Balance of Power 02/24/25
"Balance of Power" focuses on the intersection of politics and global business. On today's show, Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R) Indiana on the House set to vote on budget plan Tuesday. Maya MacGuineas, Committee For A Responsible Federal Budget President, discusses the GOP House and Senate at odds over the budget plan. Melinda Haring, Atlantic Council Eurasia Center Senior Fellow, shares her thoughts on President Trump saying Russian President Vladimir Putin wants an end to the Ukraine War. (Source: Bloomberg)
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Russia attacks centre of Kharkiv with guided aerial bombs, killing 1 person and injuring 10
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Don't give Dan Patrick his THC ban. Here's a better way for Texas on cannabis
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At the Pentagon, 14 advisory boards have been dismantled, with curt, thank-you-for-your-service notes sent to Democrats and Republicans alike. Some of the boards dealt with obscure matters. But others focused on vital issues, like rethinking the U.S. nuclear arsenal as China's nuclear buildup, Russian President Vladimir Putin's episodic nuclear threats and Trump's ambitious demand for a 'Golden Dome' missile defense system have changed the nature of nuclear strategy. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Also gone: the board of experts who were trying to learn lessons from China's astoundingly successful hack into the country's telecommunications networks -- where, by all accounts, the hackers remain to this day. 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When the history of these tumultuous past four months is written, it will doubtless focus on the moments when teams from the Department of Government Efficiency shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, when the president issued tariff threats to much of the world and when he went to war with Harvard. Less noticed, perhaps, may be the devastation of the expert class, which once dominated the city, moving between think tanks and government offices, generating alternative views in its best moments, engaging in groupthink at its worst. Today, the experts are swelling the ranks of Washington's suddenly unemployed. To the MAGA faithful, each one of these disbanded groups is a victory for a trimmer government that follows the president's wishes. To them, the National Security Council was the heart of the so-called deep state, whose members testified against Trump during his first impeachment inquiry. The raft of advisory committees mostly slowed down decision-making, they argued, when they were not undercutting policies they did not like. Worse yet, they were the source of leaks. So if an advisory committee of experts was not needed to help James K. Polk, the 11th president, figure out how to spread the United States to the West Coast, why do we need them to figure out the strategy for adding Greenland and Canada? (The expansionist Polk has been restored to a place of pride in the Oval Office -- his portrait now hangs just below and to the right of Thomas Jefferson's.) Advertisement Part of Trump's problem with experts is their portrayal as neutral arbiters, more interested in the data than presidential spin. That is what has led to the White House this week trying to discredit the Congressional Budget Office, which concluded that, yes, the new tax bill could really add $2.4 trillion to the national debt, no matter the spin. Lacking the authority to fire the budget experts there, the White House turned to casting them as politically biased. And while every new president replaces board members and demands some fealty to the new leader's ideology, what has happened in the past four months seems to some in the federal government more like China's cultural revolution, where the only good ideas are the ones that flow from the leader, and both research reports and intelligence findings should support the president's desires. And when they are not, trouble follows. Just ask the National Intelligence Council, a small subset of intelligence experts -- many drawn from academia -- what happened when it came to the conclusion that the Venezuelan government was not controlling a criminal gang, an argument that Trump had used to justify deportations. The experts were told to 'do some rewriting' so the material could not be used against the president and Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence. 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But McMaster gave voice to the question raised all over Washington when he asked, 'Should you just crush the entire organization or recognize there is a mission for that organization to advance American interests?' It was crushed, with foreign service officers, child health experts and others locked out of the offices. And that has led to both professional and personal angst. Advertisement 'If you work in the field of maternal and child health, you are in trouble,' said Jessica Harrison Fullerton, a managing director at the Global Development Incubator, a nonprofit that is trying to fill some of the gaps USAID's dismantlement left. 'Not only are you devastated by the impacts on the people you have been serving, but your expertise is now being questioned and your ability to use that expertise is limited because the jobs are gone.' In fact, what many of Washington's experts discovered was that crushing the organizations -- and putting their experts out on the street -- was the point of the exercise. It helped create a frisson of fear, and reinforced the message of who was in control. It has also led to warnings from more traditional Republicans that Trump's demand for loyalty over analysis is creating a trap for himself. 'Groupthink and a blinkered mindset are dangers for any administration,' said Richard Fontaine, the CEO of the Center for a New American Security, which, in the days of bipartisanship, described itself as a bipartisan think tank. 'Pulling from multiple sources in and outside of government to develop solid options for foreign policy decision makers is the way to go.' Well, maybe in the Washington of a previous era. Within a 200-yard radius of USAID, DOGE teams moved into the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan foreign policy think tank that had significant private funding and money from Congress. They shuttered it, from its Cold War archives to the Kennan Institute, one of the country's leading collections of scholars about Russia. At a moment when superpower conflict is back, it was the kind of place that presented alternative views. Advertisement DOGE was unimpressed. Like their USAID colleagues in another part of the Ronald Reagan Building, they were soon stuffing their notes into cartons and discovering their computer access had been shut down. (The Wilson Center also sponsored book writers, including some from The New York Times.) The war on expertise has raised some fundamental questions that may not be answerable until after the Trump administration is over. Will the experts stick around -- after hiding out in the private sector or changing professions -- only to reoccupy the 'swamp'? And more immediately, what damage is being done in what may be the country's defining challenge: the competition with China over artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons, electric vehicles, quantum computing? That is what many in the intelligence agencies worry about, not least because Europe is already openly recruiting disillusioned American scientists, and China's intelligence services are looking for the angry and abandoned. Graham Allison, a Harvard professor who writes often on the U.S.-China technological and military competitions, told an audience at the AI Summit on Wednesday that America is not acting like it understands that 'China has emerged as a full-spectrum competitor.' 'Our secret sauce,' he said, has been the American ability to 'recruit the most talented people in the world. Einstein didn't come from America.' 'The idea that we would be taking action that would undermine that makes no sense to any strategic thinker,' he said. Of course, those strategic thinkers rank among the suspect class of Washington experts. This article originally appeared in
