David Senra
00:45:46 · David Senra, Scott Kupor
[00:45:46] S0: You came in before, during, after Doge, like what was? [00:45:49] S1: Yeah. So I came in with... Basically, I got interviewed and I came in with the Doge guy. So it was obviously Elon, but of course, were guys like Steve Davis was kind of the day to day person running it. And I had the opportunity to spend a bunch of time with them pre inauguration, so kind of, you know, end of... I got nominated, like, first week of December or something. And so kind of December and first part of January lead to inauguration. Then what happens is they tell you, okay. Like, until you get through your nomination process, you basically have to be persona non grata and, like, stop communicating with folks because otherwise, it can, like, fail your nomination process. So we had developed a bunch of plans and ideas for what we would do once, like, the administration turned over. But I wasn't there day one to be able to actually execute those things. [00:46:30] S0: But you're observing a lot of what was going on. [00:46:31] S1: That's exactly right. And they were executing it literally out of my office. So it turns out like my office was like the like ground central for ground zero for like everything was happening. [00:46:39] S0: So regardless of controversy over anything that happened there, I'm not even interested in that. I'm interested if there any ideas that you saw coming out of that that you thought were good and valuable and should be spread further?
00:46:52 · Scott Kupor
[00:46:52] S1: Yeah, here's my view overall on it, is part of the issue is, okay, just to give you a sense of the numbers, right? So there were roughly 2,300,000 federal civilian employees on day one when President Trump took office. Today, we're just about 2,000,000. So we've reduced by close to 300,000 people, the size of the federal government, which puts the federal government at the lowest level it's been as a percentage of the workforce since like 1960. And you literally have to go back to like Clinton Gore before you have anywhere even close to that. The numbers that president has is is much higher, but still, like, that's the last time he had any serious effort. So part of it is, look, the entire apparatus of government is... Travels in one direction only, which is budgets just get bigger every year, every time an agency wants to do something new, go back to Congress and they say, you want us do that thing? Give us more headcount to do it. So like that's been the path of like travel basically for the last, I don't know, fifty years probably or something like that. So the way I think about what Elon did was like Elon had to come in and to change... To like change the direction of a 2,300,000 person like oil tanker, you can't do gradual incremental stuff, like you have to have a big bang approach, right? Now people can argue and debate about his tactics and it's it's fair. I think there's, you know, there's fair arguments to have on to have on both sides, but like the idea that you had to have someone come in with a mission and actually try to like do some serious change, like I don't think there's any argument that you could ever make the change that we did without effectively like a big bank strategy. Look, he got a lot of shit for it, lots of people got a lot of shit for it. And you know, look, history will will write the story about that one. What we're trying to do now, like when I came in was, I was like, great. All the... They did all this work. Now we have to institutionalize this. That's kind of how I think about my role, which is okay, like Elon, Steve Davis, all these guys did amazing job of like breaking glass basically and saying like, this is how things are gonna be. Now we have to like do the long term institutionalization of it, which means we have to now go through and say, great, what are you actually working on?
00:48:42 · Scott Kupor, David Senra
Tell me the 20 things you're working on. Like, which ones are really important? Which ones should we not be doing? We never take stuff off the plate in government. We just keep adding. [00:48:51] S0: This like inertia. It is. It's insane. [00:48:54] S1: It's crazy. [00:48:55] S0: The, the, the story of you oversee retirement benefits And for all, we were on the phone the other day and you told me the story I just could not believe. I was like, do you understand? Like we were talking about the fact that, hey, you know what, America is full of like dynamic, really smart, high agency young people that don't even know this is a path and this is an opportunity. Maybe we should just shine a light on this and maybe beneficial regardless of what you think. If you have a choice between a better functioning government or not, course, you're gonna choose that. It has to do with the people that are in it, like in any other organization. But then you're like, do you know about the mind full of 4,000,000 pages of documents and like... [00:49:33] S1: 400,000,000. I mean, 100,000,000. [00:49:36] S0: And I'm like, Scott, what the hell are you talking about? [00:49:38] S1: I know. [00:49:39] S0: Can you tell the story?
00:49:40 · Scott Kupor
[00:49:40] S1: This is a great this is a great story. So... And and credit to Elon, right, because Elon made this story a real one. So we, OPM, manage retirement. So roughly 100,000 to 200,000 people retire every year from government. And when you retire, there's a whole process, right? You have to fill out a bunch of paperwork. It has to go to your HR department who has to confirm it. One of the like literally crazy problems by the way in government is we do not have the canonical history of your government service until you literally decide to retire. So most people to this day are in government for thirty plus years. They go to different agencies over time. Each of those agencies has different HR systems, has different payroll systems. And so I cannot look at, you know, David's record and say, hey, you spent five years here and you spent this. Literally part of the retirement process is we have to create that record. Now we're changing that, by the way, one of the other big projects I'm gonna come back to the mind is we are consolidating the entire HR IT system in government from 120 different systems into a single system, and we're gonna go from spending $2,000,000,000 a year to $40,000,000 a year. We're literally gonna save 95% by actually getting to a single system, and we will now have, like, the record of David Senra that you can look at every day and see all the stuff. So, anyways, you wanna retire. What you did prior to last year was you literally filled out paperwork, you put a fucking stamp on it, you mailed it by mail to your HR department, okay? They did their stuff, they put a stamp on it, they mailed it to a payroll department, which is different by the way in the federal government from the HR department, payroll is a totally separate thing, And then they've... The final piece is they mail it literally to an underground mine in Boyers, Pennsylvania. Now nobody probably here has ever heard of Boyers, Pennsylvania. It actually happens to be in Butler County, which is where, you know, the president's assassination attempt in July, I guess, of '24 was. It's what you would expect, like, you know, rural Middle America looks like. The federal government happens to be actually one of the largest employers out there. So people go to work every day in an underground mine that used to be an actual working limestone mine.
00:51:33 · Scott Kupor
It was since turned into basically a storage facility, but you can't get in there without going through massive security. You can go down in the mine and there are literally people driving golf carts around in with limestone walls. And so it shows up here and then literally we have individuals, 800 people in my retirement service organization who take that paper, they read the paper, they make a bunch of manual calculations, and then they give you a retirement check. That process historically takes anywhere from three months at the low end to twelve plus months to do. Partly because we go back and forth, and if you forgot to sign your paper, I literally will snail mail it back to you, ask you to sign it, and that will introduce another one month delay in the process because like literally, like it's sitting there waiting for you. Elon identified this and rightly so, he's like this is insane. He teamed up with a guy named Joe Gebbia. Gebbia is a co founder of Airbnb who's now running this national design studio. And they started this project at OPM before I got there and then I picked it up, which is how do we automate this process? Today, fully automate the process. So now you never actually send a piece of paper. In fact, we declared last day of paper in the on June 30. So we will never receive another piece of incoming paper into the mine. Everything's online, which it should be in the year 2026, which is this is not rocket science, right? Like you should be able to fill up an online application for your retirement. And as a result, we can reduce the processing time today just with the first iteration of this by more than 50%. My goal is like, we're gonna be able to reduce this like by 90%. Our commitment is if you give us an application that's electronic, that's healthy, within fifteen days, like you should literally have like a full retirement check. Like it should not be any harder than that. So we're doing that. Now we have 400 existing million existing pieces of paper from all the people who retired prior to last year, basically, who call us up sometimes and they say, hey, my spouse died or my child needs to be added to my insurance, whatever the hell stuff.
00:53:18 · Scott Kupor
So literally, if you call our call center today, we send what we call a runner, this is actually a job classification of the mine, goes into the mine, pulls a file out of a electronic file cabinet. Sorry, not electronic file, but an actual virtual physical file cabinet, some of which date to like the 1950s. It's a great... I'll show you some pictures after that. And they bring it to the person who adjudicates it, then when they're done, they literally return the thing back to its thing. Like, we are now... We've just purchased two massive, like digitization machines. I don't know what you call them, like literally like scanners that like take up an entire room. It's like a mainframe computer. And, you know, from this day forward now, every single one of those 400,000,000 pieces of paper is going to be digitized, which will allow us number one to at some point in time actually literally shut down the storage component of the mine, but also just dramatically change the nature of what we're doing in terms of servicing people. Like our service is not good for people in part because like we haven't given the people there, they don't have the stuff at their fingertips to resolve problems. They literally have to wait for somebody to deliver a piece of... A file for them from a file cabinet, like it's insane. There are problems like this all over the government. They're so obvious we should fix them, but like this comes back to what we talked about about risk. I didn't like discover this, Elon to his credit didn't discover this. You can go back literally to the 1970s and 1980s, you will see articles written about how fucking ridiculous this mine is. Nobody has ever tried to solve this because God forbid, some congressional person is gonna say, oh, you screwed it up, or you didn't do this, do that. And I was like, look, this is ridiculous. We have to fix this, but the incentive structure is so aligned against fixing these things. It's way better to have a shitty service for people and not like risk rocking the boat than it is to actually try to convert these things into like a modern day experience. Like this is the fundamental like incentive problem that we have to solve.