I'm John Batson with my colleague Richard Epstein of the Civitas Institute, looking at Doge,

the results of Doge so far at the NIH, at the USAID, but Doge itself. Richard, I read a few

random headlines about Doge. Social Securityrator warns that there will be Doge

mistakes with cuts. Or Doge shudders the government's in-house tech consultancy.

Or Doge onslaught pushed layoff announcements to the highest point since 2020.

Or my anecdote from the D.C. suburbs. Houses are for sale in all directions and there's weeping.

Doge, it was a fancy idea from the campaign. Is it working or is it right now the problem?

Well, I have very mixed reactions to this like I have everything else.

It seems to me that many times what they're doing is they're cutting too fast, too furiously,

with insufficient knowledge.

And so that means that one has to be very, very uneasy because the way in which Mr.

Moss seems to think about is, yes, I'll do a lot of good things, and when I do

something wrong, I'll apologize. But apology doesn't get you back to the status quo ante, and it

doesn't answer the question that we raised in the first half of whether or not these agreements

should be respected. And I think they're going much too fast. Cutting various kinds of waste is okay,

but cutting programs that are bound of things.

And many of the things that he claims are waste or probably not waste.

It's just too fast to do this.

When he starts to say, and this is something that I approve of, is there are a lot of people

receiving money under the Social Security provision.

Unfortunately, they're all dead or they're getting double accounts, that kind of irregularity and anti-fraud behavior.

Everybody's in favor of, but the other programs are not.

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