In the 1990s Clinton and Gore eliminated 426,000 government jobs and adhered to pay-as-you-go fiscal rules, producing a $240 billion surplus by 2000. The formula was boring, bipartisan, and it worked — the exact opposite of DOGE's theatrical chainsaw approach.
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At 41:20 · chapter starts 38:20
Scaramucci walks through the historical success story DOGE had to hand but ignored. Clinton and Gore's Reinventing Government initiative cut 426,000 government positions through genuine bipartisan consensus and maintained pay-as-you-go fiscal guardrails negotiated originally by George H.W. Bush and OMB director Dick Darman. [1] — Anthony Scaramucci "In the 1990s Clinton and Gore eliminated 426,000 government jobs and adhered to pay-as-you-go fiscal rules, producing a $240 billion surplu…" 41:20 The result: a $240 billion budget surplus by 2000. The method was unglamorous — slow, politically costly (Bush raised taxes and lost re-election partly as a result), and required building buy-in across parties. But it worked. Scaramucci's prescription for today is a 25-year plan: return to pay-as-you-go rules, convene 25-year veterans of the GAO and former budget officials from both parties, document all the tricks agencies use to inflate their budgets, and gradually ratchet spending down. Kay adds the political reality: without bipartisan cooperation, any party that tries to fix this gets destroyed by opposition ads about death panels and stolen senior benefits. The result is a perpetual standoff and a $50 trillion deficit on the horizon.
DOGE cut malaria and Ebola research grants as part of its international-development purge. Now the State Department is trying to rebuild exactly those programmes after realising they protect Americans too. The cost of rehiring will be double the original budget, Katty Kay's daughter witnessed this firsthand.
Under Clinton and Gore's 'Reinventing Government' initiative, 426,000 government positions were eliminated through bipartisan consensus.
The US is on course for a $50 trillion budget deficit with no political will for the fix. The likely outcome: inflation as a stealth tax. Scaramucci says politicians would rather quietly drain your bank account than tell you the truth about what it will take to correct course.
Factories that replaced coal engines with electric ones in the early 1900s got only 6% efficiency gains. Those that redesigned their entire factory around electricity got a 3x productivity improvement. Swapping AI tools into your existing structure will give you 6%. Rebuilding around AI will give you 10x.
Lebanese terrorists backed by Iran were holding American hostages throughout the Reagan presidency. Reagan had loudly campaigned against negotiating with terrorists — putting him in an impossible position that his team quietly decided to ignore.
During the Iran-Iraq War, the US openly supplied Iraq with weapons, training, and intelligence. At the same time, Oliver North was secretly funneling missiles to Iran. The US was playing both sides of a shooting war.
Oliver North traveled to Iran under the alias 'William P. Goode' with a fake passport. CIA Director William Casey allegedly gave him cyanide pills so he could kill himself rather than be tortured if captured. He returned safely and the deal moved forward.
The Pentagon sold missiles to the CIA for $3,700 each. The CIA sold them to Richard Secord at cost. Secord sold them to Iranian middleman Ghorbanifar for $10,000 each. Ghorbanifar charged Iran even more. The profit — including $3 million in interest in one Swiss account — was diverted directly to fund the Nicaraguan Contras.
America secretly transferred 2,000 missiles and missile parts to Iran in 8 shipments over more than a year. Only 3 of 7 hostages were released. Three more were taken. The net result was zero freed hostages and a full-blown constitutional scandal.
On October 5, 1986, a CIA Contra supply plane flew a weapons drop at 2,500 feet in broad daylight. A Sandinista soldier shot it down. The only survivor, Eugene Hasenfuss, had borrowed a parachute from his skydiving brother. He was captured, paraded in front of cameras, and told the Sandinistas everything he knew.
The CIA supply operation used a front company called Southern Air Transport, widely known to be a CIA cover. Crew members of the downed plane carried their Southern Air Transport employee IDs in their wallets. One also had a business card directly linking him to Oliver North's office in Washington.
When the scandal broke, Oliver North and his secretary Fawn Hall conducted what became known as a 'shredding party,' destroying a day's worth of documents. The full truth of Iran-Contra may never be known because of what was fed through that shredder.
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