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Fareed Zakaria GPS
The War On Government, A Fareed Zakaria Special. Aired 8-9p ET
Aired April 06, 2025 - 20:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[20:00:33]
FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN HOST: America has over 3,000 nuclear warheads. Each capable of unleashing Armageddon. The government agency that keeps them safe is the little known National Nuclear Security Administration, part of the Department of Energy. It contains their radiation, prevents their plutonium from being stolen, and makes sure they don't detonate by accident.
But in February 2025, Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, fired nearly one-fifth of the agency's workforce despite strong resistance from nuclear officials. It took frantic calls from Republican congressmen to reverse many of the cuts, but the agency was still on its heels after the episode.
ELON MUSK, DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY: This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy.
ZAKARIA: Ever since Mr. Musk went to Washington, chaos has been the order of the day.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Mr. Musk, what is DOGE?
ZAKARIA: In the beginning, there was bipartisan support for DOGE, from Rand Paul to Bernie Sanders. After all, there is plenty of waste to clean up in Washington, and everyone loves efficiency. But DOGE and the Trump administration appear to be about something else.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Sweeping layoffs across several agencies.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: The cuts may be deep and widespread.
ZAKARIA: Massive job cuts have hit the Centers for Disease Control.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This includes people who have very specialized knowledge.
ZAKARIA: Chaos and confusion reign at the National Institutes of Health.
KYUNG LAH, CNN SENIOR NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: People think USAID is cutting funding to other countries.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's happening right here in my city.
ZAKARIA: And the gutting of an entire agency, USAID. LAH: 60 percent of the budget goes to humanitarian emergencies.
ZAKARIA: Has put millions of lives at risk.
MUSK: Chainsaw.
ZAKARIA: Most striking is the theater of cruelty of it all, and anger, and an intent to do harm.
We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected, top Trump official Russell Vought has said. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.
HOWARD LUTNICK, COMMERCE SECRETARY: Elon Musk.
ZAKARIA: What explains all of this rage against government?
MUSK: This is a real battle.
LUTNICK: Yes.
ZAKARIA: The determination not to improve it.
MUSK: Massive, overwhelming, sweep.
ZAKARIA: But to burn it all down.
MUSK: Your money is being wasted. And the Department of Government Efficiency is going to fix that.
ZAKARIA: To understand, we need to go back and tell the story of THE WAR ON GOVERNMENT.
Welcome to a special hour on the American conservative movement's battle to roll back government. I'm Fareed Zakaria.
The founder of modern conservatism Edmund Burke said that statesmen should combine a disposition to preserve and an ability to improve.
We're seeing something very different in today's Republican Party. There's been a rage on the right against government that's been building for decades. For almost 90 years, Republican leaders have promised their conservative voters over and over again that they would roll back the growing federal government, making it small enough to drown it in the bathtub as one activist once put it.
They made stirring speeches. They raised people's hopes. But every time they got into power, they failed to deliver.
As E.J. Dionne illustrates in his book, "Why the Right Went Wrong," the repeated failures to actually shrink government were for hard line conservatives a great betrayal, yielding anger and greater radicalism with each shattered promise.
[20:05:09] Our story begins with the first great betrayal, that of a war hero who became president, Dwight David Eisenhower.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Now cheers by those who like Ike.
ZAKARIA: In the 1950s, everybody liked Ike. General Eisenhower had led America to victory in the Second World War.
DWIGHT EISENHOWER, 34TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: You have summoned me to lead a great crusade for freedom in America and freedom in the world.
ZAKARIA: Winning the presidency in a landslide in 1952.
EISENHOWER: We must be willing individually and as a nation to accept whatever sacrifices may be required of us.
ZAKARIA: He was the first Republican in the White House since Herbert Hoover.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The president has been transported back to his desk in the capital.
ZAKARIA: Giving hardcore conservatives high hopes that he would achieve their long held dream, ending the New Deal.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It was the beginning of the worst calamity the United States economy had ever known.
ZAKARIA: In the 1930s, at the height of the Great Depression.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Banks closed. Millions were put out of work.
ZAKARIA: Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed the most ambitious legislative agenda in American history.
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, 32ND PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: It is a call to arm. I pledge myself to a New Deal for the American people.
ZAKARIA: It created vast federal programs to get Americans back on their feet.
ROOSEVELT: You people must have faith. Together, we cannot fail.
NINA TOTENBERG, NPR LEGAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: They were going to try almost everything and anything to try to get this country sort of stood up again and working. And they did.
ROOSEVELT: We can put people back to work.
ZAKARIA: The New Deal transformed the country, and it left a legacy of bridges, buildings and parks over a half million miles of roads and the nation's first real safety net, Social Security. 78 percent of America's seniors lived in poverty in 1939. In the decades that followed, that number fell to 10 percent. But for the right, the New Deal was the dawn of big government, an
expansion of federal power and bureaucracy that had never been seen before.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: In quick succession, the Supreme Court invalidated law after law.
ZAKARIA: The right-wing Supreme Court declared New Deal laws unconstitutional, but it reversed course.
ROOSEVELT: We must take action to save the Constitution from the court.
ZAKARIA: After FDR threatened to add justices to the court.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He tried to enlarge the court with justices of his own choosing.
NOAH FELDMAN, HARVARD LAW SCHOOL: The Supreme Court of the United States was controlled by a conservative indeed libertarian property- protecting majority.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Social Security Act is democratic as America itself.
ZAKARIA: And much to conservatives' consternation.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No worries. Comfort and security in their old age.
ZAKARIA: Programs like Social Security became enormously popular as the years passed.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Ike for president.
ZAKARIA: But in the 1952 presidential campaign, it looked like the New Deal's days could be numbered.
EISENHOWER: One day in every four, you don't work for yourself or your family. You work for the federal or other government. Now, don't tell me you like that.
ZAKARIA: Candidate Eisenhower called New Deal programs creeping socialism and said if Americans pined for free meals and housing, they could get them in jail.
EISENHOWER: In an effort to achieve an understanding.
ZAKARIA: Yet when the candidate became president, he did an about- face.
EISENHOWER: I say it is so serious that we just cannot.
ZAKARIA: Knowing that reversing the New Deal would be political suicide.
Should any party attempt to abolish Social Security, he wrote, you would not hear from that party again in our political history.
So instead of eliminating big government, Ike would try to make it smarter with a new approach that he called the Middle Way.
Government should support the little fellow, Ike said. It should combine a liberal attitude toward the welfare of people and a conservative approach to the use of their money.
[20:10:02]
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Efficiently coordinating all the government's efforts.
ZAKARIA: So Ike started a new federal agency, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
EISENHOWER: We are determined to improve and extend the federal program of Social Security.
ZAKARIA: And he actually expanded Social Security to an additional 10 million people.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The president of the United States acting for you.
ZAKARIA: Perhaps the crown jewel of the Middle Way was Ike's interstate highway system.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The bill marked the beginning of the largest construction project in the history of the world.
ZAKARIA: Over 40,000 miles of new roads. A big boost to the economy.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Billions of dollars will be spent for city streets and expressways.
ZAKARIA: Mostly paid for by a gas tax, with only a minor price tag for the Treasury. Ike's Middle Way was broadly popular, but to diehard conservatives it was a big government betrayal.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Good evening. Our distinguished guest for this evening is the honorable Barry Goldwater.
ZAKARIA: Especially to an Arizona senator named Barry Goldwater.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You think there are too many government controls from Washington? Too many federal controls?
BARRY GOLDWATER, THEN ARIZONA SENATOR: The federal government has gotten big. It's gotten too big.
ZAKARIA: In 1960, he published "The Conscience of a Conservative," which became the right's bible for decades to come.
GOLDWATER: I accept your nomination with a deep sense of humility.
ZAKARIA: Goldwater preached no holds barred conservatism with no compromise and no New Deal.
I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient, he wrote, for I mean to reduce its size.
President Eisenhower, in Goldwater's eyes, was a turncoat, offering little more than a dime store New Deal.
GOLDWATER: Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
ZAKARIA: Goldwater was considered radical by many Republicans at the time.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Barry Goldwater.
GOLDWATER: Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON, BOSTON COLLEGE: He called his supporters to be extremists, to be radicals. Was it a watershed moment in America? Yes, it was.
ZAKARIA: Barry Goldwater won the Republican nomination for president in 1964. But in November --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The voice of the people was heard in the land.
ZAKARIA: The Democratic candidate, Lyndon Johnson, triumphed.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: An overwhelming mandate is handed to Lyndon Baines Johnson.
ZAKARIA: In one of the biggest presidential landslides ever.
LYNDON B. JOHNSON, 36TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Ours is a time of change.
ZAKARIA: President Johnson saw a wealthy nation in which 1 in 5 were poor.
JOHNSON: And this administration declares unconditional war on poverty in America.
ZAKARIA: He declared a war on poverty, calling his agenda the Great Society.
LEAH WRIGHT RIGUEUR, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY: The Great Society is one of the most ambitious agendas that modern America has ever seen.
JOHNSON: I want economic opportunity to be spread across this land, north, south, east and west to all people.
ZAKARIA: A flurry of legislation followed.
JULIAN ZELIZER, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY: Food stamps, Medicaid, federal education assistance, environmental measures passed at this dizzying speed.
JOHNSON: More jobs.
ZAKARIA: But the linchpin of Johnson's war on poverty was Medicare. Before 1965, many of America's seniors lacked any health care coverage.
RIGUEUR: The disproportionate amount are entering into poverty because they are unable to pay for their medical bills.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The scene of an historic event.
ZAKARIA: But with Johnson's signature, America vowed for the first time to take care of all of its elderly. By the time, LBJ left office, poverty had fallen dramatically. Meanwhile, government spending on the poor had doubled.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Richard Nixon.
ZAKARIA: Conservatives had high hopes that Johnson's successor, the hard right Richard Nixon, would finally put the brakes on the sprawling federal state.
RICHARD NIXON, 37TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: For the past five years, we have been deluged by government programs, and we have reaped from these programs an ugly harvest.
[20:15:02]
ZAKARIA: But the tough-talking Nixon turned out to be mainstream in office. On some economic issues, left of center. He actually added to Washington's alphabet soup, creating the EPA to protect the environment, and OSHA to assure worker safety. It was yet another big government betrayal by one of the right's own. Conservatives were livid.
RIGUEUR: Richard Nixon looks a lot like a dime store New Deal.
ZAKARIA: Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, seemed like the real deal.
RONALD REAGAN, 40TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: It is clear our federal government is overgrown and overweight.
ZAKARIA: And by 1981.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The president of the United States.
ZAKARIA: Conservatives believed it was finally their chance to dismantle big government.
DAVID FRUM, THE ATLANTIC: You had the sense of real triumph, a breakthrough. Certainly the reforms of the '60s and '70s they are going to be rolled back. American society was going to change in some very fundamental ways.
ZAKARIA: Or so conservatives thought.
REAGAN: Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.
ZAKARIA: That story next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
ZAKARIA: As he took the oath of office in 1981.
REAGAN: I, Ronald Reagan, do solemnly swear.
ZAKARIA: Ronald Reagan began his big crusade against government.
REAGAN: So help me God.
WARREN EARL BURGER, THEN CHIEF JUSTICE OF THE UNITED STATES: Congratulations, sir.
ZAKARIA: He believed an ever growing federal bureaucracy was stifling the American people.
REAGAN: Thank you.
ZAKARIA: Culminating in the malaise of the Carter years.
REAGAN: In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.
ZAKARIA: Reagan's solution, the most radical attempt to downsize government since the New Deal.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Ronald Reagan, his supporters hope the new FDR of the right.
ZAKARIA: He would not waste any time. Before he even left the Capitol, Reagan signed an executive order to freeze all hiring in the federal government. Conservatives' hopes were sky high. But in the end, the Reagan revolution would fall far short. Big government got even bigger. And many hardcore conservatives once again felt betrayed.
ZELIZER: The Reagan Archives are filled with memos and letters from prominent activists, complaining that Reagan is selling them out.
[20:20:05]
ZAKARIA: Reagan was sincere in his efforts to roll back government. I'm trying to undo the Great Society, he boldly wrote in his diary. And try he did.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: President Reagan's budget cutting blade is hanging over the federal government.
ZAKARIA: Food stamps, Medicare and Medicaid. So painful cuts in his first year. To save money on the school lunch program, ketchup was briefly classified as a vegetable. In just three years homelessness doubled as federal dollars for housing and mental health services dried up. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We're supposed to be the land of opportunity.
It's not anymore. It's the land for the rich. And the poor can go to hell.
ZAKARIA: But when Reagan took aim at one of the government's biggest expenses, Social Security, he was immediately denounced by both Democrats and Republicans.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He promised there would be no Social Security cuts. And the darn guy is lying already. I'll never vote for him again.
ZAKARIA: Just one week later, Ronald Reagan had to back down.
The reason conservatives have had such a hard time cutting government programs over the years is because Americans generally like them. 79 percent of Americans opposed cutting Social Security in 1981.
Changing tactics the pragmatic Reagan cut a deal with Democrats to keep Social Security solvent.
ZELIZER: He agrees to a package that includes tax increases, which is anathema to Reagan and to the conservative movement.
ZAKARIA: On the hunt for any other ways to cut costs, Reagan created the DOGE of the 1980s, the Grace Commission.
PETER GRACE, CHAIR, GRACE COMMISSION: My name is Peter Grace.
ZAKARIA: Peter Grace was a wealthy corporate titan who convinced the president to empower outside advisers to root out government waste. Sound familiar?
REAGAN: Be bold. We want your team to work like tireless bloodhounds.
GRACE: $424 billion.
ZAKARIA: The commission claimed it could save the country hundreds of billions of dollars, with its nearly 2,500 recommendations. But most of the proposals went nowhere.
RIGUEUR: The Grace Commission concludes that most of these things can only be done through congressional maneuvering. And what happens? Congress says absolutely not.
ZAKARIA: Even the most right-wing Republicans had zero interest in voting against money for their home state.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Republicans warned the president that he'll have to make some compromises.
ZAKARIA: Today DOGE and Donald Trump don't seem too concerned about Congress.
RIGUEUR: The idea of the Constitution and guardrails and the three branches of government, that seems to have evaporated. ZAKARIA: After failing to dramatically curb spending in his first
term, Reagan largely gave up trying in his second. His disillusioned budget director resigned.
DAVID STOCKMAN, THEN DIRECTOR OF THE OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET: We have conducted the greatest free lunch fiscal policy of modern times.
ZAKARIA: Much to hardcore conservatives' dismay, Reagan may have talked like an ideologue, but he governed like a pragmatist.
ZELIZER: Reagan could do both. He was ideologically committed, but he also understood the job of governing. And he's constantly compromising with the Democrats.
REAGAN: Thank you.
ZAKARIA: Reagan left office declaring victory.
REAGAN: Ours was the first revolution in the history of mankind that truly reversed the course of government. And with three little words, we the people.
ZAKARIA: But by the numbers, the Reagan Revolution was much more rhetoric than reality. He added over 300,000 federal workers during his eight years in office by one count. And the federal budget surged nearly 70 percent, thanks in part to Reagan's massive defense spending.
Roosevelt's New Deal was still there. Johnson's Great Society was still there. And the big dreams of putting an end to big government had just been dashed.
FRUM: When Reagan left office not having radically transformed America, conservatives became more ready for a story of betrayal.
ZAKARIA: A new generation of Republicans would rise up to tear government down.
NEWT GINGRICH, THEN HOUSE SPEAKER: I am a genuine revolutionary.
ZAKARIA: With more radical tactics and goals than Reagan ever dreamed of. That is next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[20:29:39]
ZAKARIA: November 8th, 1994.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're going to get our country back.
ZAKARIA: A day for the history books.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Clinton Congress is taking a pounding tonight.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Thank you. Thank you.
ZAKARIA: A watershed moment for Republicans who captured both chambers of Congress for the first time since the Eisenhower administration.
[20:30:03]
Fifty-four seats flipped in the House, eight seats flipped in the Senate. A historic landslide.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Republican Party is writing another chapter in American political history.
ZAKARIA: Leading the party was congressman and soon-to-be speaker Newt Gingrich.
GINGRICH: This is truly a wildly historic night. I mean, this is just --
ZAKARIA: And Gingrich intended to parlay that historic night into a historic term.
ZELIZER: Gingrich in '94 and '95, after he wins, is really perceived as one of the most significant Republicans in the country. He's not president, but it was almost as if he had become president.
ZAKARIA: His goal? Nothing short of ending Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs like Medicare once and for all. And achieving what Ronald Reagan had hoped for but failed to do.
Gingrich believed that the federal safety net was a threat to Western civilization.
GINGRICH: I have no interest in running a cheap welfare state that destroys lives.
ZAKARIA: But Newt's war on government would be foiled by perhaps the most talented politician of his generation, who bet his ailing presidency on his belief that Americans did not want their government dismantled.
He won.
Gingrich had been preparing for a showdown over the safety net for years.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He finally did it. Newt Gingrich, a Republican.
ZAKARIA: After losing two congressional elections as a moderate, he turned hard to the right and finally won a seat in 1978.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mr. Congressman.
ZELIZER: In that last election in '78, he gets a little more blistering and he connects himself to this burgeoning conservative movement.
GINGRICH: I pull the string.
ZAKARIA: He was a new kind of Republican, much more extreme than the pragmatic Reagan, believing that politics was an all-out, quote, "war for power."
RIGUEUR: He is brash. He is loud. He is outspoken. He is a disrupter.
ZAKARIA: Gingrich led an upstart conservative training ground for candidates called GOPAC.
GINGRICH: We are in the business of inventing a new era.
ZAKARIA: Where he preached a militant new vocabulary of politics known as Newt Speak, calling Democrats not just opponents, but criminals and traitors.
GINGRICH: For the Democrats to basically say, not only are we going to rape you, but you have to pay for the motel room is a bit much.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mr. Clarke, the speaker-elect, Newt Gingrich.
ZAKARIA: By the time he became House speaker in 1995, Gingrich was primed and ready to achieve his dreams.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I hereby end 40 years of Democratic rule of this House.
ZAKARIA: Gingrich had the programs of the Great Society in his crosshairs. He zeroed in on the federal budget as his battleground. His adversary, a then floundering Democratic president, Bill Clinton.
In 1993, Clinton's health care plan had tanked.
GINGRICH: Different dreams.
ZAKARIA: Then came the '94 red wave in Congress.
ZELIZER: Two years into Clinton's presidency, he's struggling.
ZAKARIA: By 1995, Bill Clinton was very much on the ropes, forced to actually defend the relevance of his presidency.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: President Clinton, do you worry about making sure that your voice is heard in the coming months?
BILL CLINTON, 42ND PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The Constitution gives me relevance. The power of our ideas gives me relevance. The president is relevant here.
ZAKARIA: Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich seemed like the most powerful man in Washington. He went for the jugular, proposing over $450 billion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, jeopardizing those programs for the elderly and the poor. Under the plan, Medicare premiums would triple for some people within just a couple of years. Clinton refused to play ball. So Gingrich and his party refused to fund the government, allowing it to shut down. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The government runs out of money at midnight, and a
partial shutdown of government services begins tomorrow.
ZAKARIA: Gingrich's strategy represented an unprecedented act of political warfare at the time, and Bill Clinton called his bluff.
Two government shutdowns totaled a whopping 26 days.
RIGUEUR: It's a shock. It's an absolute shock to have a government shutdown.
ZAKARIA: Hundreds of thousands of government workers were furloughed. National parks and museums were shuttered. Applications for passports and even Medicare went unprocessed. Clinton blamed Gingrich.
[20:35:01]
CLINTON: The American people should not be held hostage anymore to the Republican budget priorities.
ZAKARIA: Gingrich blamed Clinton.
GINGRICH: The fact is, the president needs to recognize that Lyndon Johnson's Great Society has failed.
ZAKARIA: The Clinton camp had taken an extraordinary gamble, banking on public support for programs like Medicare to win the day.
CLINTON: Their plan would increase premiums. Brick by brick it would dismantle Medicare as we know it.
ZAKARIA: Republicans believe that the politically weak Clinton would cave.
ZELIZER: Republicans think the public will blame the president. That's how things work.
ZAKARIA: But Clinton was right. Polling data showed that Americans very much wanted their Medicare. What's more, the public hated the shutdown and laid more blame for it on Republicans than on Democrats.
RIGUEUR: The American public is enraged.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I cannot blame the president at all because those people need Medicare.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I support the president whatever it takes.
ZAKARIA: As the conflict reached a boiling point, Republican Senate majority leader Bob Dole, who was running for president, broke ranks on the Senate floor.
BOB DOLE, THEN REPUBLICAN SENATE MAJORITY LEADER: We ought to end this. I mean, it's gotten to the point where it's a little ridiculous as far as this senator is concerned.
ZAKARIA: Congressional Republicans folded, giving Clinton most of what he wanted.
CLINTON: I am pleased that Congress has completed the task of reopening the federal government, which was begun a few days ago.
ZAKARIA: Gingrich had lost his big game of chicken over the Great Society. What's more, thanks to his budget win, Clinton, ever the comeback kid, rose from the dead.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is one of the great miraculous comebacks in American history.
ZAKARIA: Parlaying his politically astute defense of the safety net into an easy reelection. The next year, legislation balancing the budget passed in Congress with significantly smaller cuts to health care than Gingrich had championed.
JANE MAYER, THE NEW YORKER: What you see on the right with Gingrich and ever after is promises that they can't deliver.
ZAKARIA: And Gingrich himself resigned from Congress shortly thereafter. Yet another Republican leader had failed to live up to his big promises to rein in big government.
Coming up, the next battle, the Tea Party rises to kill Obamacare.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[20:41:28]
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: The fragile financial system.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Is likely to get worse before it gets better.
ZAKARIA: It was the rant heard around the world.
RICK SANTELLI, CNBC BUSINESS NEWS: The government is promoting bad behavior.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Nearly 1.2 million jobs have disappeared.
ZAKARIA: The American economy was on the brink of collapse in 2009.
BARACK OBAMA, 44TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: There you go.
ZAKARIA: And President Obama had just signed a stimulus bill to save it. Then he proposed giving billions of dollars to struggling homeowners to keep them from losing their homes. But many on the right, including CNBC's Rick Santelli, thought that was a terrible idea.
SANTELLI: This is America. How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor's mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills? Raise their hand? How about we all?
President Obama, are you listening?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We want to take our country back.
ZAKARIA: Santelli's battle cry would morph into a conservative revolt against government.
SANTELLI: We're thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I'm American. And I'm mad.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm putting my foot down. I can't take it anymore.
ZAKARIA: Partly a grassroots movement.
DAVID KOCH, AMERICANS FOR PROSPERITY FOUNDATION CHAIRMAN: This is a phenomenal success in my judgment. 800,000 activists.
ZAKARIA: Partly funded by wealthy libertarians, the Tea Party was far angrier and more radical than Reagan or Gingrich. And one goal rose to the top of its list.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Why don't they take the health care being forced down our throats?
ZAKARIA: Killing the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The motion to concur in the Senate amendment is adopted.
WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: For decades, they've been trying to do it. It has now been done.
OBAMA: This is what change looks like.
ZAKARIA: The law brought health insurance to millions of Americans which to the right looked like yet another big addition to big government.
This is the story of the Tea Party's war against the Affordable Care Act. One more losing battle in the right's WAR ON GOVERNMENT.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is about a government takeover.
GEORGE W. BUSH, 43RD PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: GEORGE Good morning, everybody.
ZAKARIA: The roots of the Tea Party's anger began with one of their own.
BUSH: Major priority.
ZAKARIA: Obama's predecessor, Republican president George W. Bush.
BUSH: I call my philosophy and approach, compassionate conservatism.
ZAKARIA: Big government had grown even bigger under his watch.
BUSH: No child is left behind. ZAKARIA: Including an aggressive federal intrusion into education.
JOHN KING, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Many conservatives call this big government at its worst.
ZAKARIA: A more than $400 billion prescription drug benefit.
BUSH: Action is clearly necessary.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The motion is adopted.
ZAKARIA: And to top it off.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: The bailout was sold to Congress as life or death for the American economy.
ZAKARIA: Billions to bail out the banks during the Great Recession.
ZELIZER: There was a sense of betrayal with what Bush had done.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I have the right for the government not to control my health care.
ZAKARIA: But it was Obamacare that became the Tea Party's obsession.
OBAMA: Health care reform cannot wait. It must not wait. And it will not wait another year.
[20:45:00]
ZAKARIA: And yet, the core idea of Obamacare, requiring people to buy mostly private health insurance, had been championed by conservatives. It was proposed by Republicans as an alternative to Bill Clinton's health care plan in the 1990s, and actually implemented in Massachusetts by Republican Governor Mitt Romney in 2006. But none of that mattered.
RACHEL MADDOW, MSNBC ANCHOR: The wave of angry mobs.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: The protester who came to the town hall meeting today with a gun.
ZAKARIA: Ferocious protests sprang up everywhere in 2009, warning of a government takeover of health care, which PolitiFact called the lie of the year.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Whoever senator or congressman vote for this bill, we will vote you out.
ZAKARIA: After that, no Republican in Congress.
SEN. CHUCK GRASSLEY (R-IA): I would not vote for that.
ZAKARIA: Dared to go near Obamacare.
RIGUEUR: The Tea Party is opposing that which is drawn from their own movement.
ZAKARIA: According to an authoritative study of the Tea Party, much of the movement was bankrolled by billionaire activists like the Koch brothers, libertarians, who had a massive influence on the message of the movement.
RIGUEUR: You also have a group of people who are deeply uneasy about the idea of having a black president.
ZAKARIA: Despite Obamacare's powerful opposition and many moments when the bill looked dead.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: 219 to 212, no votes are Republicans.
BLITZER: All Democrats. No Republicans.
ZAKARIA: The Affordable Care Act became law.
REP. NANCY PELOSI (D-CA), THEN HOUSE SPEAKER: The bill is passed.
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: President Obama was blunt, saying, there's no way to sugarcoat it.
KING: Look at how much red in America tonight.
OBAMA: It feels bad.
JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: Election was a game changer.
ZAKARIA: But the Tea Party's energy led Republicans to a massive midterm victory.
PELOSI: God bless you, Speaker Boehner.
ZAKARIA: And the new Tea Party Congress was determined to repeal Obamacare. It brought a new kind of radicalism to Washington, making the Gingrich '90s look tame by comparison.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: America may be on the brink of another financial disaster.
ZAKARIA: Threatening an economic Armageddon over the routine raising of the debt ceiling and foiling Obama and the Republican Speaker John Boehner's grand bargain for the budget.
OBAMA: One of the questions that the Republican Party is going to have to ask itself is, can they say yes to anything?
ZAKARIA: The Tea Party's extremism gave Obama a powerful campaign issue.
OBAMA: If I said the sky was blue, they said no. They figured if Obama fails, then we win.
ZAKARIA: And that helped propel him to victory in 2012.
With Obama back in the White House, the chances of repealing Obamacare were zero. But that did not stop Tea Party Republicans from trying.
They attempted to repeal or amend Obamacare more than 50 times since it was passed by one count.
SEN. TED CRUZ (R-TX): I intend to speak in support of defunding Obamacare until I am no longer able to stand.
ZAKARIA: Including with the government shutdown that congressional Republican leaders opposed.
JOHN BOEHNER (R), THEN HOUSE SPEAKER: The American people don't want their government shut down. And neither do I.
BLITZER: Donald J. Trump will become the 45th president.
ZAKARIA: Even after Donald Trump won the White House in 2016.
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Thank you.
ZAKARIA: With Republicans' controlling Congress, the repeal of Obamacare went down to defeat.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Turning the thumbs down on the repeal bill.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The motion is not agreed to.
SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL (R-KY): Clearly a disappointing moment.
ZAKARIA: The right's fatal flaw, according to a history of its repeal efforts, it's indifference to finding an alternative to the law.
ZELIZER: Governing was not a major interest of the Tea Party.
ZAKARIA: Meanwhile, Obamacare got popular, covering 1 in 7 Americans through its marketplaces since 2014.
TRUMP: America is back.
ZAKARIA: But many conservatives now believe that Trump 2.0 will finally deliver in their war on government.
TRUMP: DOGE. Perhaps you've heard of it.
ZAKARIA: And a bitter Trump appears more than ready to make their radical dreams come true.
Coming up, my concluding thoughts on THE WAR ON GOVERNMENT.
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[20:54:06]
ZAKARIA: And now for some closing thoughts on this subject.
When Donald Trump announced that he was creating the Department of Government Efficiency, I welcome the initiative. Streamlining the federal government by having outsiders take a look was an excellent idea. And Elon Musk's stated objective to cut the budget by $2 trillion, while ambitious, would be a useful yardstick.
But DOGE began its work, not by taking on the most logical targets. If you were really looking for waste, fraud and abuse, places like Medicare and the Defense Department, with their gigantic budgets. No, its first major target was a tiny agency most Americans had probably never heard of.
The U.S. Agency for International Development, whose total budget, around $40 billion, was less than 1 percent of federal spending. DOGE went after it with a brutality and glee that was stunning. Musk called it a criminal organization.
[20:55:04]
Government officials who had spent years in foreign countries, providing assistance to the poor, were summarily fired and asked to return home. Medical and nutrition programs were cut off, with the likely consequence that by some calculations, millions would get sick or starved.
What could explain this cruelty directed at people and programs that, in budgetary terms, were insignificant?
DOGE seemed to understand the central challenge the right faces in its WAR ON GOVERNMENT. The real money is in the large programs that the public supports. So DOGE began its war by choosing a broadly unpopular item of government spending, on foreigners.
TRUMP: Fraud, abuse. All of this horrible stuff going on.
MUSK: This, by the way, is, I think, one of the biggest sources of fraud in the world.
ZAKARIA: Musk and Trump delighted in listing all the fraud that they found, even though none of the projects they listed have shown any evidence of largescale corruption. They were simply programs they knew many Americans would not want to fund, especially when they were mischaracterized.
DOGE did take on Social Security, but in a rather strange way.
TRUMP: How many of them were getting paid Social Security? Because that's -- if that's the case, it's a massive fraud.
ZAKARIA: It claimed to find millions of dead people on its rolls. The implication was that these people were still getting payments.
Actually, all they appeared to have found were old personnel files in which dead people's names had not been deleted. Much like your Rolodex or contact folder probably still has the names of people who are deceased. Almost none appear to be getting benefits.
But again, it was a revealing strategy. Rather than talk seriously about changing Social Security by means testing benefits or raising the retirement age, Doge was promising that it could save billions by just cleaning up the personnel files.
Of course, it's possible to find savings in Washington. Former Vice President Al Gore's Reinventing Government Commission saved the federal government around $140 billion, but it worked in a manner that was almost the opposite of DOGE. It partnered with the agencies to identify redundancies, worked with Congress to change laws, and used a scalpel to trim fat.
DOGE, on the other hand, has been doing mass firings without much consultation, so much so that its largescale IRS firings could result in significantly lower tax revenues collected, which would raise the deficit.
DOGE has also been firing masses of workers, but the federal bureaucracy is small compared with other rich countries and is about the same size as it was 50 years ago.
It's worth remembering where the money is. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other mandatory spending like veterans' benefits, along with defense spending and interest payments make up around 85 percent of the budget. Much of this is efficient check writing, which doesn't require much bureaucracy.
The Department of Defense could be massively reformed as the Trump administration has begun to do a little bit. But why does it have four Air Forces, the Armies, Navies, Marines, and Air Force itself?
If DOGE approached the problem, as one does in the private sector, it would recognize there are two components to any deficit -- how much you spend and how much you take in, in this case, through taxes.
America's bloated national debt has a great deal to do with a series of tax cuts that began in the Reagan administration. By one estimate, from a progressive think tank, the Bush and Trump tax cuts alone have added $10 trillion to the debt and account for 57 percent of the increase in Americas debt to GDP ratio since 2001.
Bear in mind that compared to other rich countries, the U.S. still has close to the lowest tax revenues as a percentage of its GDP. In that context, the simplest way for DOGE to achieve maximum success would be to recommend that the Trump tax cuts be allowed to lapse, as they will under law, which would then reduce the debt by about $4.5 trillion over the next 10 years, vastly more than any plan the GOP seems willing to go through with to cut spending.
And that would take America back to the tax rates under Barack Obama, when the stock market more than doubled and America grew faster than almost every European country, and it would put the U.S. on a much more stable debt trajectory.
But don't hold your breath on that happening. Far more likely, DOGE will announce some new stunning findings, something like software duplication in the Environmental Protection Agency, which might save the federal government $100 million or 0.001 percent of the 2025 budget.
Thank you for watching this special hour. I'm Fareed Zakaria.
