Hey, Ben. Thanks so much for being here.

It's so good to be with you, Tyler.

You just finished reporting a long behind-the-scenes story on the rise and fall of Doge.

But I'd like to talk to you about the current status of Doge, given that Elon Musk has departed and has also had this major falling out with Trump.

Who's running the show now?

And is it right to think that Doge might be kind of done?

Or is it still operating with full force?

I think Zombie State has been the moniker that I've landed on over the last few days.

It's not just that Musk has gone, a bunch of its deputies, including Stephen Davis,

the guy who ran it on a kind of day-to-day basis. They've signaled they're out the door, too.

So I think it helps to sort of take a step back and look at what this thing was.

And unlike a conventional agency or initiative of the executive branch, Doge was really unstructured.

You had Elon Musk in the White House.

You had Steve Davis trying to, you know, air traffic controls and planes.

And then you had a bunch of teams of embeds, three to five people, at a whole bunch of

agencies around the federal government.

And when I talked to those engineers, the people who worked on those embed teams, they

were assigned to, you know,

in this case, the Veterans Administration or other agencies around government, Social Security

Administration. They say this very little information flow. They had a very high-level set

of instructions about what they were supposed to do, search for inefficient grants, and then

they were sort of let loose.

...