00:00:00
Does the power reside with the president to make large scale or you know riffs or
00:00:05
do they have to consult Congress first? Your thoughts on this issue? It's an incredibly important ruling,
00:00:12
incredibly right. I think President Trump should have absolute leeway to decide how the people
00:00:20
that report to him act and do their job. M if you take a step back, Jason, there
00:00:25
are more than 2,000 federal agencies, employees plus contractors, I think number almost 3 million people.
00:00:36
If you put 3 million people into 2,000 agencies, and then you give them very poor and outdated technology, which
00:00:46
unfortunately most of the government operates on, what are you going to get? You're going to get incredibly slow
00:00:54
processes. You're going to get a lot of checking and double-checking and you're going to ultimately just get
00:01:03
a lot of regulations because they're trying to do what they think is the right job. So since 1993, what have we
00:01:11
seen? Regulations have gotten out of control. It's like a 100,000 new rules per some number of months. Like it's
00:01:17
just crazy. So eventually we all succumb to an infinite number of rules that we all end up violating and not even know
00:01:25
it. So if the CEO of the United States, President Trump, isn't allowed to fire people, then all of that stuff just
00:01:34
compounds. So I think that this is a really important thing that just happened. It allows us
00:01:41
to now level set how big should the government be? But more importantly, the number of people
00:01:47
in the government are also the ones that then direct downstream spend that make net new rules. And if you can slow the
00:01:55
growth of that down, you're actually doing a lot. In many ways, I wish Elon had come in and created Doge
00:02:04
now. Like, could you imagine if Doge was created the day after this Supreme Court
00:02:09
ruling? It would have been a totally different outcome, I think, because with that Supreme Court ruling in hand, these
00:02:17
guys probably would have been like a hot knife through butter, Travis. So, I I think it's a big deal.
00:02:22
Except that ruling doesn't happen without Doge. That Doge caused that ruling to occur.
00:02:27
True. Well, the EO did you could have passed all that was all Doge style, though. You know what I'm saying? It was
00:02:33
If if they wasn't firing people, yeah, they probably wouldn't felt the need to your point, Travis, to actually file
00:02:39
this. Travis, if you are living in the age of AI efficiency right now, operations of companies is changing
00:02:45
dramatically. Can you imagine telling somebody you you can be CEO, but you can't change personnel. That's the job.
00:02:52
You get to be CEO, but you just can't change the players on the team. You can buy the Knicks, but you can't change the
00:02:58
coach. No, you can grow it. You just can't shrink it. It's like a It's like running a
00:03:02
unionized company, which actually does exist or largeized companies where you can't do any of these things,
00:03:08
right? Do do they still exist or are they all gone? They're going quickly. Yeah, probably.
00:03:13
I think this just gets back to what what is actually Congress authorizing when a
00:03:18
bill occurs. And there's certain things that are specific and certain things that aren't. And I don't I'm not sure
00:03:26
that in a lot of these bills, it's not very specific about exactly how many people must be hired. And so if it's I'm
00:03:36
just doing the common man's sort of approach to this, which is like if if the law says you have to hire X number
00:03:42
of people, then that is what it is. If the law says you here's some money to spend, here are the ways in which to
00:03:48
spend it, but it's not specific about how many people you hire, then that is different.
00:03:53
Yeah. It should be outcome based. Hey, here's the goal. Here's the the key objectives, right?
00:03:58
Travis Travis is totally right. Like there are there's a variety of different laws, some with incredible
00:04:03
specificities, some with very broad mandates. The Constitution clearly says that all executive power resides in the
00:04:09
president of the United States. Period. There's no exceptions there. However, Congress does appropriate money and post
00:04:15
Watergate, many people think Congress has the power to force the president to spend the
00:04:21
money. And you can debate that. You can debate it on a per statute basis. and that will be more nuanced and that's
00:04:27
going to get litigated whether the president can refuse to spend money that Congress explicitly instructed him to
00:04:34
spend sometimes called empowerment. That's a very interesting intellectual debate. This one's a little bit easier.
00:04:39
It'll get more complicated again like this EO is only approved to allow for the planning. I think the vote might be
00:04:47
closer. I think there's still a majority on the Supreme Court for the actual implementation, but it may not be 81
00:04:52
when there's a specific plan that has to navigate its way through the courts again.
00:04:58
Yeah, it's super fascinating. Yeah. I wonder if they're going to get to the point where they're going to say
00:05:03
in every bill, you need to hire this number of people to hit I don't I don't know if they can. Like
00:05:08
that's where it gets borderline unconstitutional. like where you actually prescribe that the president in
00:05:14
the exercise of his constitutional duties has to hire certain number of people that feels pretty precarious.
00:05:22
Well, I I I'm not sure, Keith. It's just like they prescribe a whole bunch of other things like you must you must
00:05:29
appropriate money for to this specific institution to do this specific work. But that's not an executive function.
00:05:37
Like if you said like the secretary of state has to have x number of employees doing something. The secretary of state
00:05:45
is your personal representative to conduct foreign affairs on behalf of the president of the United States. It gets
00:05:51
a little bit more messy as you translate it to people um that the president should I mean yes Congress does set you
00:06:00
know which people are subject to Senate confirmation, what their salaries and compensation bans are. So it's it's
00:06:06
never going to be fully binary where the president can do whatever he wants and it's never gonna I don't think it'll be
00:06:11
constitutional for Congress to mandate and put all kinds of handcuffs on the president.
00:06:15
Well, then you you also have performance that comes in here. What if you look at
00:06:19
the Department of Education? You say scores have gone down. We've spent this money. We're not getting the results.
00:06:25
Therefore, these people are incompetent. Therefore, I'm firing them for cause and
00:06:29
I'm going to hire new people. How are you going to stop the executive from doing that? There's been a bunch of
00:06:34
litigation, you know, in parallel to this litigation about the president's ability to fire people. And for the most
00:06:40
part, the Supreme Court's basically, with maybe the exception of the Federal Reserve chair, said that the president
00:06:46
can fire pretty much anybody he wants. I mean, that's the way to go is like I mean, I hate to be cut, but if the
00:06:53
results aren't there, I think if they're presidential Yeah. If they're a presidential appointee, the
00:06:58
president should be able to fire you at will. Just like if you were a VP at one of our companies, the CEO should be able
00:07:04
to fire you at will. But what about Keith? If the whole department sucks. Hey, you guys were
00:07:08
responsible for early education. You had to put together a plan. The plan failed.
00:07:12
Everybody's fired. We're starting over. Like, you should be allowed to do that. How are we going to have an efficient
00:07:18
government? Some of these departments were created by congressional statute like the
00:07:22
Department of Education in 1979. And you're right, every single educational stat has got worse in the United States
00:07:28
since the department was created. But there is a law on the books that says there shall be a department of
00:07:34
education. So you may have to repeal