Theodore Schleifer
speaker
55 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Theodore Schleifer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Musk has some deeply concerned and, frankly, pretty long-held beliefs that AI could be a problem. So he does not fit neatly into a box on this issue.
Liberal billionaires have really been MIA, Terry. I mean, it's been very hard to see sort of any leadership from wealthy Democrats about what exactly their plan is to take on Trump. They're not really saying much of anything. I mean, some wealthy Harris donors have... have adopted some of that kind of kumbaya messaging where they're trying to support the new president.
Other people have been kind of in a daze. You know, Reid Hoffman, for instance, who's kind of one of the leading liberal donors, I reported a few months ago, was telling friends that he was considering leaving the United States entirely. I think lots of these wealthy Democrats legitimately feel they could be targets of persecution or, you know, from a Trump perspective.
led FBI or that their businesses could get special attention. And the sense from from wealthy Democrats is they should just lay low. So that's sort of happening right now. You know, we've seen the beginnings of kind of conversations or the concepts of conversations about how exactly they should spend their money to resist Trump.
But right now, it is not a time for a wealthy Democrat to feel like they can speak out about Trump. And, you know, that's why you're not really seeing much publicly. Privately, you know, wealthy Democratic donors I talk to are... are still sort of in blame game mode a little bit. Like they're still trying to understand how Harris lost exactly.
They're still, you know, facing questions about should they have been more vocal about Joe Biden in 2024. And 2028 is, of course, a really, really long time away. So we're not really seeing much leadership from them.
Sure. I mean, this is a war, in Elon Musk's view, a war on the bureaucracy. And there's no Geneva Convention for this war. There are no beliefs from the Musk team that they have to be fair or believe that, you know, they're required to disclose the names of their generals, even as they kind of go after the other generals.
I mean, we've seen the Musk team—I'm exaggerating for dramatic effect there a little bit— but, you know, they genuinely believe that they are in hand-to-hand combat with— a bureaucracy that wants to kill them, right?
I mean, for instance, there's at these agencies right now, there's an intense resistance to kind of giving the Musk team what they want because they think the Musk team wants to, you know, attack them. And so we just have right now, you know, a very, very, very intense personal fight between
rank and file bureaucrats and these kind of 23 year old Elon Musk acolytes who are fighting over, you know, whether or not they get access to this Medicaid system or this HR payroll or yada, yada, yada.
Pretty far. The Musk team has been sort of fighting the bureaucracy of the Treasury Department over what sort of access they could get to the payment system. But as of now, the Elon team and the Treasury team are sort of trying to find a middle ground and the courts are trying to kind of enforce a middle ground to make sure that everyone is peachy with the arrangement.
You know, I think at first the Musk team, which is led by this guy named Tom Krause, who's an executive from Silicon Valley, who recently was appointed to a top position at the Treasury Department, they're trying to have what's called read-only access to that $5 trillion in payments, essentially what that would mean
would be that the Musk team and Krauss could read kind of all payments that go out to make sure that they're complying with Trump's executive orders. You know, Elon has said publicly he wants to make sure that we're reading things like to make sure that no money is going out to terrorists from Treasury.
But the concern, especially for people who believe in the separation of powers, is that this could be a way for Musk— to essentially unilaterally decide to stop payments and things that have been authorized by Congress.
That if you suddenly have the ability to read Treasury payments as they're going out the door, couldn't Musk somehow find a way to, eh, we shouldn't spend the money on, you know, this thing or that thing. Let's cut 20 trillion right here to 30 trillion right there. And suddenly that makes Elon Musk more powerful than Congress. And that sort of is the concern.
And that's why this pretty technical approach distinction over read-only access versus kind of a more expansive power when it comes to Treasury's code. That's why that matters is because it tells you whether or not Elon Musk can just kind of read the book or write the book.
So the U.S. Digital Service was started during the second Obama term as a way to get more technologists into government. And it largely was doing things like, you know, pushing for making it easier to file your tax returns online or, you know, updating government websites, things that were pretty non-controversial.
But it was established and it was an existing department, and I think they had somewhere around 200 employees all around government, sort of being detailed to various tasks there. Doge, which originally was sort of conceived of as an outside entity, sort of jujitsu-ed its way into working as a successor organization sort of to the USDS, to the US Digital Service.
They just kept it called the United States Doge Service now instead. And essentially what that enables the Doge team to do is they don't need to create a new office. They're just kind of taking over the existing office. And they have now put all of their detail ease in into Doge and into the USDS.
And they're now farmed out across various agencies, you know, including the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees kind of the civil service or the General Services Administration, the GSA, which kind of manages government real estate. But all these people technically work for the USDS. And it was it was a pretty clever way to get in the front door
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