Andrew Prokop
speaker
268 appearances
9 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 15 Sep
Andrew Prokop’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The other thing we know, which we've covered on this show, is that Elon Musk, at least, and formerly Vivek Ramaswamy, said that they aimed to cut $2 trillion worth of federal agencies, federal workers. When you heard that number, as someone who's been in this work before, what did you make of it?
Because our colleague Dylan Matthews, who helped us cover that news, said the betting money is they don't get anywhere close.
Let's expedite the process for them. I don't know if Uncle Elon listens, but, I mean, if you could offer him any advice, maybe you already have. What would you tell him as he's embarking on this, his first major government venture?
Jennifer Palka, she helped found the United States Digital Service, which is somehow now called the United States Doge Service. What a time to be alive. Avishai Artsy and Travis Larchuk made our show today. They were edited by Miranda Kennedy. Fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Amanda Llewellyn. My voice is going. It was mixed by Andrea Christen's daughter and Rob Byers.
I'm Sean Ramos for him, and this has been Today Explained. I'll stop talking now.
We learned that Trump is really going for it. He's coming out of the gate with an extremely aggressive, dubiously legal agenda on many fronts, most notably immigration, but other issues as well. And then I think we also learned some other things, which is that on certain issues, he may not be exactly sure himself what he's going to do.
So probably the big headline from the day was Trump's massive, wide ranging pardon of the January 6th rioters. And this is something, you know, everyone knew Trump was going to do something like this. It had been discussed at length. But only a few days before Trump's inauguration, Vice President J.D.
Vance went on TV and said that if you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn't be pardoned. And there's a little bit of a gray area. Trump does not share that opinion, evidently. And he went far more aggressive.
What he did was that he just separated everyone into one of two groups. First, he singled out 14 people who had been members of far-right groups, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, who were really actively plotting and were convicted of seditious conspiracy. For those guys, he didn't give them a full pardon, but he did commute their sentences and free them from prison if they were in prison.
Then the other group is everyone else who was involved in other crimes at the Capitol on that day. Trump said, you are fully pardoned. So this is really a full-blown Trump endorsement and defense of the violence at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. for that to happen. Now he's making it unmistakably clear.
He thought that was good and those people are good and he is going to protect them from any consequences.
Well, energy and climate and the environment was a very big theme. Trump really came out of the gate hot on energy as well.
He withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement.
issued a pretty sweeping executive order calling for the rollback of a bunch of Biden administration policies, including what Trump calls the electric vehicle mandate. It's not really a mandate, but, you know, certain fuel efficiency standards that would ease the transition to electric vehicles. Trump said, nope, that's going away.
Big ugly windmills. He also opened up lots of new areas of Alaska to new fossil fuel production and wants to go from there. So Trump wants to deprioritize climate change, boost fossil fuel production and make new projects of any kind really easier to build. OK. He also made a bunch of changes to how the government works, it seemed like. Yes.
So one of Trump and the people around him's long-running regrets, thoughts about how things went wrong in their first term is that they believe that the federal civil service bureaucracy was – Two, anti-Trump, was disobedient, insubordinate, did not want to implement his policies, and that's why they failed in a lot of what they tried to do last time around.
So they have been cooking up ideas for years about how to get – in their view, better control of this bureaucracy, which mainly amounts to making more positions, political jobs that are easier to hire without going through the civil service projects and making it easier to fire existing civil servants, either by reclassifying them as political jobs or just taking their protections away.
So Trump issued a series of orders that get at different parts of this,
We didn't really see, you know, mass firings yet. There were a few firings reported, heads of immigration court systems. But this is, I think, laying the groundwork. It's a signal that they're very serious about this idea and that they really do intend on kind of taking a wrecking ball to the federal civil service as we know it.
Yes, RIP Vivek.
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