The Ezra Klein Show

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency is great branding. Who could be against a more efficient government? But “efficiency” obfuscates what’s really happening here.

Efficiency to what end? Elon Musk, President Trump and DOGE’s boosters have offered various objectives — cutting the deficit, eliminating fraud and abuse, creating a leaner and more responsive government. But DOGE’s actions in the past two months don’t seem to align with any of those goals.

Santi Ruiz is the senior editor at the Institute for Progress and the author and host of the “Statecraft” podcast and newsletter. He’s t...

To mark the release of our new book “Abundance,” my co-author Derek Thompson had me on his podcast, “Plain English,” to talk about it. We’re on book tour right now, so we’re doing a lot of talking about this book. But this conversation is different. It’s just Derek and me, and we get into the story of how the book came together, and all the people and ideas that influenced us – a kind of intellectual history of the abundance agenda. And I thought the audience of this show might find this interesting too.  

This episode of “Plain...

After the last election, there were all kinds of theories about where Democrats went wrong. But now, four months later, we have a lot more data – and it tells a few clear stories.

David Shor is the head of data science at Blue Rose Research, a Democratic polling firm, which does an enormous amount of surveying of the electorate. A few weeks ago, Shor was walking me through a deck he made of key charts and numbers that explain the election results. And I thought this would be good to do in public. Because this is information th...

It’s hard to understand the economic logic of President Trump’s tariffs. In our last episode, we tried, but with limited success. And that might be because the logic here isn’t entirely economic at all.

So we wanted to spend an episode looking at Trump’s economic policies through a wider lens.

Gillian Tett is a columnist at The Financial Times and a member of its editorial board. She’s also a trained anthropologist with a Ph.D. And she brings both perspectives into this conversation — exploring Trump’s policies as economics, as well as power...

Wall Street thought Donald Trump was bluffing about his tariff plans. The stock market rallied after his election. But the reality has started setting in. Trump is doubling down on tariffs, even as he warned Americans that the economy may experience a “period of transition,” insisting this is just short-term pain.

So what exactly is Trump’s theory here? And how much pain should we expect?

Answering those questions requires a bit of a tariffs primer. And the economist Kimberly Clausing kindly agreed to come on the show, walk through the basics, and help me make s...

Right-wing populism thrives on scarcity. The answer is abundance. But a politics of abundance will work only if Democrats confront where their approach has failed. 

This audio essay is adapted from my forthcoming book, “Abundance,” which I wrote with Derek Thompson. You can preorder it here. And learn more about our book tour here.

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

The economy has started blinking red. President Trump’s tariffs have been roiling markets. Consumer sentiment was already down. G.D.P. forecasts are predicting slower growth. And on Tuesday night Trump declared to Congress and the nation that things had never been better.

Something was different about this speech. The level of baldfaced lying. The way Republicans cheered along. How uncomfortable and uncertain Democrats seemed. It was as if, watching it all, you could feel something rupturing.

My editor, Aaron Retica, joins me to talk through Trump’s fifth address to Congress.

This...

Artificial general intelligence — an A.I. system that can beat humans at almost any cognitive task — is arriving in just a couple of years. That’s what people tell me — people who work in A.I. labs, researchers who follow their work, former White House officials. A lot of these people have been calling me over the last couple of months trying to convey the urgency. This is coming during President Trump’s term, they tell me. We’re not ready.

One of the people who reached out to me was Ben Buchanan, the top adviser on A.I. in the...

If you’re looking for a single-sentence summation of the change in America’s foreign policy under Donald Trump, you could do worse than what Trump said on Wednesday:

“The European Union was formed in order to screw the United States. That’s the purpose of it. And they’ve done a good job of it. But now I’m president.”

Trump seems to loathe America’s traditional European allies even as he warms relations with Russia. He’s threatened tariffs on Canada and Mexico while softening his rhetoric on China. And he seems fixated on the idea of ter...

In 2016, when Donald Trump won the first time, a little-known book became an unexpected phenomenon. It was “The Revolt of the Public,” self-published two years earlier by a former C.I.A. media analyst, Martin Gurri. Gurri, who is now a visiting research fellow at the Mercatus Center, argued that a revolution in how information flowed was driving political upheavals in country after country: The dynamics of modern media ecosystems naturally created distrust toward institutions and elites, and this was fueling waves of revolt against the status quo. The problem, though, was that though these dynamics could destroy existing poli...