Inside DOGE: Silicon Valley Meets the State

[uplifting music]

Well, hello everyone.

I'm Vittoria Elliott, Senior Politics Writer,

and you may know me mostly

from our so-called cover,

of our coverage of the so-called Department

of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

And the thing is, is that there's a lot of similarities

between tech

and political campaigns, particularly when it comes to hype.

And so when Elon Musk

and Donald Trump started talking about DOGE

even before inauguration, we started with simple questions.

What is this?

What is it gonna look like? What can it do?

And these questions have led to some

of our most urgent reporting on this new administration.

And with me today to help give an inside look,

are going to be three people who experience this firsthand.

We're going to have Leland Dudek,

the Acting Commissioner

of the Social Security Administration,

most recently.

Previous to his role,

he served as the Senior Advisor

to Social Securities Administration's Office

of Program Integrity.

He led agency-wide anti-fraud initiatives,

risk management frameworks,

and he also served at the US Department of Interior

and the Recovery Accountability

and Transparency Board.

Sahil Lavingia, the founder and CEO of Gumroad,

a platform that helps creators sell products directly

to their audiences.

Earlier this year, he worked for DOGE

as a software engineer at the Department of Veterans Affairs

for just over 50 days.

And George Foote,

a corporate international lawyer in Washington, DC

for more than three decades.

He is the outside counsel for the US Institute of Peace,

or USIP, and currently represents USIP's Directors

in a lawsuit challenging the right of the president

to remove them from office.

For context...

[audience claps]

For context,

USIP was founded by Congress

and has been independently funded by Congress

since 1984,

and is an independent nonprofit focused on peace building.

In March, it was taken over by DOGE,

and the Trump administration in a move

that a federal judge has since ruled was unlawful.

So starting out, I wanted to start

with both Leland and Sahil.

You were both in contact with members

of what would become DOGE, even before inauguration.

What did you think DOGE would be,

and at what point did you realize that's maybe not

what DOGE actually was?

Okay, so Vittoria, first I want to thank you

and the Wired team for inviting me here.

And I wanna say something

that's a little off script here that I haven't cleared

with Vittoria or anyone,

but I want the people here to recognize the wonderful work

that Wired has done since the beginning.

[audience cheers and claps]

Vittoria, can you please stand up?

Please stand up.

It's a lot of us.

They are doing reporting,

the best reporting in the vein of Woodward and Bernstein.

They were on top of this from the beginning.

I have not always agreed as administrator

of a government program with what they've had to say,

but I recognize they are speaking facts

and giving you the truth,

and that is to be commended in our society.

[audience claps]

And so, to answer your question, yes,

I sought out DOGE.

I posted about seeking out DOGE.

I saw an opportunity

for positive change within government, positive change

where we could break through the barriers

that have stymied us

because of the bureaucracy we have had for such a long time.

When I worked

and started at in government,

when, it was during the Bush administration

and Barack Obama came in,

and Barack Obama, I started work for Social Security.

He wanted a calendar app like OpenTable

so people could schedule an appointment

with the Social Security Administration,

like they go on OpenTable.

This was 15 years ago.

SSA still doesn't have an OpenTable app to schedule.

They have a scheduling calendar,

but nothing that,

why the heck couldn't government just hire OpenTable

and say, Hey, help us schedule.

Help us get to our customer better.

So I thought DOGE could help us do that.

That's why I sought them out.

I worked in anti-fraud, we had certain fraud problems.

I told them the truth.

I thought they could help us

break through those barriers

and help us get to ground truth.

And I thought, gee, you've got the most powerful man

in the world and you've got the richest man in the world.

How can this go wrong?

[audience laughs]

Sahil, what did you think DOGE would be?

Yeah, I guess I was excited

in my personal capacity to ship code

for the federal government.

I actually applied for like the original DOGE,

which was called the US Digital Service,

which was about this idea of bringing people from tech

into the federal government

and modernizing it, making cool apps like OpenTable

for your Social Security appointments and things like this.

I applied in 2015, I guess,

and I did not hear back.

This is a problem the government has,

is this level of sort of opaqueness to it.

And then when I saw Elon and DOGE

and this sort of like idea of, you know, when I talked

to Steve Davis about it, he sort of said like,

he wouldn't really tell me much about what it was going

to do, but he sort of did posit like, you know, it,

you know, is world class software built

by contractors or is it built

by the companies themselves, like Google?

Like, do they outsource the development?

And so, you know, we have an opportunity here to sort

of become the software engineering firm

within the federal government

and sort of build state capacity,

which aligned really well with what I wanted to do.

Ship code, as, you know,

for the federal government as a software engineer.

And that was sort of like what was sort of, you know,

promised to me or as sort of told to me in November,

December when I talked to them.

And, you know, like Sun Tzu says like,

no plan survives contact with the enemy.

So that's not exactly what happened.

Well, and-

But I do think that was,

you know, part of the plan.

Just for context for our audience,

Steve Davis, CEO of the Boring company,

frequently Elon Musk's right hand man,

and from what we understood from talking to you, Sahil,

someone who was really overseeing

DOGE's day-to-day operations when he was in government.

And to that point, you know, we will go back to Leland.

At what point did you realize that

that dream wasn't actually what DOGE was?

So I'm a student of history

and I like to understand what's going on.

And it quickly became apparent to me

pretty much as soon as I became the acting commissioner

that this was not going to go the way

that I had hoped it would go.

My philosophy has been looking at the history

of government

and recognizing that there have been attempts in the past

to bring business type practices to government.

Most notably was during the Johnson

and Kennedy administrations

with Robert McNamara in Department of Defense.

We lost the Vietnam War because of him, right?

He counted bullets instead of holding onto land

and the traditional metrics of warfare.

He was a brilliant, Bob McNamara was a brilliant engineer

from, was it General Motors

or Ford that brought those practices in from business

and wanted government to work that way.

It didn't work in DoD.

Well, this was a little bit the same.

It was a hierarchy that did not understand the culture

or practices of the government.

Fundamentally didn't understand

that government employees were not there to resist.

They were there,

and naturally there to be conservative

because the constraints in government

are such that every voice matters,

every person counts.

You cannot ignore the 20%

or the 5% to throw an app out there

or throw some practice out there to guinea pig on,

on your population, see if your idea works or not.

It doesn't work that way.

Why?

At Social Security,

how many people over the age

of 100 you wanna take off the death master file

are you going to kill

because they're not going to get a check?

So you have to have those, those kinds of talks.

And it's very hard to have those kinds of talks with people

with that single-minded Silicon Valley,

we need to hit our measures and marks,

and our KPIs and just get it done.

It's the constraints of government in contrast

with the ability to provide a government that serves all.

And how do we find that balance?

My hope is they would listen

and would work with us to find the edges

to work through the law, not bulldoze over it

and say, oh, fuck it.

And Sahil, when did you sort of get the vibe

that DOGE was fundamentally different

than what you'd been promised

in your conversations with Steve Davis?

Yeah, I think the first time I was like uh-oh,

it was actually still before I joined.

I was, you know, DOGE is sort of like,

I think of it like a bit of like a temp agency

where they kind of like exist

and they sort of throw people at these, you know,

a couple people, you know, in these different agencies.

And so I was, I, you know, they were like, Hey,

we have a spot for you at VA, talked to this guy.

He's like the first DOGE person there, you know,

You'll be a software engineer at VA

if you're interested, you know, Talk to him.

So I talked to him

and you know, I'm not super familiar.

I'm not a student of history.

I'm like the opposite,

I'm an engineer, you know, so focused

on the, on the future, but excited

to learn about a lot of this stuff.

But, and so anyway, I said awesome,

like VA's huge agency, it turns out according

to Wikipedia, absolutely massive.

Wow, what an opportunity for software

to make this stuff better, you know, also would be nice

to have an app for veterans to schedule their,

their appointments, et cetera, right?

And so like, how many, you know,

this is like a month or two

into the administration at this point.

So I say, how many of us are there at VA, right?

Like, am I the second engineer,

fifth engineer, 10th engineer.

He says like, you're actually gonna be

the first software engineer at VA.

And that was like a little concerning

and exciting in a way too, you know, like,

wow, I have so much opportunity to have an impact,

but also like, what the hell is like, why, like what's,

why like, I thought you read the news,

DOGE feels like this monster,

but it turns out like, you know, like Victoria's four,

you know, four boys,

and maybe a few older people like me with beards.

So it just was not that big.

And I think that mostly stemmed from the fact that like,

to get into it, you know, at the end

of the day, you are working for Trump, right,

sort of indirectly.

And it turns out that sort

of Venn diagram overlap of like software engineers,

you know, who wanted to do public service, who also,

like were, I'm not a Trump supporter by any any means,

but didn't have a history of like, Democrat, whatnot,

made it really hard, it made it almost impossible

to have anyone get through that filter.

So we had an interesting interaction

in the green room where you told me

you'd gotten dumped in VA.

Wouldn't say dumped.

I was honored to be there,

So I'm gonna use an acronym, you love,

I said VACO.

And he is like, well,

yeah, yeah, how'd you know?

I said, because that's, if you're in Command Control,

like in in the military, C4 ISR,

well they put you in headquarters,

but what program do you want to have an impact on?

Is it national cemeteries?

Is it VBA veteran benefits?

Is it VHA?

Oh headquarters controls all of it.

They do?

They do, really?

And so you were placed without an understanding

of where you could be most effective,

and you were given a distinct disadvantage

because not only did you not understand the environment,

but you didn't understand the politics underneath it

and the pressure from above which such

to we give me the numbers now.

Give me the result.

And so, you know, I think that what's important,

an important distinction here is for both Leland

and Sahil, you were some ways sort of in the eye

of the DOGE hurricane,

and it can be a bit calmer in there,

but this group looked very different

for those not sitting in the center.

And I really wanna come to you, George,

because can you tell us what your first experience

with DOGE looked like?

Sure.

And let's start by saying this, at the Institute

of Peace, there was nothing governmental

or efficiency about what DOGE did.

DOGE arrived as the brass knuckles on an authoritarian fist

to smash an organization and fire everybody in it.

And that's exactly what they did.

The President issued an executive order.

We got a call from OMB saying,

would you accept a detail from DOGE

to help improve your operations?

We knew by that time that was not a good idea.

The two DOGE operatives showed up at the building

one Friday afternoon with two FBI agents in tow

with a resolution saying

that the Presidentially-appointed directors had been fired,

and that the remaining directors who were the secretaries

of state and defense, and the President

of the National Defense University had adopted a resolution

that removed the acting president at the time,

George Moose,

and appointed a new one, Nate Kavanaugh,

who was a DOGE operative.

We did not let them in the building.

We told 'em to go away.

Over the weekend,

FBI agents visited USIP employees.

I got a call from the US attorney threatening me

with prosecution for obstructing their entry.

And on Monday we had secured the building,

and DOGE showed up with the FBI

and the Washington, DC Metropolitan Police Department.

They sent our security contractors into the building

with a key they had stolen.

I called the police to have them removed,

the police came and kicked us out.

So it was a combination of the White House, and DOGE,

and the FBI and the US Attorney, and our contractors

and the Metropolitan Police Department acting in concert

under the name of putting DOGE at USIP,

that seized the building, confiscated $30 million

of accounts, fired everybody in the building

and terminated all the contracts.

So it was not the most pleasant interaction with DOGE,

and it had nothing to do with government or with efficiency.

And I think, you know, this has been something

that has been something that's informed our reporting

a lot, is how much of this is about technology

versus how much

of this is about exercising power

and technology as a means to do that?

And I know for both Leland

and Sahil, you had a lot of hopes

for what could be done technologically here.

But you know, for you, Leland,

you mentioned when we've spoken in the past

that you interacted with some of the young engineers

that actually we identified at Wired.

Were they interested in learning

from experience civil servants?

Were they interested in understanding this,

and do you think they should have had access

to the power that they had?

Well, that's a really good question.

Yes, yes, and yes.

So one, we are all human beings,

and we all need to, we have hopes and dreams, and we aspire,

and we wanna be challenged.

And there is a way to take really smart people

who mean well and to incubate that talent,

and we should encourage that, right?

The DOGE engineers that many of you reported on,

they had backgrounds,

but if you look at their backgrounds,

if you're looking at it from the lens of the Washington,

of you know, Edward gets picked on a lot

because of the name Big Balls.

In fact, the number one thing I got from IRS a lot,

my friends at IRS was, Hey, have you met Big Balls yet?

Yeah, Edward's a kid who's really smart,

and he needs someone to Sherpa him and give him guidance,

and he can help move a program forward.

And frankly, I do not care

what he has done in the past.

What I care about is his commitment to what he's doing now,

and that he has sworn the same oath that I have

as a federal employee.

I made sure when Edward came to Social Security,

when the DOGE kids that came to Social Security,

I made sure they were undergoing background checks.

I made sure they got the same IT security training

that every SSA employee gets, including myself.

I made sure they got the same ethics training,

I made sure that they got the same privacy training,

and I made sure that they signed the same agreement.

And if they violated those rules,

and it, they were, I was told about it

by my IT security team, by anyone,

they would be terminated and prosecuted.

So I held them to the same standard as any employee.

So yes, I think they should have access to it.

Yes.

Do I want smart people looking at files to help me

weed through and improve data quality?

Yes. Don't you?

But I would, so I would push back on that a little bit,

because you know, what we saw at least,

and I wanna credit my colleagues, McKenna Kelly

and David Gilbert with this reporting

of DOGE's role in Social Security.

You know, we saw this sort of propaganda pushed out

about how there were supposedly 150-year-olds

receiving Social Security benefits

because of a misunderstanding of data.

And while that might be an error

that someone could correct

or would maybe learn from someone like you

to do differently,

that A, doesn't sound very much like the desire

to build an app to make something more efficient,

but also really feeding a perception

of government propagated by people in the administration

and by people like Elon Musk, that there is this sort

of rampant issue that doesn't exist.

And I don't know if I would consider that to be, you know,

a good use of those people's talents.

I would agree with that as well.

I wanna sort of backtrack for everyone, you know,

do you see DOGE

as separate from the Trump administration's agenda?

And you know, I know Sahil you and I have talked about this

and you know George as well,

so I'd wanna keep the answers brief,

but like, do you see DOGE

as a separate entity from the Trump administration's agenda?

I mean, in hindsight, you know, it is not separate.

It's you know, it was created

or modified by an executive order by Trump.

And it, at the end of the day, I think this is why it turned

to be such a sort of ideological thing,

is because that that is sort of like what they wanted out

of it, and what they got out of it.

And I think it was sort of this, maybe if we do this

and help you guys out with this

and show you that we're smart, you'll allow us

to then build a lot of cool apps for you.

And obviously like this stuff is fast and quick

and this stuff takes longer.

And I think they just sort of got played a little bit.

Yeah, I think in hindsight, at the end of the day, you know,

it is like, you know,

don't join the company if you're okay

if you're not a fan of the CEO, right?

Because at the end of the day,

that's sort of the agenda that

you're gonna be asked to work on.

If DOGE said, Hey, we have a spot for you

at ICE, you know, probably my conversation would've been,

it would've gone a little bit differently.

I felt pretty aligned with it.

I would say that as far as Doge being separate

from the government, you know, government

is people, they're human beings.

It's not just an entity that is off their, an automaton,

and people come to government with their own agendas.

There are many of the people who were recruited

for DOGE, like Saul came in wanting to do good things

with tech capabilities and wanting to accomplish things

and lead the same thing.

Elon Musk had a different agenda.

He wanted to, I'm not sure exactly what he wanted to do,

but he took his agenda to a destructive level.

[Panelist] Me too.

In the case of USIP, there was a combination

of the Musk DOGE team of trying

to strike government much smaller

with a man named Russ Vought,

who was the director of the Office

of Management Budget,

whose effort in the first Trump administration

had been to get rid of USIP.

And he tried again.

And so the combination of the Musk drive

to smash government and the vote intent to get rid of USIP,

and the fact that USIP conducted work

that Donald Trump considers to be woke

and not acceptable in his government, made a combination

of factors that certainly didn't bring DOGE to the party

in the way that it was presented to the public,

but rather brought it as the entry

of an authoritarian regime.

Well, and I wanted to backtrack a little,

'cause when you said you weren't necessarily sure

what Musk's goal was,

I heard you murmur a little bit over your style,

Me too.

I'm curious if you could talk a little bit

about what you experienced.

I know you met with Musk once, you know.

Did you, you know,

what was your sense of the level

of organization transparency, goal orientedness

around what DOGE was trying to do?

Yeah, I mean, I think at that point,

like I'd been there for a couple weeks,

and at that point the messaging had become about this,

the deficit reduction

and like this trillion dollar, trillion dollars of savings.

And so that kind of became like the sort of the go

to Mars, the kind of the North star that would sort

of align everyone to sort

of maximize cost savings, et cetera.

But there wasn't like a,

just kinda like the fraud at Social Security stuff.

Like, I think in the beginning,

I think many people would've believed,

oh yeah, maybe there's like a disconnect

and some fraud could sneak through

and, you know, if we can like sort of figure out how

to connect these two data sources,

we can uncover this thing.

And that's great.

But there wasn't like a exactly a sort

of a feedback loop on like, we tried to find fraud,

we failed to find it.

So try harder.

For example,

at VA, we looked into the same thing, like all these people

who are above the age of whatever,

and we found some guy who's 150 years old

and it turns out it was just like some error

in a database and he was 75.

But I would've been, what I heard was like,

and I'm an outsider,

I feel like these guys are a little bit more insider,

that I, the the way the government works is fascinating.

It's kinda like a big company that you're joining.

But I just, I just didn't know like how, you know,

the dynamics and incentives

and all the history behind a lot

of these things that at, like USIP,

And at USIP, the strike team that arrived,

once they cleared all the employees out, made it very clear

that they had no idea about what to do with the place.

The executive offices turned into a clubhouse.

They ate all the food in the cafeteria

and they left a half pound of weed when they left.

[audience laughs]

That's pretty funny.

It was pretty funny.

Was that reported?

I feel like I haven't ever heard it.

It was reported and most of the comments online

were what crappy weed they had left

and couldn't those guys afford something better.

You know, this guy doesn't smoke weed

'cause he talks about in pounds, not ounces.

[audience laughs]

Well, and well,

I'll come back to you

for a second, Leland,

but that becomes more relevant right now

because in this moment, you know, after the DOGE incursion

and the, you know, pounds of weed,

you guys took the administration to court, the judge sided

with you saying that the administration's actions

were unlawful, that they didn't have the right

to take over the building or fire its board members.

And though USIP technically won this judgment,

but this week a lot's happened.

The building now bears Trump's name as of earlier this week.

And today the president attended the signing

of a peace agreement between Rwanda

and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in that building.

What does that tell you about this moment,

knowing that you've won in court, and yet?

It's pretty bitter.

Let's start by saying the peace treaty

that they signed to the building today is the first time

that the building has been used for any substantive purpose

since USIP was evicted.

And by the way, that peace treaty between Rwanda

and the Democratic Republic of the Congo

is an important thing because it deals with access

to minerals without which the business plan

of everybody in this room would be useless.

The signing was held there

because the president wants

to assert control over the building

and show his, put his name

on a spectacular building on the National Mall.

But what that shows,

and what so much of this shows to me, in addition

to the slow grinding of the wheels

of justice to get us back in there.

And we will get back in there.

We're going to win this case.

[audience claps]

But it demonstrates how fragile the rule

of law in this country is.

I've practiced corporate law for a long time

and I've never doubted that the laws

of the United States of America were the strongest,

most secure, and most assuring

of a successful business opportunity

of any place in the world.

What this administration has done at USIP

and in so many other places is show that the rule

of law doesn't matter

if people don't stand up and defend it.

And the President is able to get away,

time and again, as he is at USIP today so far,

with ignoring, clouting, abusing,

the rules that have made our economy

and our country as strong as it is

and that have made my generation

as comfortable in giving us as good a life as we've had,

and that threatens the lives of younger generations

like so many other people in the room.

So the slowness

of the judicial process hurts.

I wish it were going to go faster,

but at least federal judges are holding the line.

They are upholding the law, they're applying the law,

and it will recover.

Leland, I wanted to return to you,

but I wanna keep us brief 'cause we're running on time.

Can you tell me at what point, you know, the threat of DOGE

was very apparent to George.

At what point for you did you start feeling

that DOGE was a threat

to the Social Security Administration?

Was there a moment?

It was very apparent to me when, you know,

that the first, when I saw what was happening

to US AID,

right, when I started to see at Social Security

when I came in, I tried to set the right look,

get the IG to investigate you,

set the right foot with staff,

bring in briefing teams

to educate the DOGE team about what's going on.

And when you come out of the briefing,

the day briefing,

which is an ordinary government activity,

you bring in the experts of an agency,

a 58,000-person agency that services, you know,

$74 million, $1.4 trillion in payments a year

to provide old age survivors disability insurance and SSI,

and you bring the experts in the room,

you say, Hey, here's what we do and why we do it.

And the first things that they come outta their mouthes out

of those briefings is, I need you to fire two groups.

'cause one I don't understand them.

And two, the other one provides civil rights.

Okay, so I work for the President,

I can be fired, what do I do?

My job is to execute the orders of the DOGE team

who have agency at this point, they speak for the President

of the United States of America.

So what do I do?

I recognize there's a problem.

I recognize I put 'em on administrative leave,

I slowly bring people back,

and I start to climb, confess, and conserve.

So that's when I start reaching out to the media

and I start tattle tailing on myself.

So yes, it was within the first week.

Alright, well, we're running down on time

and I wanted to come back to Sahil,

because you told me the other week

that you're actually back in the government.

[all laughing]

Can you tell our friends here a bit more?

Where are you now?

Yeah, I'm at USIP. No, just kidding.

For the weed.

Yeah, exactly.

Where's that?

No, so I'm here in my personal capacity.

I wanna cover my as ass as,

I'm learning a lot about

what I need to do, but I decided

through throughout this experience that

I actually learned as I have said publicly before,

that the government

is like pretty, pretty efficient.

Certainly could be, could move faster,

certainly does need more technical competence.

I think everyone agrees with that,

nothing too crazy about that.

And through DOGE and I was able to meet a lot of people

and one of those, one of those guys, Sam Corcos,

who's now the CIO of the Treasury, he said,

Hey, you know,

if I read this article you wrote about DOGE,

you meant, you say maybe next time, you know,

Would you be interested in helping out again?

So I decided this time I wanted to join

as a career employee.

So I'm an IT specialist,

that's the job code, you know, just a career employee.

At where?

Working for IRS for online accounts

with the goal of, you know, less mail, less fax,

more email, more push notifications, hopefully.

I'm trying to make an argument for,

[audience claps]

do you guys,

do you, I'm having a debate at work right now.

Do you guys think that IRS should have a mobile app or not?

[Audience] Yes.

All right.

I think this is a biased room.

I think you might need to be in other rooms to ask

that question as well.

That's all DOGE needs to move forward.

So your boss thinks he have a mobile app.

Really?

Oh, that's good to know because

his the middle layers have told me it's not true.

So Corcos reached out to you directly to come back?

I gotta be careful.

I don't know what I'm allowed to say or not.

Okay.

But he read my article

and said, Hey, you know,

If you're interested,

I can like refer you to, we need help.

We're working on a lot of these projects.

IRS is interesting 'cause unlike a lot of agencies

that do a lot of really good stuff,

but they sort of do it, you know,

like the IRS generates revenue,

like, most of the revenue

of the country comes through Treasury IRS.

So there is actually kind of a budget

for a software modernization that's outside

of these sort of congressional acts.

So I'm hopeful there's a lot

of cool stuff I can do there.

And I plan on being at the IRS for 10 years.

That's what I told myself.

'Cause it's gonna take some time.

'Cause I've learned it can take some time,

It can take some time.

55 days was not enough.

I have a final question for both Sahil and Leland.

And again, we're on time,

so I wanna make sure we keep it brief.

Do you have any regrets about sort

of what you help facilitate by being part of DOGE

or in your case being sort of a DOGE liaison?

I think if it doesn't turn into a lot

of really cool software that I get to ship

for the IRS, like in five to 10 years I may look back

and say that was, I should have

made a lot more money doing AI stuff.

[audience laughs]

But I'm optimistic.

I'm committed to helping

the public connect with government.

I'm committed to a better government that works for all.

I'm committed to encouraging more people

to run and join government.

So, get out there and vote.

Go out there and register others to vote.

Go run for office yourself.

If you wanna be part of this, then change the narrative.

Don't just donate money and write letters.

Be part of the change you wanna see in this world.

And so the American people I feel spoke

as part of this election,

they knew what they were getting involved with.

All I did was try to mitigate

what I could and help.

And I still remain passionate about government

and about citizens,

and in improving outcomes for all,

especially those

who are absolutely most vulnerable in our society.

And the only takeaway I want you to have here is,

how can we move forward?

We have another three years of President Trump

and you could say, well,

he'll get impeached, or he'll die.

Alright, then you have another three years

of the Vice President, right?

So how do we bridge the gap

and start working together?

It's time to start figuring out how to put the pieces

of our democracy

and real public policy conversations together

in a way that makes sense.

Alright, well thank you all so much for your time.

Thank you for being here.

Leland, George, Sahil.

Thank you so much.

And Vittoria.

[upbeat music]