--:-- Host John Bickley: Welcome to Morning Wire, I'm John Bickley, and this is a weekend edition with Georgia Howe.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Thanks, John. Joining us now is Eric Eggers, Vice President of the Government Accountability Institute and co-host of The Drill Down with Peter Schweitzer. Eric, thanks for joining us.
--:-- Eric Eggers: Thanks for having me, John.
--:-- Host John Bickley: So, you guys have been tracking the DOGE accomplishments so far. There's a lot of pressure on DOGE, a lot of backlash from the left, some maybe not so organic backlash. But what's the truth? How much has DOGE and Musk actually accomplished so far?
--:-- Eric Eggers: So, I guess it depends on how you want to measure accomplishments. If we're talking just dollars and cents, I think that their accomplishments are quite quantifiable. They've identified something like $105 billion worth of things that can be cut between a combination of lease terminations, contract cancellations, and then federal employees who will be, let's call it excused from the federal workforce.
--:-- Host John Bickley: That's a lot of money. And what kind of examples are we talking about here?
--:-- Eric Eggers: They've identified things like software licenses with at least a couple of agencies where you have twice as many software licenses, I think 37,000 WinZip licenses in the General Services Administration for 13,000 employees. So the examples like that are quite obvious.
--:-- Georgia Howe: I want to talk about that more, the messaging on this. And X plays a major role in this. We have the guy leading this charge, leading DOGE unofficially or officially, however you want to see it, Elon Musk, has his own platform that is constantly pumping out information on this thing. The American people now are seeing a lot of things exposed in the federal government that's never been exposed before.
--:-- Eric Eggers: Yeah, I think the Trump administration has become the most radically transparent administration in recent memory potentially even in American history. I think certainly in American history, when you consider the fact that everything's being exposed in real time.
--:-- Host John Bickley: That's a great point. And it's not just the Trump administration, it's also the way that social media has changed the conversation. We have the ability to see things in real-time, to expose things that were previously hidden.
--:-- Eric Eggers: Exactly. And so things like even his conversation with President Zelensky a couple of weeks ago, it makes more sense if you look at it in the context of no, things are no longer pre-packaged and hidden from the American people and then messaged in a very intentional way that's quite honestly quite deceitful as certain things were in the Biden administration.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Now you're seeing for yourself, you are the first consumer of the organic material and you can decide, hey, what, you know, was President Trump and J.D. Vance rude or was President Zelensky rude? What happened there?
--:-- Eric Eggers: And that's exactly what's happening here. They're saying, listen, we have lots of ridiculous contracts to do things like pay for military members to have conversations about how to have DEI conversations with online avatars. And you've heard the number of examples of, you know, transgender studies in different countries. And so it's all quite ridiculous.
--:-- Host John Bickley: Now to drill down a little bit here, you mentioned leases. This is something that I know you guys have looked at closely, the cost savings from DOGE's reassessment of leases. There's 360 million square feet of real estate that the government has control over. What are we seeing on that front from this administration?
--:-- Eric Eggers: Yeah, so they're willing to cut or proposing to cut up to 25% or a quarter of that space. I think that they're targeting something like a 63% reduction in the public building services division, according to the general services agency, which oversees the federal real estate.
--:-- Georgia Howe: That's a lot of space. And what about the impact on the workforce? How many people are we talking about here?
--:-- Eric Eggers: Something like a thousand workers are estimated to be removed from the workforce. And this is just one of a number of agencies that are saying, listen, we're going to take this quite seriously.
--:-- Host John Bickley: Now, the Internal Revenue Service is another major focus of the administration. What are we seeing in terms of estimates on reduction of staff there?
--:-- Eric Eggers: Yeah, it's significant. It started the second Trump administration with 100,000 employees, and they're prepared to cut that in at least half, according to some reporting.
--:-- Georgia Howe: That's a huge reduction. And what about the pushback from the Democrats? We're hearing a lot of talking points about how this is all just a billionaire oligarchy trying to control the government.
--:-- Eric Eggers: I would say this is another example of just having an honest conversation in a transparent way about the way government's supposed to work. We all heard the fact that democracy was on the ballot during the election last year. The fact that Donald Trump won, you saw Democrats protesting during his most recent congressional address that he's a dictator.
--:-- Host John Bickley: Yeah, that's a great point. And it's not just the messaging, it's also the way that the Democrats are trying to coalesce around this idea of a billionaire oligarchy. But I think that's not going to be effective in winning over a significant number of Americans.
--:-- Eric Eggers: I would say it's at least as effective as creating social media content where you have female members of Congress bouncing up and down as if they were video game avatars. They should continue to do more of that. It seems to be incredibly effective.
--:-- Georgia Howe: [laughs] Well, Eric, thanks for joining us today. It's always great to talk to you.
--:-- Eric Eggers: Thanks for having me, John and Georgia.
--:-- Host John Bickley: And that's a wrap for today's episode of Morning Wire. Thanks for listening.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Thanks for tuning in.
