The United States of Elon - The Assignment with Audie Cornish - Podcast on CNN Audio

CNN

06-02-2025

Audie Cornish
00:00:00
Back in 2023, the man who ran the Office of Management and Budget and Trump's first administration was giving the speech at an invitation only event put on by his think tank, the Center for Renewing America. Russell Vought, a Christian Nationalist and budget policy wonk, spoke about the lessons that he had taken away from his experience in office. And, in his video uncovered by the investigative journalist organization ProPublica, he explained what would be necessary to reimagine the federal government bureaucracy should Trump be reelected. Again, this is from 2023.
Russell Vought
00:00:37
We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. We want when they woke up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.
Audie Cornish
00:01:03
'Vought is now on track to be confirmed for a second tour as Donald Trump's director of the OMB. But before he even assumes office, the blueprint that he outlined back in 2023 is unfolding now with the help of a so-called special government employee.
Boris Ephsteyn
00:01:19
Elon Musk remains on his mission to revamp the federal workforce. He's also sowing confusion and chaos within government ranks. The White House calling Musk a special government employee working only at the approval of the president. What remains unclear, though, is whether an unelected businessman can wield this level of authority.
Audie Cornish
00:01:39
Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, otherwise known as DOGE, have rattled the federal civil service to its core. This week, hundreds of people attended a constituent town hall in Leesburg, Virginia to talk about it. This audio was captured by radio station WTOP.
WTOP clip
00:01:58
I've been a federal worker for 24 years and my agency for that long. And every day in the last week or two, everyone has been scared. Everyone is afraid. Every day she's going to travel, we're going to get cut.
Audie Cornish
00:02:11
So now that the richest man in the world has been put in charge of remaking the U.S. government, the questions are, how is he doing it? Who's helping him to do it? And what does it mean for the government services? You might just be taking for granted. I'm Audie Cornish, and this is The Assignment. So think about your keychain. Like each key is meaningful in its own way to your door locks, your car, special rooms in your office or home? Well, government departments are a lot like those keys. And DOGE has gotten a hold of some of the most important ones. The Bureau of the Fiscal Service. Well, that's basically the government's checkbook, paying everyone from defense contractors to your Social Security checks and tax refunds. The General Services Administration, well, it keeps an eye on government real estate and also its IT. The Office of Personnel Management is basically the file cabinet on every person who has, does or might want to work for the federal government. Unlike any of the offices I've listed here, DOGE was not set up by Congress. Musk is not a cabinet official. Nor is it clear if the people he is bringing on are serving in any official capacity. A source at OPM told CNN that they are "making backend changes without regard to federal norms and requirements." WIRED magazine writer Vittoria Elliott has been following Musk for some time. She and her team profiled the young engineers carrying out the work. Most come from Musk companies Tesla, SpaceX, X and others. So in the course of your reporting, you found specific engineers, and we're going to get to that. But talk to me about the agencies that have been taken over that have allowed the Musk folks the kind of keys to the castle, so to speak. Are they existing agency or are they new ones? Like, how are they getting people in the building, so to speak?
Vittoria Elliott
00:04:19
Sure. So the first thing that we need to look at is what used to be the U.S.. Digital Service. That is what has become DOGE. And the U.S. Digital Service was a part of the Obama administration. They were tasked with sort of working across different departments to help them modernize and streamline their technology.
Audie Cornish
00:04:38
And it was sort of a cute Internet thing like, we're going to make Obamacare easier to use. The website is going to be great, like that kind of thing.
Vittoria Elliott
00:04:46
Yeah, exactly. So they were sort of like, for lack of a better understanding, like almost like internal technical consultants, like they could come in to any agencies be sort of like, Hey, what's your process? What's not working? You know, this sort of outside, inside voice with expertise. So Doge is now the USDS. And what's very important to understand is there are technically two DOGEs. There's the permanent one, and then there's a temporary organization within that, which is another DOGE. That's the one that supposedly ends on July 4, 2026.
Audie Cornish
00:05:21
'And we should say all of this is a little bit hazy because it's not an official, it's not an agency, so to speak. It's not created by Congress. It's not funded by anyone. Is it --- Do you think of it as a mass consultancy, or what is the legal apparatus that allows the Department of Government Efficiency to exist?
Vittoria Elliott
00:05:44
So USDS was, to my understanding, nested in the executive branch.
Audie Cornish
00:05:49
Meaning, it was a White House deal.
Vittoria Elliott
00:05:53
'Initiative. Yes. So it doesn't need to be approved by Congress to make this agency. But when you have the temporary organization, what is particularly special about a temporary organization is it allows the government to bring in what are known as special government employees, and those can be volunteers or temporary employees who serve generally from 60 to 130 days, depending on what their capacity is. And that means that they don't have to get paid necessarily, and they don't have the same level of transparency required of them that other government employees have. And that means what's ended --- What we're suspecting is happening here is that these people that we're seeing come into DOGE are underneath that temporary organization and are special government employees, which means they do not have to go through the same processes that normal government employees have to go through. And that gives them a level of opacity that would not be possible in other situations.
Audie Cornish
00:06:57
So I'm going to translate that. What that means is they're not vetted the same way. They don't go through the background checks the same way. And once they've done that, they're not subject to the same oversight. They're not subject to the same kind of like, you know, public interrogation as regular government workers.
Vittoria Elliott
00:07:16
'Right. And oftentimes, you know, the big thing is that a lot of times when you're a government worker, you have to give up your other job. But a special government employee, if you're coming in as a volunteer, you don't need to give up your job. Elon Musk can go on a little hiatus. From space X. Or, you know. Or X and come in and work with the government 130 days a year as opposed to someone who's a full time government worker who has to give up their previous job. So I think that's also an important thing to note, is when we're seeing people who are executives at his companies coming in, while they still have on their LinkedIns those companies listed as their employer. The reality is -- and we don't know this because there hasn't been a lot of transparency -- but they may be there actually in a voluntary capacity.
Audie Cornish
00:08:07
Through the reporting from you and others is the description of the day to day of what this looks like. That's coming out on Reddit and out of slack channels from the government as people start to reveal information. And it sounds something like I've been sent an email that tells me A, B and C, or I have to meet with someone that says X, Y and Z. And when I sit down with them, they're cagey about who they are. They don't use a government email. And I'm nervous. Is that about right, that description? I mean, that's what in your reporting and others the scenarios keep sounding like.
Vittoria Elliott
00:08:49
So in the piece that I reported with my colleague Makena Kelly, what we found was that employees at the GSA's Technology Transformation Services were starting to get called into meetings to do what's called code reviews. So they have to show their work product and show how they've coded what they've built. They had to sort of respond to this questionnaire about how productive what, you know, what they've been working on, how productive they'd been,.
Audie Cornish
00:09:15
'Using the Silicon Valley language, right? The the Musk era language of tell me your wins. What were your what were the things you did Well, what were the things that got in your way? Again, things that make sense if you're thinking about how to re-imagine a place.
Vittoria Elliott
00:09:31
Yes. And also almost exactly the same stuff that happened when he took over Twitter in 2022. And these employees were called into meetings with people whose names they did not recognize. Sometimes those people were not using a government email address to be on the call. And what we found is that in some cases these people were quite young engineers that seem to have been brought in by Musk and his allies as part of their DOGE effort.
Audie Cornish
00:10:03
And we're saying young. They've like graduated from college. This is not a bias against youth.
Vittoria Elliott
00:10:08
Like well, one of them is as young as 19 years old.
Audie Cornish
00:10:11
Whoa. Okay, rewind. Tell me more.
Vittoria Elliott
00:10:15
One of them who was sitting in on GSA calls and whose name we also were able to identify at the OPM. So that means that he was working across two different government administration agencies. He graduated from high school in 2024. There are other people who appear to be around 21, 22. Unclear if they recently graduated from college. One was a senior at Harvard. Another appears to either be a senior or a dropout slash withdrawn student from Berkeley. And then there are other young young men who seem to have graduated within the past two, three years.
Audie Cornish
00:10:56
What do these guys have in common?
Vittoria Elliott
00:10:59
They are all young. They're all seemingly quite bright, and they all are tied to Musk's companies, or that one of his allies, like Peter Thiel, who has been a long time Trump supporter, who is very close with Musk. They both worked at PayPal together. They sort of move in the same circles. And Peter Thiel's company, Palantir, is a big data company that has billions of dollars of contracts with the U.S. military. And I think one thing that's important to note is that hiring young technical talent is quite common in Silicon Valley, and that's a place of "move fast and break things." And the government is not a "move fast and break things" kind of place because there's a lot more collateral for getting something wrong for 300 million Americans than there is in a startup.
Audie Cornish
00:11:51
But at the same time, it's a government that has struggled to deal with its legacy IT systems. Like, that's one question I have. Like, how much damage can they do in a system that is like so chopped up and barely talks to itself?
Vittoria Elliott
00:12:06
'Yes, some of these systems are arcane. Maybe they do need to be overhauled. But we have also heard that one of the things that's happening here is that, you know -- and again, my colleague Makena reported on this -- that like, you know, we don't know if they're taking data and using it to train A.I. systems or using A.I. to analyze it. And like that's a whole other issue around privacy and government data that needs to be examined more thoroughly because it's not just are they going into these systems and messing around on them, or maybe it might be hard. It's what are they doing with the access to the data that they have, you know?
Audie Cornish
00:12:47
And we say that there's personnel data, meaning the Social Security numbers, the the the medication Medicare records, like there's all kinds of records of both workers and Americans that they would have access to. And through the Federal Payments Service, which is also sort of in the process of having been captured, so to speak, they can figure out who gets paid what anywhere in the government for any reason. Am I getting that right?
Vittoria Elliott
00:13:18
'Yeah. And, you know, that's not just federal workers. That's, for instance, you know, nonprofit organizations that might have a government grant. That's hospitals that get Medicaid money. You know, that's any science funding that goes towards a university, possibly also down to individuals, like getting their tax returns on time or at all. You know, there's so many things that that Federal Payment System interacts with. And again, you know, there's the danger of sort of going into a system that you may be unfamiliar with and messing around and getting it wrong. But then there's also, you know, what must himself is talked about, which is like cutting off funding to organizations that they believe are not aligned with America First values. And that is particularly dangerous because, again, the whole point of these organizations is that they are meant to be apolitical. It means that no matter who's in power, you know that you're going to get your Social Security check on time. It means that no matter who's in power, you know that your hospital is going to get paid if you have Medicaid patients. That allows the system to keep moving with a trust that gives a sense of stability. And so suddenly the idea that there might be politics injected into this very important chokepoint -- that's more than just, hey, we want to see the code and we want to just get a sense of like where there's waste and where they're spending. But actually, like, you could get turned off at any moment.
Audie Cornish
00:14:56
Right. Nevermind I guess what they could build on their own in their own companies with the information that they've learned.
Vittoria Elliott
00:15:02
Exactly. Well, and that's, I think, a really important thing that a lot of experts have sort of talk to us about, which is, you know, the information that these people are gleaning is actually probably extraordinarily valuable. You know, Musk is a government contractor. SpaceX is a government contractor. There's stuff in there where businesses have to submit tons and tons of information to get government contracts for transparency and for vetting and all this stuff. And now people who work at private companies that might want or currently have government contracts have access to data that their competitors just don't. And so even if everything's perfect, even if, you know they are great at the code, they do not politicize any of these agencies [and] they really just come in and clean stuff up, like, best case scenario, you're still seeing these people coming in and ultimately probably returning to the private sector pretty quickly if they're special government employees with information that their competitors don't have.
Audie Cornish
00:16:05
Right.
Vittoria Elliott
00:16:05
And that in itself is a problem.
Audie Cornish
00:16:06
Just to be clear, the areas that they compete in, people hear about Starlink, which can help launch satellites, etc.. But there's also national security contracts that we don't know exactly what they are that Musk companies have as well. So there's like this area of national intelligence and security. It's not just could he get to fire more rockets for the U.S.?
Vittoria Elliott
00:16:33
'Right. And I think, you know, it's really important this --- I think part of the reason this conversation feels so vague and amorphous is because they're not really telling us what they're doing except broadly saying we're making things more efficient. I come from the world of international development. And the first question when someone says we want to make something efficient is go, efficient for who? And that hasn't been necessarily made clear.
Audie Cornish
00:16:56
But one thing they're able to do, and I think Musk is able to do, is they're able to look at their voters and say, we said we were going to go in and break things. We said we said that the deep state, so to speak, all those people, those government workers and all those people at NGOs and nonprofits and that whole world of left liberal ideology and the money that is made from it, their industry, they're going to squawk. They're going to complain. They're going to be loud. So, what is it that you try and do in your reporting to think about that lens, right? That like everybody in your story who's opposed to this is just opposed to Trump and Musk?
Vittoria Elliott
00:17:39
'I think that there are a lot of people on both sides of the political spectrum that are extraordinarily frustrated with how the government has frankly not responded to their needs. And I think in many cases that frustration is legitimate. But I don't think anybody knows how to navigate a hospital or health insurance until they have a loved one that's in a hospital and then they get a crash course really quick. But that's not something that necessarily the average American walks around thinking about or knowing every day. And so I think the biggest thing that I think is important with our reporting is to really convey the purpose of these systems and the things that they are capable --- that they do that people don't necessarily think about because it actually might be working well for them, and so it feels invisible. You know, the only things that feel really visible are the things that don't feel like they're working. And so I think one of the things to point out is like, you can have whatever opinion we want about how we spend our defense spending, or how much money we should give to this thing or whatever pain point is, but I think, you know, when we're talking about something like GSA or Treasury, you know, that's actually a system that works pretty well. And therefore, you know, when we're talking about it, it's important for people to understand, you know, that, A, this is a possible threat to something that actually might be working really well for you. And B, things that can look really wasteful to your average American might actually be really good. And I think foreign aid spending is a really important part of this. Most Americans think that foreign aid spending is like 25% of our budget. In reality, it's less than 1%. It's like going to the airport and having your suitcase be overweight and taking out your underwear. Like, it is not going to make a difference. And so I think the fact is, is that like because people feel their own pain points about like, I wish my government worked better for me in X, Y, Z ways. And then they see really big numbers like, you know, $2 million going to this thing in Uganda. That feels like a lot to an average American. And I think the biggest thing is really contextualizing like, A, some things do work well and need to work in maybe this slower or less politicized way in order to be okay, in order to be safe. And, B, like some of these things that feel like really big problems are actually in the context of things, kind of distractions from other things that could be a really big problem. Like, if some of these systems get privatized, you're going to be paying for that. One of the things is like being able to file your taxes online for free. If that gets privatized, you're going have to pay for that. And I think that's something that regular Americans feel and will feel in their day to day lives but may not know to think about unless we sort of function in this explanatory way for these systems, as well as talking about the changes that are happening.
Audie Cornish
00:20:42
I notice in the course of this interview you did not say the names of the young men, the young engineers, even though they're in the WIRED story. Can you talk about why not and what the blowback has been to this reporting?
Vittoria Elliott
00:20:57
I think for a lot of people who are really convinced that the DOGE sort of organization is doing exactly what they need to do, it has felt very much like doxxing to them. And to be clear, like there have been people online posting their phone numbers, emails, addresses, etc.. And I don't necessarily know that that is the right thing to do. At the same time, I think that this entity clearly, which is DOGE and the people associated with it, are not operating with full transparency. And I think the American people deserve to understand who is in control or who has access to some really important and sensitive systems and information because it can affect their lives. And no matter what side of the political spectrum you're on, that information is important. And, you know, I think if we're trying to understand the changes that are being made, we need to understand who's making them. We need to understand if they're qualified. You know, you can be a brilliant engineer. You can be a brilliant technical person, but that doesn't mean that you have an understanding of government administration. That doesn't mean you understand the totality of the U.S.. Digital security and privacy laws that would dictate how you need to work. You know, when we're talking about these young men, I think one of the most important things is that the greatest concern is not necessarily that maybe they're not great technical people. It's that they don't have the experience necessary in government to understand the possible consequences of what they may or may not be able to do when they're accessing our systems.
Audie Cornish
00:22:51
You've also been calling out for more people to speak up, to reach out to you with tips. What are you hearing kind of in broad themes from the workers who are reaching out to you?
Vittoria Elliott
00:23:06
I think a lot of people are really scared. People in the federal workforce feel really frustrated that their jobs are being characterized as wasteful, particularly when they have decades of expertise, when they know how things work and when they have really done a lot of things. You know, federal workers, there are certain things they can't participate in because it's a conflict of interest. They don't have for a one case is because they rely on pensions. And I think there's a lot of things that people feel like the public doesn't understand about their work. And they feel really sad and frustrated that the U.S. as a country, which they feel they have worked to protect, preserve and support for their whole careers, doesn't value them. And I think there's a grave concern across everybody that has reached out about the lack of transparency being offered not only to the public but to the workers themselves. So I think now at this point, you know, people are extraordinarily concerned with the fact that we don't know who's in these systems. We don't know what they're who they will end up working for or have worked for. We don't know any of these things. And federal workers who are who have in many cases given their lives to this work and really do understand the ramifications of what could go wrong, are really scared that these people being brought in, at best, don't know and, at worst, don't care.
Audie Cornish
00:24:34
Vittoria Elliott is a reporter for WIRED magazine. Her beat is platforms and power. So what does it feel like to be in the middle of this Musk maelstrom? Rumman Chowdhury knows because she's a former Twitter executive, and she's got some advice. You'll hear from her after this break. Okay, we're back. Now, of course, this is a show that talks to people at the center of the story, but the people at the center of this story, federal workers, well, they're afraid to talk. After Vittoria's reporting came out in WIRED with the names of the six young engineers working for Musk. Ed Martin, the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, assured the billionaire on X that he would pursue all legal action against anyone who impeded the work of DOGE. So we're talking with someone who has two key bits of experience: a former federal contractor who is also a former Twitter employee. And frankly, she's seen this movie before. Rumman Chowdhury was director for Machine Learning, Ethics, Transparency and Accountability at Twitter. Then Elon Musk took over in 2022, and she was laid off. This week, she's been posting advice to civil servants on the social media site Bluesky. Some ideas are practical. Move your group chats to encrypted messaging apps on your phone. Set them to auto delete. Others are eerie but straightforward. Don't expect managers to have your back. Overall, she describes an atmosphere of chaos.
Dr. Rumman Chowdhury
00:26:14
For me, it just makes me angry. It's so purposeful. It is intended to confuse you. It is intended to scare you. And that just makes me angry. I think with some people it makes them fearful. It makes them shut down. I think in some cases it can bring out the worst in people. And I, you know, unfortunately have seen I saw all of it.
Audie Cornish
00:26:34
What do you mean by that?
Dr. Rumman Chowdhury
00:26:35
'Well, some people go into self-protection mode, right? In some cases, there were lists being made of employees to keep and employees to fire. And some people spent their time finagling to be in those rooms so they could protect themselves and throw their teammates under the bus and people that they had worked with.
Audie Cornish
00:26:52
This does lead us to number three. Expect performances of loyalty. It says it won't help you keep your job. Can you talk about how you came to this piece of advice? Was there a sense that people were asked to jump hoops and that it was like not actually for the purpose intended?
Dr. Rumman Chowdhury
00:27:10
They went to one of my youngest and most junior engineers and asked this person if they could kick somebody off the team, who they would kick off? And do you think that there are people on there on your team who don't pull their weight or do their job? And that, you know, back to just being angry? How dare you? How dare you pick the youngest, most inexperienced person and make them feel that they have the responsibility of picking someone to be put on the firing line? You know, at least pick on someone your own size, but they won't. So these are the performances of loyalty, right? You want to go after the people who are younger and more inexperienced, make them feel like they're special and important. Pull them in a room, bring them to your side. And when you're done with them, you discard them. This is kind of what we are we're already seeing happen right at these government agencies. And, you know, they. Elon Musk is already talking about how his team works 120 hours a week. You know, it is he is pulling and duping people who want to feel that attention from somebody who maybe they admire or think is a great man, and he is just going to burn them out and discard them and find new ones. It was a very common refrain at Twitter after he left. I think some people were genuinely excited about it. A lot of those people got burnt out within the first five to six months because it's a lot of impossible asks. He prides himself on making people work nights. And I think especially when people are young, that sense of like hustle and you got to be in the game.
Audie Cornish
00:28:44
And that's part of his lore, right? Like he sleeps in offices when he's committed to a task. He's the guy who's there and he's not going to ask you to do anything he wouldn't do himself.
Dr. Rumman Chowdhury
00:28:53
Right? And I think when you are a more mature leader, you realize that if your team is working overnight, it's because you did a bad job of allocating work, not because your work is just so that important.
Audie Cornish
00:29:04
Let's get to number four, which is you cannot rely on leadership to protect or cover for you. Talk more about that because there's a lot of teams in government. There's a lot of emails going out under the names of longtime civil servants. What do you see in this moment why you would offer that advice?
Dr. Rumman Chowdhury
00:29:26
'Yeah, there are sort of two kinds of leaders that came out during the ordeal at Twitter. There are some who thought of their team first and who really wanted to help navigate whatever direction their team wanted to go in, helped navigate each individual to a safe landing. And then there are others who decided that, you know, their best bet was to cozy up to the new leadership coming in and try to protect themselves. And, you know, it's sort of every person for themselves. I would say that one of the biggest disappointments during Twitter was when we would have all hands meetings, and we were not allowed to discuss what was happening with Elon Musk. We were not allowed to talk about the high levels of attrition that were happening even before he took over. You know, we actually still don't know how many people left Twitter before he even came in. Some of the estimates are about 30%. But they stopped --
Audie Cornish
00:30:19
And, in the meantime, the federal government, we're also seeing an exodus.
Dr. Rumman Chowdhury
00:30:23
Correct.
Audie Cornish
00:30:23
We are seeing people who are leaving and many at that mid senior level.
Dr. Rumman Chowdhury
00:30:29
Absolutely. And some of them left because of Trump. And I think some of them are now leaving because of this chaos that's being sown. And I think it's tests like these that really show you who good leaders are and what people are capable of.
Audie Cornish
00:30:45
I want to stay with this point because you actually have a sub sub point on number four. If you're a leader who gives an 's,' help with exit strategy. This is a way different proposition for engineers at a place like Twitter versus people who work in the federal government. It's not so easy to just walk off the job, if you've been working for the government. So talk about this advice.
Dr. Rumman Chowdhury
00:31:12
'One of the reasons I put this is, you know, other leaders who are at Twitter, we were we and we don't even know each other actually very well before we were sort of colluding on this in a Signal channel. We were arranging things like meet and greets with different teams and different companies. Ironically, some of the people who I had meet with my team were from government agencies. You know, off of our devices, we arranged résumé reviews. In programing, we do things like, you know, coding tests so people would help each other study. And as a leader, I don't just, you know, you don't just see your responsibility as your team functioning within the unit that is the organization, your teams. You are responsible for your everyone who works for you, for their careers. What's harder for federal employees? A lot of people enter federal government wanting this job as a career. And some of these people that we are talking about have been in these jobs for 20, 30 years. It is very hard for anybody to leave a job after 30 years and then go to them. They have not interviewed in decades. Their résumé: 30 years old. They don't necessarily know newer practices of going out onto the market. And by the way, the market is not that good right now. So how can you -- while you are dealing with all of the chaos, all of the stress, the day to day, not knowing if you're going to have your job tomorrow -- somehow be able to hop on an interview and be calm and collected and confident and be able to sell yourself to be hired in a market that's not particularly friendly?
Audie Cornish
00:32:41
'What are some of the other levers or tools or approaches that Musk-led management uses to like bend a an acquisition to their will?
Dr. Rumman Chowdhury
00:32:54
I think the big thing is just fear. You know, it's kind of amazing how much people capitulate to fear. You know, people get accustomed to status quo, even a poor status quo. And I think a lot of people just get used to it. You know, I have friends who have worked at his companies and especially when they were younger. And, you know, and again, when you're young, it seems very exciting. You know, the sense of beating somebody and being the best being admired by a, quote unquote, godlike figure. I mean, he sets himself as a godlike figure. And there is a cult of worship around him. I think when you are in an environment like that, it's easy to not see how false it is and how propped up it is. And you forget that you can leave and there are other jobs you can have and that, you know, most people probably will be okay. I think some people are also just locked in. Right? They may or maybe only have one or two years left on the job before they get their pension. They're worried about health care. They're also just some very practical and pragmatic things that can be dangled in front of you, or you can be threatened with that matter in people's lives.
Audie Cornish
00:34:00
One thing I want to raise is that one of the president's preoccupations, it's always been the "deep state," that the civilian bureaucracy prevents him from executing the policies that he wants. And that in his first term, they pushed back so hard that it it sort of made it difficult to accomplish what he wanted to. In some ways, when people talk about what's happening, it kind of sounds like just the other side of the coin of what he's saying, that there is, in fact, a bunch of people who don't want to do what he wants to do and like maybe they should leave. Like maybe hearing someone who's been there for 20 or 30 years is not ideal, right, if you want to make government more efficient.
Dr. Rumman Chowdhury
00:34:47
I think a lot of it is how tech has warped our sense of value to value youth and speed. You know, "move fast and break things" over things like experience. You know, this comes up in the field that I'm in quite a bit, A.I., when people will say, oh, regulation will stifle innovation. And I'm like, well, so do you just not want to have laws? Because remember when we didn't have laws on food and anybody could just sell anything and people would just constantly die of diseases? Remember when we didn't have laws that govern medicine and you did not know what you were putting in your mouth and whether or not it would cure your disease or kill you. Right. Yeah. You know, doing things mindfully takes time. It's sort of like a macro problem we have is that everything just seems to be moving faster and faster. And I think we have to take conscious effort to say we don't actually have to move that fast.
Audie Cornish
00:35:41
Read piece of advice number five.
Dr. Rumman Chowdhury
00:35:44
'Number five: Your culture will die. The hardest lesson I learned is how fragile culture is. It's more painful than you think. I wrote a whole op-ed about it.
Audie Cornish
00:35:53
This is a pretty brutal assessment, and I can understand why you enjoyed the culture you were in, etc. But like, what's the point of offering this up right now? What do you think is important that will help people get through it?
Dr. Rumman Chowdhury
00:36:07
Maybe this will sound a little bit nihilistic, but it did help me, right. All of these things, culture, institutions, these are all things we set up as human beings. They're concepts. They're actually not real physical things. And culture requires preservation. Institutions require preservation. We can't take them for granted. If you like the culture you are in, no matter what culture it is, you actually have to contribute to it. And to see how quickly it was taken away because of one man's looming threat was very sobering, and the fragility of it kind of still stays with me.
Audie Cornish
00:36:43
One of the things it occurs to me that the Twitter folks have in common with the federal workers is like the public has a deep lack of sympathy. Like, I remember doing stories and people would be like, well, I don't care about Twitter, you know what I mean? Or just like, sure sounds bad. And over the years, there's just been such a dialog around the federal workforce. There's also a lack of sympathy there, like, who cares about them? Or people voted for Trump explicitly because they were like, yeah, get rid of those folks. Can you talk about how that plays into all of this that like, people are going through a thing but then like to the outside world, you like either deserve it, or it doesn't matter that you're going through it.
Dr. Rumman Chowdhury
00:37:27
I think a lot of this has become theater, and that is what people like Trump and Musk are very good at. They are good at theatrics. They are good at making caricatures of others so that you don't have to care about them. The other thing is a lot of this is taking place on social media, and social media just doesn't seem real. I think a lot of this feels very removed. And the reason why I'm concerned about that in particular with federal employees, fine, you don't care about Twitter, you don't care about us, that's fine. We probably may or may not have a significant impact on people's lives. But the federal government, I think people are going to understand once they realize that their kid is no longer getting subsidized lunch and that they can't take their dad to the VA hospital because it's closed, or that their roads aren't being fixed, or that airplanes may be crashing. It is absolutely wild to me how some of the richest men in the world have managed to paint public employees, as, you know, greedy and grasping when, you know, again, these people work very hard at their jobs to keep institutions going. They don't get public credit for it. They're certainly not on social media talking about it constantly. And I, I hope that people understand that the kinds of people we are talking about here are the reason your lights are on, that your water is clean, that your child is being fed clean food and good food, and taking that away is going to be very, very dangerous for all Americans.
Audie Cornish
00:38:54
Dr. Rumman Chowdhury was director for Machine Learning, Ethics, Transparency and Accountability at Twitter. Dr. Chowdhury currently runs Parity Consulting, which offers ethical AI, consulting and auditing. The Assignment is a production of CNN Audio, and this episode was produced by Sofía Sanchez, Jesse Remedios. And we got help from Dan Bloom. Our senior producer is Matt Martinez. The executive producer of CNN Audio is Steve Lickteig, and the technical director is Dan Dzula. We had support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, Jon Dianora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. I'm Audie Cornish. I want to thank you for listening, and I'm hoping that if you enjoyed this show, please hit 'subscribe.' Please share. Please leave a review because it matters.