Downsizing Up

This week, Jack and Julia unpack the latest U.S. government shutdown and the difference between "essential" and "non-essential" governance functions. How have these definitions evolved, what's the right size for our current government, and are we entering an era where institutions are losing their luster? 

Transcript

Julia (00:05)
The United States government has been shut down more than 20 times over the course of its rather short history. And we are now in the midst of another government shutdown. We are recording this on Wednesday afternoon for situational awareness. There was a vote cast just a few minutes ago. There is no indication that this shutdown is going to be easily resolved. And I'm here today with Jack to ask him: Are we as a nation now less secure than we were yesterday?

Jack Devine (00:40)
I think the short answer is we're as secure, why? There is a definition between essential and non-essential. I don't remember at what stage I was non-essential and essential. Maybe they never put it on my 201 file. I mean, people are essential. You just can't phrase it that way. But it tends to be, are you in line of, in other words, is it war, keeping the electricity on, firemen, policemen, they're essential, right? 

Everyone else is important. So, most agencies in national security identify those people. In other words, they're identified in the different slots. So, government functions for the essential people pretty much as it is and everything gets done. Your support element gets reduced. And the problem with that is you can function for a fair amount of time without it, but eventually, there's a reason why the support was there in the first place. 

They process your medical exams. They take your medical exams. You want to have people that are alive. It's that yin and yang. So, I think we're as safe as we are. I think it's dangerous to play with government this way, but it's not the first time. I've been in positions where there was a shutdown and the essential people hardly noticed it. And the people that were out came back and went right to work.

Julia (01:49)
think that this distinction and perhaps this false distinction between essential and non-essential is really interesting, Jack, because it speaks to the ways that government can adjust and to the ways that governments have shifted over the course of the years. Because what someone might have deemed essential several years ago, maybe that role has been replaced by AI or by a different system at this point. So how do you see the function of our government shifting?

Jack Devine (02:15)
One of these days, and I think we promised ourselves we started on spy books, but I love biographies of, and particularly presidents. In the last couple of years, you hear me talk about Ulysses S. Grant, McKinley, and Lincoln. Right now, I just started one, about 200 pages into Eisenhower.

But what is interesting, you just stand back and say, what did government look like? So Lincoln would walk from the White House down to Congress. He would go over and sit in McClellen's living room waiting for him to come down. It was a small town. Even when I went there in the late 60s, Washington was a small town. Virginia was dry. Not that we needed a bar because everybody went to Washington to drink, I guess.

Julia (02:58)
I'm sorry, Jack, the Virginia I know is not dry.

Jack Devine (03:01)
No, you don't, but it was dry.

There were two places and you would get what they call leftover from World War II 'Near Beer'. One was Lazy Susan and the other one was Sardis right over the Georgetown Bridge in Georgetown. But if you look at Washington, it's a city. I mean, look at Virginia, it's a major city in the north.

Julia (03:15)
⁓ beautiful.

Jack Devine (03:24)
I mean, you were in the backwoods back then. People were upset when they went to McLean because they were leaving Washington. They were going out and living with the cattlemen out in Virginia. So my point is there's been an evolution where the government has gotten huge. And I would say each war generated new growth, World War, Civil War, World War I. So your wars tend to lead to bigger government. So the question you ask yourself, do we have the right size government today?

Julia (03:51)
Very interesting topic and a very timely topic for our country given all of the DOGE efforts and some of the successes and failures of those initial efforts and some of the incomplete goals of that organization. Some analysts believe this current shutdown might help DOGE finish some of its firings and do what you're saying. Try to get the government back to the size that it might be.

Jack Devine (04:15)
Well, I think that's a good question. But when you were just talking, I couldn't help but think of a conversation I had with one of the wealth management leaders.

And I was explaining the cutbacks and what that was going to mean. He said, look, I don't understand. Why don't we just have a Defense Department, a State Department? I think he gave one -- Treasury. What do we need all these other governments? And then Elon Musk came in and he was going to completely reorganize things. It's very hard to cut back. I said at that time, if you're going to do it, you just arbitrarily say we're going to reduce by X percent and every agency has to do it. It's tough, it's tough.

But the bigger you grow and the fatter you are, the harder it is. So I don't see us much leaner than we were a year ago. I don't think the shutdown is going to make a big difference.

Julia (05:00)
But let's just broaden out here for a moment, Jack. If our government is shifting, and sort of, we're trying to recalibrate the size and the roles and understand what's essential, what is the role of our government in the world?

Jack Devine (05:14)
As far as the international picture is concerned, I think we're seeing, we see a concentration, a centralization of government in the United States. More power has gone to the federal government over the last hundred years. And I said, sometimes wars are the generators of that.

The people at the ground have less influence. And this is true in CIA. When I first joined, the Chief of Station in the field was the boss. It was like the ambassador was the boss because we didn't have communications that could reach them. So, hey, if they go to the war, right back to us, right? And so that independence abroad has shrunk. So, all governments around the world, because of technology and this concentration have moved to more centralized governments.

Now in the democratic societies you can have a centralized and sort of balance, but if you look at Russia, China, many of the countries in the world have basically non-democratic systems because of this concentration. And I think we have to be alert that that concentration stays within the bounds of this really beautiful, big beautiful constitution we have that was constructed in the 1700s and which is held up today.

Julia (06:27)
I think you've made an interesting observation there, Jack, about things being centralized all over the world. But we're also simultaneously seeing a lot of protests against that activity. We're seeing a series of significant youth protests everywhere from Nepal to Morocco, really opposing this, the corruption that often goes hand in hand when you have someone that's kind of got absolute power. I'm curious, though, about how these governments that do have centralized a large degree of authority, how do they see their role in international organizations at this point? How does that shift their understanding of their place in the world?

Jack Devine (07:05)
If I can slice the question in two parts, because I think you're talking about resistance to this trend. And I think the word corruption is really very important and that has different flavors. But when you have that concentration, corruption becomes more of an issue because those that aren't part of it see that. So you end up with more stability. So, I think there's a growing trend, you and I've talked about this at different times, about the importance of corruption as an issue. It just hasn't been joined enough. And I think these demonstrations haven't been joined. In other words, at this point, the concentration of power and this non-democratic trend around the world and this opposition is not likely to bring change anytime soon, in my view. You have black swans, all of a sudden some place that pops up, the Arab Spring, we saw what that could do.

Now, as far as the international organizations are concerned, I think their coin has been depreciated. And if you say it's the current administration, I would say they've certainly demonstrated, but I think the role of globalism has been challenged intellectually across the broad spectrum. And there's a lot of people that are now looking at these institutions differently. And maybe this is a healthy thing.

Julia (08:18)
Well, President Trump gave quite a powerful speech at the United Nations General Assembly saying as much, right? And I wanted to ask you about another example where President Trump kind of shifted the nature of diplomacy or the method when he had his two, well, he had his Alaska summit and then of course the immediate summit that was to follow. What is that an example of? What happened there?

Jack Devine (08:47)
Yeah, so again, I think there's two points that you made . It always seems that I have two points. If you give me three, I won't remember the third one. But the first one was, I was curious, I was reading a very prestigious magazine by scholars and all of this. And I've been reading it for the last several months and I've read all this before. This was written in the 1980s about international relations and we have to do this and we have to do that. And I'm saying, you're not getting it. You're very scholarly. This is a process. You're not getting it. We are now in a different ball game. And part of it is about what we're talking about. How is government used? And your last example is a fantastic example.

And someone earlier today tried to challenge me on that and said 'nothing came out of it'. And I said, well, that's not the point. What you really need to do is see how radically different that was. 

In other words, I was in the government. I know what it takes to put a summit together. You spend six months, you get down to, well, who's sitting to the right of Willie and who's sitting across from Sarah and what tie are you wearing? And here are the talking points that we reviewed with State and we reviewed....In words, you take six months getting ready for a summit, right? That's your government in action preparing. Well, what does President Trump do? He decides, I'm going to have a summit in Alaska, picks up the phone and has a summit in Alaska.

Now, all the government people sitting there, they're all going to throw stones at us, sucking their thumb, which is somebody get tablecloths so we can put tables down. In other words, the summit was called, where in the previous century, all this paperwork would be done. To add to it, when you get to the international side, in the middle of the summit, he says, 'I think I'm going to add a European part to this summit'. He picks up the phone and he has the leaders of Europe all sitting around the table. Now, I'm not saying good, bad and indifferent.

But what people have to recognize, if you're sitting in State Department, CIA, in the government, you have to look in the mirror and say, wait a minute, what's going on here? Why am I not as relevant at this table?

Or if they looked at it the other way, and is the government missing the opportunity to draw on this? So I think there's a dynamic here about a diminution of the importance of traditional diplomacy, traditional government activities, a diminution of it, which then becomes tempting for a major cut in the workforce. So I think people have to be looking at this, not by ad hoc little things, but they have to be looking at what the real trend line is here.

Julia (11:12)
Agreed.

Jack Devine (11:12)
And what it means, and I don't see a lot of commentary on this. Or even, frankly, I don't see anybody complaining about it. I don't know what that means. In other words, why isn't anyone saying why are we not being used properly or why doesn't someone say, well, you're not needed? Well, I think some are saying that.

Julia (11:28)
Jack, just to wrap it up, we have acknowledged that both the shape of our government, the sort of centralization of power is shifting to some degree or certainly being tested right now. And hand in hand with that comes the size and scale of our bureaucracy and the roles of the different layers of that. And then our role, of course, within the broader world.

And we are seeing a decentralization of diplomacy. The example like the Alaska summit where you have kind of two partners face off or have these conversations that are really relevant spur of the moment or on the sidelines, if you will. What do you see moving forward? Are the international organizations going to hold up? I mean, I still see a group like NATO being very, relevant in the face of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

What are we going to see next?

Jack Devine (12:19)
So let's do the first one because I'm not sure it's decentralization. You actually, I would make the opposite argument. The President of United States decided the diplomacy and organized it all by himself. That's not decentralization.

Julia (12:32)
No, but I mean decentralized from the UN structure or from any kind of international organization that would normally be holding a group of people together like that or running those kind of broader negotiations.

Jack Devine (12:43)
I think the word, I'm striving for the right word. and that is it's disconnected. In other words, it's centralized on one hand and then it's disconnected on the other, which is not the same as decentralized where the authority goes down. It's like floating in outer space. But if I'm looking at your question of the international side, as I said earlier, and I'll repeat it.

When I'm reading these magazines and you're talking about different organizations and their importance and relevance, and we have to have the allies and sit around the table, I think that is passe as we go into the future. There are specific ones like NATO that had grown in influence and power, but it had to do something to do that. In other words, if it stayed where it was... But if you're looking at the war in Eastern Europe, NATO has really stepped up and made itself terribly relevant. That stays around. But if you're in some organization to provide whatever you want to call it, marginal support somewhere, you're in jeopardy of being left behind in this case. 

Julia (13:42)
So are we only having the most essential organizations? The essential workers are the ones that are kept on right now?

Jack Devine (13:51)
Well, here's the problem with that, and that is how do you define essential? As I said, I always felt I was, and I'm afraid to look at my file and find out that maybe you weren't so many times. So what I'm saying is, yeah, is the government strong? I think it should be much smaller. You say, what do we do? Well, reduce it. Think of the pain that that produces, right? In other words, it's not that simple how we got where we are. But I think we have to ask, how do we want to be governed?

And I think we have the roadmap. Again, this is, I wasn't around when Washington was around. But when we look about balance of power, respecting how we handle it, we're talking about free speech again. I mean, this was an issue in the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. So it is good to go back to these things, but everything's in turmoil now. 

And I just want to repeat it again. Anyone talking the way they did five years ago, probably not going to be listened to. I think there's a new dialogue, there's things happening, and not enough people recognize it. They think it's a one-time fluke. This century is going to be different, it's going to be organized different, and we need to make sure we got a handle on it through our own laws and regulations. And we won't go there, but I'm going to be giving a speech before too long about the role of AI and HUMINT. And getting a handle around AI is really important. We're, Julia, we're going to keep them in suspense until we know where I'm going with this thought. Because I'm, I'm, I'm fire and brimstone on that one.

Julia (15:10)
All right. Well, I look forward to an upcoming AI podcast.

Fantastic. All right, well, we'll be tracking this issue.

Julia (15:21)
Fantastic. All right, well, we'll be tracking this issue. Thanks so much for your take on this, Jack.