If you’ve been listening to WatchCats for a while, you’ve probably heard us refer in passing to “neoreaction” (sometimes pretentiously dubbed the “dark enlightenment”), a once-fringe political philosophy that holds liberal democracy is not merely dysfunctional but doomed. The only hope for “freedom,” its adherents paradoxically insist, is the installation of a monarchic executive with effectively despotic powers. If this sounds like something a cranky blogger would cook up, well… it is—but from those humble origins, this proudly authoritarian worldview has won itself a shocking degree of political influence, including over the likes of Vice President J.D. Vance, tech billionaire Peter Thiel, and the techies and ideologues running the show at DOGE.
So how did this unlikely stew of ideas come to hold such sway in both Silicon Valley and Washington, and how concerned ought we to be? To find out, we spoke with Mike Brock, who had a front-row seat to the spread of neoreactionary ideology as a senior executive at Block, the fintech firm behind payment platforms like Square and CashApp. These days, Brock is loudly sounding the alarm about the neoreactionary “Plot Against America” at his newsletter Notes from the Circus, which is well worth a look.
~~~
Want to support the podcast, get early episodes, and jump into our community Discord?
Join our Substack!
--FOLLOW OUR SOCIALS--
If you’d expect anybody to be enthusiastic about the Department of Government Efficiency, it would be Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow and economic policy expert at the Manhattan Institute. A fiscal conservative of unimpeachable credentials, she’s worked as a policy scholar at the Heritage Foundation, as chief economist to Senator Rob Portman (R-OH), and as staff director of the U.S. Senate Finance Subcommittee on Fiscal Responsibility and Economic Growth. She’s a regular on Washingtonian’s annual list of the 500 most influential policy professionals in D.C.
Despite her commitment to smaller government and fiscal discipline, however, she’s been conspicuously unimpressed by the results produced by DOGE to date, documenting its faults in a New York Post op-ed, a long essay in The Atlantic, and (most recently) a roundup of expert takes on DOGE in the libertarian magazine Reason.
We spoke to her about why DOGE’s efforts to reduce government spending are leaving many fiscal conservatives cold—and what a smarter and more serious effort might look like.
~~~
Want to support the podcast, get early episodes, and jump into our community Discord?
Join our Substack!
--FOLLOW OUR SOCIALS--
If you’ve been trying to follow the nitty-gritty details of DOGE’s efforts to seize control of the Treasury Department’s payments system—and why it’s so important—then odds are you’ve already heard of Nathan Tankus. An independent journalist and researcher, his newsletter Notes on the Crises has become essential reading for anyone seeking to untangle the workings of an abstruse but vital piece of financial infrastructure that most of us had never given much thought—or even heard of—before January. (How essential? Tankus is the guy Paul Krugman calls up when he needs an explainer.)
In our latest episode of WatchCats, Tankus walks us through what the Treasury payments system is, why it’s so important—and why he thinks DOGE’s insistence on controlling its levers has set the stage for a constitutional crisis. We also explore how the Musk team’s meddling may imperil the Social Security system millions of older Americans rely on to make ends meet.
~~~
Want to support the podcast, get early episodes, and jump into our community Discord?
Join our Substack!
--FOLLOW OUR SOCIALS--
For more than 30 years, the Electronic Privacy Information Center has been advocating for—and litigating to protect—personal privacy against increasing technological encroachment. No surprise, then, that the folks at EPIC were alarmed when it became clear that DOGE staff were seeking access—for unclear purposes—to an array of highly sensitive and normally stringently siloed federal databases. They filed a lawsuit in February challenging that access under the Privacy Act of 1974, and a host of other federal privacy statutes.
This episode, EPIC’s Senior Counsel and Director of Litigation John Davisson joins us to explain their challenge, why they believe DOGE’s efforts run afoul of federal law, and why you ought to care about it.
For most of her career in journalism—first at The Washington Post, now at The New York Times—Emily Badger’s beat had been housing, transportation, and urban policy. But since the start of the second Trump administration, she’s distinguished herself as one of the sharpest observers of the fledgling Department of Government Efficiency.
The piece that first caught our eye—and the central topic of our conversation—was her impressively exhaustive catalog of the personal information contained in databases DOGE has sought access to. This episode, she walks us through what they want to know about you, and why it has privacy advocates worried.
Badger has also done essential reporting on DOGE’s ambitious claims about the money they’re supposedly saving taxpayers—and why those numbers just don’t add up. And most recently, she wrote about why Elon Musk’s latest breathless claims about fraud supposedly newly uncovered by DOGE are misleading.
~~~
Want to support the podcast, get early episodes, and jump into our community Discord?
Join our Substack!
--FOLLOW OUR SOCIALS--
For more than 30 years, Wired has been where discerning nerds go for some of the sharpest tech coverage around—but as Silicon Valley exerts ever greater influence over Washington, its writers have been proving time and again that they’re also happy to scoop the traditional press on vital political stories. If you’re trying to keep up with DOGE, their coverage is essential reading.
Much of the best of that reporting has recently come from the keyboards of Senior Writer Makena Kelly and Platforms and Power Reporter Vittoria “Tori” Elliot.
In a scant few weeks, they’ve explored explored DOGE’s plan to rewrite Social Security’s source code, mapped its myriad corporate connections, audited its approach to auditing, and pulled back the curtain on”Elon Musk’s digital coup.”
Makena and Tori joined us for a wide-ranging conversation about their reporting—and where they hope to shine the spotlight next. If you have tips, you can reach them at vittoria89.82 or makenakelly.32 on Signal.
~~~
Want to support the podcast, get early episodes, and jump into our community Discord?
Join our Substack!
--FOLLOW OUR SOCIALS--
It’s a horror movie scenario: People are suddenly falling ill in a small area. Is it food poisoning? Is it a virus? What do the victims have in common? Is a local farm contaminated, or is another global pandemic brewing?
Itir Cole was working on software to help hospitals report symptoms that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) would use to trace the contours of the threat when DOGE took control. And it quickly became clear they weren’t interested in the answers.
Concluding our series of interviews with U.S. Digital Service alumni, we explore why Cole is no longer working to answer these questions—and what she’s doing next.
~~~
Want to support the podcast, get early episodes, and jump into our community Discord?
Join our Substack!
--FOLLOW OUR SOCIALS--
Every day, an estimated 17 people die while waiting for an organ transplant, even as viable organs go to waste. As a deputy digital services lead at the Department of Health and Human Services, Amy Paris was working hard to bring that number down by modernizing and improving the algorithm that hospitals use to match organs with the compatible nearby donors who need them most urgently.
Her performance reviews were glowing. But in February, she was summarily fired, purportedly for “poor performance.”
Until her termination Paris had also been one of the highest ranking trans women in the federal government, and drawing on her experience and connection to the trans community to craft policies less hostile to trans folks—like the “X” gender marker on passports, and more sensitive security screenings at airports.
Have a listen to our conversation, and let us know whether it sounds like the government is more “efficient” without Amy Paris.
~~~
Want to support the podcast, get early episodes, and jump into our community Discord?
Join our Substack!
--FOLLOW OUR SOCIALS--
This week we’re doing something a little bit different: We’re kicking off a series of interviews with alumni of the United States Digital Service (USDS), now rebranded the “United States DOGE Service,” where Elon Musk’s youthful band of chainsaw-wielders are formally housed.
In many ways the USDS is a model of all that DOGE purports to be seeking to accomplish: It deployed skilled technologists, often with impressive résumés in private sector tech, to a wide range of government agencies with a mission to streamline and modernize operations, making them more efficient and less wasteful. Instead of benefitting from their experience, Musk has opted to effectively dismantle the agency, with many staffers unceremoniously fired and others resigning in protest.
This week we’re presenting several of their stories—talking about the work they were doing at USDS, how they found their way into federal service, and why they’re no longer there. We’ll leave it to our listeners to decide whether their departure makes the federal government any more efficient.
Our first guest in the series is Jonathan Kamens, a cybersecurity professional seconded to Veterans Affairs, where he worked on securing their public-facing website. He’s publicly described the circumstances of his departure in an op-ed for The Hill we think is well worth reading.
~~~
Want to support the podcast, get early episodes, and jump into our community Discord?
Join our Substack!
--FOLLOW OUR SOCIALS--
The new Trump administration’s “slash first, ask questions later” approach to overhauling the federal bureaucracy has, unsurprisingly, spawned a mountain of litigation raising a dizzying array of statutory and constitutional challenges to various executive actions.
Among the most effective to date at halting the steamroller, at least temporarily, have been those brought by a coalition of Democratic state attorneys general. Two of these have focused particularly on the activities of the soi-disant Department of Government Efficiency. The first lawsuit has, thus far successfully, sought to block DOGE staff from accessing the Treasury Department’s critical payments system, alleging violations of the Administrative Procedures Act, the Privacy Act of 1974, and the Federal Information Security Management Act, among others.
The second suit strikes at the formation of DOGE itself, arguing that the unprecedented power delegated to Elon Musk effectively makes him a senior government officer, and that the administration’s failure to seek Senate confirmation runs afoul of the constitutional mandate to obtain the “advice and consent” of that body for such appointments.
In order to get the inside skinny on the litigation—and what future challenges might be coming down the pike—we spoke with Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who brought the suits along with 18 other state attorneys general. Ellison previously served a dozen years in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he founded the Congressional Antitrust Caucus and the Congressional Consumer Justice Caucus, as well as co-chairing the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
~~~
Want to support the podcast, get early episodes, and jump into our community Discord?
Join our Substack!
--FOLLOW OUR SOCIALS--
As Elon Musk and his teen tech team take a chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy, those of us who followed the South African centibillionaire’s fraught takeover of the platform formerly known as Twitter may be feeling an eerie sense of déjà vu.
The hasty mass layoffs, often seemingly conducted with little understanding of who is being fired and what function they served. The dubious projections of a drastically improved fiscal outlook. The general ambiance of fear and confusion, exacerbated by intimidating all-hands e-mails. Haven’t we seen this movie before?
No, it’s not a glitch in the Matrix; Musk is running his Twitter-takeover playbook on the federal government with astonishing fidelity. To help us break down the parallels, we could think of no better guides than New York Times tech reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, authors of Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, the most detailed and thorough account out there of the microblogging platform’s transformation into “X.”
~~~
Want to support the podcast?
Join our Substack!
--SOCIALS--
Fighting through all the trash memes, trolling, and terrible DOGE database security we somehow made it to Episode 3! This week we interview cybersecurity expert Tarah Wheeler, CEO of Red Queen Dynamics.
Tarah serves as the Senior Fellow for Global Cyber Policy at Council on Foreign Relations and is a member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Board of Directors. You can find her on Bluesky @tarah.org.
~~~
Want to support the podcast?
Join our Substack!
--SOCIALS--
We're back! After reacting to Elon Musk's latest Bart Simpson level trolling on X, we talk briefly on how we're going to ramp up production in order to meet the deluge of news and noise coming out of DOGE.
Our guest this week is Professor Henry Farrell, from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Prof. Farrell was the 2019 recipient of the Friedrich Schiedel Prize for Politics and Technology and his latest book (along with Prof. Abraham Newman at Georgetown) is Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.
In order to meet the weight of the current historical moment, we shifted our editorial calendar around a bit in bringing Prof. Farrell on because we think there is a deep and poorly understood connection between the norms the United States enforces on infrastructure around the world and how it treats its own deep systems.
We thought Profs. Farrell and Newman's recent post on Lawfare, "Elon Musk Weaponizes the Government" provides one of the first framework and abstraction to understand what's going on. Take a listen and let us know what you think on our socials!
~~~
Want to support the podcast?
Join our Substack!
--SOCIALS--
--LINKS REFERENCED--
The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies
Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better by Jennifer Pahlka
In our first full episode, we interview Mikey Dickerson, the first Administrator of the United States Digital Service (USDS) – which the Trump Administration has now renamed to the US DOGE Service. We discuss his personal origin with USDS, how things get done behind the scenes in the Executive Office of the President (EOP), and the potential impacts of the DOGE Executive Order.
~~~
Want to support the podcast?
Join our Substack!
--SOCIALS--
Noah Kunin and Julian Sanchez introduce the idea behind WatchCats!
~~~
Want to support the podcast?
Join our Substack!
--SOCIALS--