Inside DOGE, The IRS & How to Scam the US Government - Sam Corcos

Chris Williamson 0:00 You got a new job. Congratulations.

Sam Corcos 0:01 (laughs) Yeah.

Chris Williamson 0:02 How'd that happen?

Sam Corcos 0:04 I, uh, I had a lot of friends reach out to me from the administration, uh, saying that they really needed help doing, really looking into IRS modernization. It's one of the worst managed IT projects in the government. Uh, I think maybe second only to the VA's attempt at implementing an electronic health records system. Uh, it's about 15 billion dollars over budget. It was actually started right around the time I was born, and it's still ongoing. It's still five years away. It was five years away in 1991, it's still five years away. So, they said they really needed somebody to look into this and see if we could fix it. So, um, I, I've always wanted to do government service. It's a thing that has been important to me. I, I care a lot about the future of the country, especially the national debt. But I, I kind of assumed this would be a thing that I would do in my 50s, after I'm retired, um, but my, my wife really encouraged me to, uh, to give this a go. So about six months ago, I made the plunge and, and here I am. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:12 What are you?

Sam Corcos 1:13 I'm, uh, I'm the chief information officer of the Treasury Department. That's my official role.

Chris Williamson 1:19 What's that mean? What's that guy do?

Sam Corcos 1:20 So the chief information officer in, in private companies is usually the CTO, is the, the primary technical leader. In the government, it's the chief information officer.

Chris Williamson 1:30 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 1:30 Um, it's an interesting one. I think a lot of what I've learned is tracking the history of a lot of these things can be interesting. So, the chief information officer really stems from, if you go way back, it stems from when it was effectively a librarian role, if you want to call it that.

Chris Williamson 1:46 Mm.

Sam Corcos 1:46 Where it, the, the, the legacy of chief information officer is when things were in filing cabinets. Where is the information? How do you keep track of this stuff? And it slowly evolved into what it is today. But part of the challenge that I've seen internal to government is that most of the chief information officers, at least before this administration, were non-technical, and the main reason is there's no technical standards or requirements for the role. And so, you can kind of see how you get there where, when it's a librarian role, it's not, there, there's no requirement to really know how computers work.

Chris Williamson 2:28 Mm.

Sam Corcos 2:28 And if you never update the standards, you just sort of fall into the situation.

Chris Williamson 2:34 Is that prescient? That not only were the systems not updated, even the job title wasn't?

Sam Corcos 2:39 I think it's, it's less the job title, it's more the qualifications for the job. Like we have standards for being like the chief counsel of an agency. You have to be a lawyer. I think most people would think that's reasonable. We just never updated that for technology or, in government they really call it IT. That's the, that- that's- that's the more common way they would describe it.

Chris Williamson 3:00 It also feels like an outdated term.

Sam Corcos 3:01 Yeah, for sure. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 3:03 How technical are you?

Sam Corcos 3:05 Me? Um, I've been a software developer for more than ten years. In my most recent role, I was the CEO, so I didn't do as much coding, I did in the early days. Um, I actually poked around in my GitHub account a few months ago. I- I've contributed about a million lines of production code. So I'm, I'm not the best engineer that I know, but I've, I've done a lot of it.

Chris Williamson 3:26 That sounds like a H index for engineers compared with academics.

Sam Corcos 3:29 Yeah, it's, it is definitely something that if you, if you optimize for it, it becomes useless, because it's very easy to just like-

Chris Williamson 3:37 Burn out.

Sam Corcos 3:37 ... create a bunch of boilerplate code and pretend like you did it. But it's, uh, it's, but I'm sure it's correlated.

Chris Williamson 3:43 What's your relationship with Doge?

Sam Corcos 3:46 I was originally brought in through Doge in March, so that's when I started. Uh, I was put in at the Treasury Department with my primary focus, uh, being the IRS.

Chris Williamson 3:58 Okay.

Sam Corcos 3:58 Which is trying to figure out how to land the plane on this, on this, uh, IRS modernization program.

Chris Williamson 4:04 What did you think you were walking into?

Sam Corcos 4:08 I really didn't know. I've read a lot of things. Uh, I've heard stories from friends of mine who have been in the government in the past. Uh, some of those things turned out to be true, some of them turned out not to be true. Um, I think my, the thing that I was really encouraged by, which is an expectation that I had coming in, is that my friends told me that this administration is willing to make changes that have never been on the table before. When it requires significant structural changes to an organization, uh, that requires a lot of courage that historically we've been shuffling things around, that people are willing to make those changes now. That, for the most part, has been true-

Chris Williamson 4:53 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 4:53 ... which has been very exciting. I think one specific example which, uh, when I was about, when I was about a month in, I started to recognize at the IRS that we had a major problem with the, uh, the technical background of the leadership team in IRS IT, which is to say there were not enough people in leadership that knew how computers work. And that was the upstream problem of a lot of the other issues that we have. Because if you don't know how, if you don't even know what the words are in the scope that you're responsible for, it's very hard to make good decisions. And these are not insignificant decisions. These are multi-billion dollar technology decisions made by people who don't understand it.

Chris Williamson 5:45 Mm.

Sam Corcos 5:45 So, uh, I, this would have been in April, so really peak tax season, I made the recommendation that we put effectively the entire leadership team of IRS IT, which is about 50 people, on administrative leave, which I, we can get into what all these terms mean.

Chris Williamson 6:04 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 6:04 Uh, which effectively means we're removing them from their roles. We're not firing them, but we're...... we're putting them on leave, and we're replacing them with the people who are technical enough to do the job, and that requires a lot of courage. Nothing like that had ever been done before, as far as I know.

Chris Williamson 6:22 You said, uh, you had been assured that going in people were ready for change. I have to, um, predict that the 50 people who were put on administrative leave were probably not so keen on the changes that were being made in that regard. So-

Sam Corcos 6:38 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 6:38 ... it sounds good from the outside com- you were ready for change, like this is th- th- there's been enough that's been done. People are sick of the ossification and the slow, lumbering behemoth that is internal government systems that need updating.

Sam Corcos 6:51 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 6:51 But that can't be everybody, and maybe it's not even most. Perhaps it's some key decision makers. So that power struggle between move fast, break things Doge degens and existing government bods that are scared they're gonna lose their job-

Sam Corcos 7:04 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 7:04 ... wh- I mean, h- anybody that's worked in an office understands that navigating politics in the office is difficult.

Sam Corcos 7:11 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 7:11 You are in politics.

Sam Corcos 7:13 (laughs) Yeah.

Chris Williamson 7:13 So what do the politics of politics like when it comes to that power struggle?

Sam Corcos 7:17 So the, the specifics, the, the interesting thing about... Well, we'll take this specific example. So a lot of the folks that I talk to, uh, some of the people who we ended up putting on administrative leave, um, I have a lot of empathy for them because a lot of them really didn't intend to be in that role. Uh, they were put into that role, and several of them, I can think of some specifically from conversations that I had, they knew that they were not technical enough to be in this role, and they knew that they were not making good decisions and they felt some guilt about it, and they were put into that position for, uh... 'Cause it's largely, promotions are largely tenure based, so just by being around long enough you end up in these roles.

Chris Williamson 8:08 Mm.

Sam Corcos 8:08 That's a whole set of problems in the government is that, uh, almost everyone in the performance reviews, almost everyone gets a four or a five, no matter what. And so it's very hard to make sure that the people in these roles are actually the ones who know what they're doing. So some of these folks were really hardworking, good people, they're just put in a position where they could not be successful.

Chris Williamson 8:30 Mm.

Sam Corcos 8:30 And I talked to some of them afterwards and, like, they're obviously not happy, but they didn't lose their jobs. They're just on administrative leave so that we can shuffle things around, but, you know, it's, a lot of them really understand why this is happening and they, they know deep down that this is for the best. Uh, but it is, it is uncomfortable.

Chris Williamson 8:51 Just lingering on your appointment first.

Sam Corcos 8:54 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 8:55 What is the role that this executive order thing plays in what you do and how you arrived at this?

Sam Corcos 9:02 Um, I think the Doge executive order sets up the ability to create the office. I was actually never... I think this, this is, uh, a common question is like, "What even is Doge?" (laughs)

Chris Williamson 9:13 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 9:14 And, uh, it's, it's, uh, it's an office in the Executive Office of the Presidency, the U.S. Doge Service. Um, I've never been a part of that organization. I've, I was brought in directly as an employee of Treasury. I get my deliverables and my instructions from the Treasury team. I coordinate a lot with the Doge people. I think the, uh, there's been a lot of court documents that describe me as Doge-affiliated. So-

Chris Williamson 9:38 Like you're Doge-adjacent.

Sam Corcos 9:39 Doge-adjacent, yeah.

Chris Williamson 9:40 Yeah.

Sam Corcos 9:40 So like-

Chris Williamson 9:41 Alt-Doge.

Sam Corcos 9:41 (laughs) Yeah. It's like whatever these definitions are, it's kind of amorphous. Um, but yeah, I, it's, it's allowed us to, uh, there's, there are specific authorities in that executive order that give us the ability to review contracts and to make sure that we have review on a lot of the things that are being done in these agencies.

Chris Williamson 10:04 Are you different as a political appointee rather than a career public servant?

Sam Corcos 10:09 Um, functionally, there is not a huge difference. Uh, I think the only big difference is that you can be more easily fired as an appointee.

Chris Williamson 10:20 (laughs)

Sam Corcos 10:20 It's very hard to get fired as a career civil servant.

Chris Williamson 10:23 Right. Okay. I think, obviously America's pretty politically divided and-

Sam Corcos 10:28 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 10:28 ... we're still in the aftermath of November. What made you feel comfortable about stepping into a political position?

Sam Corcos 10:35 Um, I mean, it's technically called a political appointee, but the reality is everyone wants the IT systems to be good. Everyone wants the government to work better. Um, I, I did a, I did a news thing with Secretary Besson a while ago, and there was some concern that I had that there would be negative repercussions from that, but, uh, I was surprised that really in a bipartisan way, people that I know on any side of the spectrum were just really glad that somebody who knows what they're doing is trying to fix this stuff.

Chris Williamson 11:12 Mm.

Sam Corcos 11:12 So I think it depends a lot on what it is that you're doing. In my case, I'm, I'm really just there to fix the computers.

Chris Williamson 11:19 Mm. America has the fifth highest government expenditure per capita in the world.

Sam Corcos 11:23 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 11:25 Is that a good thing?

Sam Corcos 11:26 I did not know that. That's, uh, probably not. (laughs) I think in theory it's fine if there wasn't such a large deficit. If we were, if we were not going into such debt in order to pay for this, I think it would be fine. But the, uh, our national debt is reaching a, a critical point where we will never... There's like some runaway effect that we need to, we need to get that under control.

Chris Williamson 11:58 I want to know how the gov... Oh, there we go.

Sam Corcos 12:01 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 12:01 This is the usdebtclock.org, and all of the numbers are massive. What stands out here?

Sam Corcos 12:09 I mean, the $37 trillion.

Chris Williamson 12:12 Where's that?

Sam Corcos 12:13 Right over there.

Chris Williamson 12:13 Over my shoulder.

Sam Corcos 12:14 That's really the top line number.

Chris Williamson 12:15 Okay.

Sam Corcos 12:16 Uh, it's, uh, just an astoundingly large number. We have, uh, $100,000 in debt per citizen. Um-

Chris Williamson 12:27 And it's going up at about a $100,000 a, a second.

Sam Corcos 12:30 (laughs) Yep, pretty much. Yeah. That's the, that's really the intent of Doge and a lot of s-

Chris Williamson 12:36 What's the Doge Clock? What's that?

Sam Corcos 12:38 I don't actually know. I think that's maybe counting the amount of money saved from Doge, but-

Chris Williamson 12:42 Yeah, it looks like it.

Sam Corcos 12:43 ... maybe the, based on the goals of the organization.

Chris Williamson 12:46 So I'm interested in how the government operates internally. Uh, what's it like inside of it? Everybody thinks about this. You hear the stories of, you know, the sort of, um, hallowed halls, the chesterfield sofas, the-

Sam Corcos 13:00 Yeah. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 13:00 ... sort of cigar lounge ty ... I might be speaking a bit British here. But still, uh-

Sam Corcos 13:04 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 13:04 ... what is being inside of the government like? Uh, how slow and ossified is it? How keen are people to change? Are people just sort of sat back with their feet up, not doing any work?

Sam Corcos 13:16 I'll, uh, I'll give two different examples that show how, how it can go. So this kinda ties back to what I mentioned around I ... From the conversations I've had with friends of mine who have been in previous administrations that things are slow, decisions don't get made. Everyone ... The whole name of the game is cover your ass. Everyone is like, "Every decision is made by committee, so no one can be blamed." Th- that's the whole game. It's all about optics.

Chris Williamson 13:44 Mm.

Sam Corcos 13:45 Um, it ... At least in my limited experience, I've only been in government for six months and I've only really been in Treasury, uh, we're lucky, as I think many of the other agencies are, that we have a secretary, somebody who's leading the organization, who's willing to make the hard calls. Oftentimes everyone knows what needs to be done, but there's just a lack of willingness to do it. So, uh, the example that I gave before, putting those people on leave, uh, that was a decision that the secretary's team had to make. And after we did it, there was about a week of everyone panicking and then everything almost immediately got better. As in better than it was even before.

Chris Williamson 14:25 Mm.

Sam Corcos 14:25 As in our, things that were stuck for years started getting delivered in weeks, because we put decision-makers, technical decision-makers in technical decision-making roles, and so we were able to make decisions way faster. And I remember one of our best engineers who's, uh, who's been there for more than ten years, he, uh ... This was right after we made this change, he said, uh, "I don't know if this is good yet, but this is definitely the most different it's ever been here." (laughs) And so the, the willingness to make that hard decision-

Chris Williamson 14:56 Mm.

Sam Corcos 14:57 ... I think comes from the top, and there's a lot more of that than I think has been historically the case. And now I'll give you a totally different example of a thing that I have been stuck on for a long time that's driving me nuts, which is, uh, I'm trying to get to the bottom of why the IRS does so many things by fax. (laughs) I, I'm working on trying to get the customer service software to be better, and I'm listening on these calls, I'm working with the reps to try to improve these cycles, and oftentimes when they n- when you're a taxpayer and you need to send us documents, we say, "Okay, great. Uh, here's our fax number." And this is the most common response is, "I don't know how to send a fax." I'm like, "Well, it's the only way that we can receive data is by fax, so you have to figure out how to fax this to us."

Chris Williamson 15:49 Mm.

Sam Corcos 15:50 And, uh, I, I ask, "Why are we doing this by fax?" And the answer is, "Well, there's a, a policy, there's a belief." There's some, there's some reason why we do this, which there are many people who believe that faxing is the most secure way to send information, and that email is not, the internet is not, it's fax. That's like the gold standard-

Chris Williamson 16:14 Mm.

Sam Corcos 16:14 ... of information security. And I've talked to the federal CISO, I've talked to a whole bunch of people in cybersecurity in the government saying, "Am I missing something or is this crazy?"

Chris Williamson 16:25 Mm.

Sam Corcos 16:25 And, uh, this might have been true 25 years ago, but it's definitely not true now, and I've been trying (laughs) to get to the bot ... We, we receive 60 million faxes per year at the IRS. We have, I believe, 50,000 active fax lines, and the, the struggle that I have is trying to figure out why do, why are we still receiving faxes? What policy says that we need to? How do I change this? And it's like s- I'll talk to somebody, they say, "Oh, the Office of Tax Policy is responsible for that." I'll talk to them, they say, "Oh no, that's over at the IRS." I talk to this person and I just, I cannot for the life of me ... Still right now, this is, I'm actively (laughs) working on this-

Chris Williamson 17:09 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 17:10 ... I cannot figure out h- like, where are the levers? Who makes this decision and then how do we implement this change? Uh, there's just, there's so much inertia and I guess you would call it bureaucracy. I don't think this is unique to government. I imagine this might be similar at very large corporations, which I've never worked in, but-

Chris Williamson 17:31 Yeah, that's a, that's a great point. How much of this is a unique issue that is to do with government and how much of this is when you get an organization of this size, diseconomies of scale come along for the ride and change is difficult?

Sam Corcos 17:44 I think the, I think most of it is probably the same as you would see in like a legacy large corporation. I think the added complexity is the fact that you have a staff that you have very limited leverage to change. So, uh, there was one guy who came in, uh, I forget which agency, uh, and he was brought in to make some pretty significant changes to the agency and he asked me like, "All right, so how do I do this?" Like, "In my experience," he's, he's been a CEO before of a company. "My experience, you come in, you find the good people, you find the bad people, you fire all the bad ones and you promote all the good ones." And I said, "Okay, well-"... you're gonna have to figure out how to do this without any of those things. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 18:35 Hmm.

Sam Corcos 18:35 Because you can't, you can't fire the people who are not good. You just can't. It's not-

Chris Williamson 18:41 Why?

Sam Corcos 18:44 Well, this is, this is a whole long conversation about civil service and what it means. Um, there, there is a reason why it exists, and we have to go back to, like, 1880 to explain why this exists, um, and it exists for reasons that make sense. We may be at a point where we've over-indexed, but, uh, back in the day, this would've been, like, Andrew Jackson era, they used to call it the spoils system, where when your party would win an election, you would fire basically the whole government and you would install all of your buddies. And there was a lack of continuity, so, like, major government functions would just stop working because we have these new people in who don't know how any of these things work. Uh, they would make a whole bunch of money, and then they would leave when they lose the next election. Uh, so this was, this is not good. So the civil service reforms, I think it was, hm, like 1883, uh, they created this concept of, like, a permanent civil service, where there's some class of people who are apolitical, who you cannot just willy-nilly fire all these people just because you won an election. They have certain protections-

Chris Williamson 20:04 Hmm.

Sam Corcos 20:04 ... which I think is generally a good thing because you do get continuity of service for these functions. Um, it is now the case that, I think, there's roughly, uh, roughly a f- couple million people who are civil servants, and you have something like 4,000 appointees, so we, we might have too many people that have these sorts of protections. And in theory, you can fire them, but th- there's a whole process to doing so. They have to get, uh, they have to get a poor performance review-

Chris Williamson 20:38 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 20:38 ... I think three times in a row. It's, it's multiple times in a row, uh, and they're spaced out pretty significantly. If you ever give somebody a poor performance review, the unions come after you and it's, like, ten times more work to deal with it, and so a lot of people just give everyone a five and just, like, move on. So the most common way that I've heard from inside of government, people who've been there for a long time, the most common way to get a poor performer off your team is to promote them.

Chris Williamson 21:04 (laughs)

Sam Corcos 21:04 Yeah. Yeah. This is absolutely ubiquitous. Like, everyone does this.

Chris Williamson 21:10 You pass the parcel up.

Sam Corcos 21:11 Yeah. You pa- just like, give them a promotion, move them to another team, and we can keep this. There are some people who are really diligent about doing performance reviews and keeping quality teams, um, but they are few and far between.

Chris Williamson 21:26 Mm. I think a lot of people assume that government employees are lazy or incompetent. What's been your experience with that? What's the proportion of people who are fit for purpose and not?

Sam Corcos 21:39 Hmm. I think there's, there are, there are some people who are really excellent. Um, m- most of my exposure has been at the IRS. Um, we have, when I came in, we had about 8,500 people in the CIO's office, which is the product design engineering, but mostly, ostensibly it's mostly engineering. Um, I interviewed a lot of people. We have, from the folks that I talked to, at least, at least a couple hundred good engineers. There might be more, but from the people I've talked to, at least a couple hundred. There are a lot of people who just, they don't pass the, "What would you say you do here?" test. You ask very basic questions about their role, and they can't even answer the simplest questions. Like, if you're, if you are, if your job is you are the engineer responsible for data integrity and I ask you a basic question of like, "Okay, so how does data go from here to here?" And they go, "Oh, I, I don't know. We should ask, uh, so-and-so." It's like, "Okay, is, is that just your answer for everything? Like, what, what do you actually do other than set up meetings?" There's a, there's a really good book. Do you ever read the book, Bullshit Jobs?

Chris Williamson 23:00 Uh, no, but I, I have an idea about what it is.

Sam Corcos 23:02 Yeah. There's a lot of that.

Chris Williamson 23:04 Hmm.

Sam Corcos 23:04 And because you can't really fire these people, because you can't really give them negative performance reviews, they just sort of, they're just sort of there. Um, as like a, a, maybe a, a data point, um, at most software companies that I've worked at or had exposure to, the ratio of engineers to non-engineers-

Chris Williamson 23:25 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 23:25 ... within, like, a product design engineering function is something like five engineers to every one non-engineer.

Chris Williamson 23:33 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 23:34 Uh, or if you're, like, a really tech-heavy company, it might be ten to one. We're basically the inverse of that. It's like one to ten. There are so many people whose job it is, is to, like, manage managers of managers, of contracts of managers. There are some really good people-

Chris Williamson 23:52 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 23:52 ... but it is not the majority.

Chris Williamson 23:54 Right.

Sam Corcos 23:54 And so finding those good people is really the name of the game.

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Chris Williamson 25:05 How hard is it to get change to happen, then, just across the board? It seems like there's some protections in place, um, there is this odd tenured professor thing going on, uh, very procedural, uh, there is a disincentive for starting that process because you're gonna get kicked in the ass off the unions. Uh, there will be social pressure as well. Oh, did you hear about Sandra? Sandra got, you know, let go by that, that Sam guy from Doge again. Uh, if you wanna make some changes happen, how much of a solvent have you been able to be with these new sort of powers to step in and, and actually make shit happen?

Sam Corcos 25:42 Yeah. I would say there are, there are certain things that are relatively easy to get the first step in. This is, this is one of the biggest surprises for me is, uh, specifically, uh, as having been a CEO before, one of the things that you learn is that you have to be very careful with what you say to the team. Because if you suggest an idea, it might just become the new company priority without you realizing it-

Chris Williamson 26:20 Yeah.

Sam Corcos 26:20 ... and people just immediately action this thing. Uh, it is about as far the opposite of that as you can imagine in the government. Um-

Chris Williamson 26:31 You can say whatever you want and people just continue on the existing train tracks.

Sam Corcos 26:33 Yeah. Like, the president puts out an executive order that says, "This is the new priority." The secretary sends a message to the whole comp- the whole organization and says, "This is the new priority." And then you check in a couple weeks later and everyone's just like, "What? Which thing?" And the, the number of times that I have had to just, like, really hound people to get these done, you can often find that these... Sometimes you, you have this thought of, "You know what we should really have? We should have this policy in place, but nobody's doing it, so we should write this policy." And then you discover that's actually been the policy for 15 years. (laughs) Somebody 15 years ago had this idea, but it didn't actually happen.

Chris Williamson 27:14 Could you give me an example of something?

Sam Corcos 27:16 Yeah. I mean, Do Not Pay is a specific one. So Do Not Pay is, like, it's a list of whenever there's, like, a, a fraudster using a particular bank account. Before you send out money to that bank account, you wanna check it against the list of known fraudulent bank accounts, and that's a, that's a thing that makes sense that you'd want to do. Um, that's been a thing that was supposed to be implemented in, like, 2013, so this isn't, this isn't new. Um, but the, I would say, if I were to say it concisely, the biggest surprise is that, uh, executive orders are not self-actualizing. Just having the policy is a very small part of the amount of work that actually needs to get done to get these things implemented-

Chris Williamson 28:04 Mm.

Sam Corcos 28:04 ... and under the hood, you really have to, you have to hound people. I think if, if I were to say the one thing that the Doge people are particularly good at, it's knowing what the priorities are and making sure they get done.

Chris Williamson 28:23 The enforcement, in a way.

Sam Corcos 28:25 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 28:25 Interesting.

Sam Corcos 28:26 And sometimes just doing it. There's, there's a lot of times when there just is not the talent or capacity in-house to get it delivered, and the process for outsourcing it to a contractor is so cumbersome and onerous that sometimes you just have to do it yourself.

Chris Williamson 28:42 Have you spoken to Dominic Cummings?

Sam Corcos 28:44 No.

Chris Williamson 28:45 You know who he is? He was, uh, Boris Johnson's, uh, enforcer, right-hand, during COVID.

Sam Corcos 28:51 Mm.

Chris Williamson 28:51 He was also the guy that Benedict Cumberbatch played in the movie about Cambridge Analytica-

Sam Corcos 28:57 Oh, yeah. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 28:57 ... uh, for Brexit.

Sam Corcos 28:58 Mm.

Chris Williamson 28:59 So, um, technically proficient, has a Substack. You know, he's, like, sort of modern DGen, does podcasts wearing a baseball cap.

Sam Corcos 29:05 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 29:06 Anyway, I think it'd be interesting for you to speak to him.

Sam Corcos 29:08 Sure.

Chris Williamson 29:08 So I'll, I'll, I'll intro you. But he famously brought up a bunch of stories, I'm gonna just give you a few that will maybe make you feel a little bit less bad about your situation. Uh, one was during COVID, uh, there was no way to keep the figures centralized, so they were written on pieces of paper and then he would write them on a whiteboard. And Boris apparently was just shooting from the hip based on what newspapers were put in front of him that day-

Sam Corcos 29:38 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 29:38 ... and that was where the policies came from.

Sam Corcos 29:40 Mm.

Chris Williamson 29:40 There was a need to find a way to have cloud document storage that people could live work on at the same time, but they didn't know if Google Docs was sufficiently secure, uh, or the same for Microsoft Teams and stuff like that. So they, uh, engaged a consultant company who I think spent m- multiple years and multiple millions-

Sam Corcos 30:04 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 30:04 ... of pounds to tell them that, "We need to do it. We can build... We'll bootstrap it ourselves." Um, most impressively, up until 2020, a good chunk of the NHS was still run on Windows XP-

Sam Corcos 30:17 Mm.

Chris Williamson 30:17 ... and there was a special ransomware virus-

Sam Corcos 30:20 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 30:20 ... WannaCry or something else, that got released, uh, that affected, like, 1% of NHS and, uh, uh, thousands, tens of thousands of patient data went. Uh, pages and fax machines still quite heavily used. Um, the rail system in the UK still famously-

Sam Corcos 30:37 Mm.

Chris Williamson 30:37 ... uh, uses fax machines and can't really explain why or how that gets unwound. So I guess-... uh, it's not just you. Uh, we do have a much older country, so I ... Perhaps we have a little bit more of an excuse-

Sam Corcos 30:49 (laughs) Yeah, right.

Chris Williamson 30:50 ... than you do. But, uh, when it comes to building tech inside of government, does government do that? What, what, what does building software and tech inside of government look like?

Sam Corcos 31:00 Yeah. The interesting challenge about building software in the government that my vantage point is a little bit skewed because the IRS is basically a technology company. In a lot of other government organizations, the technology is very much a secondary consideration for them, but for the IRS, almost everything we do ultimately is downstream of technology. If you wanna do enforcement of tax, you have to use computers to figure out who is non-compliant. If you want to pull up somebody's tax information when you're on the phone with them for customer service to resolve an issue, you need the IT system to be good in order to do that. Virtually everything we do is, is based on IT systems. So, uh, a lot of our systems are internally built. A lot of other systems are built with vendors and these, these vendors are ... I think the biggest challenge you have is there's this core incentive misalignment issue that you have with the vendors where, because the people making the decisions on whether to sign a contract or not, it's not their money. You have this very large budget.

Chris Williamson 32:21 Mm.

Sam Corcos 32:21 This is one of the other, uh ... I'm not sure I would call it a misconception, but it's commonly said, people say, "Oh, the budgets are so tight." I can tell you firsthand, especially within IT at the IRS, the budgets are not tight. We (laughs) spend so much money on these things, but nobody cares. Nobody's paying attention.

Chris Williamson 32:42 Mm.

Sam Corcos 32:42 The ... We would, we will gladly spend hundreds of millions of dollars with some vendor to build a thing over the next five years, but we won't pay our engineers slightly more money because of some weird statutory thing where you can't compensate engineers at even close to market rates once you reach a certain threshold.

Chris Williamson 33:02 Mm.

Sam Corcos 33:02 Uh, so, uh, I'll give you like a very specific example that I'm dealing with right now. There's a vendor that, uh, we wanted to work with to build a particular system, and it was-

Chris Williamson 33:14 When you say vendor, what do you mean?

Sam Corcos 33:16 A vendor is like, uh, Accenture, Deloitte, Booz Allen Hamilton, Leidos, Palantir. There's like a whole list of companies that are contractors that work commonly with the government. I'm sure there are thousands of them, but there are, there are some that are bigger and more well-known than others. Uh, I think Booz Allen Hamilton gets something like 97% of their revenue from the government. Like they're, they are like one of the quintessential vendors. Um, the ... One of these that I'm talking to now, it was a previous vendor that we were using and they were really taking advantage of the government on pricing, and so I talked to one of the new vendors and said, "Can you do this for us, and how much would you charge?" And it was a much lower rate. I think it was something like $2 million a year is what they offered. And I said, "Okay, great, but that's the price, right? I just wanna make sure that that's gonna be the price that we pay." They said, "Yep. You know, we're not like those other guys. It's two million," and there's a couple other projects they're working on as well. The first six months go really well, great. Then, the contract comes up for a renegotiation, and now they want $100 million a year. (laughs) And I'm asking them, uh, "This is ... I thought we talked about two million for this, 250,000 for that." And it's like, "Oh, that was our pilot pricing." It's like the ... If I had known that you were gonna raise your price arbitrarily by 20X for no reason whatsoever, I would not have agreed to this. (laughs) But now we're in a position where we can't just stop because now they're in our systems, and so now there's gonna have to be this whole ... We can either, we're either gonna come to terms with like a more reasonable price or we're gonna have to find a new mi-

Chris Williamson 35:07 Start again.

Sam Corcos 35:07 We're gonna start with a new vendor or we're gonna have to bring it in-house, and it's just so tedious.

Chris Williamson 35:12 Is that not what happens with all businesses though? That you use a, a third party, they come in, they pull the wool over your eyes a little bit?

Sam Corcos 35:19 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 35:19 Is this unique to government in some way?

Sam Corcos 35:21 So, the only reason why it's unique to government is that historically nobody in my seat says no.

Chris Williamson 35:29 Right. You're seen as a soft touch.

Sam Corcos 35:31 Yeah, like th- this-

Chris Williamson 35:32 This is how you negotiate with government.

Sam Corcos 35:35 Yeah. Uh, basically, normally they would come back with a price like 100 million, and they just check, "Oh, is this within our budget? Yes? All right." Sign off. But I'll say, "Where did you come up with these numbers? How are you defining this price?" And they'll say, "Oh, well, we didn't actually change the price. It was just a change in scope." It's like, "But, no. It's, the price is 20 times more." And then they come back, this actually happened, like, "Well, what if it was like 50 million?" It's like, you can just, like ... You can just like arbitrarily change the price like that? Guys, what are we doing? This is crazy.

Chris Williamson 36:07 Yeah.

Sam Corcos 36:08 And, uh, this is not the thing that they, they said directly. They said, "Well, you know, usually when we talk to government, they don't negotiate on price. People, government entities usually prefer a fixed price." It's like, "I, I don't see ... That's, this is completely irrelevant to me." Like-

Chris Williamson 36:24 (laughs)

Sam Corcos 36:24 ... I'm, I want to know what it is that we're paying for, and what we're paying for seems to be something completely arbitrary.

Chris Williamson 36:30 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 36:31 So, I think they're just used to not dealing with this 'cause actually this maybe ties into a broader problem, which is that I'm, I'm in this role for some limited duration of time as the Chief Information Officer of Treasury. Um, this role-I'm responsible for something in the range of, like, $10 billion of spend per year. This role is paid, I think, $160,000 a year and you're not allowed income from any other source. There's like a- there's a rule against, like, I can't do consulting, I can't do anything else. Um, you also have to, like, publicly disclose your finances. There's all these limitations that come with it.

Chris Williamson 37:14 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 37:14 Um, and so historically, these people are not, like, super experienced people who have run large technology organizations before. Uh, it's historically been a role where you get promoted internally from some- some role, usually a non-technical role, uh, and then you end up the CIO and you're responsible for making these decisions. And it, uh, it... I think over the last several decades at IRS, it just led to a lot of very bad decisions.

Chris Williamson 37:46 What have you had to give up to take on this role?

Sam Corcos 37:50 Uh, well, the simplest one is money, but, like, you can make money later. The- I think the biggest- the- the hardest selling point for this is that, uh, it's not just that you make less money, that's fine, but for the types of people that they wanna bring on, the pitch that you have to tell them is like, "I hope you have a lot of money in savings because as a result in taking this job, you'll probably burn down a lot of your savings." And so I've been trying to advocate for, uh, just make it... These are called, uh, th- the... A lot of these leadership roles are SES. There's the generals, GS, which is like most government employees, and then there's the SES, which is the executive leadership group. There's about 8,000 SES, if memory serves. Um, just make the compensation average, just like industry average. I think the- the role that I'm in should probably be compensated something in the range of like a VP of engineering at Walmart would be probably a reasonable comp. But, uh, this role, the CIO often makes less than the engineers on the team, and I think that, uh, it leads to a lot of challenges when it comes to both keeping people in there who actually care.

Chris Williamson 39:08 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 39:09 Like, thi- this is... I- I found myself, uh, struggling with this where there are some contract, there's one that comes to mind that was a couple weeks ago, $35 million for some set of new toys that we really didn't need, but it's technically in the budget, and I just said, "No, we don't need this." And a lot of people were upset, and I found myself in the back of my head going like, "Why do I care? This is not my money. I could just say yes and then this problem goes away and no one will care. There's not a single person that will care. By me saying no, onl- there are only people who are upset and there's like this ambiguous win for the taxpayer."

Chris Williamson 39:50 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 39:51 Uh, of course, I still did say no, but you can- you can feel that in the back of your head and you're thinking like, "You really need people in these positions to care enough to be willing to make those hard calls."

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Sam Corcos 41:15 Hmm. I'm not sure that that's the framing. I would say, why should they trust people with substantial relevant industry experience (laughs) versus people who oftentimes stumble their way into these leadership roles? I think that's probably the way that I would frame it. Um, and it's not even like trust as in they're gonna do anything nefarious. It's just when you work in an organization, you want your leaders to make good decisions. And I think especially within technology, you want people who make good decisions in these roles. And one of the consequences of not having this is just this contractor bloat, and like a- a very specific and relevant example is the amount of money that we were spending at the IRS on cybersecurity contractors was just astounding.

Chris Williamson 42:18 Oh.

Sam Corcos 42:18 It was hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And we were doing a contract review and we asked all of the leaders of these groups to justify their contracts, like which of these are mission critical? Which of these are not? Which can we descope? The cyber team came back, said 100% of their spend was mission critical. Not a single thing could be changed. We moved on during that administrative leave portion, we- we put those leaders on leave, we brought in the cyber engineers who really understood what these contracts do, and we just went line by line.And on I, I would guess about a third of them, we hadn't even used this vendor in years and we were still paying them $10, $20, $30 million a year, and just nobody cares. And when it's not your money, there is some non-zero risk that if you cancel a contract, something bad might happen and there is zero benefit of canceling it for you-

Chris Williamson 43:19 Mm.

Sam Corcos 43:20 ... at all. There's zero benefit. You can just ask for more money and you will probably get it and then that's it. So finding people who are willing to make those calls, and this kind of ties into the, the industry comparison, if the IRS were a private company, it would have gone bankrupt many, many years ago because people would stop buying the service because it's bad.

Chris Williamson 43:41 Mm.

Sam Corcos 43:42 You'd have some feedback loop where people recognize these problems and they s- they, they stop funding it.

Chris Williamson 43:51 Government contractors have been pretty vilified, I think, by Doge and other people over the last few months. How come? Like, what is it specifically about the contractors that have, uh, got the Eye of Sauron turned around onto them?

Sam Corcos 44:05 There are many things. (laughs) I think the biggest one is, uh, this core incentive misalignment problem, which is the pricing is often arbitrary, and they will claim that it's not. They say, "Oh, it's firm-fixed price," kind of like the one that I mentioned earlier. They said, "Oh, we didn't change the price at all. It's firm-fixed price. We charge the same price to everyone. It's just a scope change." And it's like, okay, but, like, we're not getting anything different and it costs more. So, what's going on here? Um, a lot of the contractors, some of this is not even specifically the fault of the contractors. So like, I'll give you, I'll give you a specific example of a type of problem that you experience. So, if you want to do something simple like, "Hey, I wanna sign up for this online service and it's like $10," there might be some threshold where you can do it, but in general, it's like, great, we need to set up a contract vehicle, which could take a year, and you have to go through this whole rigmarole of like a competitive bidding process is what it's called. The, the procurement systems that we have today, the process that we go through to procure things is totally and utterly broken and it leads to disastrous and bad outcomes. So like if you wanted to do that, you'd have to do this competitive bid, and this is at least the case for IRS, I, I know from other discussions this is the case a lot of other agencies as well, which is that the, uh... If you are in technology and you need a specific piece of software, you'll write up the RFP, the, the proposal for what you need. That then goes to the procurement team. At that point, it's basically a black box. Usually, the engineer has no further input into what is selected, who selects it, what... They'll often just end up with some random vendor for something that is somewhat related to what they asked for and then they just have to make do. The other challenge is that because we have these salary caps for most, for all roles really, but for a lot of the very specialized technical roles, we can't really be competitive with hiring some of these roles. So, uh, in the early to mid-career, we can actually be reasonably competitive. We can pay engineers something like $160, $180. The cap is $226, I believe. So you can be reasonably competitive for those roles. But once you get into like mid to late career, which is when people really specialize, there's just no way to pay $250,000 ever. It just does not exist. And so there, there are some, I think there's a special thing where there are a total of 800 people in the government that can exceed that number and it requires a whole process to do, but the only way you can hire that $250,000 person, the way that you would do it is you would hire some contractor, one of these large entities that I mentioned before. You pay them $500,000 to funnel $250,000 to the person that you actually wanted to hire.

Chris Williamson 47:18 Mm. And they'll arbitrage off the top.

Sam Corcos 47:20 And then they'll arbitrage off the top and this whole system incentivizes those kinds of things.

Chris Williamson 47:27 How important is getting above $225 for the sort of technical talent that you need to run the government?

Sam Corcos 47:32 Well, this is the, this is the interesting thing is that for the most part you don't, but there are some that are crucially important. Um, the IRS as I mentioned has, when I arrived had about 8,500 people in IT. It's now about 6,000 plus another, I think, 6,500 contractors.

Chris Williamson 47:52 (laughs) Yeah.

Sam Corcos 47:54 Yep. And so the, the numbers are often misleading and you, it's hard to really get a handle on who is doing what and how many people are there. Um, there are maybe a hundred of those roles in total where you would really like to be able to pay up to maybe $300,000-

Chris Williamson 48:14 Mm.

Sam Corcos 48:14 ... and it would make such an impact on the organization to be able to retain your really technical high-context people that are there already-

Chris Williamson 48:25 Mm.

Sam Corcos 48:25 ... and to be able to bring in people who have a lot of experience with this stuff.

Chris Williamson 48:29 If you fix the contractor problem, what would improve?

Sam Corcos 48:33 Well, uh, I'll give you another specific example of like the contract, the, the procurement process generally is we, we have this big initiative for, uh, to eliminate paper processing at the IRS. We spend something ballpark with like labor and all this stuff, ballpark a half a billion dollars a year on paper processing. Um, the...... uh, we wanna use external vendors. This is what people in the commercial, uh, in the commercial space do all the time. There are vendors, they take in paper, they use, uh, robots to digitize them, and they basically just send you an API request. So it, technically, you're still receiving paper, but your, your organization doesn't even need to know about that. It's just-

Chris Williamson 49:22 You don't need a warehouse, you don't need-

Sam Corcos 49:24 You don't need any of that, yeah. We have this gigantic warehouse in Kansas City. I can show you pictures, like, there's paper stacked to the ceiling.

Chris Williamson 49:30 (laughs)

Sam Corcos 49:30 And it's just some of these things are months, sometimes even years backlogged just, like, sitting there 'cause it takes so long to process these things.

Chris Williamson 49:39 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 49:39 So, um, the, uh ... When I first started, I said, "This is really obvious. It's way less expensive to use a vendor. It scales way better. There are far fewer issues using these vendors, so we should just do that." Great. We started the process. We, we have to write up the proposal. We, we do a competitive bidding process to get the vendors. We get a bunch of vendors who sign up. Cool. We pick a couple of the vendors. Then it gets contested, which is a thing where if you believe ... If you're one of the other vendors and you believe that the process was unfair or that one of the other vendors was selected unfairly-

Chris Williamson 50:20 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 50:20 ... you can contest it.

Chris Williamson 50:21 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 50:21 It costs, I believe, $100-

Chris Williamson 50:23 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 50:23 ... and you can just do it. Anyone can do it. And then the process stops for 30 days. And then there was some situation we had to re-compete it, which then takes another, however, 30, 60 days. Then you have to do an, like, you have to do a new analysis, then it gets contested again, and then it's just like we, I don't even... We started this process of zero paper in April. We don't even have the contract awarded yet to start on the project, and this costs us more than a million dollars a day that we don't have this implemented and nobody cares because we just have to follow the process. Because if you don't, it can get overturned and it can get contested. And it's just like the, like, it's just, it's maddening.

Chris Williamson 51:13 Well-

Sam Corcos 51:13 It's, it's a million dollars a day, and I'm trying to make this point. We need this done. We need to start. I don't care which vendors we use. We need to start moving on this project, and it's like, well, you know, we have to wait for another 30 days before we can do anything because of this rule and then ... But, but you can also see how this exists for a reason, which is you don't want, you don't want people to just choose their buddy's company, right? That's, I'm sure there's-

Chris Williamson 51:40 Some checks and balances.

Sam Corcos 51:41 You need some checks and balances, and you can kinda see how you got here, which is, I'm sure there was a time when as soon as people got into government, they just, like, traded favors with all the people in the past or they traded future favors of like, "Hey, Company X, I'm gonna get you all these contracts, and then as soon as I leave government, you're gonna give me this cushy job." So you need some, some checks and balances there. It feels like we are way overindexed on process and on, like, competitiveness to the point where ... I'll give you another specific and absurd example.

Chris Williamson 52:18 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 52:18 Value-added resellers. So this is a thing (laughs) because everything has to be a competitive process for the most part. If you want licenses for some generic product, the kind of thing where you could just go online and sign up for right now, be it, like, I don't know, think, uh, licenses for Adobe or licenses for Figma or licenses for any, like, web application that you would use, like any SaaS product, right? When, when you're looking for the thing, you're not looking for any similar tool. You need this one specific license, right? But you can't compete that because you might end up with some different license, which doesn't actually serve your purpose. So what you have to do, this is a common thing, is you have to create what's effectively a fake auction where you find a value-added ... You find three or four value-added resellers who are all reselling that license-

Chris Williamson 53:13 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 53:13 ... and they're competing on the price for that license. So they all just take a cut off the top. They don't do anything, but they're there to provide cover for it looking like a competitive process. This is ubiquitous, and I think this is one of the things that the people over at GSA are looking to fix. General Services Administration is responsible for the procurement process broadly.

Chris Williamson 53:38 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 53:39 This is one of the big things they're looking to fix because they just, they just take money right off the top and they almost always do nothing.

Chris Williamson 53:47 It, there's sort of a strange, um, contrast going on here because people say the budgets are tight-

Sam Corcos 53:53 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 53:53 ... in government. But you seem to be saying the opposite at the same time. Which one's true? Are there misconceptions about how much money government spends?

Sam Corcos 54:03 I think the, if I'm a, if I'm gonna steelman the way that, like, when, when people are in the government and they say that budgets are tight, I think probably the fairest way to describe it is they're saying that for the things that are important that we want to spend money on, we are not allowed to. I think that's probably the fairest way to describe it. It's not that there's a lack of money overall. Like, the overall budget ... Yeah, (laughs) the overall budgets are astoundingly large, but when they say, "Hey, we'd like to spend $10,000 on this thing," it's like, "Well, which contract vehicle are you gonna use?" "Oh, well, we don't have one." "Okay, well, you need a competitive bidding process. Maybe in a year and a half you can get that, and we will have spent a million dollars to try to come up with some contract vehicle so that you could spend $10,000." And so the amount of overhead ... I, I've described it to a friend of mine recently as, in government, everything is at least medium hard.There is no, like, just go, "Oh, yeah, that's simple," just go, you can handle that. Everything requires so much time and overhead to do, especially with all this contract nonsense that it's, uh, the... If you wanna do something very simple, if you wanna hire good people, the, the problem is you, you can't spend money on things that are useful because there's so much overhead to do all these things that you're, you're trapped. And so the amount of, I don't wanna call it discretionary, but it's really, like, the... If you know what's important, like the, the paper initiative that I mentioned, I could argue budgets are tight because, like, we can't get money for this thing, but we have money for this thing. We just can't do it, we're stuck.

Chris Williamson 55:49 Mm-hmm. So legislation is tight, budgets are wide.

Sam Corcos 55:53 You could say that, or you could say the rules are tight, the rules are-

Chris Williamson 55:57 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 55:57 ... cumbersome and onerous 'cause most of the stuff for, it's called FAR, um, Federal Acquisitions Regulation, I think is what it stands for, I don't think hardly any of that involves legislation. It's just, like, compounded rule-making from GSA and other groups that just make it really hard to do these things.

Chris Williamson 56:18 When it comes to the big spend in government, how much of this is negligence, fraud, incompetence, waste? Like, how culpable is anybody here? Because it sounds like everyone has plausible deniability.

Sam Corcos 56:36 Yeah. I, I think one of the things that's been a, a strange observation is this, this term waste, fraud, and abuse. Um, it's, it... You know, Trump in his first campaign ran on drain the swamp. This has been a longstanding campaign goal. Um, I think what was most surprising was discovering how, uh, how gray the boundaries are between these concepts of, uh, what is waste, what is fraud, and what is abuse. I'll give you, like, a very specific example. This was not at our agency, but I was talking to another CIO who's dealing with this. They were doing contract review, and they disc- they found a contract for a piece of software that's, like, $20 million a year that has been on the books for, like, five to 10 years, and one of the DOJ initiatives was, uh, matching the number of licenses that we pay for with the number of licenses that are in use.

Chris Williamson 57:41 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 57:42 And they discovered that we'd been paying for these licenses, and not only was nobody using it now, no one had ever used it. N- not a single license had ever been activated for this product, and it was set to just effectively auto-renew, and every time it would come up for renewal, people would say, "Oh, yeah, it's mission critical. We have to keep it," because nobody really knew what it was for, who used it.

Chris Williamson 58:05 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 58:06 So is that waste? Is it fraud? Is it abuse? S- I think we could say it's wasteful, at a minimum, but you start looking into, like, "Oh, well, who runs the company?" It's like, "Oh, well, that, that's interesting 'cause that guy used to be in the government. I wonder if there's anything there." But nobody really looks into it.

Chris Williamson 58:26 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 58:28 These, these boundaries get very fuzzy, and it's really hard to know what's going on. Um, the, uh... I would say in, in terms of, like, abuse as well, this ties into some of the other procurement problems. Like, uh, there's this whole program within, uh, the Small Business Administration that has some requirements on how many of your contracts go to small businesses, and there's this... It's the 8A program, and there's something called, uh, the Small Disadvantaged Businesses, and frankly, it's just a huge scam. The... If you, if you give a contract to a Small Disadvantaged Business, you can basically skip the whole procurement process. You can skip the competitive bidding process-

Chris Williamson 59:12 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 59:12 You can pick the vendor that you want.

Chris Williamson 59:14 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 59:14 It's like you get the fast lane-

Chris Williamson 59:15 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 59:15 ... but it's capped. Uh, for some of these groups, it's capped at $25 million. So this is one of the things when I was doing contract review, and you see all these things, like 24.9 million, 24.9 million, 24.9 million, and you're like, "Okay, something's going on here, and you can skip it." And these contractors or these, these... this workaround, they will often take 10, 20, sometimes 50% off the top of a contract to do actually nothing. On, on the books, they're supposed to do 51% of the work is what it says-

Chris Williamson 59:50 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 59:50 ... but they never do 51% of the work.

Chris Williamson 59:52 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 59:53 I shouldn't say never, almost never. I have yet to find an example-

Chris Williamson 59:57 (laughs)

Sam Corcos 59:57 ... having looked for this-

Chris Williamson 59:59 Good caveat.

Sam Corcos 59:59 (Laughs) I have yet to find an example where they do any of the work really-

Chris Williamson 1:00:04 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 1:00:05 ... and they just funnel money. I, I think when, when I was talking to somebody who's investigating this, uh, they estimate that this might be as much as $80 billion a year in just graft.

Chris Williamson 1:00:17 Yeah.

Sam Corcos 1:00:17 My estimate puts it at about $30 billion.

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Sam Corcos 1:01:33 Yeah. That's right.

Chris Williamson 1:01:36 How's that feel from the inside? And how's that feel as an American?

Sam Corcos 1:01:42 I would say from the inside, it's, uh, it's obviously very frustrating. I think it's, in some ways, being in the role that I'm in, I feel encouraged because you can see how to fix it.

Chris Williamson 1:01:55 Look at these big glaring problems.

Sam Corcos 1:01:57 Yeah. It's, it's, uh, it's both concerning and encouraging at the same time.

Chris Williamson 1:02:03 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 1:02:03 Because you can see, you can see how bad it is, but also you have such an impact on being able to change these because you have the willingness and the authority to do it.

Chris Williamson 1:02:14 Yeah.

Sam Corcos 1:02:15 And you can have, you know, 10, 100 million dollar swings with very little effort-

Chris Williamson 1:02:21 Mm.

Sam Corcos 1:02:22 ... because people just haven't really looked at these things before. So, uh, I think the, the, the biggest surprise to me has been for so many of these things, just the, the scale of how problematic a lot of these contracts are. I think everyone kind of knows that the government is inefficient, and that's kind of okay. We all know that, and-

Chris Williamson 1:02:42 Mm.

Sam Corcos 1:02:43 But we all think these things might be 2X or 3X inefficient, but you find examples where things are 100X, 1,000X beyond what you pay in the commercial sector-

Chris Williamson 1:02:54 Mm.

Sam Corcos 1:02:54 And it's just, uh, there's just no excuse for it. It's crazy.

Chris Williamson 1:02:58 Is there anything in addition to the technical talent problem that's contributing to dysfunction of IT systems in the government?

Sam Corcos 1:03:11 I think upstream of all of these things is leadership, and, uh, I would s- I would separate out the, call it political leadership from administration to administration, and much more the career civil servant leadership.

Chris Williamson 1:03:26 Mm.

Sam Corcos 1:03:26 Um, there are some examples of, uh, entities that are within my purview that are pretty well run. Um, FinCEN, which does a lot of, uh, they do a lot of, uh, international finance, uh, investigations. Uh, they have their CIO, Amy Taylor, who's technical. She's been there for a long time, and she runs a tight ship. And you can see downstream of good leadership tends to lead to good teams.

Chris Williamson 1:03:57 Mm. Mm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 1:03:57 They tend to have technical talent. And you see some of these organizations that have had, uh, like Tim Gribbin's over at, uh, Bureau of the Fiscal Service, he's been running that for six years. He's had stable leadership. He is very intentional about who's on his team. Uh, they do performance management. They, they take it seriously, and they have a pretty good team. Um, so if you have good leadership, things like what is the technical talent of the people on the ground tends to work itself out because the people at the top care enough to follow through on ensuring that you have that.

Chris Williamson 1:04:34 They continue to find people until they get the right technical talent.

Sam Corcos 1:04:36 Yep.

Chris Williamson 1:04:37 Yeah. I, I, it's a rule of business that A-grade players hire-

Sam Corcos 1:04:40 Yes.

Chris Williamson 1:04:41 ... A-grade players, but B-grade players hire C- and D-grade players.

Sam Corcos 1:04:44 That's right. And the, uh, so many of these things... So, at the IRS, which is, to be blunt, has had poor technical leadership for roughly 40 years, it's just this compounding issue. So, we... At the IRS, the policy for a long time has been we don't do technical interviews. We just do resume review. So if you were to apply-

Chris Williamson 1:05:08 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 1:05:08 ... and you just wrote the word Java on your resume, we will just assume that you know how to do this.

Chris Williamson 1:05:13 Mm.

Sam Corcos 1:05:14 And so the... This is sort of a joke, but it's not really a joke. Somebody told me, they said, "Historically, if you wanna hire a good engineer, you have to hire five, because you just don't know what you're gonna get."

Chris Williamson 1:05:24 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 1:05:25 "So you need five engineers, you gotta put out a ro- you gotta put out 30 roles to find five or six good people."

Chris Williamson 1:05:31 Because the hiring process is not sufficiently scrutinous.

Sam Corcos 1:05:34 Yeah. And this, uh, I'll give you... Again, this is a thing that I'm dealing with right now.

Chris Williamson 1:05:39 Yeah.

Sam Corcos 1:05:39 Because I'm, I-

Chris Williamson 1:05:39 I'm loving the, I'm loving the examples-

Sam Corcos 1:05:41 Yeah. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:05:41 ... becau- it s- it sounds, you know, sort of, uh, uh, very conceptual and, and fluffy until you bring it-

Sam Corcos 1:05:45 Yep.

Chris Williamson 1:05:45 ... into land with, with real stories.

Sam Corcos 1:05:47 Totally. And this is the, the benefit of just being in the weeds trying to solve these problems.

Chris Williamson 1:05:51 The coalface.

Sam Corcos 1:05:52 Yeah. (laughs) The, uh, the specific thing I'm working through right now is we were in the process of, uh, recomposing the engineering org in the IRS, which is, we have too many people within the engineering function who are not engineers. And w- where they end up, I think it's gonna be in chief operating officer, some of them in product and design. It doesn't really matter, but I have a, I have a memo that I'm still drafting that I'm probably gonna publish at some point. Uh, the, the memo is titled Engineering is for Engineers, and it, it argues that if you're in engineering, you should be an engineer, and if you are not an engineer, you should not be in engineering.

Chris Williamson 1:06:39 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 1:06:40 Um, anyone from the private sector would view that as a tautology because why would you ever have somebody who's not an engineer in engineering? But in government, this is going to be very controversial because most people in these roles are not engineers. Um, so, the goal is let's find who our engineers are, let's move the people who are not into some other function, and then we're gonna bring in more engineers. I think we currently have 100 engineering roles open right now at the IRS-

Chris Williamson 1:07:16 Mm.

Sam Corcos 1:07:17 ... which if anyone listening wants to apply, that's, uh, it's at USAJobs. That's the, that's the website. We have 100 roles open. Um, the challenge though, and I'll, I'll just walk you through the process why this is such a problem.

Chris Williamson 1:07:30 Mm.

Sam Corcos 1:07:31 ... at the IRS, we have six job openings, right? And as a point of comparison, if you wanted to hire somebody, you would write up the job description, "This is what you do," you post it, you interview those people, you decide if you want them, you hire them or you don't hire them. It's not like that here. (laughs) So let's say you want an engineer who specifically does this one thing. Well, you send it to the HR team. They decide if it matches one of the existing, they call them PDs, position descriptions, I think, um, if it matches one of the existing approved PDs, which in the case of our current hiring pipeline, many of them did not.

Chris Williamson 1:08:15 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 1:08:15 And so they ended up getting posted with some fairly generic thing. But by the time you've written the position description, the engineers are no longer in the loop on this process, so it gets handed off to a mid-level person in HR. They decide if your job description is accurate or not, they then post it, you get a bunch of people apply, the mid-level in HR decides whether that person is qualified.

Chris Williamson 1:08:43 Mm.

Sam Corcos 1:08:43 The engineer is not in this loop at all, by the way.

Chris Williamson 1:08:45 Yeah, the HR person does not have technical capability, they can't assess whether or not-

Sam Corcos 1:08:49 No.

Chris Williamson 1:08:49 ... this person can actually write in Java or whatever.

Sam Corcos 1:08:52 Nope. They just look at a resume, they make the determination, "Is this person qualified for this role?" And then eventually this person, the engineer, will finally get, like, a packet of PDFs to review. It's like, "Here's 10 people that we think are qualified for this role." And they don't get to see the people coming into the pipeline, they don't get any of the stuff. Um, I'm currently in the process of trying to figure out, is this a law that says that the engineers are not allowed in this process? Is it, is it just fiefdom building where somebody is trying to just exclude them so that they have a role that can't be-

Chris Williamson 1:09:30 Mm.

Sam Corcos 1:09:31 ... uh, disintermediated? Um, how do we, uh, how do we get the people who are the hiring manager, the engineers, the engineering leaders who need more engineers, how do we get them back in the process of actually hiring our engineers? I'm actively working on this right now. Uh, I'm working with the Office of Personnel Management to try to figure out what the issue is there, I'm working with IRS HR to try to figure out what the issue is there, and this kinda ties into the other set of problems that I've found. Uh, one thing that is fairly unique about what's happening right now is the amount of collaboration between agencies is probably the highest it's ever been. So when you have an issue with the Office of Personnel Management, I can just call and I know legal counsel there, and I can call them and I can say, "This is what we're seeing. Is this an OPM policy or not?" He'll look into it, he'll get back to me. Usually these things are done in such information silos that, uh, that sort of collaboration never happens. The, the people at OPM might say, "Oh, it's not my problem. That's a Treasury problem-"

Chris Williamson 1:10:42 Mm.

Sam Corcos 1:10:42 "... so they'll just ignore it." But there's a, there's a level of collaboration and mission orientation to get these problems solved that, that's probably the biggest difference from what we're seeing now from what's been the case in the past that I think really is leading to a lot of these changes.

Chris Williamson 1:10:56 Doege became, uh, famous for hiring young people.

Sam Corcos 1:11:00 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:11:00 Uh, infants, some are accused.

Sam Corcos 1:11:02 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:11:03 W- why is the federal government behind the private sep- sector typically when it comes to hiring young people?

Sam Corcos 1:11:10 Yeah. I think the, the biggest reason is, uh, there are, there were actually some quite successful programs. There's one called Pathways, I think it was maybe before Pathways, but there was a program that used to exist where you could recruit people out of colleges, and there was an internship program. But this actually maybe ties into what we were talking about before of, like, so many of these things are just unforced errors, where we used to have this internship program. We'd get people out of college or grad school, they would be in the job, they'd see if they like it, and then we'd wanna hire them. And then we could hire them. That worked. This was, like, early 2010s. Then there was a change that said, well, you can't just hire them because that... I, I believe it has something to do with, like, they thought it violated something around veterans' preference or something. There was some reason why-

Chris Williamson 1:12:09 Mm.

Sam Corcos 1:12:09 ... they didn't want you to just be able to hire people normally anymore through that. So, they had to go through a competitive process, finger quotes, right, which is the one that I basically just described before. And so, uh, it was often, and some of, some of the people who've been there for a long time told me, it was usually the case that those interns who were actually really good, who they really wanted, would not be the ones that could be selected-

Chris Williamson 1:12:36 Mm.

Sam Corcos 1:12:36 ... 'cause they were deemed unqualified or they were deemed, uh, insufficiently experienced or they did not have enough of a veteran's preference to make it to the top of the stack. Um, the, a lot of the hiring processes that we have are, uh, they... For a lot of these roles, you are, you are specifically instructed to hire the minimally qualified candidate, which, which means you're instructed to hire effectively the first person who meets the minimum threshold.

Chris Williamson 1:13:11 Okay. That sounds like it would be quick though.

Sam Corcos 1:13:14 It is quick.

Chris Williamson 1:13:14 All right.

Sam Corcos 1:13:15 It's, it's quick if you don't care who you get. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:13:18 Right. But it's, it's quick to get people in who are often underqualified and not fit for purpose and slow to get them out.

Sam Corcos 1:13:25 Yes. Effectively impossible to get them out, but, yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:13:27 Right. So you hire quickly, fire slowly.

Sam Corcos 1:13:29 Yeah. Or never, fire never, yeah. You, you can hire slow- there are different hiring authorities. There are some roles where you have something called direct hire authority-

Chris Williamson 1:13:39 Mm.

Sam Corcos 1:13:39 ... which just allows you to-... pick the people who you want for specific roles. There's a very limited number of roles that have direct hire authority-

Chris Williamson 1:13:48 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 1:13:48 Most of these are in this competitive process, um, and the competitive process often means that you will end up with candidates that are not the ones that you want.

Chris Williamson 1:13:57 You are painting a picture that is almost exactly what I thought it was going to be.

Sam Corcos 1:14:01 (laughs) Oh, yeah?

Chris Williamson 1:14:02 Like, uh, you know, as a immigrant foreigner who doesn't really pay much attention or care about what goes on inside of the US government-

Sam Corcos 1:14:09 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:14:09 ... uh, this is precisely what I thought it would be.

Sam Corcos 1:14:11 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:14:12 Uh, it is ossified, right?

Sam Corcos 1:14:16 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:14:16 It's big, it's inefficient, um, and I have to assume that it is causing even well-meaning people who really want to try and make change to sort of regress back to the mean of government. So even the high agency, you know, upwardly mobile, talented people that want to drive things forward learn over time that their efforts are kind of wasted, and actually, when they do try and move things forward, they rock the boat so much they're probably disincentivized from doing that too.

Sam Corcos 1:14:54 Yep.

Chris Williamson 1:14:54 So cha- change is highly, uh, highly pushed back against.

Sam Corcos 1:14:57 Yeah, and I would say there's ... the, call it 100 or 200 people that I've really come to rely on at the IRS.

Chris Williamson 1:15:08 Out of 12,000, 13,000-

Sam Corcos 1:15:11 Yeah, including contractors, yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:15:12 ... including contractors?

Sam Corcos 1:15:13 Um, they're, they're really quite good, and I, uh, I've had conversations with them about, like, "Why are you still here?" 'Cause if I was in their position, I don't think I would have lasted three months.

Chris Williamson 1:15:28 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 1:15:29 And every one of them has said, like, "Oh, believe me, I've thought about leaving." (laughs) But several of them have said, "I- I just, I care enough about the mission. I recognize that if I left, very bad things would happen-"

Chris Williamson 1:15:42 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 1:15:43 ... and they have this sense of responsibility, and that's why they're still here. And, uh, I, I really admire that and I'm glad that they're still there. I would, I would not be able to do this if they weren't there.

Chris Williamson 1:15:54 Mm-hmm. What's the federal government missing that the private sector isn't? Is it, uh, competition, incentives, accountability?

Sam Corcos 1:16:04 (inhales deeply) I think there's one thing that it w- it is always missing and will always miss, and this is just a ... I would describe it as an assumption that you have to make when you're thinking about designing any system, and it's kind of how we got here to begin with, which is there is no feedback loop when it's the government. It's kind of like why FDR was so opposed to public sector unions, is because in the private sector you can unionize, but if you demand too much from the company, eventually the company will just die.

Chris Williamson 1:16:34 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 1:16:35 But the government won't. You can just demand more, you can just work less. They, there is no counterbalance to the unions-

Chris Williamson 1:16:43 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 1:16:43 ... in the public sector. It just, you can just always say yes and nothing happens. The debt just gets larger, the amount of money just goes up, and there is no force that pushes against it. So, um, the, the assumption that you always have to make, and why we end up with so many of these rules around personnel, around contracts, is that there is no natural incentive structure that prevents government from doing bad things.

Chris Williamson 1:17:11 I, I, I think it doesn't surprise me that this is the sort of challenge that people are facing, but also, 16%, only 16% of Americans trust the federal government. That was some Pew study from 2023, I think. Is that surprising to you, given that you, what you've seen from the inside on what trusting the government means? But you would-

Sam Corcos 1:17:37 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:17:37 ... trust somebody to, uh, look after your dog. Okay, so what are the things that they need? Well, they need to be driven, they need to be competent, they need to be conscientious and aware, uh, they need to have the skillset that's required to be able to look after a dog, um, they need to not be, uh, malicious against dogs. So there's, you know, the fraud, waste, abuse, you, like, insider tra- all of those things. There's a, a number of different levels that you need to get through in order to be able to think, "I trust this person," and not all of them are malicious, and not all of them are competence-based, but 16% of Americans-

Sam Corcos 1:18:12 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:18:12 ... trust the federal government. Doesn't seem surprising.

Sam Corcos 1:18:16 Yeah. I think it's generally good for people to be skeptical of the government. It is the entity with a monopoly on violence. That is a thing that one should inherently be skeptical of. Um, I do wonder how much of that is just ... a, an overexposure to the news. I think that's, uh, there's, there are a lot of things that are ... either completely not real that people believe are true, or they are sufficiently non-representative of reality that they are effectively not real.

Chris Williamson 1:19:01 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 1:19:01 And if you go way back, people cared a lot more... I'm sure you've, you know all this stuff. People cared a lot more about th- their local community. There was no 24/7 national news coverage.

Chris Williamson 1:19:14 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 1:19:15 But over time, it's basically become a team sport, and people watch it like they're watching football, and these, these things that have always happened sort of on the edges of the government are now front and center, and they look like they are representative of reality when they're not.

Chris Williamson 1:19:34 Right.

Sam Corcos 1:19:35 So I don't really know, and I've, it's been interesting to observe from the inside how the tail can wag the dog in a lot of these things, like-A specific example is at the IRS, we hosted for the first time ever, we took 50 of our best engineers who have been there, many for 10, 15 years, across all the different teams. We brought them together for a strategic planning session at Treasury to discuss across all these teams, which rarely talk to each other. What are you seeing? How do we land the plane on this modernization program? It was incredibly useful. People were finding data sources that we didn't even know about. Uh, we were finding all kinds of issues. Problems that were just a coordination problem that had been stuck for years got resolved on the spot, because people could just talk to each other 'cause historically when you have this many layers, for an engineer to talk to another engineer, they've gotta tell their supervisor, who tells their director, who tells the subject matter expert, who goes across to the other team, and then it's got, it goes through like eight layers of filtering, none of whom know anything about this topic.

Chris Williamson 1:20:45 You can't just Slack them.

Sam Corcos 1:20:46 You can't just, like, communicate with them.

Chris Williamson 1:20:48 What is communication? What, what's the platform that you guys use?

Sam Corcos 1:20:51 Teams typically or email.

Chris Williamson 1:20:52 Microsoft Teams and email?

Sam Corcos 1:20:54 Mm-hmm. Yep.

Chris Williamson 1:20:55 I, I haven't used Teams apart from-

Sam Corcos 1:20:56 It's very similar to Slack.

Chris Williamson 1:20:57 Okay. Right.

Sam Corcos 1:20:58 Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:20:58 Uh, how many people are in your teams?

Sam Corcos 1:21:03 That's a good question. Um, I don't know if I have any actual direct reports. I've just sort of, um, co-opted a bunch of other teams. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:21:14 You're float- you're, you're floating in there. You're like a, a mercenary.

Sam Corcos 1:21:16 Basically.

Chris Williamson 1:21:17 A free, freeloader. Um-

Sam Corcos 1:21:20 So there, there's these communication gaps that are a huge problem. Uh, we hosted an event of strategic planning. Wired magazine put out a piece that says that we hosted a hackathon, that Doge-

Chris Williamson 1:21:31 Oh, this was what that was.

Sam Corcos 1:21:32 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:21:33 Ah.

Sam Corcos 1:21:33 Doge. They said, "Doge hosted a hackathon with a bunch of Doge people."

Chris Williamson 1:21:38 What's a hackathon for the people that aren't familiar?

Sam Corcos 1:21:41 Well, so typically it's like you do 48 hours of a bunch of coding, and then you have some deliverable at the end. And what's-

Chris Williamson 1:21:48 Navy SEAL hell week for-

Sam Corcos 1:21:49 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:21:50 ... coders.

Sam Corcos 1:21:50 For, for software developers, yeah. And what's, what's weird about it is they requested, like, "Hey, we heard you guys are hosting a hackathon." And we said, you know, "Pick." Most of these people didn't even have their computers open. This is a strategic planning session with 50 career IRS engineers-

Chris Williamson 1:22:08 Mm.

Sam Corcos 1:22:08 ... who talk about IRS modernization.

Chris Williamson 1:22:10 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 1:22:11 And they invented the story out of whole cloth that it's a Doge hackathon. It's completely made up. And this is sort of the tail wagging the dog thing, where I still get requests from Congress asking about this hackathon.

Chris Williamson 1:22:24 Would that be a bad thing if you had hosted a hackathon?

Sam Corcos 1:22:27 I'm not even sure it would be, but like none of this is real.

Chris Williamson 1:22:30 What do you think's, what do you think's the subtext? Is the subtext of the hackathon this is Silicon Valley degeneracy, caffeine-fueled, Adderall-addicted young people-

Sam Corcos 1:22:43 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:22:43 ... eating at Chick-fil-A and coding up the matrix?

Sam Corcos 1:22:47 I think what this story intentionally implied, which is not real, but this, what they want people to think, is that the, the young Doge engineers are hacking around with taxpayer data-

Chris Williamson 1:23:01 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 1:23:01 ... and we're doing something nefarious with it.

Chris Williamson 1:23:03 Yeah, I suppose the word hackathon-

Sam Corcos 1:23:04 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:23:04 ... i- i- it's not got great optics.

Sam Corcos 1:23:06 Yeah. They're, they're using these words intentionally, and they, they suggest certain things that... You, you ever read Ryan Holiday's book, Trust Me, I'm Lying?

Chris Williamson 1:23:16 Yeah.

Sam Corcos 1:23:17 He has this great concept called trading up the chain, which is about how you start with something that's like a half-truth that you suggest, which then... Like it started out, I think it's even in that article, they say that I am SpaceX affiliated because my brother interned there many years ago. And then if you look at a lot of news stories today, they say, "Sam Corkos, SpaceX engineer." I have never worked at SpaceX.

Chris Williamson 1:23:43 Right.

Sam Corcos 1:23:43 Like, the closest affiliation I have is that my brother interned there. Like, I have nothing to do with SpaceX at all.

Chris Williamson 1:23:50 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 1:23:50 But they just like, they, they imply something, which suggests something, which then just becomes reality.

Chris Williamson 1:23:57 Right.

Sam Corcos 1:23:57 And then all of these news stories start to say that.

Chris Williamson 1:23:59 It's like a slippery Martin Daly type thing.

Sam Corcos 1:24:02 Yeah, exactly. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:24:03 (laughs)

Sam Corcos 1:24:03 And it's just, it, it becomes the new narrative, and they just build on top of it, so-

Chris Williamson 1:24:08 How, how big of a deal was trying to deal with this hackathon story? Was that a huge pain in the ass?

Sam Corcos 1:24:12 It was a huge pain in the ass, yeah, because, like, people kept asking, wh- this is the tail wagging the dog thing, right? I started getting emails from IRS engineers saying, "Hey, can I join the next hackathon?" It's like, "Guys, there is no hackathon. There was never a plan to do a hackathon. None of this is real." (laughs) And it's just like I, I still -

Chris Williamson 1:24:31 I have enough to do-

Sam Corcos 1:24:32 ... regular... I know.

Chris Williamson 1:24:33 ... already. I don't need to be, uh, you know, pushing back. That is fake news.

Sam Corcos 1:24:39 It's 100% fake.

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Chris Williamson 1:25:55 Obviously, a lot of people associate-

Sam Corcos 1:25:56 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:25:57 ... Doge with Elon. Elon left recently.

Sam Corcos 1:26:00 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:26:01 How big of an impact... Well, actually, uh, even before that-

Sam Corcos 1:26:04 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:26:04 ... how much of a driving force was Elon in Doge?

Sam Corcos 1:26:09 Um, in the stuff that I was doing, not a lot. I had very little interaction with him. Um, the... We primarily worked with the secretary's team and within our agency. Um, I think the biggest effect was, um, there was a more... How would I describe it? I think the, the biggest impact was when there was the initial blow up, there was a week of real uncertainty on what it all meant.

Chris Williamson 1:26:49 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 1:26:49 Um, but over time, the, uh, the teams had already been so embedded with