00:00:00.000Hey everybody, today on the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:00:01.000How do we properly staff a government?
00:00:03.000Sir Rob Sharma is here from American Moment to talk about one of the most important issues, that personnel is policy.
00:00:09.000Email me your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com and support the Charlie Kirk Show at CharlieKirk.com/slash support and get involved with Turning PointUSA Today at tpusa.com.
00:00:42.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:54.000And it's not just a problem with presidencies.
00:02:56.000It's a problem with congressional staff.
00:02:58.000Frankly, it's a problem with a lot of the think tanks here in Washington, D.C. as well.
00:03:02.000Basically, the conservative movement is very good at electing people who are great at running for office.
00:03:08.000We elect great congressmen, we elect great presidents, we elect, we fund and create great think tanks that have very good missions and fancy names.
00:03:16.000But we're very, very bad at paying attention to the work that needs to be done behind the scenes at the sub-principal level.
00:03:23.000This can be everything from the young public policy researchers that decide what work product comes out of a think tank, the legislative aides and correspondents that are deciding how a member of Congress is going to vote, and the presidential appointees that end up determining so much of how successful a president is.
00:03:42.000And that is a problem that we've had, I would say, for 40 years since basically the Reagan administration.
00:03:47.000Ronald Reagan was successful because he hired young, he hired ideological, and he hired underqualified.
00:03:53.000He didn't care about the incumbent credentials in American life.
00:03:57.000We've lost that ability on the right of center.
00:03:59.000And because of it, the amount of success we're able to have when we elect great people to office is very limited.
00:04:06.000And it's a problem that we can never let happen again because the hour is very late in this country.
00:04:11.000And the left has made it very clear that their goal is to make it so that it is essentially illegitimate for the right to ever have political power.
00:04:19.000And so while we still live in a constitutional republic where we are allowed to win elections, we have a responsibility to use that power effectively.
00:04:29.000One of the questions I have, Sir Rob, is that why is it that the left is so much better at this than we are?
00:04:38.000Why is it that they understand navigating and building the administrative state?
00:04:42.000And we as conservatives have failed so terribly because, Sarab, it's not because of a lack of resources.
00:04:47.000You know, there's been hundreds of millions, not billions of dollars that have been deployed into the conservative movement in Washington, D.C. Lots of white papers have been written.
00:04:58.000But when Donald Trump won, where was the, let's say, battle plan to properly staff the government?
00:05:05.000Why is it the left gets this so much better than we do?
00:05:08.000I think there's a couple of reasons why.
00:05:10.000One, you think about the resources that the left of center has available to it.
00:05:14.000We think that we have a ton of them on the right, and it's true that we do.
00:05:17.000A lot of patriots, you know, little old grandmas have been cutting 10, 15, $20 checks to conservative organizations that promise to save the country for something close to 60 to 70 years.
00:05:27.000However, the left has even more resources available to it.
00:05:32.000The right of center gets to recruit its people out of conservative think tanks, congressional offices, maybe a few conservative leaning businesses, and that's it.
00:05:40.000Meanwhile, on the left of center, they get the universities.
00:05:44.000They get all of the career bureaucracy.
00:05:47.000They get all of the quote-unquote nonpartisan civic organizations, which as we know, are completely taken over by the far left.
00:05:53.000And they basically get a revolving door with Fortune 500 companies.
00:05:57.000The C-suites and presidential administrations are basically coterminous, especially when it comes to places like big tech.
00:06:03.000The Obama administration was full of big tech flax.
00:06:06.000The Biden administration is no different.
00:06:08.000And so the right is operating with a much more limited set of resources in terms of places it can draw its people from.
00:06:15.000And so it has to be really attentive to who it brings in.
00:06:18.000And we haven't been very attentive about it.
00:06:21.000Most of the people who come to DC to be part of the staffing world here could easily work for either party.
00:06:27.000When I say that, I'm specifically talking about the people who work on the right of center.
00:06:32.000They're kind of center left, maybe center right.
00:06:34.000They don't believe anything particularly intensely, and they are not as committed to it as the left of center is.
00:06:41.000You know, people come here to do it kind of for one or two years on their way to law school, usually on the right of center, or maybe they want to go back and be in business or something.
00:06:51.000But because people on the right are not obsessed with government in the way that the left is, we tend not to give the attention we need to to this issue.
00:07:00.000And it's why we've ultimately not had as robust a personnel pipeline.
00:07:32.000It is a culturally far left-wing city that even the Republicans are center-right.
00:07:37.000So, Rob, can you build us out a little bit more?
00:07:39.000The archetype of a traditional congressional staffer, 23, pretty arrogant, you know, wears the, they all wear the same clothes, you know, kind of the thinly trimmed beard.
00:08:00.000And there's actually an Instagram account that puts together basically starter packs of what these people look like.
00:08:06.000And you've gotten the profile exactly correct.
00:08:10.000More importantly than some of those characteristics is actually what motivates them to come into politics.
00:08:17.000I like to joke that D.C. is full of a lot of the second sons of East Coast businessmen who want to keep them as far away from the family business as humanly possible.
00:08:25.000It's a lot of the kids of donors, the fail sons, the ones who you really didn't want to have anywhere near the money making for the family, their third, fourth generation wealth.
00:08:35.000And unfortunately, a lot of the systems in D.C. have acclimatized themselves to that.
00:09:04.000And so those are the people who enter the pipeline, the people who come from these powerful backgrounds, the people who are not invested in the struggles of working class, middle-class people in the country, and certainly people who have been so removed from the Republican base for generations at this point that they'd have utter contempt if they went to a local tea party meeting or a local GOP meeting for the people they're supposed to be representing.
00:09:35.000So there's so many different angles I want to go with this.
00:09:37.000I want to just focus in on just kind of more of the technical aspect, which is our government is headquartered in Washington, D.C.
00:09:44.000And if you want to become a congressional staffer, then you're likely going to be a son or daughter of a family that can afford you to not work that summer, can afford to pay for your rent that summer.
00:09:58.000And I'm going to tell you kind of some of the ways I figured that out myself as I play into the stereotypes of the overly waspy population that seems to staff our government over the summer.
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00:11:07.000Can you just kind of walk through the culture of Washington, D.C. summers and how that actually lays the groundwork for how policy itself is debated?
00:11:16.000So from my understanding, there's a bunch of interns that flood the Capitol Hill.
00:11:28.000It's like $2,500 a month or $3,000 a month.
00:11:31.000Plus, you got to pay for food in a very expensive city and travel and all of this.
00:11:34.000So basically, after all of it, it's like $15,000 to do, which is, that's, that's basically boat fuel for a family, you know, on up in Mount Desert Island.
00:11:47.000Why is it that this is such a talk about the impediment there and how the culture in Washington, D.C. exists?
00:12:03.000And so, you have all these Senate offices, these House offices, these think tanks on the right of center.
00:12:09.000And you would assume, oh, okay, they're conservatives.
00:12:11.000And so, they're going to be selecting for people based on their worldview.
00:12:14.000They're going to be selecting people who want to serve and want to make an impact in support of the priorities that these politicians are running on.
00:12:34.000They prioritize Ivy League education slash other kinds of fancy schools.
00:12:39.000They prioritize people who are, you know, are very well spoken, but not very substantive, people who aren't going to rock the boat but talk pretty.
00:12:49.000And of course, they, by the nature of the system, prioritize people who are wealthy.
00:12:54.000And so, you bring in this class of people.
00:12:56.000Most of them aren't going to stay, but the percentage that are are the ones who really couldn't cut it anywhere else.
00:13:02.000And those then enter the pipeline for the broader staffing set on the right.
00:13:07.000And so, those people they run up the chain, and very quickly, by the time you're in your late 20s, you can have very real serious power in Washington, D.C.
00:13:16.000And unfortunately, most of these people, even if they came into DC believing anything at all, they're constantly surrounded by a culture that beats out any heterodox, interesting instincts they have.
00:13:26.000It makes them into pawns of the establishment, makes them deeply cynical and nihilistic, and it makes them essentially useless when it comes to serving the interest of someone who does want to maybe rock the boat, someone like President Donald Trump or some of these fantastic members of Congress that have been elected.
00:13:42.000And then, what the establishment will do on the back end is they'll say, Well, you have to hire our people.
00:13:48.000You have to hire these cynical clowns because they're the only people left.
00:13:52.000You know, I'm sorry, you people don't have anyone with experience.
00:13:55.000And so, that's why you can't just pay attention to these senior roles, the ones that some people probably are aware of, you know, cabinet secretaries and so on.
00:14:02.000You have to pay attention to the system at the very origin point of the pipeline, because if you don't get the beginning of this process right, you can't expect a good result at the end.
00:14:13.000Yeah, and so is anyone actually going about fixing some of the entry costs for kind of the summers in DC problem, which ends up being the framework, if you will, or the bedrock or the impediment?
00:14:26.000Is someone going about trying to fix that?
00:14:28.000Yeah, actually, Congress a couple years ago, about two years ago, passed a sequestered intern fund, essentially, basically, a little pool of money that offices can only spend on interns.
00:14:41.000So, you know, the typical intern salary is like $800 to $1,000 a month, which you could spend that much money on just the flight to DC and the flight back from DC and going back home once for 4th of July.
00:14:52.000So, it doesn't solve the entire problem, but it does help.
00:14:55.000It makes it so that someone maybe who spent their year in college saving up a little bit, or maybe their college helps fund part of their internship or something, it's a little bit more possible for them.
00:15:04.000You know, we at American Moment have a program where when it comes to the people who we know want to do this, they are deeply aligned.
00:15:11.000We pay them $3,000 a month, the best-paying internship program in DC.
00:15:15.000And it's not for anyone who doesn't need it.
00:15:19.000It's for specifically people who are college dropouts, didn't go to college at all, and who want to be involved in this system, but there is just no path to them doing it.
00:15:28.000And, you know, because we've been trying to lead by example, you know, these other organizations will call me sometimes.
00:15:33.000They'll ask, you know, how do we design our intern program?
00:15:36.000And I tell them, if you want our help, I better see a responsible wage floor set for these interns because I have very little interest in helping out organizations that are going to be part of the problem as opposed to helping solve it.
00:15:50.000But it's extremely important, especially, you know, I hear on the news all the time from Republican elected officials that we're now a working class party.
00:15:57.000And I think that it's really important that the people who are coming to be part of the advisory class to these members.
00:16:34.000So when you want to consolidate your debt and use equity in your home to do so to lower your monthly expenses, you have to use my friends, Andrew and Todd, at andrewandtodd.com.
00:16:44.000You have to know what you're going through.
00:16:46.000So look, I just had dinner with Andrew and Todd in Orange County.
00:17:42.000I hang out with them casually and I've got to know them really well.
00:17:45.000They'll treat you right and that when you use them, you're not using Citibank or Chase or these people that hate your values, that believe in this trans nonsense.
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00:18:04.000Well, maybe you will two months from now.
00:18:06.000Maybe you young millennials out there, maybe the millennials listening to our show, my fellow millennials, you're going to buy a home soon.
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00:18:13.000It's AndrewandTodd.com for a quick mortgage checkup.
00:18:17.000Use the equity in your home before it's too late.
00:18:49.000Schedule F is how we destroy the deep state.
00:18:53.000For your listeners, Charlie, this is going to get a little bit in the weeds, but it is so important.
00:18:58.000Basically, what happens in Washington, when it happens when it comes to the deep state, the career bureaucrats that have so much control over how policy is made, is that even the ones that aren't really that influential, they have an incentive structure to pretend like they're doing a big policymaking role because it comes with more perks, it comes with more prestige, it comes with more money.
00:19:18.000And so the problem is that policy should be made by political appointees.
00:19:21.000It should be made by the people who are appointed by the person, the American people elected.
00:19:26.000And so what Schedule F is, is this brilliant way to use the incentives of the system against itself.
00:19:32.000This is a proposal, an executive order by President Trump that they attempted to implement in the final days of the administration that would say, okay, if you are a so-called policymaking career bureaucrat, that's fine.
00:19:46.000However, it means we are going to reclassify you under Schedule F, which strips you of all of the protections you have from being easily fired.
00:19:54.000Because if you're making policy, then you need to be responsive to the duly elected president of the United States who sets policy.
00:20:00.000And this is the way that we are going to fire thousands of bureaucrats when President Trump gets reelected or whoever does.
00:20:08.000It is the future of how we defeat the deep state.
00:20:10.000Well, so let's just go through this, though.
00:20:12.000Without Schedule F, how hard is it to fire a federal bureaucrat?
00:20:15.000This is hard for people to understand and grasp.
00:20:18.000It's extremely difficult for a bunch of reasons.
00:20:20.000There's an entire set of laws mostly passed in the 20th century that exists to make federal bureaucrats removed from political oversight.
00:20:30.000Now, once upon a time, these rules were put in under the guise of merit.
00:20:35.000They said people would say, okay, we want bureaucrats that have basic competence, intelligence, and education to be able to implement policy.
00:20:43.000However, what merit became is not the way that, say, our adversaries think about merit, China, places like Japan, other countries that have very, very competent, effective civil services.
00:20:53.000What merit became is stuff like Pete Buttigieg and Rachel Levine.
00:20:58.000It was deeply incompetent, confused, strange people who want to impose their unhappiness on the rest of us.
00:21:04.000And so those protections built for a merit-based civil service are now used to enforce left-wing orthodoxy even when Republican presidents are elected.
00:21:20.000Congress does not have anything to do with this.
00:21:22.000Now, Congress may try to prevent Schedule F from getting implemented.
00:21:25.000So there are Democrat members of Congress that have been filing legislation of late to make it so that a future Republican administration could never implement Schedule F.
00:21:33.000So there's certainly ways that they could gum up the works.
00:21:36.000But as of right now, any president that came in that decided they want to do this could do it.
00:21:41.000Now, would it get challenged in court?
00:21:42.000Would the left find a thousand ways to gum up the works?
00:21:46.000And that's something we need to be better at is responding in that moment of, you know, Aikido, you have to do with the left.
00:21:52.000But I think President Trump could decide to do this unilaterally.
00:21:55.000Why didn't Trump do it in his first term?
00:21:59.000Honestly, this idea percolated for a very long time, but there were people that were at the time running the presidential personnel office and the Office of Personnel that weren't interested.
00:22:15.000Well, because it was neocons that were running the early days of the administration, and the neocons have no problem with the career bureaucrats.
00:22:28.000You know, sometimes they disagree slightly on the tax rate, but functionally for their purposes, it didn't matter if it was left-wing career bureaucrats or themselves.
00:23:48.000I think you had two competing forces seeking to undermine him, right?
00:23:52.000So, you had the first problem, which is that the entire political system absolutely despised Donald Trump, everything he stood for, and it was a shock to the system.
00:24:01.000And so, they immediately went into overdrive trying to prevent Donald Trump from actually taking over the federal government and implementing his worldview.
00:24:09.000The second, more specific problem that you had is that you had a right that was either uninterested or incapable of implementing his vision.
00:24:17.000So, the ones that were uninterested were the establishment GOP, the people who would have easily done the transition for Jeb Bush or any of the other establishment people running for office.
00:24:27.000Those were a lot of the same people running the transition because those were the people who knew how to run transitions.
00:24:32.000And so, that gets to the final problem, which is that the people who were OG America first OG MAGA, they weren't as experienced in navigating Washington.
00:24:42.000And unfortunately, because those early picks for who decided who got hired were so bad, being a day one Trump supporter was actually a liability to get hired in the Trump administration because to them, it was a signal that this would be a person who would actually fight for the president's agenda and his voters.
00:24:59.000And they couldn't have that, they didn't want that.
00:25:03.000The blue book is the list of every single job in the federal government.
00:25:07.000It is, it is essentially, and then the other elements to it are what gets done in the first hundred days of the presidency.
00:25:15.000And so, there are packets and packets of information that every president needs to start on day one with the people who he's going to hire and what he's going to do.
00:25:24.000And so, what a lot of conservative organizations need to work on over the course of the next two years is making sure that we get that right next time.
00:25:32.000I mean, so it's 4,000 positions, is that right?
00:25:35.000And so, is so you're working on it, but who else is working on this for the next Republican administration, Republican administration?
00:25:42.000There's a lot of fantastic organizations.
00:25:44.000I mean, I'm talking to you here from the Conservative Partnership Institute, a great organization led by Senator Jim DeMint and Mark Meadows.
00:25:50.000They're patriots, they've been such good friends to us.
00:25:53.000America First Legal, Stephen Miller's group, Center for Ruining America, that's Russ Vogt's group.
00:25:58.000There's just a fantastic set of organizations.
00:26:00.000We're all working together with the new great leadership at the Heritage Foundation on some of this.
00:26:05.000I think that there's a lot of people who are working together who are going to make sure that this doesn't happen again.
00:26:09.000And we're very lucky that we get to be a part of those conversations.
00:26:12.000I think we bring a lot of the ideological energy that this energy for an America first worldview for a lot of these personnel.
00:26:21.000That's what people have leaned on us quite a bit for.
00:26:23.000And I would be shocked if we make this mistake again.
00:26:26.000And I think that the next Republican president and the next conservative administration is going to be much more in the conservative movement.
00:26:32.000So, for example, let's say Blake Masters and JD Vance win.
00:26:35.000Is there an effort to try to get them properly staffed as well?
00:26:38.000Well, they're two very good friends of mine, and we've had those conversations already.
00:26:41.000So, I get the sense that they're going to have people trampling over each other to work for them.
00:26:48.000I mean, I think a lot of young people, especially, realize that JD Vance and Blake Masters are the future of the Republican Party and they understand and are capable of articulating what needs to happen if we're going to have a country at all in our lifetime.
00:27:01.000So, I think they'd be just fine, but we'll be helping them as much as we can once they get elected.
00:27:06.000So, yeah, I know you got to go in a second, but I do want to ask about this question about the administrative state in general.
00:27:14.000Conservatives seem to be very apprehensive about using political power.
00:27:19.000So, we win, we purge the ranks of the awful people, we put new people in.
00:27:25.000What should we actually use government for?
00:27:30.000The way that I like to think about it is that there are three ends that I think the conservative movement worth the name would direct its energy towards: strong families.
00:27:40.000We have a crisis of family formation and fertility in this country.
00:27:44.000And if you don't have families, if you don't have children, you don't have a country.
00:27:47.000Sovereignty, we need a sovereign nation.
00:27:49.000That means responsible policies on trade, on foreign policy, and on immigration to make sure that we don't just invade the world and invite the world all the time, that we actually protect the integrity of what it means to be an American and to have a country.
00:28:03.000And then the last is broad-based economic prosperity, not this kind of corporate donor-focused vision of conservative economics that dominated for so long, where it was just whatever the Fortune 500 companies and the billionaires want, but also not the leftist approach of just endless welfare and no substantive vision of a productive, healthy working economy.
00:28:26.000We need to create broad-based prosperity, and we do that by fixing or trading relationships.
00:28:31.000We do that by incentivizing innovation.
00:28:33.000We do that by actually making things in the country again.
00:29:36.000What we do know is that Americans hate this economy, right?
00:29:38.000The CNN poll out recently found that 64% of Americans believe the U.S. economy is currently in a recession.
00:29:45.000Now, that may not be the case, but that's what people feel.
00:29:48.000CNN says 64% of Americans feel that they're in a recession.
00:29:53.000And yet, the people that are actually working in the intricacies of your government are saying that, oh, no, recession is actually not two quarters of negative economic growth, one after the other.
00:30:03.000And if you have so many people that then staff your government that are left-wing ideologues, then how are you actually ever going to fix anything?
00:30:14.000I was actually a member of the Trump transition team.
00:30:17.000And I saw firsthand the worst of the lobbyists, the insiders, they all penetrated and infiltrated every single level of government.
00:30:27.000And so, for any Republican that runs for office, any Republican that runs for office in 2024, the same way that Donald Trump put forward Supreme Court picks, he should put together his cabinet.
00:30:41.000He should run on an entire list of who he would staff the government with.
00:30:46.000Personnel is policy, as Morton Blackwell would say.
00:30:49.000Who you have actually in positions of power ends up being tomorrow's policy.
00:30:54.000Trump did it with Supreme Court justices.
00:30:56.000He should be able to do it as well with staffing the entire government.
00:31:20.000Producer Andrew is a fan of New York City.
00:31:22.000And he just remarked when we were driving to one place, said, Man, this place is just dirtier, hotter, and trashier than any city I remember.
00:31:29.000I said, Well, San Francisco would be close to it.
00:31:32.000But New York used to be just a gem of a city.
00:31:40.000You came there to work, to succeed, to aspire, to dream that you would only be capped by the limits of the skyscrapers of how high you could possibly go.
00:31:50.000I mean, New York was a special place, and it is corrupt politicians.
00:31:54.000It didn't take a lot of them to destroy it.
00:31:57.000And I'll be honest, Bloomberg was an amazing mayor compared to Bill de Blasi.
00:32:03.000I had plenty of problems with Mike Bloomberg, trust me.
00:32:05.000But he was pro-police, and he fought the government unions, and he did not put up with trash and homelessness and vagrancy and dirtiness on the street.
00:32:16.000And in a recent study, it actually shows that New York is the unhappiest city in America, 318 out of 318.
00:32:24.000I believe, and this is a contrarian argument, I do not believe, I believe, and I do not believe it's, I guess, let me say, I believe, I could do the negative or the positive.
00:32:34.000I do not believe people were meant to live in urban cities.
00:32:40.000I don't think it makes you joyful, especially the way the cities are being run right now.
00:32:45.000I think it could work if you have a great mayor, but the way Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, it is the death of the American city.
00:32:52.000And so Eric Adams has been a continued chapter in that destruction.
00:32:56.000And I want to kind of get into this segment just a little bit here.
00:32:59.000We'll talk about it in the coming days of how Blue City mayors are now pulling the alarm of the cost of illegal immigration.
00:34:23.000Why can't Greg Abbott now go use the National Guard to secure the southern border that we've been calling for on this program for the last year and a half?
00:35:13.000But if Muriel Bowser can nationalize the National Guard or use the National Guard to clean up illegals, why can't Greg Abbott and Doug Ducey do that in Arizona and Texas?
00:35:23.000Muriel Bowser is now showing more resolve in regards to deploying the Guard than most Republicans.
00:35:29.000Because Washington, D.C. is the sandbox for the world's elite.
00:35:33.000And now, all of a sudden, that there's a Nicaraguan near the basilica, or there's a Honduran in Georgetown, or there's a Mexican citizen that might be coming up asking you for money.
00:35:45.000Muriel Bowser, get these people out of there.
00:35:47.000You see, diversity is not actually our strength, according to the left.
00:35:50.000Diversity is a soundbite, but they want their cities to remain all white.
00:35:54.000And if you dare have a third world person come, like, no, no, no, you're only there to vote for me.