What This Latest Supreme Court Ruling Means For Every President - Chamath Palihapitiya

Does the power reside with the president to make large scale or you know riffs or do they have to consult Congress first? Your thoughts on this issue? It's an incredibly important ruling, incredibly right. I think President Trump should have absolute leeway to decide how the people that report to him act and do their job. M if you take a step back, Jason, there are more than 2,000 federal agencies, employees plus contractors, I think number almost 3 million people. If you put 3 million people into 2,000 agencies, and then you give them very poor and outdated technology, which

unfortunately most of the government operates on, what are you going to get? You're going to get incredibly slow processes. You're going to get a lot of checking and double-checking and you're going to ultimately just get a lot of regulations because they're trying to do what they think is the right job. So since 1993, what have we seen? Regulations have gotten out of control. It's like a 100,000 new rules per some number of months. Like it's just crazy. So eventually we all succumb to an infinite number of rules that we all end up violating and not even know it. So if the CEO of the United States, President Trump, isn't allowed to fire people, then all of that stuff just

compounds. So I think that this is a really important thing that just happened. It allows us to now level set how big should the government be? But more importantly, the number of people in the government are also the ones that then direct downstream spend that make net new rules. And if you can slow the growth of that down, you're actually doing a lot. In many ways, I wish Elon had come in and created Doge now. Like, could you imagine if Doge was created the day after this Supreme Court ruling? It would have been a totally different outcome, I think, because with that Supreme Court ruling in hand, these

guys probably would have been like a hot knife through butter, Travis. So, I I think it's a big deal. Except that ruling doesn't happen without Doge. That Doge caused that ruling to occur. True. Well, the EO did you could have passed all that was all Doge style, though. You know what I'm saying? It was If if they wasn't firing people, yeah, they probably wouldn't felt the need to your point, Travis, to actually file this. Travis, if you are living in the age of AI efficiency right now, operations of companies is changing dramatically. Can you imagine telling somebody you you can be CEO, but you can't change personnel. That's the job.

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 coach. No, you can grow it. You just can't shrink it. It's like a It's like running a unionized company, which actually does exist or largeized companies where you can't do any of these things, right? Do do they still exist or are they all gone? They're going quickly. Yeah, probably. I think this just gets back to what what is actually Congress authorizing when a bill occurs. And there's certain things that are specific and certain things that aren't. And I don't I'm not sure

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 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 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 spend it, but it's not specific about how many people you hire, then that is different. Yeah. It should be outcome based. Hey, here's the goal. Here's the the key objectives, right? Travis Travis is totally right. Like there are there's a variety of different laws, some with incredible

specificities, some with very broad mandates. The Constitution clearly says that all executive power resides in the president of the United States. Period. There's no exceptions there. However, Congress does appropriate money and post Watergate, many people think Congress has the power to force the president to spend the money. And you can debate that. You can debate it on a per statute basis. and that will be more nuanced and that's going to get litigated whether the president can refuse to spend money that Congress explicitly instructed him to spend sometimes called empowerment. That's a very interesting intellectual debate. This one's a little bit easier.

It'll get more complicated again like this EO is only approved to allow for the planning. I think the vote might be closer. I think there's still a majority on the Supreme Court for the actual implementation, but it may not be 81 when there's a specific plan that has to navigate its way through the courts again. Yeah, it's super fascinating. Yeah. I wonder if they're going to get to the point where they're going to say in every bill, you need to hire this number of people to hit I don't I don't know if they can. Like that's where it gets borderline unconstitutional. like where you actually prescribe that the president in

the exercise of his constitutional duties has to hire certain number of people that feels pretty precarious. 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 appropriate money for to this specific institution to do this specific work. But that's not an executive function. Like if you said like the secretary of state has to have x number of employees doing something. The secretary of state is your personal representative to conduct foreign affairs on behalf of the president of the United States. It gets a little bit more messy as you translate it to people um that the president should I mean yes Congress does set you

know which people are subject to Senate confirmation, what their salaries and compensation bans are. So it's it's 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 constitutional for Congress to mandate and put all kinds of handcuffs on the president. Well, then you you also have performance that comes in here. What if you look at the Department of Education? You say scores have gone down. We've spent this money. We're not getting the results. Therefore, these people are incompetent. Therefore, I'm firing them for cause and

I'm going to hire new people. How are you going to stop the executive from doing that? There's been a bunch of litigation, you know, in parallel to this litigation about the president's ability to fire people. And for the most part, the Supreme Court's basically, with maybe the exception of the Federal Reserve chair, said that the president 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 results aren't there, I think if they're presidential Yeah. If they're a presidential appointee, the 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

to fire you at will. But what about Keith? If the whole department sucks. Hey, you guys were responsible for early education. You had to put together a plan. The plan failed. Everybody's fired. We're starting over. Like, you should be allowed to do that. How are we going to have an efficient government? Some of these departments were created by congressional statute like the Department of Education in 1979. And you're right, every single educational stat has got worse in the United States since the department was created. But there is a law on the books that says there shall be a department of

education. So you may have to repeal