DOGE updates + Liberation Day Tariff Reactions with Ben Shapiro and Antonio Gracias

The episode opens with joking about the White House recording. One participant warns that "everything is archived by the White House right now, so everything we say is recorded," and the banter that follows includes mock accusations about unpaid taxes and parking tickets. The host then introduces the regular panel and two guests: Ben Shapiro, introduced with a joke about having "the number two podcast in the world," and Antonio Gracias, who is described as being on "a little tour of duty" in government working on DOGE.

The response rejects the idea of a hiatus from Valor. The speaker says the arrangement amounts to "a seven day a week, sixty to eighty hour day job," with partners covering parts of the work and the firm allowing it. Asked whether the role had been public, the speaker cites a New York Times story about going to the Social Security Administration (SSA), calls it "Not not right," and confirms having worked in Woodland, Maryland.

Asked how DOGE staff are placed, the speaker says they first volunteered for the VA because it is "close to my heart." Elon then asked them to go to the SSA first, calling it "the biggest internal problem we have," and to look for fraud, waste and abuse there.

The team, as described, included two people from Valor, John and Peyton, one an engineer and the other a "finance ninja." They joined an existing team that included Scott Coulter, described as a former Lone Pine employee who had started his own fund and come in as a volunteer. That team had already begun work on the enumeration system, the part of the system that issues Social Security numbers, including cleaning up the database.

The mandate is described as "Fraud, waste, and abuse," which the speaker presents as a goal past presidents also talked about. The urgency comes from solvency: "The system's going bankrupt. It's gonna be bankrupt 2037." The speaker adds that the country overall is "on its way toward bankruptcy."

The core of the segment is a chart shown at a Sunday rally. The speaker describes the team's method as mapping "the entire system from beginning to end," from how a number is issued through to office operations. During that mapping, Peyton found data on a category called "enumeration beyond entry," which showed a steep rise from a baseline of roughly "three, four hundred thousand people all the way to 2,100,000 people."

A host gives background on why issuing numbers to noncitizens is routine in itself. Social Security numbers were created in 1936 so citizens could track earnings. In the 1990s, the government began issuing them to noncitizens authorized to work so it could collect taxes from them. Green card holders need a number to work and pay into Social Security and Medicare. The host says that when they first came to the US twenty-five years ago on a TN visa, they were able to get a number because they held a valid visa.

The speaker stresses that the program has "legitimate use." Examples include H-1B and green card holders, and Afghan translators who came in after the war. The 300,000 to 400,000 per year baseline is treated as the expected level. According to the speaker, the program started in 2017. The concern is the growth: "Why did it grow this fast? And what happened?"

A host raises a criticism of the chart: people want to see the previous ten or twenty years. The host asks whether the rise reflects a COVID overhang or the 2023 border surge. The speaker says a longer history is not available because the program became active in 2017. Only a few numbers appear in 2018, and volume grew in 2019 and 2020, which is why those years are used as the baseline: "I can't go back twenty years. It doesn't exist."

The speaker says most of the growth came from asylum programs, parolees, and people who received notices to appear (NTAs), mostly at the border. Of about 5,400,000 people in total, about 1,200,000 had a status marked "unknown" and about 1,200,000 were marked "general parole." In the speaker's view, these people should have been labeled with the specific program they were under.

The speaker argues that "a legitimate program was in the word I use abused," because the requirements were loosened. As evidence, they contrast an older four-page form, on which an applicant had to show a credible fear of being murdered or tortured by their government, with a newer form of four questions that the speaker calls "super leading." One question they read aloud is:

So do you have any reason for concern about being returned to your own country or being removed from The United States?

The team travelled to Brownsville and Laredo because it could not find data explaining the unknown categories. As the speaker describes it, a notice to appear lets a person enter the country with a court date that averages about six years out, which the speaker calls "some quasi legal status." While waiting, a person can file an asylum application without an interview, then file form 765 for work authorization. Once the 766 authorization is issued, a Social Security card is mailed automatically. The speaker says: "No interview at all," and calls this "the majority of the growth you see in these numbers."

Asked whether identities are verified to prevent duplicate numbers, the speaker answers "there's no real ID verification": some people showed IDs, such as passports or driver's licenses, and some did not. The detail that "tipped us off" came from birth certificate data presented at the border. According to the speaker, the most common birth date was 01/01, and people were "four times more likely to be born on 01/01 than any other, day of the year."

On biometrics, the speaker says photos exist, but "twenty three percent of the records looked at did not have fingerprints." They attribute this to border staff being overwhelmed and admit "we're not sure why this happened." They also report that Border Patrol and border protection described record suicide rates during the surge, with "over seventy of these agents" dying by suicide in that period. The speaker calls this a human tragedy, "because they knew what was going on."

Asked whether the administration will try to invalidate the numbers, the speaker first describes tracing the population into benefit programs. They say "1,300,000 of them are on Medicaid right now, today," and that the number is "just ramping." They also describe checking public voter rolls in a few states that would cooperate. The team found that "thousands of them registered to vote in a handful of states," and that in some of those states many had actually voted.

The speaker gives no final answer on remedies. Some cases have been referred for prosecution. Because the people involved have "various kinds of status," the speaker says a detailed legal analysis of how to handle them is still under way.

One participant offers a counterpoint. They cite a Heritage Foundation project, described as "obviously right leaning," that tracks fraud cases and has found "only been 24 cases since 02/2003" (as transcribed) of noncitizens trying to vote. The participant notes these are only the cases where people were caught, so even a thousand would be "incredibly dramatic." The response insists "it's more than a thousand in just a couple of states." The speaker calls this "the tip of the iceberg," pointing to 7,800,000 people they say ICE has recorded as entering illegally. They add that "this is not a political issue."

A host restates the two concerns: illegal voter registration, and use of resources that "could have otherwise gone to an American." Another participant adds that these people could also be paying taxes. The speaker calls the picture "massively complex" and says every benefit program examined, in a handful of states, included people from this group, including on unemployment and Medicaid. The speaker says the list was sent to the National Targeting Center, which found "hard hits" on criminals and people on terrorist watch lists. The speaker also acknowledges that some people in the group "have jobs and paying in the system," and says "All these things are true."

A host says critics, including the hedge fund manager Jim Chanos (transcribed as "Jim Chaneyos"), accused the analysis of cherry-picking. The speaker answers that the critics' chart was "apples to oranges." It counted all enumerations, including numbers issued in SSA offices and through consulates before arrival, and set that total against the enumeration-beyond-entry figures alone. A host suggests "we need a stacked bar chart" and says "there's some fun with numbers going on there."

The speaker is careful about motive: "I don't wanna impute negative motives. They just maybe were confused." They say the first person to post the critical chart deleted it, apologized and asked questions. A host argues that the debunked chart still became a "Rorschach test" and shaped much of the online and media narrative.

Asked about political background, the speaker says "I was a democrat for twenty years," mentions knocking on doors in Iowa, and says Democratic friends are "as shocked as I am" when shown the data. A host adds that calling them a Democrat is an understatement and describes them as a major party donor. The host then asks how moderates, MAGA, classic Republicans, Democrats and "the woke lunatics" might reconcile, and whether data and logic could help.

The reply argues that Americans have broadly agreed for a long time: stop illegal immigration at the southern border, then decide who among those already present stays. The speaker calls the drop in border crossings to "the lowest numbers in recorded history" "an unmitigated success." They argue that politics has wrongly assumed people can only be treated "as a class," either everyone stays or everyone goes. Their answer to how individuals could be assessed is: "the IRS does it with our tax returns literally every single year."