00:42:45 · Scott Kupor, David Senra
Look, we're never gonna, like, pay what Silicon Valley does, and that's fine, and that's okay. But we ought to at least level people appropriately so that, like, Ed should not come in at this GS five, which is, like, the most entry level for government. He should come in at a GS-fourteen or 15, which is the highest levels, because his merit shows that he's capable of performing at that level. But the system as it existed would not have allowed that to happen. So this is what we've doing from a policy perspective, to fix all that stuff and say like, Merit matters, take a test, take an assessment, and everything else, quite frankly, we shouldn't worry about. [00:43:15] S1: So big balls kind of gives you the blueprint where he says, I'm super talented. Yes. Dropout, maybe never wouldn't qualify for the set of requirements in federal government, but I heard this person I admire tell a compelling story. Exactly. Right. You came in before, during, after DOGE? Like, what was...
00:43:15 · David Senra, Scott Kupor
[00:43:15] S1: So big balls kind of gives you the blueprint where he says, I'm super talented. Yes. Dropout, maybe never wouldn't qualify for the set of requirements in federal government, but I heard this person I admire tell a compelling story. Exactly. Right. You came in before, during, after DOGE? Like, what was... [00:43:33] S2: Yeah. So I came in with... Basically, I got interviewed, and I came in with the DOGE guys. So it was obviously Elon, but of course, there were guys like Steve Davis was kind of the day to day person running it. And, I had the opportunity to spend a bunch of time with them pre inauguration. So kind of, you know, end of... I got nominated, like, first week of December or something, and so kind of December and first part of January late to inauguration. Then what happens is they tell you, okay. Like, until you get through your nomination process, you basically have to be persona non grata and, like, stop communicating with folks because otherwise, it can, like, foul your nomination process. So we had developed a bunch of plans and ideas for what we would do once, the administration turned over, but I wasn't there day one to be able to actually execute those things. [00:44:13] S1: But you were observing a lot of what was going on. [00:44:15] S2: That's exactly right. And they were executing it literally out of my office, so it turns out my office was ground zero for
00:44:15 · Scott Kupor, David Senra
[00:44:15] S2: That's exactly right. And they were executing it literally out of my office, so it turns out my office was ground zero for [00:44:22] S1: everything So that regardless of controversy over anything that happened there, I'm not even interested in that. I'm interested, is there any ideas that you saw coming out of that that you thought were good and valuable and should be spread further?
00:44:35 · Scott Kupor
[00:44:35] S2: Yeah. Here's my view overall on it, is part of the issue is... Okay, just to give you a sense of the numbers, right? So there were roughly 2,300,000 federal civilian employees on day one when President Trump took office. Today, we're just about 2,000,000. So we've reduced by close to 300,000 people the size of the federal government, which puts the federal government at the lowest level it's been as a percentage of the workforce since, like, 1960. And you literally have to go back to Clinton Gore before you have anywhere even close to that. The numbers that president has is much higher, but still, like, that's the last time he had any serious effort. So part of it is, look, the entire apparatus of government is... Travels in one direction only, which is budgets get get... Just get bigger every year. Every time an agency wants to do something new, they go back to congress, they say, great. He wants to do that thing? Give us more headcount to do it. So, like, that's been the path of, like, travel basically for the last, I don't fifty years probably or something like that. So the way I think about what Elon did was, like, Elon had to come in and to... Like, change the direction of a 2,300,000 person, like, oil tanker, you can't do gradual incremental stuff. Like, you have to have a big bang approach. Right? Now people can argue and debate about his tactics, and it's it's fair. I think there's, you know, there's fair arguments to have on to have on both sides. But, like, the idea that you had to have someone come in with a mission and actually try to, like, do some serious change, like, I don't think there's any argument that you could ever make the change that we did without effectively like a big bank strategy. Look, he got a lot of shit for it. Lots of people got a lot of shit for it. And, you know, look, history will will will write a story about that one. What we're trying to do now, like, when I came in was... I was like, great. All the... They did all this work. Now we have to institutionalize this. That's kind of how I think about my role, which is, okay, like, Ivan, Steve Davis, all these guys did an amazing job of breaking glass, basically, and saying, like, this is how things are gonna be. Now we have to do the long term institutionalization of it, which means we have to now go through and say, great. Are you actually working on?
00:46:26 · Scott Kupor, David Senra
Tell me the 20 things you're working on. Which ones are really important? Which ones should we not be doing? We never take stuff off the plate in government. We just keep adding. [00:46:35] S1: This inertia- It is.... Is insane. [00:46:38] S2: It's crazy. [00:46:38] S1: The story of you oversee retirement benefits We overall, were on the phone the other day, and you told me a story I just could not believe. We were talking about the fact that, Hey, know what? America's full of dynamic, really smart, high agency young people that don't even know this is a path and this is an opportunity, and maybe we should just shine a light on this and maybe be beneficial regardless of what you think. If you have a choice between a better functioning government or not, you're going to choose that. It has to do with the people that are in that organization. But then you're like, Do you know about the mind full of 4,000,000 pages of documents? [00:47:17] S2: 400,000,000. I'm like, [00:47:20] S1: Scott, what the hell are you talking about? I know. Can you tell the story?
00:47:23 · Scott Kupor
[00:47:23] S2: It's a great it's a great story. So... And and credit to Elon, right, because Elon made this story a real one. So we, OPM, manage retirement. So roughly 100,000 to 200,000 people retire every year from government. And when you retire, there's a whole process. Right? You have to fill out a bunch of paperwork. It has to go to your HR department who has to confirm it. One of the, like, literally crazy problems, by the way, in government is we do not have the canonical history of your government service until you literally decide to retire. So most people, to this day, are in government for thirty plus years. They go to different agencies over time. Each of those agencies has different HR systems, has different payroll systems, and so I cannot look at, you know, David's record and say, Hey, you spent five years here, and you spent this. Literally, part of the retirement process is we have to create that record. Now, we're changing that. By the way, one of the other big projects that I'm gonna come back to the mind is we are consolidating the entire HR IT system in government from 120 different systems into a single system, and we're going go from spending $2,000,000,000 a year to $40,000,000 a year. We're literally going save 95% by actually getting to a single system, and we will now have the record of David Senra that you can look at every day and see all the stuff. So anyways, you want to retire. What you did prior to last year was you literally filled out paperwork, you put a fucking stamp on it, you mailed it by mail to your HR department. Okay? They did their stuff. They put a stamp on it. They mailed it to a payroll department, which is different, by the way, in the federal government from the HR department. Payroll is a totally separate thing. And then the final piece is they mail it literally to an underground mine in Boyers, Pennsylvania. Now, probably here has ever heard of Boyers, Pennsylvania. It actually happens to be in Butler County, which is where, you know, the president's assassination attempt in July, I guess, of '24 was. It's what you would expect, like, you know, rural Middle America looks like. The federal government happens to be actually one of largest employers out there. So people go to work every day in an underground mine that used to be an actual working limestone mine.