This is the Friends of History Debating Society. I'm John Batchzer. I'm also Gaius, and Germanicus is here,

and we turn our attention to the 21st century again, but this time very parochially.

The events of Washington, D.C., a city I've never lived in, I've visited, and I've never felt

comfortable, quite different dimensions and

pace than I'm used to in Manhattan. And now that I'm not in Manhattan or Washington anymore,

I puzzle about major American cities and how they get on. Right now, Washington is not getting on

because we're told again and again,

this is not our opinion, this is the headlines, that Doge is a constitutional crisis.

I leave that alone because Germanicus and I are not here to entertain constitutional crises.

What we're looking at is Doge, Department of Government Efficiency.

Mr. Trump said during the campaign, this is what I'm going to do.

And he turned to Elon Musk.

Elon Musk said, this is what I'm going to do.

There's any number of younger people, the kind that are hired by Tesla and SpaceX, with their laptops,

going from department and department in the executive branch and identifying redundancies or inefficiencies,

or people that aren't needed for the task at hand.

They're turning loose.

We're told there's no paper on this, which is just anecdote.

We're told they're turning loose something called an agent.

Artificial intelligence has agents.

That is, you assign a task to an algorithm and you turn it loose and then it comes back with results.

Those agents are identifying tens of thousands of jobs that are not needed for an efficient government. There is

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