Speaker 1: And we are back with another edition of the Federalist
Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle, Senior Elections correspondent at the Federalist,
and your experienced sure put on today's quest for Knowledge.
As always, you can email the show at radio at
the Federalist dot com, follow us on x at FDR LST,
make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast, and
of course to the premium version of our website as well.
Our guest today is Sean Davis, the Sean Davis CEO
and co founder of The Federalist. On the Making of
the Doge, There are some things you may not know
about Sean Davis. First, he rocks literally first rate guitarist.
Sean is the American Jeff Beck of the American Conservative movement,
and I mean that sincerely. He also, many years ago
wrote the law that you could say created the first
department of government efficiency, or at least it provided the
Doge the tools and the tools that the taxpayers were
able to use for many years now to audit their
own government. Sean, thank you so much for joining us
on this edition to the Federalist Radio Hour.
Speaker 2: Well, that was a very generous introduction. Thank you.
Speaker 3: I don't know if Jeff Beck is going to appreciate it,
but I certainly did.
Speaker 1: Well, what's he going to say about it now? Huh yeah, yeah, absolutely,
we'd have to have a seance to get his opinion
on this on that front. But to the point of generosity,
the American taxpayer, we find out in recent weeks, thanks
to the DOGE, has been extremely generous with all kinds
of insane programs and initiatives paid out to all kinds
of countries. And it's just so head scratching. Take us
back because many years ago you were working in a
senator's office and a conversation came up about how do
we let America know just how much waste, fraud, and
abuse is in their government?
Speaker 2: Yeah, the great question.
Speaker 3: So years ago I worked for Tom Coburn, who is
a great senator from Oklahoma, who's an obstetrician, delivered babies
as a living felt called to go try and save
the country in Washington, and what he cared about more
than anything else was rooting out unconstitutional and indefensible spending.
So that was our entire mission in his office. I
was his chief investigator, and we were going we were
doing oversight and investigation on a particular USAID grant or
contract and I want to say this was an.
Speaker 2: Four, would have been five or six.
Speaker 3: And I think at the time USAID was funding literal
sex trafficking through a particular contractor grant. It's been almost
twenty years sot the exact details are I don't have
at the tip of my tongue. And as happened a
lot back then and still now, we would send lots
and lots of letters to every agency asking them for
information on this grant or that grand what they were doing,
who approved it, where the money was going, and they
just ignored us. They lied to us, they misled us,
and we were sitting around and at one point I said, well,
you know, why don't we just make them put it
all online. If they're just gonna lie to us and
ignore us and non answer letters from Senator, we should
just make them put it all online and then we
won't even have to deal with them anymore. We can
just go to a website and find it. And that
was the genesis of USA Spending dot gov. So in
early two thousand and six I wrote the legislation for that,
we introduced it, and I think April of six. It
was called the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of
two thousand and six. I think it was S. Twenty
five ninety in the one hundred and ninth Congress, is
my guest, but again I might be one or two
off there. So we introduced it in April of two
thousand and six. Barack Obama was the chief original co
sponsor of it, as was John McCain. We had a
great bipartisan coalition of people who just knew that the
games that had been the government was playing with spending
couldn't go on forever, and had a lot of momentum
for it.
Speaker 2: I think we had forty five.
Speaker 3: Or fifty co sponsors, nearly the majority of the Senate.
We got it through committee and then to it came
to a standstill. And this is I think a fascinating
story of the power of the people and the power
of a media when it's doing its job. Two senators
put what are known as called secret holds on the bill.
Any senator has the ability by right as a senator
to object to any one thing or any one person
passing by unanimous consent. And then once you put a
hold or announce your intent to do to block unanimous consenter.
You see that it creates all kinds of issues in
the Senate. You have to go through all sorts of
hurdles and through all sorts of obstacles that just make
it really difficult to find floor time to pass things.
And so we started a pr campaign at that time
involving the public the media to find out who these
senators were blocking such a common sense bipartisan spending transparency bill,
and lo and behold, people were calling their senator's office
every day demanding to know who it was, and eventually
Ted Stevens and Robert Burr fest up secret holds which
had never People don't understand how crazy that was. That
had never happened. And for us to have rolled both
Ted Stevens and Robert Byrd, the granddaddy's of federal overspending
and federal appropriations in the Senate, I mean, no one
came close to the power that they had on spending.
So the fact that we were able, with the help
of the public to roll them, it still astounds me
to this day. It never should have happened, and it
eventually passes. We had a companion bill in the House
that passed and then I think on September twenty six
six it was passed by both houses and signed into law.
And I actually have a copy of the bill in
my office behind me on the wall. They call them
red lines, their kind of fancy ceremonial treatments of past bills.
And because Ted Stevens was the President pro tim at
the time, he had to sign the bill. So every
day when I come into work and get ready to
sit down at my desk, I look at that and
it makes me laugh that not only did we beat
Ted Stevens, we forced him to sign the law he
tried to block, and that's what ended up creating USA
spending dot gov.
Speaker 2: The thing in that that.
Speaker 3: I'm actually most proud of is we were able to
enact that and get it created and implemented and put
online without appropriating a single new dollar for it. We
forced them to find money within the budget I think
O andb ended up taking money out of like an
interagency budget line item to fund it. So yeah, we
were able to build that without spending a new dime
of spending. And so if you've ever used USA spending
dot gov, you've got Tom Coburn in his courage for
making that happen.
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know the inside stuff that went into this, I don't
think most people know about. You said a couple of
things that surprised me along the way. You said, a
Barack Obama then senator, was involved in this very very
important piece of legislation, and you said that corporate media
at the time was doing its job. Man, some things
have changed over the years. Av Me Sean. I mean,
it's remarkable to me, first and foremost that maybe Senator
Barack Obama didn't have the kind of sway with the
left that he certainly has had since. But you would
think that Democrat senators would be any reflecting at the
altar of Barack Obama on anything that he did at
the time. But that simply was not the case, was it.
Speaker 3: No, And he was different as a senator than he
became as president. He was always liberal. He was a
tried and true Democrat. He was pretty easy to work with,
and oddly enough, my experience as a budget staffer in
the Senate for for kind of a firebrand anti spending republican,
we generally found a better cooperation from Democrats at that
time than we did from Republican leadership. Republican leadership in
the Senate had to be dragged, kicking and screaming to
even do the most basic of oversight or spending cuts.
So we had a we had a good working relationship
with Obama and his staff, and it helped that.
Speaker 2: It was good for him. So it was he.
Speaker 3: Wasn't just doing that out of the goodness of his
heart and the purest of fiscal intentions.
Speaker 2: He knew he was going to run for pre isn't it.
Speaker 3: He wanted to build up an image of himself as
a bipartisan coalition builder. So at the time everyone won.
You know, we were able to get some Democrat support
and bipartisan help on that, and then he was able
to at least at the time, establish himself as a
bipartisan coalition builder. Unfortunately, that didn't end up extending to
his tenure in the White House, But you know.
Speaker 2: What can you do?
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, it must have broken the heart of Robert
Byrd though having to eventually sign on to a bill
that a black senator supported.
Speaker 3: I actually don't know what it would have offended him
more having to go along with a black senator or
having to do anything that might lead to spending reductions.
Speaker 2: I think it's a coin flip.
Speaker 1: Well, you know this, it's so important, it really is.
I mean, you want to talk about transparency and government
and out flash fast forward low these twenty years, and
this was something that was you know this website. It
was so essential for a lot of organizations across this
country to be able to track where taxpayer dollars were going.
And now we have Doge basically using these fundamentals doing
an audit on criminal I've said this many times, criminally
wasteful spending. And you have the left absolutely up in
arms on an issue that Americans, the vast majority of
American support. How did we get here in America today?
Speaker 3: Yeah, So it's interesting you asked about the media back then.
I actually think one of the reasons we were able
to use the media to be helpful is that So
this was twenty six, this was before the election, This
is before the total bloodbath against congressional Republicans due to
a lot of congressional corruption, but mostly what was going
on with the war in Iraq. It had become just
a total disaster. So because we had all Republican government
at the time, the media saw it is a useful
way to go after Republicans and especially the Bush administration,
and and so that gave us a lot of wind
in the sales that had we been arguing for those
tools against the Democrat administration, I don't think the media
or Democrats would have would have ever gone along with it.
And even as partisan as things were back then, it's
nothing compared to now. You know, if Trump says, you know,
the sun rises in the east, there will be fact
checks out saying, actually, idiot, the sun doesn't rise at all.
And Trump doesn't understand physics and he, you know, he
should probably read up on some Galileo. They would do
that whole thing, all that nonsense. If he says good
morning and it just hit noon, they would call him,
you know, a dementia adult liar who can't even tell time.
That's just the environment where in now, unfortunately, the left
is reflexively against anything Republicans or Trump do, not just
to the detriment of the country, but to their own
detriment as a party. But I want to talk about
the Doge thing for a minute, because it illustrates to
me the power of using new technology and young new
energy to go do things to save America. So when
I was on the hill and we did oversight an
investigation of waste, we would open appropriations bills, or we
would open up a bunch of documents, and we would
personally read through every single page, in every single line.
I mean, I spent probably years of my life doing
nothing but reading approach bills line by line and categorizing
them and putting them into Excel and all that. The
new generation doesn't have to do that, Like these whiz
kid engineers who know how to do database engineering and
software engineering, excuse me. Elon has unleashed them and they're
doing stuff that's just beyond my comprehension and how they're
finding the waste and organizing it. And it's totally inspiring
to me to see it because they're using tools I
don't know how to use. They have skills that I
don't have. And to see them using all this new
stuff and to see all the energy they have, I mean,
these are like nineteen twenty twenty year old kids. To
see them accomplish what they're accomplishing, I just think it's
pretty cool. If you had told two thousand and five
me that the richest man on earth would be deploying
an army of engineers to go and root out all
the waste that we were desperately trying to stop twenty
years ago.
Speaker 2: I would have said you were nuts.
Speaker 3: So it's kind of surreal to watch it happen.
Speaker 1: It's pretty cool.
Speaker 4: There's a specific reason why some of these politicians hate
Elon Musk. Elizabeth Warren claims she doesn't accept donations from
big Pharma. Not only does she collect money, she collects
more than anyone else does. And the person next in line,
Bernie Sanders. Check out the Watchdog on Wall Street podcast
on Apple, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: I think it's cool. I think it's fascinating to look
at what the left is doing and how their heads
are exploding over this group of young bucks out there
doing exactly what you're talking about, when they have been
so conflicted over the last several years in this country.
You know, we're supposed to follow the Greta Thunberg's of
the World, the youth movement when it comes to climate change.
At the same time, they had a doddering, old, demented
fool as the President of the United States their standard bearer.
This is a party that is absolutely in the wilderness.
They don't know what to attack, they don't know what
to do, they don't know really what they ultimately stand for.
But back to your point, seeing what the young engineers
for Elon Muskin Doze you're doing. They've got all these
new tools, but what is really interesting to me is
they're using the stuff, the pioneering stuff that you and
your team put together to find and root out this waste.
And I think corruption in our government.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's at least made it a lot easier because
when we started doing this, there was a whole hodgepodge
of different databases and ways of storing information. I think
there was FPDSDOD which was a nightmare fads fads and
I'm blanking on what what.
Speaker 2: That stood for.
Speaker 3: But there were just these databases spread around everywhere. Each
agency had its own. They were not the kind of
things that were like searchable through an API. Some agencies
and departments would just have spreadsheets that they were manually
entering stuff into, and that was what passed for high
quality data. I will say that that despite everything we
tried to do and enacted that, the government still is
not properly implementing that law. One of the main reasons
we did it wasn't just to get top line grant
and contract data. It was to figure out what was
happening after the C three or organization that got the money,
what happened to the money after that, because in the
early two thousands, what they would do is you'd have
the government give the money to grantee a say, give
them a million dollars, and then they go spend it.
The government only knew what they were doing based on
what they said, like, oh yeah, well, you know, we
spent it on good stuff, don't worry. And what we
forced them to do in that law was to track
subgrants and subcontracts so that they couldn't play this little
shell game where the government sends it to one group
they can do whatever they want because there's no tracking
after that. The sub awards and subgrants and subcontracts. That
was the holy grail that we had wanted to capture,
and to this day, the government is still playing games
with it. The particular linguistic game they're playing now is, oh, well,
if we give the grant to grantee A and they
sub grant it, and then that entity subgrants it, well,
that's two levels, and you only said we needed to
do one, so sorry, which is you know that's actually
not in the law. They are interpreting what I consider
to be pretty clear language about how you're supposed to
track the flow in ways that make it easy for
them to send out money and not be accountable for it.
Data quality is still a huge issue. They're exempting all
kinds of transactions from showing up in USA spending dot gov,
which they have no authority to do. So it's awesome
that that has been the foundation for what they're doing.
There's still so much work to be done, and hopefully
in this Congress we'll see some people go in and
actually force the federal government to do what it's required
to do by law, and that means tracking every single dime,
not just the stuff they feel like tracking.
Speaker 1: Indeed, our guest today is Sean Davis, CEO and co
founder of the Federalist and Grabs you didn't know this,
but he was there with Sandra Coburn years and years ago,
back almost twenty years ago, putting together what became WW
That's what we used to say back in the day. Www.
Dot USA spending, dot GUV, a Google like search engine
that allows every citizen to see how their tax dollars
are being spent and where, and Sean, you know what
it did for me. I'm old enough. This is how
old I am. I remember a time when journalists used
to love going into these kinds of files and catching
government bad actors abusing taxpayer dollars for whatever their motivations
might be. This really helped journalists, journalists who really wanted
to do the work of watchdog, I think as much
as anybody.
Speaker 3: Oh, it absolutely did. And I've always had kind of
the mind and itch of an investigator. I've never trusted
stuff that I only hear from sources. You know, journalists
love to just hear something from sources and that's it
and they go with it. I have always loved source documents,
like going back to my days as an intern, going
back to being a chief investigator or for doctor Coburn,
because documents generally don't lie. Now, you have to interpret
them correctly. You have to understand the context. But what
the document says it says, and what the numbers say
or what they say, you can't really mess with them.
And to see journalists now have no curiosity. You know,
we gave them a gold mine of information to go into,
and if a Republican's president, they can use it to
smack Republicans, and if a Democrats president, they can use
it to smack Democrats. It's a wonderfully bipartisan tool. It
has no ideology. And yeah, there used to be a
time where really good journalists all they wanted to do
was go sit down with you stack of documents they
got from sources, go through spending receipts, look at billing
invoices and all that stuff that there's just so much
amazing information you can get in there. They're their own
treasure maps, essentially. And it's just so interesting to see
now how incurious so many corporate journalists are. All they
want to do is repeat whatever deep state goon tells
them that they know is probably not true, but it
helps them create a narrative. And that's all they care
about anymore. All they care about is the narrative. They
don't care about the facts or the data, even though
we gave them a tool that didn't cost them a
dime to do what journalists should do, and so many
of them just ignore it.
Speaker 1: Mendy. It's painfully obvious, particularly with this story and the
corporate accomplished media's. You know, the way they handled the
first opening weeks of the Trump administration not surprising to anyone.
I'll close with this briefly. We were talking about surprises
at the outset of our conversation. One thing that did
surprise me when you said there were two senators who
would not go along with this transparency bill, and when
you said their names, that didn't surprise me. Robert Bird,
Ted Stevens again, as you noted, notorious for big government,
big time spending. I almost thought you were going to
say Joe Biden was one of the holdouts, not the case.
Speaker 3: Huh No, No, it definitely wasn't him. It was the
two big appropriators, because what we were doing was a
gigantic threat to appropriations, because once people could see how
they were spending their money, they were going to call shenanigans.
I'm trying to remember if Biden was even a co sponsor.
I know Tom Carper was his colleague from Delaware because
he was on the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee
with Coburn, and they generally had.
Speaker 2: A pretty good relationship.
Speaker 3: We had a decent relationship at the staff level with
their people, and I think Carper was one of the
first ones on. I genuinely don't remember if Biden was
a co sponsor, but he certainly didn't get in the
way at the time. He was busy being obsessed with
all his I'm sure not corrupt at all Horn Relations
Committee projects.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the big guy needed to get paid. We know that.
At the end of the day, I really appreciate it.
I think this is tremendously important to look back at
the roots of what's going on today Without this, and
I think so many ways, I don't know if we
have the kind of audits that we're seeing today. It's
just it's a remarkable time in America.
Speaker 2: It is God bless America.
Speaker 3: And it's also awesome to see a bunch of whiz
kids going at it. You have the Democrats get mad. Oh,
these are just kids. They're twenty twenty two years old.
Those people at that age do impossible things because they
don't think they're impossible. They haven't yet been told by
the world that they can't do that, or you're not
allowed to do that, or that's not how things work.
And you know, it's that age group of people that
helped found this country. A lot of the founders were
in their twenties when they came over and started agitating
to give us our independence. So I think it's really
inspiring seeing people of that generation going in and doing
things people are trying to tell them is impossible, and
being led by a guy who decided he was going
to relaunch rockets and then catch them with chopsticks. So
it's just amazing things happening in America right now.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, look what the cruel is the cruel tables doing
New York Magazine crop this right What Sean Davis was
talking about was absolutely so critical. What is so important
about the DOGE, the Department of Government efficiency, What the
accomplice media and the leftist screen about it constantly miss
is the fact that this is your money. This is
the American taxpayer's money, and we are talking about hundreds
upon hundreds of billions of dollars being wasted in your
name on all kinds of strange programs. I wrote about
this in a piece for the Federalists called Doge is
Deadly to the Swamp and a ray of light for
the American taxpayer. And I firmly believe that we are
getting a much better look at the cancer that is
killing this republic, this criminally wasteful and abusive spending of
our money. The Doge is proving to be a pretty
powerful MRI. I say that because think about it this way.
A doctor tells her sick patient, I've got good news
and bad news. You have an aggressive form of cancer,
but I think we can make you better. Stunning news,
but thank god, there's hope, right, there's a way forward.
Instead of being relieved, though, imagine the patient furiously denying
the diagnosis and screaming at the doctor, how dare you,
in the parlance Gretathundberg, how dare you tell me I
have cancer? I don't have cancer. You're the one who's sick.
It's basically what we're hearing from the left, the prof
depress and a Democrat party doubling down on insanity. As
the Department of Government Efficiency begins detailing the diseases sickening
the body politic and devouring taxpayer dollars. I mean, it
is absolutely stunning to me to see the Left and
its army of accomplish media reporters talk about and rail
against how awful it is that the American people see
the abusive spending that is going on on all kinds
of insane programs and initiatives. I mean, we are talking
about programs that just defy absolute logic. And just think
about what the average American earns, particularly in very difficult
inflationary times over the last few years in this country,
and how those earnings by inflation have been basically siphoned out.
And yet we have the spending on the sorts of programs,
the DEI programs, the programs, the funding in Guatemala for
sex changes. My colleague Tristan Justice did a great job
at looking into these kinds of programs where you're seeing
money spent all over the world and as we note,
millions upon millions of dollars paying for corporate media outlets
to favorably cover the government that is so badly spending
your money. These are remarkable times. These are critical times,
and you're going to hear a lot more of the
gnashing of teeth from the left and their partners in
the public relations firm known as corporate media. It is
absolutely critical that news organizations like The Federalist and others
keep shining a light on the light that the Doge
is shining again. I want to thank my guest today,
Davis CEO and co founder of The Federalist. You have
been listening to another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour.
I'm Matt Kittle, senior elections correspondent at The Federalist. We'll
be back soon with more. Until then, stay lovers of
freedom and anxious for the frame