Yuval Levin
speaker
343 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 16 Jan
Yuval Levin’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 — 2 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.
Appearances
They were both bold kind of steps that tried to do something big all at once, and they were not thought through in practical administrative terms. What's this going to look like on the ground? And it's because they're thinking about... presidential power as a concrete reality and the people affected as an abstraction when it's actually the other way around.
Here's how this would have happened in the Bush years. And I don't suggest that George W. Bush was the model of governance in every way, but I worked there and this is how it would have happened. You would have had a meeting at OMB where you bring in the chiefs of staff or senior political appointees from the various cabinet departments and
lay out for them what's in this memo, what is it going to mean for you, and then take hard questions and some stupid questions so you can work through what is this really going to produce that we're not thinking about. And somebody in the back of that room would have raised his hand and said, well, so are we shutting down the Medicaid payment portal? And
Somebody at OMB would have said, well, no, we're saying this doesn't affect payments to individuals. And the guy would have said, well, those payments actually go to hospitals. Am I supposed to shut them down? And there would have been a conversation. They would have said, no, we're not touching Medicaid. Instead, what happened was they just did this.
And the guy who runs the Medicaid payment portal in Baltimore shut it down. And, you know, there was a banner on the website that says we're shutting it down because OMB told us to. That kind of practical chaos, OMB exists to avoid that, and they're clearly not working to avoid it.
They do come in with a sense that the bureaucracy is hostile to them and has to be fought. but they also come in with a sense that chaos can serve their purposes. And I think these are two different assumptions and that the second one is profoundly mistaken. So the buyout is a very, very interesting experiment.
A lot of these folks do just want to do their jobs, but there are some among them who really are very hostile to the administration's intentions. The question is, how do you deal with that? How do you make your way through it? Now, look, in the long term, there's certainly an argument for driving some churn in federal employment, for driving some turnover, for bringing in some new blood.
I can see that. But in the medium term, and politics is a medium term business. In the medium term, this is going to bring chaos. So think, for example, about what they're doing to their new political appointees. You have all these people who are just now getting confirmed by the Senate. They're coming into these departments. Some of them are quite new to these places.
Some of them maybe have been there before. And they're coming in as, I don't know what, a tenth, a fifth of their workforce is going through a long-term resignation process. And those people have not been chosen on the basis of any sense of which jobs are most important, which people are doing the best work. What government functions are most essential? What actually has to be done by law?
None of that. This is all happening on the basis of who finds it attractive to not work until September while getting paid and then take another job. That means they're going to come in with chaos. And the way they're approaching it is rooted, I think, in a Silicon Valley argument that says –
Creative destruction is how you learn, break things, and then see how they fall, and you can build something new. And the civil service just isn't going to work that way. That's not really how this system can learn.
Yeah. There's 3 million people who work for the federal government. And I think a lot of people's sense of who the kind of modal federal employee is, is probably off. I mean, I would say now people probably think it's somebody who lives in Washington and works from home and shuffles paper. And that's not actually a very common type in federal employment.
Most federal employees don't live in or near D.C. And there are real functions to perform here. It's also worth remembering that that the federal workforce is about as big now as it was 50 years ago. The government has a lot more contractors than it did then.
It's taken on a lot of things, but it hasn't really grown the federal workforce much, which means that in those really essential functions that only government employees could do, the federal workforce is actually stretched pretty thin in some important places. We shouldn't underestimate how much we've assigned to our government and how much would be left undone if there weren't people doing it.
If you saw a lot of attrition in the FDA, the effects of that would be pretty serious. It's actually quite important that the agencies that keep us safe and healthy operate and do their basic work. This is the basic challenge of administration in a system as big as we're talking about.
is that there are a lot of effects on the ground that it's possible to think through if you involve the different parts of the system in coming up with the reform. But it's very hard to think through if you're just sitting in a room and coming up with it on your own or just throwing it out there because it's something that worked at Twitter.
And you don't have very much experience in the government, as Musk and his crew do not. Yeah.
It runs deeper than that because the federal workforce is constrained by a challenge that isn't really present in the private sector, which is that there are salary caps that prevent you from paying the most qualified people the kinds of pay they could get in the private sector, which means that places like not just the VA, but the FDA, NIH, all the Commerce Department sub-agencies –
Those places are full of people who spend their day sitting across the table from private sector people that they're regulating or working with and thinking, I have the same skill set as this guy, but he's got a much nicer house. Why am I working at the FDA rather than at Pfizer? And now there's an answer to that question. And, you know, a lot of people in those jobs really enjoy them.
They like them and they have, you know, they have real significance and authority and that matters to people. But In the federal government, those are the people who are marginally attached to their job, who are constantly thinking, you know, I got to pay for my kid's college in a few years. Shouldn't I be working at a much higher paying contractor job or private sector job?
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