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Inside Elon Musk’s Plan for DOGE to Slash Government Costs

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Inside Elon Musk’s Plan for DOGE to Slash Government Costs

An unpaid group of billionaires, tech executives and some disciples of Peter Thiel, a powerful Republican donor, are preparing to take up unofficial positions in the U.S. government in the name of cost-cutting.

As President-elect Donald J. Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency girds for battle against “wasteful” spending, it is preparing to dispatch individuals with ties to its co-leaders, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to agencies across the federal government.

After Inauguration Day, the group of Silicon Valley-inflected, wide-eyed recruits will be deployed to Washington’s alphabet soup of agencies. The goal is for most major agencies to eventually have two DOGE representatives as they seek to cut costs like Mr. Musk did at X, his social media platform.

This story is based on interviews with roughly a dozen people who have insight into DOGE’s operations. They spoke to The Times on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

On the eve of Mr. Trump’s presidency, the structure of DOGE is still amorphous and closely held. People involved in the operation say that secrecy and avoiding leaks is paramount, and much of its communication is conducted on Signal, the encrypted messaging app.

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Mr. Trump has said the effort would drive “drastic change,” and that the entity would provide outside advice on how to cut wasteful spending. DOGE itself will have no power to cut spending — that authority rests with Congress. Instead, it is expected to provide recommendations for programs and other areas to cut.

But parts of the operation are becoming clear: Many of the executives involved are expecting to do six-month voluntary stints inside the federal government before returning to their high-paying jobs. Mr. Musk has said they will not be paid — a nonstarter for some originally interested tech executives — and have been asked by him to work 80-hour weeks. Some, including possibly Mr. Musk, will be so-called special government employees, a specific category of temporary workers who can only work for the federal government for 130 days or less in a 365-day period.

The representatives will largely be stationed inside federal agencies. After some consideration by top officials, DOGE itself is now unlikely to incorporate as an organized outside entity or nonprofit. Instead, it is likely to exist as more of a brand for an interlinked group of aspirational leaders who are on joint group chats and share a loyalty to Mr. Musk or Mr. Ramaswamy.

“The cynics among us will say, ‘Oh, it’s naïve billionaires stepping into the fray.’ But the other side will say this is a service to the nation that we saw more typically around the founding of the nation,” said Trevor Traina, an entrepreneur who worked in the first Trump administration with associates who have considered joining DOGE.

“The friends I know have huge lives,” Mr. Traina said, “and they’re agreeing to work for free for six months, and leave their families and roll up their sleeves in an attempt to really turn things around. You can view it either way.”

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DOGE leaders have told others that the minority of people not detailed to agencies would be housed within the Executive Office of the President at the U.S. Digital Service, which was created in 2014 by former President Barack Obama to “change our government’s approach to technology.”

DOGE is also expected to have an office in the Office of Management and Budget, and officials have also considered forming a think tank outside the government in the future.

Mr. Musk’s friends have been intimately involved in choosing people who are set to be deployed to various agencies. Those who have conducted interviews for DOGE include the Silicon Valley investors Marc Andreessen, Shaun Maguire, Baris Akis and others who have a personal connection to Mr. Musk. Some who have received the Thiel Fellowship, a prestigious grant funded by Mr. Thiel given to those who promise to skip or drop out of college to become entrepreneurs, are involved with programming and operations for DOGE. Brokering an introduction to Mr. Musk or Mr. Ramaswamy, or their inner circles, has been a key way for leaders to be picked for deployment.

That is how the co-founder of Loom, Vinay Hiremath, said he became involved in DOGE in a rare public statement from someone who worked with the entity. In a post this month on his personal blog, Mr. Hiremath described the work that DOGE employees have been doing before he decided against moving to Washington to join the entity.

“After 8 calls with people who all talked fast and sounded very smart, I was added to a number of Signal groups and immediately put to work,” he wrote. “The next 4 weeks of my life consisted of 100s of calls recruiting the smartest people I’ve ever talked to, working on various projects I’m definitely not able to talk about, and learning how completely dysfunctional the government was. It was a blast.”

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These recruits are assigned to specific agencies where they are thought to have expertise. Some other DOGE enrollees have come to the attention of Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy through X. In recent weeks, DOGE’s account on X has posted requests to recruit a “very small number” of full-time salaried positions for engineers and back-office functions like human resources.

The DOGE team, including those paid engineers, is largely working out of a glass building in SpaceX’s downtown office located a few blocks from the White House. Some people close to Mr. Ramaswamy and Mr. Musk hope that these DOGE engineers can use artificial intelligence to find cost-cutting opportunities.

The broader effort is being run by two people with starkly different backgrounds: One is Brad Smith, a health care entrepreneur and former top health official in Mr. Trump’s first White House who is close with Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law. Mr. Smith has effectively been running DOGE during the transition period, with a particular focus on recruiting, especially for the workers who will be embedded at the agencies.

Mr. Smith has been working closely with Steve Davis, a collaborator of Mr. Musk’s for two decades who is widely seen as working as Mr. Musk’s proxy on all things. Mr. Davis has joined Mr. Musk as he calls experts with questions about the federal budget, for instance.

Other people involved include Matt Luby, Mr. Ramaswamy’s chief of staff and childhood friend; Joanna Wischer, a Trump campaign official; and Rachel Riley, a McKinsey partner who works closely with Mr. Smith.

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Mr. Musk’s personal counsel — Chris Gober — and Mr. Ramaswamy’s personal lawyer — Steve Roberts — have been exploring various legal issues regarding the structure of DOGE. James Burnham, a former Justice Department official, is also helping DOGE with legal matters. Bill McGinley, Mr. Trump’s initial pick for White House counsel who was instead named as legal counsel for DOGE, has played a more minimal role.

“DOGE will be a cornerstone of the new administration, helping President Trump deliver his vision of a new golden era,” said James Fishback, the founder of Azoria, an investment firm, and confidant of Mr. Ramaswamy who will be providing outside advice for DOGE.

Despite all this firepower, many budget experts have been deeply skeptical about the effort and its cost-cutting ambitions. Mr. Musk initially said the effort could result in “at least $2 trillion” in cuts from the $6.75 trillion federal budget. But budget experts say that goal would be difficult to achieve without slashing popular programs like Social Security and Medicare, which Mr. Trump has promised not to cut.

Both Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy have also recast what success might mean. Mr. Ramaswamy emphasized DOGE-led deregulation on X last month, saying that removing regulations could stimulate the economy and that “the success of DOGE can’t be measured through deficit reduction alone.”

And in an interview last week with Mark Penn, the chairman and chief executive of Stagwell, a marketing company, Mr. Musk downplayed the total potential savings.

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“We’ll try for $2 trillion — I think that’s like the best-case outcome,” Mr. Musk said. “You kind of have to have some overage. I think if we try for two trillion, we’ve got a good shot at getting one.”

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Paramount and YouTube TV extend deadline for a new carriage deal

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Paramount and YouTube TV extend deadline for a new carriage deal

Paramount Global and Google’s YouTube TV agreed to a short-term contract extension late Thursday, keeping CBS and other networks available as the two media companies worked to negotiate a new distribution agreement.

The eleventh-hour reprieve spared about 8 million YouTube TV customers from losing access to nearly two dozen networks, including BET, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon and TV Land. Broadcast stations KCBS-TV Channel 2 and KCAL-TV Channel 9 in Los Angeles also would have been dropped.

“We’ve reached a short term extension as we work toward a deal with Paramount to keep their content on YouTube TV,” YouTube said in a statement directed at users. “We appreciate your patience as we continued to negotiate on your behalf. We also value Paramount’s partnership and willingness to work towards an agreement.”

Clashes between programmers and distributors have become increasingly common in recent years. Pay-TV providers are motivated to control costs in an effort to attract and retain subscribers who have an abundance of viewing options.

At the same time, Paramount and other traditional Hollywood programmers are struggling to maintain their financial footing amid ratings declines and cable customer defections. They can ill afford cuts to one of their most important revenue streams: pay-TV distribution fees.

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The current dispute centers on the fees Google must pay for the rights to carry Paramount channels.

“We’re fighting for an agreement that avoids passing along additional costs and offers you more flexibility in how you watch your favorite sports and shows,” YouTube said earlier this week in a blog post.

The negotiations come at a troubled time for New York-based Paramount.

CBS is separately sparring with Sony Pictures Television to retain distribution rights for Sony’s hugely popular game shows “Jeopardy!” and “Wheel of Fortune.” The company also is trying to fend off a $20-billion lawsuit filed by President Trump over edits made to a “60 Minutes” interview of former Vice President Kamala Harris last fall.

Paramount’s controlling shareholder Shari Redstone struck a deal last summer to sell the company her family has controlled for decades to David Ellison’s Skydance Media. The $8-billion deal has encountered turbulence at the Federal Communications Commission. The agency must sign off on the transfer of the CBS television licenses to Ellison for the deal to go forward.

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Paramount’s cable channels, including Nickelodeon and MTV, have lost millions of subscribers amid a migration to video-on-demand streaming services such as Netflix. In August, Paramount took a $6-billion write-down to account for the declining value of its cable television portfolio and so it entered the negotiations with Google with a weaker hand.

“We have made a series of fair offers to continue our long-standing relationship with Google’s YouTube TV, providing subscribers access to the full array of Paramount’s entertainment, news and sports programming,” Paramount said Wednesday in a statement.

YouTube TV, which launched eight years ago, is hoping to sharpen its edge.

The service has quickly grown into a major player in television, appealing to younger viewers and sports fans. It has successfully plucked subscribers from the legacy cable- and satellite-TV providers.

YouTube TV is now the fourth-largest multichannel distributor in the U.S., behind Charter’s Spectrum, Comcast Xfinity and DirecTV, based in El Segundo.

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The service made a big bet on sports when it took over the NFL’s “Sunday Ticket” offering in 2023 after that package became too expensive for DirecTV, the longtime rights-holder. However, the nearly $2-billion-a-year price for the Sunday afternoon NFL games drove up the cost of operating YouTube TV, prompting Google to scrutinize other contract costs.

YouTube TV’s fees also are on the rise.

Last month, the service hiked its charge to customers to $82.99 a month, up from $72.99 a month.

The company said it would offer YouTube TV customers an $8 credit a month “if we can’t reach an agreement and [Paramount] content is unavailable for an extended period of time,” Google said in a blog post.

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The Restaurant That Started Panda Express

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The Restaurant That Started Panda Express

This orange chicken has not been waiting for you on the steam table. It has not been bouncing and sweating in the darkness of a clamshell container while you wheel your luggage to the gate.

At Panda Inn, the Pasadena restaurant that started Panda Express, the orange chicken is made to order, strewed with whole dried chiles, scallions and a few threads of orange zest. It arrives craggy and glistening on a blue stoneware plate.

Is it good? Trick question! It is sticky, and it is familiar. It is relentlessly crunchy, with a flatly precise and habit-forming ratio of sweetness to acidity to heat. It is better, though not dramatically different from the one that waits on the steam table — always there, always waiting — but sometimes presentation can be everything.

Orange chicken, all dressed up, reminds me of when my parents set out cloth napkins and silverware while unpacking boxes of takeout, transferring everything to serving plates (yes, even pizza). I used to find this absolutely unhinged, but now I see it as a tender gesture that underscored the luxury of their taking the night off from cooking — they did it so rarely.

When the Cherng family opened Panda Inn in 1973, it was a popular Chinese restaurant that catered to the neighborhood. Early menus from the 1970s and ’80s included a bone-in tangerine-peel chicken, sizzling beef hot plates and a “Chinese Pasta” section of noodle dishes.

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It was a nice, sit-down restaurant that also did a bit of takeout and catering. It appealed to local families, but also local developers, who asked the owners to come up with a restaurant concept for the expansion of the Glendale Galleria mall. That restaurant was Panda Express.

Panda Express developed its orange chicken in 1987 and, depending on whom you ask, the dish was either the natural evolution of tangerine-peel chicken or a lightning invention of Andy Kao, a chef for the chain. Either way, it helped to embed a sweet, crowd-pleasing idea of American Chinese cuisine into the global culinary consciousness, now deployed through 2,500 or so fast-food counters.

It also propelled the family’s small business into a privately held empire: Along with Panda Express, the group owns Uncle Tetsu, Hibachi-San and more, and the Cherng family has a net worth of more than $3 billion.

At the end of last year, the company completed a major renovation to the Panda Inn in Pasadena, with a red carpet that leads into a sprawling, glamorous, wood-paneled dining room. The ceilings are high and vaulted. There are lush pots of violet orchids at the host stand and bar.

The vibe would seem clubby if Panda Inn weren’t warm and welcoming, always peppered with shouty families celebrating birthdays and special occasions. On my most recent visit, an impeccably well-dressed man in his 70s enjoyed a multicourse meal on his own, while the two men next to me chatted in Armenian over beers, kung pao chicken and sushi.

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Why is sushi on the menu? Because people love sushi, and because honey walnut shrimp was begging to be converted into a sloppy but delightful roll, but also because the restaurant’s founder and first chef, Ming-Tsai Cherng, lived and worked for some years in Yokohama’s Chinatown.

Why Taiwanese popcorn chicken and stone bowls of Taiwanese braised beef on rice? Because in the 1950s, Mr. Cherng worked as a chef at the Grand Hotel in Taipei, Taiwan.

You’re not thinking about all this as you sit down for a big meal at one of the round tables for 12, spinning the lazy susan with glee until the dish you want most is finally in front of you. But Panda Inn in Pasadena isn’t just a place for Panda Express superfans to come and pay their respects; it’s a devoted corporate flagship — a grand, Disneyfied spin through the family’s story that reframes this restaurant as proof of the American dream.

On the newly designed menu, there’s a photo of Ming-Tsai Cherng, born in Yangzhou, wearing a cook’s shirt and tossing food in a wok. Below, in a story about the immigrant family’s journey, Panda Inn describes itself as “a restaurant that embodies the pursuit of a better life for all.”

Such a frictionless story of the American dream seems fanciful if you so much as glance at the news, but it also doesn’t have much to do with why the dining room is consistently packed.

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Even though Panda Express was never my go-to, the orange chicken will occasionally stand in for the fried and glazed thing that I genuinely long for, but can never have again: the sweet-and-sour pork at a restaurant called Peking Inn that once existed in suburban London.

For my ninth birthday, I asked my parents to make me that sweet-and-sour pork, along with the sweet corn and chicken egg-drop soup. We had just moved 300 miles away, to France, and I was still angry and depressed about it, but I didn’t know how to say all that.

Instead, I dared them to try and make me happy. I dared them to recreate a dish from my favorite Chinese restaurant (impossible!), one whose vast pleasures and disappointments are still hard-wired into my brain.

Those particulars are different for everyone, but they fill out the story behind Panda Inn’s greatest hits, embedded like core memories. On any given night, there’s an order of orange chicken on nearly every table — a dish that isn’t just tangled up in its own corporate mythologies, but tangled up in our own.

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Their grandfather came to America and opened a nursery. A century later, it's closing

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Their grandfather came to America and opened a nursery.  A century later, it's closing

For the better part of a century, generations of the Nakai family have kept the shelves at Hawthorne Nursery stocked with seeds and fertilizers, the lot outside full of fruit trees, potted plants and succulents.

The job, for the past many years, has fallen to Kei Nakai, 70, and his brother, David. But they will be the last. When the brothers retire at the end of the month, the 97-year-old nursery and, with it almost a century of family and local history, will go too.

“It’s time,” Nakai said.

Kei Nakai is shown in the garden center at Hawthorne Nursery.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

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The nursery dates to 1927, when it was started by Kei and David’s grandfather, Minegusu Nakai, who had emigrated from Japan to Vancouver, Canada, in 1898 and moved to Hawthorne after marrying. Today, it is one of the few remaining plant nurseries in the Los Angeles area that were opened by Japanese Americans before the U.S. entered World War II at the end of 1941. Shortly after, 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry living in the U.S., many of them citizens, were forced into incarceration camps under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. Taking what they could carry, they sold or left behind their homes, possessions and businesses.

To avoid being imprisoned in a camp, the Nakai family fled to work on a sugar beet farm in Colorado, according to the Los Angeles Conservancy. Another nursery owner in Gardena leased the property while they were gone and when they returned at the end of the war they purchased more land to expand the nursery into what it is today.

Kei Nakai says he’ll miss the most his parents’ home — a skinny, green two-story building that adjoins the nursery on Grevillea Avenue.

He pointed out his childhood bedroom window and said he wants to take a pane of glass and part of the old molding to make a commemorative frame before it’s bulldozed when they sell. He said he hopes the land is turned into something nice.

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A scale is seen inside a plant nursery

A scale from 1927 is among the items at Hawthorne Nursery in Hawthorne. There is so much “old stuff” everywhere, owner Kei Nakai says.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

There is so much “old stuff” everywhere, he said, it’s hard to decide what to keep and what to toss. Antique items are part of what’s left on display across the nursery’s walls: A scale that’s been there since the nursery opened. The ‘50s retro blue sign outside. A letter board above the register that reads, “Beautifying Hawthorne for 97 years. Enjoy the outdoors. Go gardening.”

A weathered train car used for storage — older than the nursery itself, he thinks — might go too, Nakai said. He isn’t sure where it came from or how old it is, though he remembers his father bringing it onto the property at some point. The conservancy expressed some interest it in, but he hasn’t heard anything in a while.

The closure isn’t for a lack of business, Nakai said. He declined to share revenue information but said the business was doing well and there’s been an additional boost since the closure — and sales to clear inventory — was announced.

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Early on a recent Monday morning, the nursery was quiet other than an occasional phone call answered by his brother, David, in a back room. It was a far cry from the days during the COVID-19 pandemic, when South Bay residents were stuck at home and came looking for plants to cultivate and distract.

“This place was packed,” Nakai said. “It was never empty.”

A man in a gray vest and dark shirt stands near a chair

Kei Nakai said he has been discussing retirement over the last 15 years and was just waiting for the right time.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

A man wheeled his baby boy into the store to ask when the doors will shut for good. “I love this place,” he told Nakai.

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Kevin Baker, 45, frequented the shop when he first moved to the area from Pacific Palisades four years ago, drawn by the rare or interesting offerings not easily found at other nurseries, he said. He visited weekly, then monthly, then less frequently after his two children were born and his schedule got busier. “I’m glad I got to see it before it closed,” he said.

Nakai said he has been discussing retirement over the last 15 years and was just waiting for the right time. As a kid he worked for his parents in the shop and made 25 cents a day. When he graduated from UCLA in 1976 as an engineer, he said, government layoffs at the end of the Vietnam War meant he’d be jockeying for work right out of college. It made sense for him to take over the business instead.

His own children, now in their 30s, are happy with their own careers and have no interest in taking over, he said.

A photo, plaques and a Hawthorne Nursery sign hang on a brown wall

Memorabilia cover the walls of Hawthorne Nursery. The Nakai family “really did live, breathe and thrive in the plant world,” another nursery owner said.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

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The Nakai family brings a century of knowledge and skill to its horticulture work, said Russell Akiyama, a third- generation owner of the nearby Sunflower Farms Nursery in Torrance. “They really did live, breathe and thrive in the plant world,” he said.

Nakai spent time studying the Dudleya genus, succulents native to the West Coast, and contributed to its taxonomy, or scientific classification. In a presentation recorded in 1992 at the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden, a younger Nakai flips through pictures and describes different species of Dudleya plants.

And David Nakai “could make something grow out of a rock,” Akiyama joked. He recalled once seeing David propagating a flourishing flat of white wisteria, which is particularly hard to grow, and wondered how he’d managed to do it. And the nursery’s passion fruit, which Akiyama called “the best passion fruit you’ve ever tasted,” will live on in Sunflower Farms’ own collection, he said.

As Hawthorne Nursery prepares to close, Akiyama said he takes solace in seeing the influence the Nakai family and other Japanese American nursery owners have had when he drives through neighborhoods in Torrance, Gardena and other cities nearby and sees trees cultivated by the nursery owners decades ago.

“Our landscaping is just as much of a monument to who we are as our buildings,” he said. “There is no full, total goodbye. It’s just an, ‘I’ll see you later.’”

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