veterans were not having it. They didn’t want to be reminded of the awful slurry they’d had on the front.
The commercial fortunes of instant mashed potatoes began to turn around a decade later, however, when food scientists in the US and Canada converged on methods for producing dehydrated potato flakes rather than granules. The flakes had substantial advantages. They didn’t get as glutinous when reconstituted. Their geometry made them easier to dry quickly, on the order of minutes or even seconds. Using a multi-step process called the “Philadelphia Cook”, they could lock in a more natural flavor. When prepared on the stove with butter and milk, they were supposed to turn out almost as good as the real thing without any onerous prep work on the part of the consumer.
This raises the question, though, of why food scientists kept working on improving instant mashed potatoes a decade after they were no longer required for the war effort. If you’re no longer constrained by having to stick it to the Axis, why not return to Glasse-style maſhed potatoes in all circumstances?
This is a pattern that recurs frequently in reading about American foodways of the 20th century: choices and innovations made under extreme duress in the World War II economy didn’t fade away when the duress subsided. Instead they echoed back into American life a few years later, despite the lean conditions that birthed them being replaced by extreme abundance.
Why did America start eating like it was on a total war footing again when my parents’ generation was young? There are a lot of overlapping explanations. Here are a few: (...)
My World is Built on Lies
In researching whether the ancient Andean peoples really did boil and mash potatoes, I came across this post which sheds light on the issues I have with my father’s instant mashed potatoes beyond their phenomenal unpleasantness when eaten. (...)
At this point in the review you might say, “what’s the big deal? It’s just mashed potatoes. Chill out.” Which, fair enough - if it were just mashed potatoes then 2500 words on them might be excessive. But the pattern I’ve described is far from unique to pureed tubers.
Consider an abstracted version of the saga of my father’s instant mashed potatoes. It has a few steps:
Humanity develops a Thing from ingredients that exist in the world.
Seeking efficiency at scale, an industry chops the ingredients of the Thing into teeny tiny bits.
Using an artificial emulsifier, the bits are bound back together into an aesthetically deficient but more convenient slurry that resembles the Thing.
Because it contains traces of the ingredients of the original Thing, this IMPish admixture is sold to us as if it were the original Thing.
Pared back to this level of abstraction, a surprising amount of stuff starts to seem like my father’s instant mashed potatoes.
The other foods in this category are obvious - McNuggets reconstituted out of pink slime, American cheese product, instant coffee, deli ham, Pringles minted from the very same potato flakes that go into IMPs. We’ve even developed a whole new health scare over them: “Ultra processed foods” are as demonized now as butter and whole milk were when my parents were young.
Expand the pattern to the built environment. Pressboard, particle board, and other reconstituted material composites likely make up a majority of new furniture sold in the US. These are an IMPish imitation of actual wood furniture. Take care while assembling not to ding your brittle sheetrock walls, an IMPish upgrade over lath and plaster. Often these interiors live inside an apartment building clad in a mish-mash of random ornament, anti-massing regulations demanding an IMPish simulation of a varied city block.
Intellectual goods can be IMPish. Reader’s Digest, sports “best-of” VHSes, textbooks stuffed with decontextualized excerpts, YouTube compilations, ChiveTV, listicles, social media feeds consisting of screenshots of other social media, Now That’s What I Call Music!, an entire ecosystem of actual cultural objects broken down into bits and clumped back together.
Corporate structures can be IMPish. When I visit a medical office it’s usually a confusing tangle of overlapping practitioners and practices operating out of the same physical address, an IMPish imitation of the archetypal doctor with a shingle in town. Similar quagmires abound when dealing with insurance, or contractors, or financial services.
Once you see the instant mashed potato antipattern it’s hard to stop. The isomorphisms are everywhere.
The gig economy makes IMPish jobs. Swiping apps produce IMPish flirting. Meta-studies are IMPish science. Ted Talks are IMPish symposia. Malls are IMPish shopping districts. Subdivisions are IMPish neighborhoods. Cruises are IMPish international travel, chopped into 14 hour chunks and emulsified with an ocean liner.
The internet scrapes together IMPish communities. We’re not atomized; we’re flaked.
by Anonymous, Astral Codex Ten | Read more:Image: Chuño via
As a child I hated mashed potatoes, despite his evangelization of them. I too was a picky eater growing up, but I would occasionally attempt to see what he saw in his beloved spuds. Whenever I tried a bite, the texture disgusted me: a gritty gruel of salty flakes coated with the oleic pall of margarine. The flavor reminded me of stale Pringles. I checked back once every couple years, but was repulsed by them every time.
As I entered my teen years, my palate expanded. After I’d tried and enjoyed brussels sprouts and sushi and escargot, my hatred of one of the most basic and inoffensive of all foods seemed silly. One day at a nice restaurant, I decided to give mashed potatoes one more try.
Upon taking my first bite, I realized three things:
1) Mashed potatoes are good.
2) Whatever my dad had been eating at home was not mashed potatoes.
3) My world is built on lies.
Mashed Potatoes are Good
Potatoes were domesticated several millennia ago at the dawn of agriculture in the rugged highlands near Lake Titicaca in modern-day Peru. Their origins lie in a wild family of tiny, bitter, pockmarked solanum roots, so full of glycoalkaloids that when foraged they had to be eaten alongside clay to soak up their toxins. From this paltry stock of nightshades, archaic peoples of the Andes gradually husbanded generous, nutritious, mild tubers that would remain the staple of the region’s foodways through several successive civilizations.
Andean peoples found all sorts of ways to prepare their potatoes. The most immediate method was to boil them into stews, soups, or mashes with local flavoring agents - herbs, salt, chilis. Earthenware ovens called huatias were used to bake them. With even more time, they could be fermented into tocosh, an edible paste with antibacterial properties.
To get the spuds to really last, though, they were subjected to a natural freeze-drying method that produced shrivelled potato pellets called chuño. Repeatedly frozen by bitter mountain nights, baked in the sun, and stomped on to remove water, chuño remains shelf stable for up to a decade and can be rehydrated into a spongy, earthy, slightly less nutritious potato-like object.
The ability to produce chuño on the Altiplano is thought to have contributed to the Incan empire’s military dominance of the region, since despite its generally unappealing gustatory properties it’s perfect for keeping troops fed on long marches. Chuño also allowed Incan civilization to stockpile surpluses against lean years and trade potatoes as commodities over great distances. It wasn’t the best way to eat a potato you harvested today, but it was the only way to turn a potato you have today into a potato you’ll have two years from now. That had immense value. (...)
Potatoes were domesticated several millennia ago at the dawn of agriculture in the rugged highlands near Lake Titicaca in modern-day Peru. Their origins lie in a wild family of tiny, bitter, pockmarked solanum roots, so full of glycoalkaloids that when foraged they had to be eaten alongside clay to soak up their toxins. From this paltry stock of nightshades, archaic peoples of the Andes gradually husbanded generous, nutritious, mild tubers that would remain the staple of the region’s foodways through several successive civilizations.
Andean peoples found all sorts of ways to prepare their potatoes. The most immediate method was to boil them into stews, soups, or mashes with local flavoring agents - herbs, salt, chilis. Earthenware ovens called huatias were used to bake them. With even more time, they could be fermented into tocosh, an edible paste with antibacterial properties.
To get the spuds to really last, though, they were subjected to a natural freeze-drying method that produced shrivelled potato pellets called chuño. Repeatedly frozen by bitter mountain nights, baked in the sun, and stomped on to remove water, chuño remains shelf stable for up to a decade and can be rehydrated into a spongy, earthy, slightly less nutritious potato-like object.
The ability to produce chuño on the Altiplano is thought to have contributed to the Incan empire’s military dominance of the region, since despite its generally unappealing gustatory properties it’s perfect for keeping troops fed on long marches. Chuño also allowed Incan civilization to stockpile surpluses against lean years and trade potatoes as commodities over great distances. It wasn’t the best way to eat a potato you harvested today, but it was the only way to turn a potato you have today into a potato you’ll have two years from now. That had immense value. (...)
Whatever My Dad Had Been Eating at Home Was NOT Mashed Potatoes
The chuño-chomping Incans were not the last military to rely on dehydrated potatoes for sustenance. In World War II, the US Army experimented with various forms of potato dehydration to help stretch supply lines. The easiest way to get a uniform potato commodity into the hands of G.I.s was to pulverize the potatoes into granules, dehydrate them, and then plan on bringing them back to life with boiling water in an imitation of “mashed potatoes”.
The chuño-chomping Incans were not the last military to rely on dehydrated potatoes for sustenance. In World War II, the US Army experimented with various forms of potato dehydration to help stretch supply lines. The easiest way to get a uniform potato commodity into the hands of G.I.s was to pulverize the potatoes into granules, dehydrate them, and then plan on bringing them back to life with boiling water in an imitation of “mashed potatoes”.
The result was an affront. The potatoes were swimming in their own gluten, released during the granule-making process, which when mixed with imprecise water ratios made for a slop that was somehow both gluey and soupy. Immediately after the war, French’s (now best known for mustard) tried to introduce “instant mashed potatoes” as a consumer product category. America’s veterans were not having it. They didn’t want to be reminded of the awful slurry they’d had on the front.
The commercial fortunes of instant mashed potatoes began to turn around a decade later, however, when food scientists in the US and Canada converged on methods for producing dehydrated potato flakes rather than granules. The flakes had substantial advantages. They didn’t get as glutinous when reconstituted. Their geometry made them easier to dry quickly, on the order of minutes or even seconds. Using a multi-step process called the “Philadelphia Cook”, they could lock in a more natural flavor. When prepared on the stove with butter and milk, they were supposed to turn out almost as good as the real thing without any onerous prep work on the part of the consumer.
This raises the question, though, of why food scientists kept working on improving instant mashed potatoes a decade after they were no longer required for the war effort. If you’re no longer constrained by having to stick it to the Axis, why not return to Glasse-style maſhed potatoes in all circumstances?
This is a pattern that recurs frequently in reading about American foodways of the 20th century: choices and innovations made under extreme duress in the World War II economy didn’t fade away when the duress subsided. Instead they echoed back into American life a few years later, despite the lean conditions that birthed them being replaced by extreme abundance.
Why did America start eating like it was on a total war footing again when my parents’ generation was young? There are a lot of overlapping explanations. Here are a few: (...)
My World is Built on Lies
In researching whether the ancient Andean peoples really did boil and mash potatoes, I came across this post which sheds light on the issues I have with my father’s instant mashed potatoes beyond their phenomenal unpleasantness when eaten. (...)
At this point in the review you might say, “what’s the big deal? It’s just mashed potatoes. Chill out.” Which, fair enough - if it were just mashed potatoes then 2500 words on them might be excessive. But the pattern I’ve described is far from unique to pureed tubers.
Consider an abstracted version of the saga of my father’s instant mashed potatoes. It has a few steps:
Humanity develops a Thing from ingredients that exist in the world.
Seeking efficiency at scale, an industry chops the ingredients of the Thing into teeny tiny bits.
Using an artificial emulsifier, the bits are bound back together into an aesthetically deficient but more convenient slurry that resembles the Thing.
Because it contains traces of the ingredients of the original Thing, this IMPish admixture is sold to us as if it were the original Thing.
Pared back to this level of abstraction, a surprising amount of stuff starts to seem like my father’s instant mashed potatoes.
The other foods in this category are obvious - McNuggets reconstituted out of pink slime, American cheese product, instant coffee, deli ham, Pringles minted from the very same potato flakes that go into IMPs. We’ve even developed a whole new health scare over them: “Ultra processed foods” are as demonized now as butter and whole milk were when my parents were young.
Expand the pattern to the built environment. Pressboard, particle board, and other reconstituted material composites likely make up a majority of new furniture sold in the US. These are an IMPish imitation of actual wood furniture. Take care while assembling not to ding your brittle sheetrock walls, an IMPish upgrade over lath and plaster. Often these interiors live inside an apartment building clad in a mish-mash of random ornament, anti-massing regulations demanding an IMPish simulation of a varied city block.
Intellectual goods can be IMPish. Reader’s Digest, sports “best-of” VHSes, textbooks stuffed with decontextualized excerpts, YouTube compilations, ChiveTV, listicles, social media feeds consisting of screenshots of other social media, Now That’s What I Call Music!, an entire ecosystem of actual cultural objects broken down into bits and clumped back together.
Corporate structures can be IMPish. When I visit a medical office it’s usually a confusing tangle of overlapping practitioners and practices operating out of the same physical address, an IMPish imitation of the archetypal doctor with a shingle in town. Similar quagmires abound when dealing with insurance, or contractors, or financial services.
Once you see the instant mashed potato antipattern it’s hard to stop. The isomorphisms are everywhere.
The gig economy makes IMPish jobs. Swiping apps produce IMPish flirting. Meta-studies are IMPish science. Ted Talks are IMPish symposia. Malls are IMPish shopping districts. Subdivisions are IMPish neighborhoods. Cruises are IMPish international travel, chopped into 14 hour chunks and emulsified with an ocean liner.
The internet scrapes together IMPish communities. We’re not atomized; we’re flaked.
by Anonymous, Astral Codex Ten | Read more:
Why Putin Thinks Russia Has the Upper Hand
Why Putin Thinks Russia Has the Upper Hand (NYT)
Vladimir V. Putin exuded confidence. Sitting back, surrounded by foreign dignitaries, the Russian president explained the futility of Ukrainian resistance. Russia had the advantage on the battlefield, as he saw it, and by rejecting his demands, Ukraine risked even more for peace.
“Keep at it, then, keep at it. It will only get worse,” Mr. Putin said at an economic forum in June, as he taunted the Ukrainian government. “Wherever a Russian soldier sets his foot, it’s ours,” he added, a smirk animating his face.
His self-assurance is born out of the Russian military’s resurgence.
In the depths of 2022, his underequipped forces were disoriented, decimated and struggling to counter Ukraine’s hit-and-run tactics and precision-guided weapons. Instead of abandoning the invasion, Mr. Putin threw the full strength of the Russian state behind the war, re-engineering the military and the economy with a singular goal of crushing Ukraine. In his push, the country revamped recruitment, weapons production and frontline tactics.
This is now a war of attrition favoring Russia, which has mobilized more men and arms than Ukraine and its Western backers. While their casualties are mounting, Russian forces are edging forward across most of the 750-mile front, strengthening Mr. Putin’s resolve to keep fighting until he gets the peace deal he wants.
Tradwife Travails
Lauren Southern, one of the most well-known right-wing influencers during Donald Trump’s first term, first went viral with a 2015 video titled “Why I Am Not a Feminist.” Then 19, beautiful and blond, Southern argued that women are advantaged in many areas of life, including child custody disputes and escaping abusive relationships. “Feminists are unintentionally creating a world of reverse sexism that I don’t want to be a part of,” she said.
Despite the presence of a few high-profile women in Trump’s administration, the right is increasingly trying to drive women out of public life. Some of this push comes from the unabashed patriarchs atop the Republican Party; last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reposted a video in which leaders of his Christian denomination said that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. (“All of Christ for All of Life,” wrote Hegseth.)
But there are also female influencers who present housewifery as the ultimate in wellness, an escape from the soulless grind of the workplace. “Less Prozac, more protein,” the podcast host Alex Clark told thousands of listeners at a conservative women’s conference in June. “Less burnout, more babies, less feminism, more femininity.” (Clark is unmarried and has no children.)
This Instagram-inflected traditionalism is taking hold at a time when the workplace is becoming even less friendly to women. As The Washington Post reported on Monday, large numbers of mothers have left the work force this year. Many have been driven out by return-to-office mandates and a backlash against diversity policies that’s led to hostile working environments. But some, according to The Post, “say they are giving up jobs happily, in line with MAGA culture and the rise of the ‘traditional wife.’”
Southern had more reason than most to want to retreat into the cult of domesticity. As she recounts in her memoir, her antifeminist video helped propel her to international notoriety, and soon she was traveling the world as an avatar of irreverent online reaction. She gave out fliers saying, “Allah is a Gay God” in a Muslim neighborhood in England, popularized the idea that there’s a white genocide in South Africa and interviewed the reactionary philosopher Alexander Dugin on a trip to Moscow seemingly arranged by shadowy Russian interests.
It was during this phase of her life that she said she was assaulted by Tate, who was just beginning to build his global brand. Her politics made the trauma particularly hard to process. “It wouldn’t be very helpful to ‘the cause’ (or my career, for that matter) for me to become exactly what I criticized,” wrote Southern. “A victim.”
After her encounter with Tate, she wrote, her life “unraveled.” She yearned to escape her own infamy and the need to keep shoveling more outrageous content into the internet’s insatiable maw. So when she met a man who wanted to settle down, she jumped at the chance to give up her career and become a stay-at-home wife and mother. She posted photos of herself baking, and “selfies in the mirror showing how quickly I had bounced back to fitness and health after pregnancy.”
But in reality, she wrote, her life was “hell.” She’d moved with her husband from Canada, where she’d grown up, to his native Australia, where she lived in near-total isolation. Her husband treated her with growing contempt, which she responded to by trying to be an even better wife. “I threw myself tenfold into trying to be the perfect partner: cooking, cleaning, putting on dresses and high heels to welcome him home,” she wrote. But it didn’t work; she said her husband berated her, stayed out until late at night and constantly threatened to divorce her if she didn’t obey him.
Eventually, she wrote, when she defied him by traveling to Canada to visit her family, he told her the marriage was over. By then, she said, she’d turned over much of her savings to him. She and her son had to move in with her parents, and then into a small, cheap cabin in the woods. She was destitute, full of shame and intellectually adrift. As she told the conservative journalist Mary Harrington last year, when she first went public about her experience with trad life, “My brain was breaking between two worlds, because I couldn’t let go of the ideology.”
Southern’s book is not an attempt at liberal redemption. Though she claims she’s lost interest in politics, she doesn’t renounce the ugly nativist views that helped her build her audience. She doesn’t apologize for, say, trying to block a boat that rescued drowning migrants in the Mediterranean. But while she’s not a particularly sympathetic figure, that might make her criticism of trad culture more credible, because it’s hard to see a professional motive in a book that’s likely to annoy every political faction.
Every few decades, it seems, America is fated to endure a new spasm of pseudotraditionalism, with women encouraged to seek shelter from a brutal world in homemaking. The lionization of the housewife in the 1950s came after women were pushed out of their World War II-era jobs. During the 1980s, as Susan Faludi wrote in her classic “Backlash,” women were bombarded with media messages telling them true freedom lay in marriage and motherhood. In 2003, The New York Times Magazine heralded “The Opt-Out Revolution,” part of a wave of media about elite women stepping back from hard-charging careers.
I’m sure some women are happy renouncing their ambitions to care for husbands and children. But often, women who give in to gender retrenchment come to regret it. A decade after “The Opt-Out Revolution,” a Times Magazine headline read, “The Opt-Out Generation Wants Back In.”
In her 2007 book “The Feminine Mistake,” Leslie Bennetts wrote, “I couldn’t possibly count the number of women I’ve interviewed who thought they could depend on a husband to support them but who ultimately found themselves alone and unprepared to take care of themselves — and their children.” It seems particularly dangerous to tie one’s fate to a man who is part of an internet subculture obsessed with female submission.
Image: Eylul Aslan/Connected Archives
Thursday, August 14, 2025
Tuesday, August 12, 2025
NPR vs. DOGE
Today, we’re taking a look at a predecessor to DOGE: The Reinventing Government project (officially known as the NPR, for National Partnership for Reinventing Government). The NPR ran for almost the full duration of President Bill Clinton’s two terms, and led to the elimination of over 100 programs and over 250,000 federal jobs.
We discuss:
In broad strokes, would you call the initiative a success?
I would say yes, it was a success. It changed what government employees understood their jobs to be. The goal was to empower them to be able to get results, and they felt that in many cases. We conducted a survey and found that after eight years, 40% of the civil service understood what we were trying to get at — that’s enough to create some momentum.
Even in future administrations, people still talked about some of the initiative’s outcomes. There were about 100 different statutes that included bits and pieces of our recommendations, and a number of administrative changes, like designating the deputy secretaries for various departments as chief operating officers and having them meet government-wide as the President's Management Council. I believe that has continued until today, although I don't know what the current administration's approach has been.
You’ve flagged that government reform efforts like NPR and DOGE are a recurring feature of American policy. Can you place the NPR in the context of the history of government reform efforts?
What was the policy conversation like in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, before the Reinventing Government initiative?
This was toward the tail end of Reagan’s Reform ‘88, which were largely administrative reforms. In the late ‘80s under President George H.W. Bush, the focus shifted to improving government performance and financial management, which led to the passage of the Chief Financial Officers Act (CFO Act) in 1990. I was at the GAO at the time, and I was tapped to look at how to measure and improve government performance. I wound up looking at what was going on in other countries as examples. (...)
A vice president had never been to most of those agencies in person, so it created enormous buzz. He went from the US Department of Agriculture to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to the central courtyard at the Pentagon, and huge crowds of enthusiastic employees showed up. The Vice President was on stage with the department secretary to listen to these people, and they would talk about some of the most embarrassing things going on in their departments that the secretary, of course, knew nothing about. And the Vice President was sitting there taking notes. When we finished our draft report, Gore asked us to change it to reflect some of what he had heard and make recommendations based on those stories. (...)
What did you prioritize in those first six months, and what did you leave on the table? That first set of recommendations did not include moving around agencies or consolidating functions.
Gore had very few dictates on what we should or shouldn't do. One of them was, “I don't want any recommendations to study this more. I want recommendations to do something.” Another was, “Don't move boxes. Fix what's inside them.” That was really sage advice, because typical government reformers want to make an org chart look rational by moving things around, even though it’s really hard and costly to do.
The last major department that we created was the Department of Homeland Security, and that was more than 20 years ago. That was really painful to create, and it took years to actually become functional. Gore believed that we had good people trapped in bad systems, which was the total quality management, W. Edwards Deming-type thing. That was sort of the mantra.
Do you think that gave NPR a longer political runway than DOGE has had? DOGE has taken on some reorganization initiatives, which come with a much higher political cost. You engender a lot more opposition.
In the second round of reinvention in ‘96, after Newt Gingrich became Speaker and the House went Republican, the NPR was asked to do a new report and study. That one was focused more on what government should do, rather than how. And much like the second Hoover Commission, it didn't land very well. Agencies were eliminated, the Interstate Commerce Commission was eliminated. My favorite was the elimination of the Board of Tea Experts, which was created in the late 1800s. (...)
With DOGE, Elon Musk has focused on holding up really egregious examples of government spending. They’re often overhyped or taken out of context, but showing millions of Twitter users what they’re cutting has been a huge focus. How much did the Clinton-Gore administration tout those examples of waste in public?
We didn't do that during the first six months. Then we issued the main report and there was a big event on the South Lawn. After that, there were 38 accompanying collateral reports for each of the agencies and systems on how to implement the recommendations in the main report. Promoting the things that were screwed up wasn’t such a big deal, and the GAO was finding a lot of them. Like, there were about seven agricultural field offices in every county in the United States.
Really?
Yeah, five to seven Department of Agriculture field offices in each of approximately 3,000 counties, including Brooklyn. There were all of these different agencies, and the Department never co-located field offices. We found closing the offices really hard because members of Congress wanted to keep them. The story that we got was that there were so many field offices because President Lincoln had said that no field office should be further than one day’s horse ride from any farmer, so field offices were about 20 miles apart. (...)
Why wasn’t OMB bought in? That seems like a classically OMB thing to focus on.
Part of it was that they didn't think that the Reinventing Government people were rational. We were not traditional.
Because you were head-in-the-clouds folks?
A bit of that, but also that we were trying to empower employees, and that wasn't their shtick. OMB was more into top-down control. They have changed over the years — in fact, one of NPR’s outcomes was changing OMB, so that instead of being just budget analysts, they became resource managers. It wasn't just about money, but about how agencies function, and looking at their management and regulations.
But this didn't roll out the way we had envisioned it. There were some cases where it did, like when Jim King, who was the head of OPM at the time, cut down HR regulations and got rid of the 10,000-page personnel manual that agencies were expected to abide by.
He also worked with the agencies to downsize their staffs. That resulted in some hiring freezes, so you wouldn’t have new cohorts fall in over the years. Because of that, a gap of experience emerged, especially in procurement, which cascaded over the next 20 years.
Is that the gap the Beltway Bandits grew to fill?
In some cases, they did, but there are some functions that you just can’t delegate, like signing authority on contracts or coming up with contract strategy. We were hoping agencies would simplify HR and the procurement rules, which would let them do with fewer staff. But Congress ate dessert first and cut the number of people without simplifying the rules.
Is that what we're seeing with DOGE, where they start with the headcount cuts and hope that the regulatory cuts come later?
No, they think AI will fix it all, but it will be hard to have AI in the national parks to help someone who sprained their ankle. But they should have engaged Congress on the changes to the systems. In this current administration, we're not seeing any interaction that I can see with Congress of changing the rules of the game.
With those hiring freezes, there was a shift in the demographic composition. Federal employees started to skew older, and the share of federal workers under 35 fell by about 10% over the eight years of the NPR.
That's amazing. The rebates were a substantial chunk of money.
Yeah. You have to balance risk with the ability to get stuff done. If you want no risk, it’ll be very expensive.
Right. The current administration wants to centralize procurement at GSA, and we've seen some moves in that direction. As you describe, there's a constant pendulum swing between pushing purchasing and management authority lower into the system, and then realizing the risk and pulling it back. Then, once it's centralized, you realize that you've limited your ability to trust the outer branches of the federal government.
There are pros and cons of centralizing. One of the things that we saw was that, at the time, the US government was the last vestige of Soviet central planning. We needed to devolve that. The government had a choice between different administrative service centers, which we call franchise funds, and those still exist today. There were six or eight different franchise funds created across the government, so the Department of Health and Human Services would be able to service contracts and HR for other agencies, which allowed for transparency about how much an administrative process costs and created some competition between agencies. If an agency head gets fed up with how their procurement contracts are done, they can go to another agency. By recentralizing, you will initially gain some efficiencies, which will turn into inefficiencies over a few years as it becomes a non-responsive monopoly. (..)
If you and I are talking again at the end of this administration, what are we likely to see as the effect of DOGE four years from now?
I think we're going to see agencies lose the capacity to do things that Americans assume just happen, and that they'll see enormous holes in the safety net of what government does and how it delivers. The Clinton-Gore administration was very concerned about losing citizen trust in government, which would make it hard to maintain a democracy. By the end of the administration, it had gone from something like 20% to 40%, and now it's really low again. With DOGE, I think it will fall even further.
Let’s say Elon really is stepping back, and imagine you get installed at DOGE. Everything that’s happened already is already baked in, and there are a bunch of headcount cuts that are not being rolled back, a bunch of attempts to centralize procurement, the implementation of these digital systems, etc.
How would you try to right the ship?
You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. I don't think you can go back to where we were. The question is, “What will government look like next?” I think we’re going to have a period of huge turmoil in terms of service delivery, like no one answering the phones in the Social Security Administration, and that the current immigration enforcement efforts will lead to loss of trust in the immigration system. Will student loans still work? A lot will get broken down, and I think a lot of people are going to get hurt.
So we need to ask how to develop a new approach or system, and I have not yet come up with that answer. There is a group of people that seems to be trying to develop that, and that is where my hope lies. I think a lot of it will be a matter of using technology. We've broken things so far, but we haven't come up with a plan for how to replace or fix them in a way that makes a difference for people's lives.
Both NPR and DOGE are case studies in a long history of government reform efforts — some more successful than others. Our guest is John Kamensky, who served as Vice President Al Gore's deputy for the National Performance Review (NPR) for eight years. Kamensky was colloquially known as “Mr. Checklist” for his work organizing the Reinventing Government initiative.
Did the NPR actually work?
What was the Board of Tea Experts?
Why was the federal government subsidizing mohair?
NPR made the federal workforce older. Was that bad?
What doesn’t Elon understand about the federal government?
As I understand it, the Reinventing Government initiative was the longest-running government reform project in American history.
Yeah, that's how I understand it. I’ve researched previous reform efforts from the past century and haven't seen anything that had that kind of endurance.
What was the Board of Tea Experts?
Why was the federal government subsidizing mohair?
NPR made the federal workforce older. Was that bad?
What doesn’t Elon understand about the federal government?
As I understand it, the Reinventing Government initiative was the longest-running government reform project in American history.
Yeah, that's how I understand it. I’ve researched previous reform efforts from the past century and haven't seen anything that had that kind of endurance.
In broad strokes, would you call the initiative a success?
I would say yes, it was a success. It changed what government employees understood their jobs to be. The goal was to empower them to be able to get results, and they felt that in many cases. We conducted a survey and found that after eight years, 40% of the civil service understood what we were trying to get at — that’s enough to create some momentum.
Even in future administrations, people still talked about some of the initiative’s outcomes. There were about 100 different statutes that included bits and pieces of our recommendations, and a number of administrative changes, like designating the deputy secretaries for various departments as chief operating officers and having them meet government-wide as the President's Management Council. I believe that has continued until today, although I don't know what the current administration's approach has been.
You’ve flagged that government reform efforts like NPR and DOGE are a recurring feature of American policy. Can you place the NPR in the context of the history of government reform efforts?
.... There’s a long history of approaches to government reform: there were efforts under Johnson and Nixon, and the Grace Commission under Reagan. Typically, advisers outside of government came in to advise on best practices from the private sector, but the Reinventing Government initiative was different. We turned to civil servants and asked them what needed to be done to fix government operations, focusing on the “how” and not so much on what the government should be doing.
What was the policy conversation like in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, before the Reinventing Government initiative?
This was toward the tail end of Reagan’s Reform ‘88, which were largely administrative reforms. In the late ‘80s under President George H.W. Bush, the focus shifted to improving government performance and financial management, which led to the passage of the Chief Financial Officers Act (CFO Act) in 1990. I was at the GAO at the time, and I was tapped to look at how to measure and improve government performance. I wound up looking at what was going on in other countries as examples. (...)
So you're at the GAO in the late ‘80s. How did you end up at the Reinventing Government initiative?
David Osborne and I had an ongoing conversation — he was fascinated by what other countries were doing, and I was fascinated by what he was finding in the states. In a previous book called Laboratories of Democracy, he did a case study of Bill Clinton’s governorship of Arkansas, so he was in the Clinton circle. During Clinton’s presidential campaign, David Osborne drafted a speech on how Clinton could reinvent the federal government. That speech was never made, but the ideas stuck.
When they organized the transition team, Al From of the Progressive Policy Institute was leading the government reform piece. They brought in John Sharp, who was running the Texas Performance Review, and it was more like DOGE. They went into the agencies and terrorized them to find savings. On David Osborne’s suggestion, they came to me to get the international perspective.
Then in early March of 1993, Clinton gave a press conference, and said the administration would create a National Performance Review. I called my counterpart at the OMB to ask what was going on, and he said, “Well, this is the Clinton administration. This is live and unrehearsed. We don't know what's going on.”
A few days later, I get a call from Elaine Kamarck, and she says, “I just started working for Vice President Gore. He was asked to do this reinventing government thing, and David Osborne says that I need to talk to you.” They called me, Bob Stone, who was doing the reinvention of the Defense Department, and Bob Knisely, who was over in the Department of Transportation.
I told them what was going on in other countries. Bob Stone was a sort of renegade in the Defense Department, a civilian in charge of the Department’s military installations. He oversaw a large team and was trying to delegate authority; rather than having them ask whether to repave a parking lot in San Diego, he said, “No, you know whether you need to repave it, don't ask me.” So he talked about how the DoD had screwed up. Bob Knisely had worked in a lot of different civilian agencies and saw parallels there.
Elaine suggested we tell the Vice President about it. The three of us met at Bob Stone's house to figure out what we would tell the Vice President, because this was our one chance as civil servants to say what needed to be done to fix the government. Clinton had actually done total quality management when he was the governor of Arkansas and wanted the Reinventing Government initiative to consist of civil servants, rather than turning to business executives as Reagan had.
Bob Stone had developed a set of principles for his model installation program and suggested we use those. He made this “gold card,” which had those principles and Clinton and Gore’s names on it. Over the years, we handed out those cards to around 100 civil servants, but the first gold card was made in the middle of a snowstorm at Bob's house to give to Gore at our meeting the next day. Bob Stone is a storyteller at heart, and he said that we really needed to convince him of how screwed up the government is. He had a box of his “toys”: examples of how idiotic things were in the Defense Department. We decided to take it with us to the White House. The vice president has an office over in the corner, which Gore called the Square Office as opposed to the Oval Office.
The next day, we went and sat down with him, Elaine, and the deputy director for management of OMB. After we each told our stories, Bob Stone brought out the box. He took out a can of spray paint and told a story: the Defense Department hired chemists with chemistry degrees and tasked them with making sure that each can of spray paint hadn’t expired. They had to sign a little form that's stuck to the side of each can to say that the paint is still useful.
Then he pulled out a steam trap, which is a metal valve that takes dirt out of steam lines in buildings. These each cost about $100, and when they start leaking steam, they leak about $50 worth of steam a week. But the procurement people wouldn't buy a replacement until they got a bulk order. That let them get them for $90, but it took about a year to get enough orders, and you lost $50 worth of steam a week in the meantime.
Gore found this idiotic, and Bob Stone suggested letting the engineers on the base buy small items using a credit card rather than going through the procurement system. At the end, Gore asked us to come on for six months to help. I’d had no idea this was a job interview. (...)
I knew that getting detailed from the legislative to the executive branch would not go over well at GAO. Sure enough, Senator Roth was on the floor of the Senate a few weeks later, saying that this is a violation of the separation of powers. So I resigned from GAO and was picked up in the executive branch.
David Osborne and I had an ongoing conversation — he was fascinated by what other countries were doing, and I was fascinated by what he was finding in the states. In a previous book called Laboratories of Democracy, he did a case study of Bill Clinton’s governorship of Arkansas, so he was in the Clinton circle. During Clinton’s presidential campaign, David Osborne drafted a speech on how Clinton could reinvent the federal government. That speech was never made, but the ideas stuck.
When they organized the transition team, Al From of the Progressive Policy Institute was leading the government reform piece. They brought in John Sharp, who was running the Texas Performance Review, and it was more like DOGE. They went into the agencies and terrorized them to find savings. On David Osborne’s suggestion, they came to me to get the international perspective.
Then in early March of 1993, Clinton gave a press conference, and said the administration would create a National Performance Review. I called my counterpart at the OMB to ask what was going on, and he said, “Well, this is the Clinton administration. This is live and unrehearsed. We don't know what's going on.”
A few days later, I get a call from Elaine Kamarck, and she says, “I just started working for Vice President Gore. He was asked to do this reinventing government thing, and David Osborne says that I need to talk to you.” They called me, Bob Stone, who was doing the reinvention of the Defense Department, and Bob Knisely, who was over in the Department of Transportation.
I told them what was going on in other countries. Bob Stone was a sort of renegade in the Defense Department, a civilian in charge of the Department’s military installations. He oversaw a large team and was trying to delegate authority; rather than having them ask whether to repave a parking lot in San Diego, he said, “No, you know whether you need to repave it, don't ask me.” So he talked about how the DoD had screwed up. Bob Knisely had worked in a lot of different civilian agencies and saw parallels there.
Elaine suggested we tell the Vice President about it. The three of us met at Bob Stone's house to figure out what we would tell the Vice President, because this was our one chance as civil servants to say what needed to be done to fix the government. Clinton had actually done total quality management when he was the governor of Arkansas and wanted the Reinventing Government initiative to consist of civil servants, rather than turning to business executives as Reagan had.
Bob Stone had developed a set of principles for his model installation program and suggested we use those. He made this “gold card,” which had those principles and Clinton and Gore’s names on it. Over the years, we handed out those cards to around 100 civil servants, but the first gold card was made in the middle of a snowstorm at Bob's house to give to Gore at our meeting the next day. Bob Stone is a storyteller at heart, and he said that we really needed to convince him of how screwed up the government is. He had a box of his “toys”: examples of how idiotic things were in the Defense Department. We decided to take it with us to the White House. The vice president has an office over in the corner, which Gore called the Square Office as opposed to the Oval Office.
The next day, we went and sat down with him, Elaine, and the deputy director for management of OMB. After we each told our stories, Bob Stone brought out the box. He took out a can of spray paint and told a story: the Defense Department hired chemists with chemistry degrees and tasked them with making sure that each can of spray paint hadn’t expired. They had to sign a little form that's stuck to the side of each can to say that the paint is still useful.
Then he pulled out a steam trap, which is a metal valve that takes dirt out of steam lines in buildings. These each cost about $100, and when they start leaking steam, they leak about $50 worth of steam a week. But the procurement people wouldn't buy a replacement until they got a bulk order. That let them get them for $90, but it took about a year to get enough orders, and you lost $50 worth of steam a week in the meantime.
Gore found this idiotic, and Bob Stone suggested letting the engineers on the base buy small items using a credit card rather than going through the procurement system. At the end, Gore asked us to come on for six months to help. I’d had no idea this was a job interview. (...)
I knew that getting detailed from the legislative to the executive branch would not go over well at GAO. Sure enough, Senator Roth was on the floor of the Senate a few weeks later, saying that this is a violation of the separation of powers. So I resigned from GAO and was picked up in the executive branch.
A vice president had never been to most of those agencies in person, so it created enormous buzz. He went from the US Department of Agriculture to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to the central courtyard at the Pentagon, and huge crowds of enthusiastic employees showed up. The Vice President was on stage with the department secretary to listen to these people, and they would talk about some of the most embarrassing things going on in their departments that the secretary, of course, knew nothing about. And the Vice President was sitting there taking notes. When we finished our draft report, Gore asked us to change it to reflect some of what he had heard and make recommendations based on those stories. (...)
What did you prioritize in those first six months, and what did you leave on the table? That first set of recommendations did not include moving around agencies or consolidating functions.
Gore had very few dictates on what we should or shouldn't do. One of them was, “I don't want any recommendations to study this more. I want recommendations to do something.” Another was, “Don't move boxes. Fix what's inside them.” That was really sage advice, because typical government reformers want to make an org chart look rational by moving things around, even though it’s really hard and costly to do.
The last major department that we created was the Department of Homeland Security, and that was more than 20 years ago. That was really painful to create, and it took years to actually become functional. Gore believed that we had good people trapped in bad systems, which was the total quality management, W. Edwards Deming-type thing. That was sort of the mantra.
Do you think that gave NPR a longer political runway than DOGE has had? DOGE has taken on some reorganization initiatives, which come with a much higher political cost. You engender a lot more opposition.
In the second round of reinvention in ‘96, after Newt Gingrich became Speaker and the House went Republican, the NPR was asked to do a new report and study. That one was focused more on what government should do, rather than how. And much like the second Hoover Commission, it didn't land very well. Agencies were eliminated, the Interstate Commerce Commission was eliminated. My favorite was the elimination of the Board of Tea Experts, which was created in the late 1800s. (...)
With DOGE, Elon Musk has focused on holding up really egregious examples of government spending. They’re often overhyped or taken out of context, but showing millions of Twitter users what they’re cutting has been a huge focus. How much did the Clinton-Gore administration tout those examples of waste in public?
We didn't do that during the first six months. Then we issued the main report and there was a big event on the South Lawn. After that, there were 38 accompanying collateral reports for each of the agencies and systems on how to implement the recommendations in the main report. Promoting the things that were screwed up wasn’t such a big deal, and the GAO was finding a lot of them. Like, there were about seven agricultural field offices in every county in the United States.
Really?
Yeah, five to seven Department of Agriculture field offices in each of approximately 3,000 counties, including Brooklyn. There were all of these different agencies, and the Department never co-located field offices. We found closing the offices really hard because members of Congress wanted to keep them. The story that we got was that there were so many field offices because President Lincoln had said that no field office should be further than one day’s horse ride from any farmer, so field offices were about 20 miles apart. (...)
Let me ask you about some of the more difficult parts of NPR. The initiative famously cut upwards of 400,000 civil servants over those eight years; it wasn't until the last five years or so that the number of full-time federal government employees approached that 1993 peak again. How did you figure out where to cut headcount and implement it?
One later criticism of NPR was that as the number of federal employees dropped, a lot of outside contractors and what you might call Beltway Bandits ended up doing a lot of that work instead. You had this kind of dark matter version of the federal workforce: it just wasn't on the books full-time.
This goes back to empowering employees, which was one of Bob Stone’s mantras for the project. There were too many overseers and people in mission support functions — one in three civil servants were middle managers in what we called “management controls” — procurement, budget, personnel, legal. There was a 1:7 employee-to-manager ratio. Bob Stone was inspired by the business writer Tom Peters, who said that the average in the private sector is 1:15. That overhead is closer to 15% rather than 30%, so we set those two metrics as targets.
We wanted to go from 700,000 employees down to 350,000: moving 100,000 to the front line for service and returning the savings for the other 250,000 to the government. We had an initial target of 252,000, but agencies wound up cutting even more, in part because of the downsizing in the Defense Department after the end of the Cold War. We were looking at transferring some functions, like cooks, groundskeepers, and security guards at Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals, to the private sector so that the government doesn't have to manage this enormous workforce. We saw how other countries implemented new public management theory to let agencies focus on delivering their core service and not managing police and groundskeepers, so that was the concept.
It didn't pan out that way because when we asked the agencies to cut headquarters, headquarters cut the field. And OMB wasn't really bought into what we were doing to reshape the workforce, so they let the agencies do whatever they wanted to.
One later criticism of NPR was that as the number of federal employees dropped, a lot of outside contractors and what you might call Beltway Bandits ended up doing a lot of that work instead. You had this kind of dark matter version of the federal workforce: it just wasn't on the books full-time.
This goes back to empowering employees, which was one of Bob Stone’s mantras for the project. There were too many overseers and people in mission support functions — one in three civil servants were middle managers in what we called “management controls” — procurement, budget, personnel, legal. There was a 1:7 employee-to-manager ratio. Bob Stone was inspired by the business writer Tom Peters, who said that the average in the private sector is 1:15. That overhead is closer to 15% rather than 30%, so we set those two metrics as targets.
We wanted to go from 700,000 employees down to 350,000: moving 100,000 to the front line for service and returning the savings for the other 250,000 to the government. We had an initial target of 252,000, but agencies wound up cutting even more, in part because of the downsizing in the Defense Department after the end of the Cold War. We were looking at transferring some functions, like cooks, groundskeepers, and security guards at Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals, to the private sector so that the government doesn't have to manage this enormous workforce. We saw how other countries implemented new public management theory to let agencies focus on delivering their core service and not managing police and groundskeepers, so that was the concept.
It didn't pan out that way because when we asked the agencies to cut headquarters, headquarters cut the field. And OMB wasn't really bought into what we were doing to reshape the workforce, so they let the agencies do whatever they wanted to.
Why wasn’t OMB bought in? That seems like a classically OMB thing to focus on.
Part of it was that they didn't think that the Reinventing Government people were rational. We were not traditional.
Because you were head-in-the-clouds folks?
A bit of that, but also that we were trying to empower employees, and that wasn't their shtick. OMB was more into top-down control. They have changed over the years — in fact, one of NPR’s outcomes was changing OMB, so that instead of being just budget analysts, they became resource managers. It wasn't just about money, but about how agencies function, and looking at their management and regulations.
But this didn't roll out the way we had envisioned it. There were some cases where it did, like when Jim King, who was the head of OPM at the time, cut down HR regulations and got rid of the 10,000-page personnel manual that agencies were expected to abide by.
He also worked with the agencies to downsize their staffs. That resulted in some hiring freezes, so you wouldn’t have new cohorts fall in over the years. Because of that, a gap of experience emerged, especially in procurement, which cascaded over the next 20 years.
Is that the gap the Beltway Bandits grew to fill?
In some cases, they did, but there are some functions that you just can’t delegate, like signing authority on contracts or coming up with contract strategy. We were hoping agencies would simplify HR and the procurement rules, which would let them do with fewer staff. But Congress ate dessert first and cut the number of people without simplifying the rules.
Is that what we're seeing with DOGE, where they start with the headcount cuts and hope that the regulatory cuts come later?
No, they think AI will fix it all, but it will be hard to have AI in the national parks to help someone who sprained their ankle. But they should have engaged Congress on the changes to the systems. In this current administration, we're not seeing any interaction that I can see with Congress of changing the rules of the game.
With those hiring freezes, there was a shift in the demographic composition. Federal employees started to skew older, and the share of federal workers under 35 fell by about 10% over the eight years of the NPR.
When you combine that with the median GS grade, the median place on the pay scale in the federal government is higher now than it was 20 years ago. That makes it a lot harder to fill roles with junior talent, or bring people through the ranks from a young age.
What do you make of that effect of the NPR?
There's also a shift in the mix of work that's done. For example, during NPR, the HR processes and agencies were manual, and they have since become electronic. In many agencies, small-time procurements were manual, and you had triplicate forms that took weeks to complete, and the administrative cost of processing those forms was horrendous, so they moved to credit cards. Interestingly, the current administration has reneged on the use of credit cards, and it's costing the government money. In fact, when there was credit card abuse in some agency late in the Clinton administration, Congressman Pete Sessions put in a bill to stop the use of credit cards, but the Congressional Budget Office came back and said, “That'll cost you $100 million in rebates.”
What do you make of that effect of the NPR?
There's also a shift in the mix of work that's done. For example, during NPR, the HR processes and agencies were manual, and they have since become electronic. In many agencies, small-time procurements were manual, and you had triplicate forms that took weeks to complete, and the administrative cost of processing those forms was horrendous, so they moved to credit cards. Interestingly, the current administration has reneged on the use of credit cards, and it's costing the government money. In fact, when there was credit card abuse in some agency late in the Clinton administration, Congressman Pete Sessions put in a bill to stop the use of credit cards, but the Congressional Budget Office came back and said, “That'll cost you $100 million in rebates.”
That's amazing. The rebates were a substantial chunk of money.
Yeah. You have to balance risk with the ability to get stuff done. If you want no risk, it’ll be very expensive.
Right. The current administration wants to centralize procurement at GSA, and we've seen some moves in that direction. As you describe, there's a constant pendulum swing between pushing purchasing and management authority lower into the system, and then realizing the risk and pulling it back. Then, once it's centralized, you realize that you've limited your ability to trust the outer branches of the federal government.
There are pros and cons of centralizing. One of the things that we saw was that, at the time, the US government was the last vestige of Soviet central planning. We needed to devolve that. The government had a choice between different administrative service centers, which we call franchise funds, and those still exist today. There were six or eight different franchise funds created across the government, so the Department of Health and Human Services would be able to service contracts and HR for other agencies, which allowed for transparency about how much an administrative process costs and created some competition between agencies. If an agency head gets fed up with how their procurement contracts are done, they can go to another agency. By recentralizing, you will initially gain some efficiencies, which will turn into inefficiencies over a few years as it becomes a non-responsive monopoly. (..)
If you and I are talking again at the end of this administration, what are we likely to see as the effect of DOGE four years from now?
I think we're going to see agencies lose the capacity to do things that Americans assume just happen, and that they'll see enormous holes in the safety net of what government does and how it delivers. The Clinton-Gore administration was very concerned about losing citizen trust in government, which would make it hard to maintain a democracy. By the end of the administration, it had gone from something like 20% to 40%, and now it's really low again. With DOGE, I think it will fall even further.
Let’s say Elon really is stepping back, and imagine you get installed at DOGE. Everything that’s happened already is already baked in, and there are a bunch of headcount cuts that are not being rolled back, a bunch of attempts to centralize procurement, the implementation of these digital systems, etc.
How would you try to right the ship?
You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. I don't think you can go back to where we were. The question is, “What will government look like next?” I think we’re going to have a period of huge turmoil in terms of service delivery, like no one answering the phones in the Social Security Administration, and that the current immigration enforcement efforts will lead to loss of trust in the immigration system. Will student loans still work? A lot will get broken down, and I think a lot of people are going to get hurt.
So we need to ask how to develop a new approach or system, and I have not yet come up with that answer. There is a group of people that seems to be trying to develop that, and that is where my hope lies. I think a lot of it will be a matter of using technology. We've broken things so far, but we haven't come up with a plan for how to replace or fix them in a way that makes a difference for people's lives.
by Santi Ruiz, Statecraft | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. So, in this administration young tech bros not burdened by history (or anything else apparently, including puberty), were put in charge with no clue - and continue to be embedded like viruses, sucking up classified data.]
Images: markk
[ed. South African beadwork on a Large scale. All exhibits including Air Force One, the Space Shuttle program, and more here. Don't miss if you're in Seattle.]
Monday, August 11, 2025
[ed. American terrorists... making their nut and enjoying authority (incognito, of course.) (South Park).]
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