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 experience shirpa 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 the premium version of our website as well. Our
guest today is John Hart, CEO of Government spending tracker
Open the Books. As The Federalist reported this week, Open
the Book's deep dive into a Department of Health and
Human Services documents shows an explosion in state administered Medicaid
payments to in home service provider personal assistant. Those areas
a surging industry fraud with fraud. John, thank you so
much for joining us. I know you have been extremely
busy of late.
Speaker 2: Well, Matt, thank you so much for having me on again.
And unfortunately it is a very deep pool.
Speaker 3: Of waste that we have to dive in, but we're
glad to.
Speaker 2: Get the scuba gre on and shine a light in
these dark crevices of the federal bureocracy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you've got some sea creatures, some real leviahs going
down there.
Speaker 3: If we could go with this analogy all day, I
think we could.
Speaker 1: But monstrosities, yeah, no doubt. You know the area that
I think is just amazing. Payouts to personal assistance services
have ballooned nationally between twenty and eighteen and twenty twenty four.
Over that seven year period. It's amazing what you folks
have found. Tell us a little bit about your findings
and where all of this information is coming from.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, well, first of all, I give a lot of
credit to DHS. They dropped an unprecedented amount of data
to help with public transparency a few few weeks ago,
and it included two hundred and seventy million payments made
to Medicaid from twenty eighteen to twenty twenty four. So
we did a big review of that, and there's different
entities have been looking at this. Doctor Oz has done
a great job of, you know, drilling down into California
and he's been very very outspoken in those areas. But
one of the unusual cases or states and case studies
we found is Pennsylvania. We found that that Pennsylvania's Personal
assistant service received a more than ten thousand percent increase
since twenty eighteen.
Speaker 1: Just amazing.
Speaker 2: Either there was a ten thousand percent increase in demand
or people figured out how to gain the system and
understand so that this big opening left for fraudsters was
exploited in very grotesque ways. And you're and your reported
a great job of really highlighting you know, one of
those schemes, which was a mL Patel. He was charged
with wirefraud, you know, fifty nine year old who milked
billions out of out of the Medicaid system by setting
up essentially ghost home health care services. And that was interesting,
is you know, this is this is the home health
issue is something that you know, I remember when I
worked for Coburn in the House and the Senate. This
was this is a known problem for twenty five thirty
years and longer. And so we really have to step
back because there's there's so much detail in our report
and what you know, uh, doctor Oz is highlighting And
the real question is why why have we set up
a system that simply invites people to defraud it to
the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year,
and and and the and the answer really is that
the incentive structure is really set up to be defrauded.
And you know, as I always talk about the Milton
Friedman box, you know, there's four ways to spend money.
You spend money on yourself, you spend your money on
someone else, or someone else's money on yourself. But the
least efficient of those four is you spend someone else's
money on someone else. And government that is that that's
what government does. And so the reason we have a
constitution that limited the size of the scope of government
is because the founders, who are very learned people in
touch with reality, understood that the incentive structures within government
were always going to be susceptible to misbehavior, corruption, fraud,
and that's why they wanted to limit the size of
government and concentrate it in the hands of we the people,
and keep it closest to the people they represented, particularly
the states. And so instead of instead of following that example,
we've allowed the administrative state to believe and over the
past hundred years, so now we have these massive, gargantuan
federal agencies and then we wonder why there's so much
fraud and and so I think it's I really commend
the administration for shining a light on this, and you know,
for the President to elevate jd Vance's you know, as
as the anti fraud person in chief, if you will,
And and so that's that's it's an important step because
the but but it sort of raises the question of well,
you can you can only go so far getting rid
of the fraud. You have to you have to use
the debate about the fraud to really tackle the systemic
problem we have, which is again these massive entitlement programs
that that I believe are too they're too big to succeed.
We have we have a federal government that is too
big to succeed. And yes, we need to go after
the fraud, we need to eliminate it. But in the
process of doing that, I hope we get to this
bigger conversation of how are we really going to get
our get our arms wrapped around on the safety net
problem we have that's the cause of our unsustainable debt
and deficits, which is a threat to our national and
economic security as a country.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I do too, John, you mentioned it before, But
I mean, this is something we have been dealing with
for a long time, and no surprise, you know, since
we have seen the rapid expansion of the administrative state,
the bureaucratic state, from the Wilson era of course, going
all the way back to the turn of the twentieth century.
But you know, we've talked about this before. I grew
up in Wisconsin and there was a senator there maybe
the last Democrat who was conscientious about government spending. His
name was William Proxmyer. He used to have the Golden
Fleece Awards talking about wasteful and fraudulent, abusive spending, some
of the worst examples of that of all time. And
you know that was an award that he gave out
from seventy five to the late eighties. We are still
dealing with that, and look at what is happening in
Minneapolis and Minnesota these days, and that is just the
tip of the iceberg. So do you think we really
are at a point now to finally deal with the
systemic problems of the massive welfare give outs and how
the incentives work to incentivize fraud.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Look, you know, I'm always a glass half full person.
I'm always optimistic about how these you know, findings can
lead to bigger systemic reform and part of the reason
I'm optimistic is this is part of my lived experience.
Speaker 3: This isn't sort of happy talk, pie in the sky thinking.
Speaker 2: And you know, back back in the you know, when
Comberan was in the Senate, we went after the famous
Bridge to Nowhere earmark, you know, in two thousand and five,
and he lost that vote eighty two to fifteen, by
sixty seven votes.
Speaker 3: So you know, he was he was quote.
Speaker 2: You know, blown out by the ear Mark caucus.
Speaker 3: But that that defeat really set us up for victory.
Speaker 2: And what we saw was, you know, we won that battle,
or it lost the battle, but we ended up winning
the war because it galvanized public support. And the argument
we made at the time is that earmarks are the
gateway drug to Washington spending addiction. And in order to
in order to really get things done within our system,
you have to be willing to make incremental wins and
taking incremental gains. Now getting rid of fraud itself. It's
an enormous We're talking way more than the ear mark problem.
You know, we're talking in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Speaker 3: You know, the.
Speaker 2: GAO estimates the federal government loses between two hundred and
thirty three billion and five hundred and twenty billion in
fraud every year. So it's a massive problem. But even
that's only about a third of our of our deficit spending.
And so my hope is that as as we you know,
talk about these individual examples that you highlighted in your
in your story, you know, the case of Pennsylvania, and
we give people the big picture look at the scope
of medicaid payments, and you know, we also described how
medicaid payments have gone from about one hundred and ten
billion dollars since twenty eighteen two one hundred and eighty
five billion, but the number of claims has been you know,
actually less roughly the same. So we've seen the you
all throughout government, you see these big deltas where you know,
the numbers of claims tend to be the same, but
then the spending is way way up. And so again
part of the explanation is that it's just fraudulent people
figure out how to game the system, because we've created
a system that invites itself to be gained. And so
I am helpful that that, you know, Vice President, other
people who are taking this problem seriously will understand that,
you know, it's not enough to.
Speaker 3: Just talk about the fraud. We need to deal with
the systemic problem. And the other thing that.
Speaker 2: People will tell you privately that they'll very rarely admit
on the record is that most well, I'm not going
to say most, I'm going to say many, many members
and many very senior people in administration understand.
Speaker 3: They agree with everything we're saying right now.
Speaker 2: In other words, they understand that there's not enough fraud
in the system to really fix the entitlement problem. But
they believe, and I think correctly, that the public will
not trust them or anyone in Washington to fix the
really big problems if you're not willing to fix the
little problems or the small ms. And it's and it's
it's a biblical principles. Whoever is faithful with a little
will be faithful with much. Whoever is dishonest with a
little will be dishonest with much. And so you have
to win people's trust and confidence by dealing with things
like earmarks, by dealing with things like the stupidity of
the examples that we highlighted in Pennsylvania, and then you
set yourself up to really make the big reforms, and
you'll have a constituency of change.
Speaker 3: Ready to back you up with those really hard votes.
Speaker 1: One of the biggest problems has been forever is that
there's an acceptance of this right. I mean, you have
not only lawmakers, but a jaded American public. They're like, well,
I guess that's just part of a deal. And that's
you know, that's what surrounds that's what you get when
you have corruption basically, and laziness as part of the
corruption as well. But a lot of people are making
a lot of money off of this failed, fraudulent system
you mentioned. You know, this is not just a Pennsylvania problem,
although the issue is obviously very big, which happens to
be doctor Oz's home state, if you will, at least
it was when he was running for Senate back in
twenty twenty two. But you know, you look at New
York and you point this out in your report. This
is I think something that should raise some eyebrows and concerns.
Certainly in New York. The elderly and disabled may hire
friends and family to serve as in home personal care assistance.
You know, those who take care of the elderly and disabled.
As we mentioned provide you know, basic services for them.
That's big Medicaid payout area funded by taxpayer money, Lots
and lots. The scheme is especially popular in New York State,
which has seen seventy two point seven billion dollars in
such spending from twenty eighteen to twenty twenty four, according
to the OTB analysis. Now that's a lot of money.
And there are just egregious, notable examples of fraud in
that system. So why do we have that kind of
system if it is just so tied in, it's just
so Yeah, fraud is so intrinsic to it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, again it goes back to what's what I
was just saying.
Speaker 2: I think the way to change it is literally doing
what we're doing right now, is because we're we're highlighting
the examples. You know, in our report we talked about
you know, there's one hundred and twenty million dollar kickback
scam with something called the Royal Edate daycare Facility and
Flushing Queens where you it actually bribed patience to enroll.
Speaker 3: And so it's sort of different layers of fraud. It's like,
it's absurd the degrees people go to.
Speaker 2: But they when they're making When the incentives are there
to make millions of dollars, people will do extraordinary things
to get that money, and they do and when they
feel like they're going to get away with it. And
so simply by doing the reporting, doing the oversight, capturing
the data that we do and then people like you
actually you know, publishing, that's that's part of the process
of of.
Speaker 3: Of fixing it. And you have to get people, you know.
Speaker 2: The thing The thing with with you know, as you
know well, is that the art of getting things done
and change is getting people mad about the right things.
It's getting them really focused in and uh animated about
about issues that are really going to affect their lives.
Speaker 3: And they do affect their lives.
Speaker 2: And when you when you're competing with all this other
noise and nonsense on on TikTok or whatever, uh, you
have to be able to cut through. And I give
I get you know, Nick Shirley has done a brilliant
job obviously in Minnesota with the quote leering centers.
Speaker 1: They have a lot to leer in Minnesota, yes and so, and.
Speaker 3: That exists all over the country.
Speaker 2: But it's one thing to sort of talk about it
abstractly it's another thing to go in and document.
Speaker 3: And that's and again that's part of.
Speaker 2: Why it was so valuable for DHS to do to
do the data done, because in some ways they're all
like admitting, look, we know this problem is bigger then
we can. We don't even have the staff to understand
and get our arms wrapped around it. And by the way,
that was the whole impetus too, of the Cobra and
Obama bill to put all government spending online. We wanted
to create an ecosystem that would crowdsource oversight because the
task was so enormous that our oversight team in Washington
couldn't possibly understand every area of government.
Speaker 3: That there was to identify.
Speaker 2: And so that's so that's really how change happened. So
I am optimistic because when when normal people see this information,
they get their hands on it, they hear about it,
they you know, they kick the tires on the data
and realize, wow, these people really are are authentic. They're
dealing in an evidence based world. They're not dealing with
simply hyperbole and propaganda and nonsense.
Speaker 3: And you can go look up the data yourself and
double check it all.
Speaker 2: Then then you start to build momentum, and and you
know there's there's plenty of periods in our history really
when that succeeded, you know, the Tea Party movement. You know,
we successfully reduce spending for at least a time.
Speaker 3: And I think that.
Speaker 2: Can be that constituency is ready to be reanimated and redeployed,
if you will, for this problem.
Speaker 1: I think so. I think people are very angry about
what is happening in Minnesota. It's hard to miss that story,
even as the accomplice media has done its best to
shift attention or not cover that story. But this is
this is something that's you know, just bursting at the seams.
As a matter of fact, related to that story in Minnesota,
you have the headline today that Governor Tim Walls Democrat.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walls laid out his anti fraud legislative
package one day after the White House paused two hundred
and fifteen nine million dollars in federal medicaid payments to
the state until a comprehensive action plan is laid out
to fight fraud. That from CBS News reporting. Let me
ask you this, though, John Waltz, dealing with fraud isn't
Tim Walls pushing anti fraud measures, kind of like JB.
Pritzker handing out diet tips.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, I think that's I think that's true. Yeah yeah, Look.
Speaker 3: He had he you know, he had his moment. If
he was serious about this, this never would have become
a story.
Speaker 2: And and in Minnesota, I think, sadly, the the the
entire system was gained and rigged to be exploited and
used as a patronage vehicle. And that's you know, he's paid,
He's paying the price for that, and he deserves to.
But let that, let let that be a cautionary tale
for anyone, any governor, any public official around the country
that if you play games with this, that the technology
is moving so far asked that you are.
Speaker 3: Not going to be able to keep this hidden.
Speaker 2: And the Minnesota case was interesting too because I'm you know,
I'm on the board of a group called the State
Financial Officers Foundation.
Speaker 3: And one of the one of the really.
Speaker 2: Dumb things Minnesota did is get they got rid of
their Treasurer's office. You know, I'm typically ninety nine percent
of the time, I'm in favor of getting rid of offices, no.
Speaker 3: Matter no matter what they're called.
Speaker 2: But when when you if you particularly if you don't
have great transparency laws, the treasure or financial controller can
be the last backstop and protector and make sure that
these things don't happen. And then when you get rid
of these internal checks and balances, you again, you just
you create, you create a system of opacity and.
Speaker 3: Darkness where where bad things are more likely to happen.
Speaker 2: And you know, Governor Walls had plenty of opportunities to
prevent this and he didn't, and he, in fact, he
you know, facilitated it and exploited it.
Speaker 1: Indeed, our guest today is John Hart, CEO of Government
Spending Tracker. Opened the Books a great report out this week.
You can find it on their website at it is
otb dot com.
Speaker 3: Open the books, Yeah, open the books.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 2: Fash Flag sub stack is where you'll get the most
most recent reports.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's good because you can take a look
and you'll see well presented the charts and the graphs
that go along with the explosion of these state operated
medicaid funds that have occurred over a seven year period
through twenty twenty four. But you know, first and foremost,
I look at the Minnesota case, and it seems like
there's no doubt to me that this was driven in
large I shouldn't say large part, but certainly a significant
part of it was driven because of politics. I mean,
this was making sure that can stitch uncs. We're getting
lots and lots of funding so that they could secure votes.
Now they'll tell you something different about that, but that's
what it appears to a lot of Americans, and understandably. So.
So with that said, the question that a lot of
Americans are asking right now, will anybody ever be held
accountable for this or anything for that.
Speaker 3: Matter, Well, I hope so.
Speaker 2: Look, and I think the administration has taking steps obviously
to prosecute fraud more aggressively.
Speaker 3: I think that's absolutely the right thing to do, and
the need.
Speaker 2: They need to target you know, Republicans and Democrats because
there's no there's no innocent side here. But you know,
we hear a lot about, you know, quote protecting democracy,
but often when it's Democrats seeing it, they just want
to protect democrats, not democracy. And I think we're seeing that.
You know, we gave you know, Shapiro's office a chance
to respond and they declined.
Speaker 3: What is that? Why?
Speaker 2: Is why is he not willing to give an answer
provide some context to his own constituents. What does that
say about his level of respect for the people that
he represents, right, So they deserve to be held account
for that, And that's true of governors in any state.
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Speaker 1: Josh Shapiro. Of course, the Pennsylvania Democrat governor, who has
clearly has higher aspirations for higher office, is the answer
to that question, and you don't know it directly from
him or his office because they refuse to answer these
important questions like you know why this category of spending
climb ten thousand percent? I think that's a legitimate question
to ask, and they didn't want to answer it. But
do you think that Josh Shapiro, with his higher political aspirations,
doesn't even want to broach the topic, because if he does,
and groups like yours keep digging, it's going to look
worse and worse for him.
Speaker 3: Absolutely.
Speaker 2: Look, I think it's in his interest and again this
is true for any governor, it's in their interest.
Speaker 3: To get ahead of this.
Speaker 2: And if there was a mistake made, you need to
own it and take responsibility and describe all the ways
you're fixing it. You're not going to be able to
run from it. I mean there's again the technology that's
part of it so exciting. I think we're on the
cusp of a renaissance of citizen led accountability through AI
and technology, and we're doing a whole initiative on that
as well. But he's not going to be able to
sweep this under the rug. I mean, it's too big
of a bump. It's a mountain under the rug that
he's going to be tripping over on his way to his.
Speaker 3: Campaign for President.
Speaker 1: I want to talk about that, the use of AI
in just a bit, because I think that's fascinating and
as you mentioned, it something that you had opened the
books are looking into. But on the radio earlier this week,
I was talking about this issue. In fact, we had
one of your great researchers on the show in Omaha
to talk a little bit more about the report, and
a caller had some interesting ideas on how to deal
with this fraud. One of the things he had mentioned
and I can't intelligently speak to this because I just
don't know how the system is set up, but he
said that we should have specific fraud government fraud courts,
even if you wanted to add waste and keeps in
there as well, but specifically fraud courts like we do
with deportation courts, you know, specifically set up to deal
with this massive problem. Do we have such a thing
anywhere in this country? And what do you think about it?
Do we need such a thing?
Speaker 3: I think that's a I think that's a fantastic idea.
I think it would. I think we need a process.
Speaker 2: To to to expedite the hearings on these issues, but
to also deal with a massive scope of it. I mean,
that's you know, it's clearly an issue with immigration is
there's not there aren't enough people in the system.
Speaker 3: To to you know, deal with all the cases, and
so there are so many.
Speaker 2: Again, it's it's so easy to just it's a mind
numbing amount of waste and fraud that we see. And
so I think that's I think that's a great idea.
And again this is where I'm usually non in favor
of more of more offices, but sometimes you know, money
can be spent, well, if you're preventing far more waste
from from happening as a result.
Speaker 1: How about some of what we see in for instance,
Somalia when opponents are caught engaging about some of that
style of punishment. Well, it is a massive problem and
it's getting bigger. We talk about Minnesota that has been
the spotlight, but there are states where they're going to
make Minnesota look like a piker. California immediately comes to mind.
What have you seen there in terms of medicaid spending growth,
that is to say, this blue state using federal taxpayer
dollars to expand its medicaid programs And what about the
fraud there?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: I mean yeah, California is, you know, sadly the golden
child of all this. We've seen payments balloon one hundred
and twenty seven billion dollars. So and the only state
that's higher with medicaid spending is New York one hundred
and forty two billion. Then Texas at sixty sixty four,
Massachusetts at fifty five, New Jersey forty six. So it's
mostly blue states, but it's a mix of red and
blue based on population. But California has been has been
one of the worst. And again I think with California
in particular, also the home health problem has been has
been out of control there and it's loosening, it's loosening
the requirements, it's making it making it easy for people
to sign up. And so I commend you know, doctor
Oz for for really shining the spotlight on the on
the California cases because it's, you know, it's one of
the biggest population states and you know, it's a uniparty government, sadly, yeah,
very little internal accountability, and people in California are just
are going crazy at then of wasting fraud we see
in their in their state.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's me I listen, let's give Gavin credit.
Gavin Newsom, you know a little bit of sympathy here.
It's very difficult to track this amount of fraud when
you only have a nine to fifty s a t right.
Speaker 2: To commend you for your love, for your compassion. I
think it was nine to sixty.
Speaker 1: Nine mean to undergot him.
Speaker 3: Yes, well, be accurate and open the books.
Speaker 1: Listen, he's just like you and I with his SATs
and so it's difficult to really get into this issue.
You know, I joke around, but you had mentioned before
that Gavin Newsome and Josh Shapiro and any bureaucrat that
wants to try to hide this. It's getting increasingly more difficult,
not just because of the great you know, shoe leather
work that we've seen in Minnesota by an independent reporter.
You're not getting this from the corporate news outlets, which
is again sad, but now you're going to get something
that has been in the works for a long time.
It's called citizen journalism. It goes alongside with independent reporters.
But these are people who are just concerned about spending
in their government. These are the people that attend local
school board and county board meetings. And hearings and they're
getting that information that some of these folks are really
getting good at tracking that. But now AI is here
artificial intelligence that can do all this stuff in a flash. Right,
let me ask you are you are you using artificial
intelligence for this? And is this truly the next wave
of exposing waste, fraud and abuse in government?
Speaker 2: No, Matt, thanks for the quat Absolutely so yeah, I think,
you know, let's step back and think about you know,
people are right to be very concerned about AI and
the use of the technology. But you know, I can
tell you that there is no technology in history that's
ever had a reverse gear.
Speaker 3: And so you know.
Speaker 2: This this bus is moving. So the question is how
do you steer it? And how can we steer it
in such a way that really advances human freedom and flourishing.
And so what we've what we've done in Open the
Books is you know, we've been collecting government spending data
at all levels of government for over a decade and
that's state, federal, and local. And again we were the
Open the Books work was enabled in part by the
cobn Obama Bill that was passed twenty years ago. But
Adam Ajiski the founder wisely figured out that hey, let's
expand that to get to get stay in.
Speaker 3: Local and so so I've.
Speaker 2: Done all you know in the inter years when I
left Coburn and i'm, you know, just decided to take
over from Adam after you passed away. At opened the
books because I work with with Silicon Valley companies and
nonprofits and other other other clients, and I learned that
the secret between A behind AI is an assembly line
of data entry. You need three things to make AI work.
You need big data, you need an algorithm, and you
need processing power.
Speaker 3: So it opened the books. You know, data is like
enriched uranium. You know, you can use it for peaceful
purposes or destructive purposes, and we use it for peasable purposes.
So it's a very very powerful tool.
Speaker 2: So what we're doing, uh, is we're trying to create
what I call the money the moneyball of politics.
Speaker 3: I don't know if you're a baseball fan or if.
Speaker 2: You know the moneyball, right, Okay, so the genius for
people that don't know it. You know, moneyball is about
the Oakland a and how they.
Speaker 3: And Brad Pit, isn't it and Brad Pitt.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Brad wasn't that he was really mean. It's about
the general manager and how they realized how to use
metrics to the advantage of kind of an underdog small
market team. And the genius of what they did is
they didn't go out and do this sort of fake
black magic. Hey, let's make up all these new metrics. Instead,
they looked at data, and they looked at metrics that
were always there but never applied, and they figured out
how to apply them and make the small market team
way more successful than people thought was possible. And so
what AI can do is you take the open the
book's data set and then you merge it with other
publicly available data sets and some that aren't publicly available,
things like measuring economic performance, you know, policy outcomes on
wage growth, education attainment. And then you train an algorithm
to identify the relationships and the structure and the patterns
in the data, and then you do pattern prediction. So
in other words, it's pattern recognition pattern prediction. And as
you put an AI can do all this stuff in
an instant whereas it would take us, you know, twenty
years ago in the Senate, you know, weeks to do
these Excel spreadsheet projects and compare the numbers, and there's
a lot you can do with Excel, but but you
run into kind of a time crunch.
Speaker 3: There's just too much data.
Speaker 2: And so what we're doing is what we're partnering with
with other with other groups, and particularly there's a guy
named Paul Allen, not not the Microsoft founder Paul Allen,
but a guy named Paul Allen who is one of
the co founders of ancestry dot com again, a wildly
successful platform where they captured all the genealogy data to
help people discover their story.
Speaker 1: And this isn't the guy that calls the Minnesota Vikings
games right.
Speaker 2: Now, that's not all right, and so and so what
we're what we're trying to do is, you know, the
way to thwart again, people are right to be worried
of AI and a surveillance state where you give, you
give state, the state the power of this technology they're
going to use to conduct surveillance. Well, the best way
to thwart a surveillance state is with a surveillance citizenry.
And so we're trying to create what we call superintelligent
citizens where we give we don't ask citizens to delegate
their power and authority to a mysterious technology. Instead we
entrust them with the power of that technology. So a
case study is, let's let's say you're at a town
hall meeting. You can you can take your phone and
we're and we're building an app to do this where
you can hold it up and do a live visual
recognition on the politician speaking and then capture their face
and then and you can immediately get a report of
all the contradictions and what they're saying in their voting record,
in the of their of their legislation, and you get
the super intelligent report literally in your palm to make
you a better citizen. And and that's that that that
technology exists, and so that's that's really what we're going
to be focused on, especially this year and in the
near future, or building these tools again to create to
effectively give you know, every citizen their own terminator, robot
or or special investigator by their side so that they
can be they can they can have the power to
hold government accountable.
Speaker 3: And it's it's very exciting. What and again, when when
the that's.
Speaker 2: Why transparency laws are so important, Matt, because when when
the data is out there and searchable, then it can
be used to teach tools like the ones we're building
where in a free society, the challenge is you want
the center of gravity and the authority to always be
with we, the people. That's the whole that was the
whole vision of purpose of our constitution. It's a document
fundamentally about limitation of power. It's not about creating a
permission structure. It's about creating a limitation structure so that
you ensure that the electorate has control over the government.
And technology is one of the ways that we can
make that make sure that happens and is protected for
future generations.
Speaker 1: That's exactly what you were doing with the Coburn and
the exactly Obama Coburn. Bill. I want to ask you
that real quick here and then we get back to AI.
But what do you think Barack Obama thinks of his
creation now loath these movies years later because he, I mean,
this was before he was president, Barack Obama, he was
a senator, worked alongside a very fiscal conservative. You've talked
about this before. The aspiring Barack Obama, who had aspirations
for the presidency, saw this as a great issue to
run on that he was going to be the transparency guy.
But I wonder what he thinks about it all low
these many years later.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I think, And I'm just I'm just
going to do a sort of an ideological psychological assessment
off the cuff here. I think I think people who
are like offically progressive are sort of can be double
minded between On one hand, you want to be a
person who really submits and bends the knee to an
evidence based conversation. But if the evidence based conversation it
becomes an existential threat to your worldview, then people kind
of waffle on their on their belief and evidence based conversation.
I think the modern Democratic Party is has been largely
taken over by what I would call progressive fundamentalists and
which you know, we kind of we've seen on display
at the State of the Union and other places. But sure,
I think I think they're misaligned with the country. I
think I think the average kind of person is this
is a no brain or conversation that they would of
course we want more transparency. Of course we believe that
we should have an evidence based, fact based conversation about politics.
And to me, that's an unstoppable political argument. It's it's
an unstoppable force, and so I think I think Obama
if he's you know, if you're really worried about either
party being taken over by authoritarians, the number one thing
you should support is transparency, and then an evidence based
conversation is it's impossible for bad actors to really take quote,
takeover in a situation where you have an electorate.
Speaker 3: Armed with the truth and armed with data.
Speaker 2: And so I would hope that's he looks back at
this and thinks, gosh, this is pretty inconvenient for a
lot of my favorite causes because the data is coming
in in such a way it's not very favorable to
things like Obamacare.
Speaker 3: I think.
Speaker 2: I think if you want to have an evidence based
conversation about Obamacare, it's going to be hard to defend
the outcomes of that policy. But if you really believe
in democracy and not just democrats, then I think you
have to be excited and very, very optimistic about what
AI and technology is going to do for the future.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Uh, I agree. I just think that they're on
the left right now, and I think that's a great
term progressive fundamentalists. You know, these are folks who are
at war with reality. We certainly see it in a
number of issues and I need to go over them now.
But that's what we're we're at in politics. But the
numbers don't lie. You are a guy who you know,
tries to step back from the rhetoric and the politics
and just focus on the numbers. That's that's your job.
That's what you do. And as far as the the
technologies that you're using AI, that's you know, that is
as you say, it's it's it's in a critical area
to make citizens even more part of you know, the
the process. That said, you still have to go through
the human work of going after the records and you know,
getting the getting the information to put that information into
the system. I don't know if that will ever change.
But where do you see this battle going? You know,
in the future, But where do you see this a
decade from now?
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well I'll talk I'll talk about where I see
it hopefully in the next in the next couple of
weeks and then and then we'll kind of we'll touch
on a decade.
Speaker 3: But sure, I'll tell you that there is.
Speaker 2: There's a there's a move, there's a move afoot and
I hope to have more to share on this very
soon to up to do a serious upgrade to our
transparency laws to create what we call real time transparency.
So one of one of the flaws of USA spending
is that there's a there's too long of a delay
between the time money money flows or goes out the
door and by the time it's reported. It can be
thirty days, sixty days, ninety days, six months and what
And the nature of sort of the struggle between against
centralized power and we the people is that you could
have a great law, but then it gets eroded and
degraded over time, and that there's the sort of unglamorous,
un sexy truth about about a free society is you
have to do maintenance, you have to do hygiene, you
have to make sure you go You go through these
laws every every couple of decades and upgrade them. So
right now we need an upgrade in our transparency laws
because the federal agencies that come up with all kinds
of new ways to not share the data. So there's
a there's a move and members I'm working with to
do a new bill that would effectively demand and require
real time transparency, so that that's that could be a
revolutionary step of making sure again, making it impossible for
any future regime to play hide the ball with the
American people and the more.
Speaker 3: Again, this is.
Speaker 2: All so much of politics as a center of again,
a center of gravity question, because you know, one of
we're in such a dysfunctional Bible time where people just
congregate in their camp and they don't want to think.
They don't want to listen to evidence. They just want
to Again, the progress progressive fundamentalists, they don't they're not many.
I mean, they're not really interested in reason, they're interested
in evidence. They just want they only want to.
Speaker 3: Hear what's going to agree to their worldview.
Speaker 2: And you know, sadly the same is true on the
right you have people who also are not really willing
to rethink what they what people. I just happen to
think that if you look at the evidence, and I'm
very transparent about my biases, it's it's hard to it's
hard to argue for a bigger government. I think when
you look at the evidence, look at the outcomes, you know,
throw me into that fight, throw me into that briar
pitch with anybody. And so so I'm you know, I'm
very very optimistic about where we could be in ten years.
Because once, once people get a taste of agency and
they get a taste of freedom, you want more and
more of it, and and that's that's that's what That's
a beautiful thing of this idea of freedom is that
when you experience it, it becomes part of your life
and you realize, Wow, I actually do have the ability
to hold my elected officials accountable.
Speaker 3: My voice does matter.
Speaker 2: The extra the extra thirty seconds I might spend on
one of our apps or our website, I feel smarter,
I feel more equipped. I want more of that and
that and that whole vision of you know, it's not
about expanding federal agencies. It's about expanding your agency, you know,
and your ability to pursue happiness on your terms and
your ability to hold government accountable. That's that's infectious. That's
that's the essence of being a happy warrior. And when
we make it easier for people to do that, then
we get more of that.
Speaker 3: And it's in you know, Paul Allen has.
Speaker 2: A great analogy he describes that, you know, in our system,
we've allowed these sort of muscles of self governance to atrophy.
And one of the ways to rebuild that is again,
is to do the very things we're doing, you know,
to do these reports, to do these interviews, to do
to build these tools so that when people exercise those
muscles of representative government and accountability, they want more of
it and they're more and more equipped to be better citizens.
And you don't have to reach every single person in
the country. If you get if you get ten or
twenty percent of the public engaged, that's more than enough
to completely change the direction of the country. And so
that's that's that's why I'm optimistic that in ten years
we could be having a different conversation. And I'll just
I'll throw one other just historic analogy I think is
really I've been studying the uh, the history of leeches, okay,
and the use of leeches in medicine because interesting.
Speaker 3: Society.
Speaker 2: Well it'll it'll make sense to you, because every every
generation we look back at something we did and fifteen
hundred years ago and think, how could we have been
so stupid to think X.
Speaker 3: Y, and Z made sense?
Speaker 2: But one of the things we look back on is
the uses of leeches in medicine. That was that was
a rage for centuries where people thought, oh, you know,
if you have any disease, throw some leeches on it
and suck the bad stuff out, and you're going to
get better. Like there's an intuit It makes sense on
an intuitive level, until you learn through science that actually
that doesn't help. In fact, it could make you a
lot worse. But what's interesting about that matter is there's
no there was no magic point when people realized that
was a really stupid practice. It took it took decades.
There's only maybe a fifteen year kind of turning point.
Speaker 3: But there was.
Speaker 2: We got to a point when where that, yeah, that
was clearly just totally rejected. And so I'm convinced there's
a lot of what we do now within public policy
that we will look back on and.
Speaker 3: Think, I can't believe we would use those leeches.
Speaker 2: I can't believe we would just do it that way
and didn't understand it didn't make any sense. And the
only way to make that, to make that change happen,
is to get the information out and to be totally
transparent about your worldview, and be transparent and bring people
together who have different perspectives, and simply build a culture
where you bend the knee to the evidence.
Speaker 3: You just look at it. Okay, what is reality?
Speaker 2: Are we willing to live in a reality based, fact
based world and then let the chips fall where they may?
And I think, I think if we do that, we'll
see the leeches fall off, We'll see we'll see the
decline of a lot of really dumb and bad public policy.
But it'll be driven by the electorate. It's not going
to be driven by by sort of an ideological crusader.
It's going to be driven by what is the evidence show,
And that's what the founders believed, and so they were
They were inspired by the Greeks and Romans, and Cicero
famously said in fifty BC, true law is right reason
and agreement with nature. So we know what true law
is like natural law when you merge reason and common
sense with an understanding of nature in the world as
it is. So if you can't understand nature, if you
don't look at evidence, if you don't look at transparent data,
and if we focus on building these institutions, then you
can get to that reality we want to live in.
And so that's what we're just relentlessly focused on. It
up in the books is getting the information out there,
giving people the tools that they deserve to make their
own judgments, and so I'm hopeful about where we're going
to be in ten years.
Speaker 1: Well, I know that James Garfield probably hoped that the
medicine would It wasn't leeches, it was dirty fingers that
were It's.
Speaker 3: Exactly the same era.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just peaked in about the eighteen fifties, and it
was germ theory that.
Speaker 3: That I was actually talking to. I'll steal this.
Speaker 2: I'll give him credit Scott Rasmus and the pollster making
the same same argument you were making about you know,
if Garfield his death probably saved millions of lives because
he expedited the acceptance of of sterilized medicine. And that's
what we're trying to sterilize our politics. And let's let's
get some of the idiocy and stupidity out of it.
Speaker 3: So that we can we can help help people flourish.
Speaker 1: Well, it is an interesting comparison because as we know,
there are a whole lot of leeches in American politics
sucking taxpayer money dry. That's that's what we're trying to
get at here, and that's what Open the Books does
every day, and they're going to keep doing it. Because
that's the mission, and it's been that way for a
long time. Thanks to my guest today, John Hart, CEO
of Government Spending Tracker Open the Books, you've 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. Everywhere time is going back at