Episode 2763： Accountability for the Failing Administrative State
Episode Stats
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Summary
Former White House chief of staff David Bernhardt joins me to discuss his new book, You Report to Me: How I Moved Mountains in the Trump White House, a memoir about his time in the George W. Bush administration.
Transcript
00:00:05.500
Pray for our enemies, because we're going medieval on these people.
00:00:10.760
I got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people.
00:00:18.400
I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that,
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but you're not going to stop it. It's going to happen.
00:00:22.320
And where do people like that go to share the big lie?
00:00:26.620
I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.
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Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose?
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If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.
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Friday before Memorial Day, right here in the belly of the beast.
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I can't tell you how pleased I am to have a guest with me today who was my top bureaucrat.
00:01:08.420
I use the term in all the best sense of the word.
00:01:11.300
And in the Trump White House, he's written a book called You Report to Me.
00:01:20.500
And what it should say here, based on his conversation with the president himself,
00:01:25.440
the cover should have said, you report to me with a quote, Donald Trump,
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because that's the story behind the story that I'm going to have him tell, not me.
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But the story I want to tell quickly about David Bernhardt, he was the Secretary of Interior.
00:01:39.100
And the way I met David was one day it came to my attention that there were Chinese Communist drones
00:01:49.020
that the Interior Department was buying and deploying for interior use.
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And I knew full well that the data that would fly through those drones could likely wind up in Communist Chinese hands.
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And so I called up the Secretary of Interior from the White House and said, hey, here's what's going on.
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And eight hours later, eight hours later, and so when I talk about my expression in Trump time,
00:02:23.540
which was the title of my first White House memoir, get it done as quickly as possible.
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Steve Bannon was actually trying to get you for over a month
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because he actually paid for you to report to me.
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You didn't get a free one, but somehow your publicist, you know, whatever.
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I really appreciate it, and I'm thrilled to be here.
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And bottom line of this book is it highlights the reality that with a little leadership
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and clear direction, consistent direction from a president, you can get a lot done.
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And the fact of the matter is that it takes a lot of effort to move these agencies,
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But at the end of the day, we can get people to understand that every one of us
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that has ever worked in government ultimately reports to the American people.
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And this could have been called moving the deep state.
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I mean, you speak from vast experience because you actually served with President George W. Bush
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You love Donald Trump, not just as a man for the person he is,
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Can you give us a little contrast between the Bush bureaucracy below the president
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And the fact of the matter is that in the, and this will be a particularly enlightening example,
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in the George W. Bush administration, you had some folks who didn't want,
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And what that meant is that they would delay things.
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But you could go around them, and you could find sufficient folks to always get the job done.
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There was never a question about ultimately driving forward with the mission.
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In the Trump administration, my experience was really right from the day after the election.
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What you saw was a series of articles, announcements of, quote, resistance, efforts to resist from day one.
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And I think it became socially acceptable within the civil service for a much larger percentage of folks
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to be willing to actually affirmatively resist the policies of the new president.
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And they did that through a whole host of mechanisms that we lay out in the book.
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Now, the vast majority of civil servants, they just want to do their job and move forward.
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Well, my experience was these people, they get in there, they work their way up the chain,
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they feel entitled, and they figure that they're smarter than whoever sits there
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and that they're going to make the decisions and shape policy.
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Well, I think that the experience that you just laid out is the experience of the folks
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at the most senior levels of the civil service.
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There's a lot of folks every day, particularly in an agency like the Department of the Interior,
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I mean, you're doing stuff that really requires effort and productivity and outcome.
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The higher you go, it's interesting, and we lay this out and you report to me,
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the higher you go in the administration, the more in government, the more and more partisan
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Generally, the civil service is about two Democrats to every Republican.
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As you get to the senior executive service, it's three to one.
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And so you have an even higher degree of policy proclivity at those highest levels.
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And those were the people, you know, when you're in the White House, those are the levels of
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The biggest deep stater, I think, that afflicted us in the Trump administration, hands down,
00:07:08.460
But I think the second most damaging person in the health care bureaucracy was this woman
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And you use her kind of as the poster girl for how the deep state works around.
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This gal wrote a book after she left government.
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And in her book, she describes what she calls a workaround.
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And what she called a workaround was essentially she would write a document that was going to
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go out to the public related to the stuff that she was working on.
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She would send it up to be reviewed through various levels, just like anyone else would
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And those comments back were things that maybe she liked, maybe she didn't.
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And she would make the changes in some places, but then reinsert her views in other places
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and send it back through the process as, quote, a workaround.
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Now, in the real world, where most people work, that would be blatant insubordination.
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It wasn't caught, which is on the folks that were reviewing, to be fair.
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But more importantly, she wrote a book explaining how awesome it was she did it.
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And that, to me, epitomizes just how far we've gotten from an understanding that, hey,
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policymakers are there because a person was elected to the presidency.
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And the policymakers define what the policy is.
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They don't define what the law is, and they don't define what the facts are.
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But to the extent there's policy discretion, that discretion rests with the representatives
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And you're just the political appointee, and you'll be gone in a few years, and they'll
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Tell a story, I love this story, about, hey, buy this book, you report to me.
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The fact that he actually shelled out his own money for you tells it.
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Why is this title so important, both to what you experienced and also to 2024 in the presidential race?
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So I used, I came up with this title for two reasons.
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First off, obviously, everybody in government reports to the American people, so they all
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But more importantly, for the specific title, it comes from my first conversation about serving
00:10:02.260
You were, to set the stage, you were solicitor, you were the deputy, second in command at interior
00:10:08.700
to the secretary, Ryan Zinke, who got in trouble for various indiscretions, and what happens
00:10:22.220
Ryan's resigning, and I, secretary Zinke's resigning, and I'm asked to come over to the
00:10:28.680
And to be very fair, I'm very nervous about this meeting, because it's the first time I've
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ever been summoned to the Oval Office individually.
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You worked at the White House, so that's a daily occurrence for you.
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For the deputy secretary of interior, that's a big deal.
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So I walk over there, and I don't know what's going to happen.
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I have no idea if this is going to be a good meeting or a bad meeting.
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And I walk into the Oval Office, and you go through this threshold, and you walk over
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to the resolute desk, and the president's sitting at this big desk.
00:11:07.100
So I sit down, and here's what's amazing about President Trump, one of many things.
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I sit down, and it's clear, I think, to him that I'm not very comfortable.
00:11:16.240
And here's the president of the United States, and he spends five or ten minutes just talking
00:11:22.360
to me getting my blood pressure down before we have a conversation, which said a lot to
00:11:29.160
me about the man, the individual, just how nice that was to an employee that was very
00:11:40.360
And we talk about the job, we talk a little bit about the situation, we talk about his
00:11:45.980
priorities in interior, and he basically tells me, look, you're going to be running this
00:11:51.400
place for a while, this department in the interior.
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And so I say to him, well, sir, can you tell me who I report to?
00:12:05.200
And I'm sitting there thinking, well, the Constitution, sir, I understand what the Constitution
00:12:15.980
And I thought that was unlikely, because I served in the Bush administration, and it
00:12:24.420
had taken, I had seen examples where it literally took months to have a conversation between
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the secretary and the president because of the processes of the White House staff.
00:12:36.600
And so I left the department, or sorry, I left the White House, went back to the department,
00:12:41.040
and a few days later, I had to make a decision that I knew was going to be controversial,
00:12:46.460
and the White House would read about it, and I couldn't surprise them.
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I picked up the phone and called the president's secretary, because I figured she could bail me
00:12:57.220
out, like she would know the right person to talk to.
00:13:03.060
I said, hey, Molly, this is the junior varsity quarterback in interior.
00:13:13.740
And she laughed and said, the president will call you right back.
00:13:21.220
In about 20 minutes, the president calls, and I explain this in the book.
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And here's the amazing thing about President Trump.
00:13:35.080
And I'd taken over during the government shutdown.
00:13:37.480
I was going to reopen some of the federal national parks.
00:13:42.420
And in doing this, his first statement to me was, the shutdown's been going on a while.
00:13:54.800
And then I said, this is going to be controversial.
00:14:01.140
And here's the amazing thing about President Trump.
00:14:03.740
He says, David, if it's going to be controversial and you're the new guy, maybe you should say that I directed you to do it.
00:14:13.460
Which is exactly the opposite any politician in America would want to do.
00:14:19.640
And then he said, and this was really important to me, he says, David, you're running the Department of the Interior.
00:14:27.900
Make decisions you need to make and get going with them.
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That is another reason why I love David Bernhardt, former Secretary of Interior.
00:14:42.820
In my book, literally, I wrote future Secretary of Interior under Trump.
00:14:49.020
He's going to tell us what to do in terms of cleaning up the deep state.
00:14:59.520
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He did that in the interview that I had with him a couple weeks ago at his home.
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00:17:13.680
I'm with David Bernhardt, former Secretary of the Interior.
00:17:22.640
I just want to, I buried the lead yesterday when Steve and I were talking and I mentioned my Substack.
00:17:28.940
It's peternavarro.substack.com, peternavarro.substack.com.
00:17:33.160
One thing I want to tell you, besides the fact that if you pay for a subscription, it's a modest sum,
00:17:40.800
But everyone who is a paid subscriber gets an autographed copy of my Taking Back Trump's America book.
00:17:47.200
And, by the way, in the chapter on cabinet appointees who I recommend for Trump come January 2025,
00:17:56.520
this guy is one of the few survivors that I recommended highly.
00:18:01.580
So, David, you report to me, you know, I looked at this and I said, you know, this is a great title, but the cover sucks.
00:18:11.140
I thought it sucked just because they didn't have any graphics or colors or anything like that.
00:18:15.320
But the President Trump had a very different take.
00:18:18.280
Tell us a little bit about your trip to Mar-a-Lago to give him this book.
00:18:23.380
And then the page 115 on, which is what the posse is here today for, to listen to,
00:18:32.380
because this is your solution to blowing up the deep state.
00:18:39.720
I actually think the cover is great, by the way.
00:18:43.700
And I think the title you report to me was fantastic.
00:18:48.960
And the President looked at, President Trump looked at this book, and his first question was, is this my quote?
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And I said, actually, it could be, it is your quote.
00:18:59.800
And he said, oh, David, you would do so much better with this book if you would put quotations on the book
00:19:13.640
And I said, well, you know, sir, I wrote this book for the American people and for you.
00:19:19.500
And if you'll just take and have everybody that you deal with read from page 115 forward,
00:19:26.680
we can have a much better outcome going forward for America.
00:19:32.860
You also told him you didn't care about how many books you sold.
00:19:36.640
He said, he said, selling books is really freaking important.
00:19:44.920
He said, you know, if you're not going to go with the quote, you ought to go with the picture,
00:19:55.600
My experience with the deep state, and I had really extensive experience in the various skiffs
00:20:04.000
where we would meet for these PCC processes, which is like insane.
00:20:11.320
It's like I always thought that before I went into the White House that the purpose of the bureaucracy
00:20:17.460
was to implement policy the way the president wanted.
00:20:21.120
And the PCC process that Bush put in basically turns that upside down,
00:20:26.180
where everything's got to bubble up from the bottom of the bureaucrats.
00:20:34.120
How do you make sure that these people who are being paid on the taxpayer's dime
00:20:43.240
Well, I think first off, you have to have a strong chief executive,
00:20:46.220
a chief executive that has a clear and consistent message to his appointees.
00:20:52.200
Number two, which is something you spend a lot of time talking about,
00:20:55.900
is you've got to get the right people in these agencies as your appointees.
00:21:00.040
And the people that you put in need to be the people that have the courage and the competency
00:21:04.560
to make decisions themselves with the assistance of the career civil servants that you need.
00:21:15.820
I mean, how hard is it to find those kind of people?
00:21:19.080
And let's be honest, how hard is it going to be to find the next time around?
00:21:22.720
Everybody I know is either a target of the Injustice Department or going to grand jury.
00:21:32.160
How hard it is to find people that are willing to be loyal to the agenda of a president like Donald Trump?
00:21:43.620
At Interior, we had a very good team, a core group of team that worked on the transition,
00:21:49.320
worked on the beachhead, worked all the way through.
00:22:01.480
I think there's an entire core of those people this time around, a much bigger core.
00:22:08.180
Because there's a lot of folks that were younger political appointees that served in the Trump administration.
00:22:16.780
And here's what they learned, things that I didn't learn in the George W. Bush administration.
00:22:23.660
They learned how to work for a leader that was consistent.
00:22:28.120
And so I think you have this entire cadre of folks that served as Schedule Cs,
00:22:34.700
which is the more junior political appointee that I initially was,
00:22:40.480
that served as like deputy assistant secretaries.
00:22:42.960
You have a whole group of people that can go back on day one and hit the ship.
00:22:49.980
And the next administration is better positioned because of it.
00:22:54.060
So you got the strong executive, you got find the right people.
00:22:58.380
And then really what you have to do is I believe you have to move forward with some of the initiatives
00:23:03.480
the president drove to rein in unions and do some creative things with the civil service
00:23:11.040
in terms of like Schedule F was something that was very...
00:23:15.700
It basically was going to recategorize some of the positions within the civil service.
00:23:22.660
I mean, you can't fire these people or move them very easily, right?
00:23:28.580
The other thing is a lot of the you can't hold people accountable is self-inflicted within the agencies.
00:23:36.440
It's the agency's own guidance and directives have made it harder than it really is.
00:23:46.920
Firing involves a series of appeals and we need to look at farther reforms like moving to a more at-will environment.
00:23:57.120
What I highlight in the book is employees, except for veterans, were at will until the 60s.
00:24:05.240
So is this a legislative thing that you have to do?
00:24:10.800
But 90% of it can be done administratively and should be done administratively.
00:24:17.040
If I'm writing an executive order, should Trump do it by executive order?
00:24:21.300
I absolutely think he should basically ask every secretary to maximize their utilization of accountability factors and that they should go through their own agency and get rid of their own self-inflicted policies that they've put in place that add unnecessary process.
00:24:41.680
There's a lot of unnecessary process that has burdened these agencies from accountability.
00:24:46.980
But more importantly, if policymakers will just say, I'm the one making the decision, I'm the one making significant decisions, I'm going to own the decision, I'm going to be held accountable for it, and I want your input, civil servant, I want your input, I want to know the facts and the law, but I'm going to own the decision.
00:25:08.100
You can move things much, much, much more quickly, and you need to, you know, as a leader, you have to be willing to be held accountable.
00:25:18.100
Much of the inertia in the bureaucracy is because the senior leaders in the government don't actually want to be accountable for anything, and so they basically hope that somebody else will make the decision.
00:25:31.460
If you look at the law, if you look at the law, for the law that established the duties of the secretary of the interior, it uses the term, the secretary shall supervise all functions of the department of the interior.
00:25:45.200
I've always thought that that was a wonderful term because supervise is active.
00:25:50.820
It's not just, I'm going to go show up at a ribbon cutting, but I need to be active, and it's an element of accountability.
00:25:58.320
And that accountability is what people need to be respectful of and be responsible.
00:26:07.980
We need serious people to go into these jobs, and we need them to say, hey, give me the ball.
00:26:15.060
What about this PCC process that just drove me nuts?
00:26:19.000
Again, for the posse here, it's like if you wanted to do like an executive order,
00:26:25.060
it had to go out to low-level bureaucrats across the relevant agencies for comment, work its way up the chain to the secretary level, and then back to the president.
00:26:45.800
But that's not the way that the lame chiefs of staff we had – do you have to do that process?
00:26:57.520
That is all – at the end of the day, that's the leaders of these agencies and OMB saying, here's the level of review we want.
00:27:08.340
All of the authority and law for the Department of the Interior rests with the secretary, and then the secretary has delegated it down.
00:27:16.200
And in the book, you report to me, I highlight that the delegations down have caused a lot of challenges because it moves things farther and farther down.
00:27:25.980
And there's no – ultimately, when I was solicitor, I would have assistant secretaries and policymakers, they were desperate for me to tell them they didn't have authority because if I said you only have one choice, they wouldn't have to choose.
00:27:46.000
And they wanted to be able to tell their – they wanted to be able to tell a constituency, look, my hands were tied.
00:27:53.020
Instead of I wanted to make this decision or that one.
00:27:57.000
All right, Posse, let's move the needle today on Amazon.
00:28:02.220
You report to me, this is the best book you will read about cleaning up the deep state.
00:28:09.980
So honored to be with former secretary and future secretary of the interior, David Pernard, although he doesn't want to jinx anything.
00:28:18.520
Do you have any social media or anything like that?
00:28:31.800
Steve Bannon did more for moving the ball than anybody can imagine.
00:28:42.120
When we come back, we're going to get an update on the weaponization of government out in the great state of Texas, which isn't looking so great today.
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By proceeding with this illegal impeachment scheme to overturn a decision made by Texas voters just a few short months ago,
00:30:50.980
the corrupt politicians in the Texas House are demonstrating that blind loyalty to Speaker Dade Phelan is more important than upholding their oath of office.
00:31:05.920
They have denied me the opportunity to present the evidence which contradicts their politically motivated narrative,
00:31:12.080
and they are showcasing their absolute contempt for the electoral process.
00:31:18.440
Every politician who supports this deceitful impeachment attempt will inflict lasting damage on the credibility of the Texas House,
00:31:31.940
The House is poised to do exactly what Joe Biden has been hoping to accomplish since his first day in office,
00:31:38.820
to sabotage our work, my work, as Attorney General of Texas.
00:31:45.880
Their plot imperils critical litigation in my office has brought against the Biden administration
00:31:51.540
to end the federal government's attacks on our constitutional rights and the rule of law.
00:31:58.080
There is no other state in this country with so much influence over the fate of our nation,
00:32:05.420
and this is solely because of the relentless challenges I bring against Biden's unconstitutional policy agenda.
00:32:16.180
Under my leadership, our state has sued Biden nearly 50 times to end his unlawful, tyrannical policies.
00:32:22.960
In fact, this week, while the Texas House was killing essential bills on crime and illegal immigration
00:32:31.000
and plotting their illegal impeachment scheme in secret, it was business as usual for me.
00:32:39.200
I was launching lawsuits against the Biden administration and predatory corporations.
00:32:43.700
On Tuesday, I sued the Biden Department's Homeland Security to end his illegal use of CBP-1 app
00:32:58.780
On Wednesday, I announced a lawsuit against global hotel chain Hilton
00:33:06.880
On Thursday, I sued Biden's IRS over his devastating new policy
00:33:12.100
that will impair child support services in our state and across the nation,
00:33:20.640
Then, I announced an $85 million settlement that we secured with Volkswagen and Audi
00:33:27.000
over their violations of Texas environmental laws.
00:33:33.100
As Attorney General, I'm leading dozens of urgent challenges against Biden's unlawful policies.
00:33:38.200
My lawsuits threaten his destructive attempts to open the borders,
00:33:47.260
and destroy our country with extremist, tyrannical regulations.
00:33:52.920
In addition to defending Texas from illegal federal policy,
00:33:56.880
my office works night and day to solve cold cases,
00:34:05.220
and hold predatory corporations accountable when they harm the public.
00:34:16.120
I'm grateful for the outpouring of support I've received from so many Texans
00:34:20.720
who understand this process is unjust and unethical.
00:34:25.340
The fact that I was prohibited from presenting evidence to defend myself
00:34:29.260
reveals that this shameful process was curated from the start
00:34:36.180
This vote is expected to take place Saturday at 1 p.m.
00:34:41.820
And I want to invite my fellow citizens and friends
00:34:44.540
to peacefully come let their voices be heard at the Capitol tomorrow.
00:34:49.920
Exercise your right to petition your government.
00:34:53.300
Let's restore the power of this great state to the people
00:34:59.280
I hope the House makes the right decision, but if not,
00:35:02.260
I look forward to a quick resolution to the Texas Senate
00:35:04.720
where I truly believe the process will be fair and just.
00:35:35.720
You've got a lot of Texas interests down there,
00:35:38.480
corporate interests, who loves to have cheap labor coming across.
00:35:45.060
I remember Ken Paxson was one of the few attorneys general in the country
00:36:30.340
And all of this allegations were out there for the voters to sift through.
00:36:41.660
And yet you've got the uniparty in the Texas legislature