Chris Sununu has DOGE fever

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

David Weigel: So, why are you here?

Chris Sununu: My message on DOGE — as a fellow engineer like Elon, and as someone who’s been an executive in the public sector — is that it’s possible, but you have to understand how the system works before you can find the inefficiencies. You walk up to a machine, and you can see obvious things that are broken, but if you don’t know how the machine works, then you’re just going to be nipping at the edges.

We can talk about cutting a few billion here and there, but that’s mostly political, until you get to the heart of the fiscal crisis in America. At the core of it, you need a balanced budget amendment. Right? Why do you go through all the pains and all the difficulty and all the challenge of cutting if at some point you lose the White House and lose Congress and they just undo it? In about eight years, Social Security benefits drop to 83%, Medicare goes bankrupt, the interest rates come due, and if you deal with that now, it’s far easier than if you wait eight years. I think Elon gets that. And it’s got to be bipartisan.

Trump ran for president saying he wouldn’t touch Social Security or Medicare. Does that hamstring Republicans here? Does that limit what you’d like to see them do?

Trump and the Republicans in Washington are still under this antiquated belief that if they make tough decisions, they’ll be penalized politically. They won’t be! They’ll be championed politically. I think myself and other governors are proof positive of that. When Republican governors make tough decisions, people say: Thank you! And we get elected.

The real compact with America is that DC is going to finally play by the same rules as everybody else. If they do that, they will be rewarded. They shouldn’t be fearful of it. I think Trump plays into that a little bit. I do love that they put a two-year timeline on it, so this isn’t some new agency that’s going to go on indefinitely. But Trump’s opportunity, because he doesn’t have to run again in four years, is to try to get Congress on board with a plan today and move forward structurally by year two or three.

Republicans did go after this 20 years ago, when Bush proposed investing some of Social Security in the stock market. If you do the math on what would have happened to that money, sure, it would have solved some of the problem.

Can you imagine? If we put all that Social Security money into the stock market back in 2000 — George W. Bush was absolutely right, and he’s been proven right time and time again. But it’s not about dumping it into the stock market. You give people choice. You have to move that retirement age. That’s just so obvious. You don’t have to move it for today’s retirees. You have to move it for a generation away from retirees. Gen Z doesn’t even know when they’re going to retire, if they’re going to retire. That’s the least of their worries right now. Whether it’s 62 or 64 or 65, find the right number that works. Do it for the next generation. Allow some of this to be privatized. Those models have proven to be absolutely rock solid, and work. George W. Bush was a couple of senators away from getting this done. So many of America’s problems would be cured.

But they didn’t have the courage to do it. They were afraid. Don’t be afraid! You weren’t elected to just get reelected and do nothing. It’s the same thing on the Balanced Budget Amendment. Virtually every state has a balanced budget. Even the most fiscally mismanaged states in the country, like California, are run better than the federal government, because they are mandated to live with certain constraints. You don’t have political opportunities like this very often, where someone gets elected to be a disruptor for one term, and can try this.

But when I’ve covered the push for balanced budget amendments, since the Tea Party, there’s always been some kind of carveout, some provision that would allow Washington to spend more.

You can always go back to an additional appropriation in an emergency. Every state can obviously do that. So the model of a balanced budget should never be feared, because it’s already being done. By the way, 27 states have already signed a resolution saying, if you don’t do it, Congress, we will do it. We’ll bring a constitutional convention. That means five states, some of which are conservative states, are going to be pushed in the next couple of years. So it would be horribly embarrassing to Congress if the states forced Washington to do their jobs.

What would have happened in New Hampshire if this was already in place? There’s a lot of Medicaid spending you don’t have to worry about.

That’s part of what DOGE is doing, finding the inefficiencies. You want to really solve a lot of the spending problem? You block grant programs for the states. This idea that they’re going to get rid of some of these departments — everyone wants to use the Department of Education as an example, but there’s a lot of examples. There’s an insurance department in this town that does nothing. I mean, it’s completely useless.

DC is so antiquated. It’s like having a Ford Thunderbird that looks kind of shiny, but it’s never gotten a tune up and it runs like crap. At some point you just can’t fix it anymore. To get money from DC is nice, but do you know how many times we’ve had to say no to money because it comes with so many strings? I don’t know how many employees are in the Department of Education, how many thousands. You could cut that down to a few hundred and basically make them auditors, right? Just making sure that the states are actually spending the dollars on education, within the two-page guidelines that you can probably give them. HUD is a great concept, but there’s 33 different sub-organizations, different grant programs that nobody can understand. You can massively simplify it. Trust the states. It’s exactly how the Founding Fathers set it up.

How do you avoid some situation where these cuts happen, and the people who used to be federal employees are now working as contractors in Roslyn? That’s what I think of when Vivek Ramaswamy says, “Let’s start by firing half the federal workforce.”

Yeah, with all due respect to Vivek, they don’t understand how these systems work. When he says, “We’re gonna fire half the bureaucracy,” I have no problem with that. But they’re just saying it for a political point, as opposed to really looking at what structurally needs to happen. Trump really didn’t understand how that system worked in 2017 and 2018. He didn’t know how to work with Congress. He tried to go in and just try to muscle everyone over to what he wanted. That’s not how you do it. I think he’s smarter this time around. I think his team is much smarter this time around.

Trump also ran on a bunch of new tax cuts that were meant to shore up programs; taxes on tips, Social Security taxes, those were put in place to stabilize Social Security in 1982. Which tax cuts are negotiable if you’re trying to balance this budget?

I think they should maintain the tax cuts, because you need to grow, too, right? There’s more cash being held by these large corporations right now than ever before. If you can provide those tax cuts and give them this regulatory reform, those companies will spend that cash into our economy. They’ll do their capital investments in their own businesses. You’ll start seeing private equity really move again, and that gets the economy moving.

And on tips and Social Security taxes…

Look, I don’t think those things should be taxed. There’s nothing wrong with saying, “Here’s five tax cuts I want to see, and if you have to negotiate with Democrats to only do two of them, you give up on a few of them to get them to vote for the efficiency pieces.” Anyone who says it can’t be done, or a balanced budget amendment can’t be done? They don’t want it to be done.