Andy Kroll

But Vogt does chime in every once in a while.

He has over the years.

And

What I found actually was there was a New York Times article that came out when Joe Biden was president, but it talked about the lingering effects of the first Trump administration's chaos and the dysfunction and the aggressive policy changes at the top, specifically at the EPA.

And there was someone in there in the New York Times article who said that

that this was a traumatic experience for the people who worked at the EPA, the first Trump administration they were talking about here.

And Russ Vogt shared this story online, and he shared it with a little message above that said, quote, straight into my veins, as in, I love what this story is conveying about federal workers feeling traumatized.

And clearly his goal was to try to replicate that on a much larger scale.

And that is just something that has really stuck with me this entire time is the psychological motivation that he has to want to traumatize people who have devoted their lives, their careers to public service.

I think the way to understand Vote and Doge is this.

Vote is a planner.

He's a thinker.

He's a student of not just history, but how the federal government works and where the levers are that he can pull to try to enact his agenda.

Doge, with Musk at the head, was kind of like a battering ram, a blunt force instrument that swept through the federal government trying to get rid of as many employees, cancel as many programs as it could, as fast as it could.

And so I think while there may have been some particular programs, there may have been some specific offices that Russ Vogt may not have wanted to get rid of or may not have had on his

list of targets to be wound down, and Doge did go after those, Doge kind of changed the calculus for a vote.

But for a lot of Trump administration officials, they saw that if you moved fast and broke things, to use the Silicon Valley catchphrase, you could kind of get away with it.

From all the reporting I've done, people I've talked to who are close to Doge, that was very much an Elon Musk idea, something that Musk pitched to the president and the president embraced.

In some ways, I think Doge kind of got in the way initially of votes plans that he had been crafting for years for a potential second Trump administration.

But as things started to play out earlier this year and as Doge started to move so aggressively through the federal government, I think votes saw an opportunity to take advantage of what Doge showed was possible and to take even more drastic action.