Yuval Levin

You were a little less alarmist and were skeptical that they were going to accomplish as much as it felt like they might at that moment.

Right.

We're a year into this long second term.

Where are you now?

Walk me through the numbers you ran comparing federal spending in 2024 under Joe Biden to federal spending in 2025 under Trump.

One example of this is the National Institutes of Health, which people might have heard about them gutting spending for early in 2025.

What happened there?

Something you've said to me that I thought about after is that Trump governs retail rather than wholesale.

What does that mean?

One thing we saw in Trump's first year was this assault, really, on the universities and picking pretty Ivy League ones, but not only them, off one by one.

to bring them more into line with what the Trump administration wanted them to be.

What has that achieved?

How do you see its status now?

I think people are seeing less from it.

What did it all amount to?

There's an interesting dynamic where retail deal-making fits the bandwidth of the news, and legislation doesn't.

Exactly.

People do not know a tenth of what was in the Inflation Reduction Act, the Chips and Science Act, the big, beautiful bill, for that matter, that in legislation, often much more change is happening than

than people realize, but you cannot fit it into the size of a news story.

You cannot even fit it into the size of a dozen.