If you’ve been listening to WatchCats for a while, you’ve probably heard us refer in passing to “neoreaction” (sometimes pretentiously dubbed the “ dark enlightenment ”), a once-fringe political philosophy that holds liberal democracy is not merely dysfunctional but doomed . The only hope for “freedom,” its adherents paradoxically insist, is the installation of a monarchic executive with effectively despotic powers. If this sounds like something a cranky blogger would cook up, well… it is —but f...
Jun 05, 2025•1 hr 12 min
If you’d expect anybody to be enthusiastic about the Department of Government Efficiency, it would be Jessica Riedl , a senior fellow and economic policy expert at the Manhattan Institute . A fiscal conservative of unimpeachable credentials, she’s worked as a policy scholar at the Heritage Foundation , as chief economist to Senator Rob Portman (R-OH), and as staff director of the U.S. Senate Finance Subcommittee on Fiscal Responsibility and Economic Growth. She’s a regular on Washingtonian ’s an...
May 13, 2025•58 min
If you’ve been trying to follow the nitty-gritty details of DOGE’s efforts to seize control of the Treasury Department’s payments system—and why it’s so important—then odds are you’ve already heard of Nathan Tankus . An independent journalist and researcher, his newsletter Notes on the Crises has become essential reading for anyone seeking to untangle the workings of an abstruse but vital piece of financial infrastructure that most of us had never given much thought—or even heard of—before Janua...
May 06, 2025•1 hr 12 min
For more than 30 years, the Electronic Privacy Information Center has been advocating for—and litigating to protect—personal privacy against increasing technological encroachment. No surprise, then, that the folks at EPIC were alarmed when it became clear that DOGE staff were seeking access—for unclear purposes—to an array of highly sensitive and normally stringently siloed federal databases. They filed a lawsuit in February challenging that access under the Privacy Act of 1974, and a host of ot...
Apr 28, 2025•45 min
For most of her career in journalism—first at The Washington Post , now at The New York Times — Emily Badger’ s beat had been housing, transportation, and urban policy. But since the start of the second Trump administration, she’s distinguished herself as one of the sharpest observers of the fledgling Department of Government Efficiency. The piece that first caught our eye—and the central topic of our conversation—was her impressively exhaustive catalog of the personal information contained in d...
Apr 16, 2025•1 hr 7 min
For more than 30 years, Wired has been where discerning nerds go for some of the sharpest tech coverage around—but as Silicon Valley exerts ever greater influence over Washington, its writers have been proving time and again that they’re also happy to scoop the traditional press on vital political stories. If you’re trying to keep up with DOGE, their coverage is essential reading. Much of the best of that reporting has recently come from the keyboards of Senior Writer Makena Kelly and Platforms ...
Apr 08, 2025•56 min
It’s a horror movie scenario: People are suddenly falling ill in a small area. Is it food poisoning? Is it a virus? What do the victims have in common? Is a local farm contaminated, or is another global pandemic brewing? Itir Cole was working on software to help hospitals report symptoms that the Centers for Disease Control ( CDC ) would use to trace the contours of the threat when DOGE took control. And it quickly became clear they weren’t interested in the answers. Concluding our series of int...
Apr 02, 2025•40 min
Every day, an estimated 17 people die while waiting for an organ transplant , even as viable organs go to waste. As a deputy digital services lead at the Department of Health and Human Services, Amy Paris was working hard to bring that number down by modernizing and improving the algorithm that hospitals use to match organs with the compatible nearby donors who need them most urgently. Her performance reviews were glowing. But in February, she was summarily fired, purportedly for “poor performan...
Mar 28, 2025•34 min
This week we’re doing something a little bit different: We’re kicking off a series of interviews with alumni of the United States Digital Service (USDS), now rebranded the “United States DOGE Service,” where Elon Musk’s youthful band of chainsaw-wielders are formally housed. In many ways the USDS is a model of all that DOGE purports to be seeking to accomplish: It deployed skilled technologists, often with impressive résumés in private sector tech, to a wide range of government agencies with a m...
Mar 25, 2025•57 min
The new Trump administration’s “slash first, ask questions later” approach to overhauling the federal bureaucracy has, unsurprisingly, spawned a mountain of litigation raising a dizzying array of statutory and constitutional challenges to various executive actions. Among the most effective to date at halting the steamroller, at least temporarily, have been those brought by a coalition of Democratic state attorneys general . Two of these have focused particularly on the activities of the soi-disa...
Mar 11, 2025•1 hr
As Elon Musk and his teen tech team take a chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy, those of us who followed the South African centibillionaire’s fraught takeover of the platform formerly known as Twitter may be feeling an eerie sense of déjà vu. The hasty mass layoffs, often seemingly conducted with little understanding of who is being fired and what function they served . The dubious projections of a drastically improved fiscal outlook . The general ambiance of fear and confusion, exacerbated by i...
Feb 27, 2025•57 min
Fighting through all the trash memes, trolling, and terrible DOGE database security we somehow made it to Episode 3! This week we interview cybersecurity expert Tarah Wheeler , CEO of Red Queen Dynamics . Tarah serves as the Senior Fellow for Global Cyber Policy at Council on Foreign Relations and is a member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Board of Directors . You can find her on Bluesky @tarah.org . ~~~ Want to support the podcast? Join our Substack ! -- SOCIALS -- X BlueSky...
Feb 24, 2025•1 hr 48 min
We're back! After reacting to Elon Musk's latest Bart Simpson level trolling on X, we talk briefly on how we're going to ramp up production in order to meet the deluge of news and noise coming out of DOGE. Our guest this week is Professor Henry Farrell, from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies . Prof. Farrell was the 2019 recipient of the Friedrich Schiedel Prize for Politics and Technology and his latest book (along with Prof. Abraham Newman at Georgetown) is Underground ...
Feb 12, 2025•1 hr 28 min
In our first full episode, we interview Mikey Dickerson, the first Administrator of the United States Digital Service ( USDS ) – which the Trump Administration has now renamed to the US DOGE Service . We discuss his personal origin with USDS, how things get done behind the scenes in the Executive Office of the President (EOP), and the potential impacts of the DOGE Executive Order. ~~~ Want to support the podcast? Join our Substack ! -- SOCIALS-- X BlueSky...
Jan 27, 2025•57 min
Noah Kunin and Julian Sanchez introduce the idea behind WatchCats ! ~~~ Want to support the podcast? Join our Substack ! -- SOCIALS-- X BlueSky
Jan 27, 2025•3 min
