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The Ezra Klein Show

By Ezra Klein

Produced by Rollin Hu

This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.

As long as it may have felt, we are only one year into Donald Trump’s second term as president. To follow the Trump administration in the news is to be exposed to the full-muzzle velocity of this presidency: the overwhelming procession of new stories, wild statements, spectacular, outrageous — sometimes terrifying — events.

It feels like so much more is happening than the human mind, than the entire media, than the country can absorb.

But how much has actually changed? How much has Trump actually gotten done? How many of these stories that were so spectacular when they began have followed through into a durable difference in how the government works or what it does or how we live?

About a year ago, just a few weeks into Trump’s second term, I had Yuval Levin on the show. Levin is one of the smartest thinkers on the right — a real conservative who thinks deeply about institutions and the nature of the presidency and how these things work in the constitutional order.

And at that time, he was in some ways a very measured voice. This was the moment of DOGE and Musk and executive orders, and he was skeptical that as much was actually happening as there appeared to be happening.

So now, after this truly wild year, a truly historic year in American politics and life, I wanted to have him back on to see what he thinks has happened and how his analysis of Trump has or has not changed.

Ezra Klein: Yuval Levin, welcome back to the show.

Yuval Levin: Thank you very much for having me, Ezra.

We talked, at least on the show last year, right after Donald Trump took office, amid the early chaos. It was DOGE and executive orders and this feeling that the entire presidency was being reshaped — and that they could do anything.

You were a little less alarmist and were skeptical that they were going to accomplish as much as it felt like they might at that moment.

We’re a year into this long second term. Where are you now?

Well, it has been a long year in a lot of ways, and there has been a lot of action, I would say. But I think that, on the whole, the view that they were not well set up to accomplish an enormous amount of durable policy change is still more or less my view.

I think that a year in, you’re hearing two kinds of stories.

So one story says there are a lot of accomplishments: The southern border is much more secure than it was a year ago; woke left-wing radicalism in a lot of institutions is back on its heels now; the Iranian nuclear program has been set back a lot; the war on Gaza is over, and the surviving Israeli hostages are home; the “big, beautiful bill” is law; unemployment is low; the economy is strong. It’s a year of achievements.

On the other hand, you can tell the story from the point of view of a Trump critic who says federal law enforcement has been contorted in the service of the president’s grudges and priorities; the administration has intimidated all kinds of institutions throughout American life; this year there are squads of masked agents pursuing immigrants around the country; federal scientific research funding is in disarray; tariffs have increased prices.

These stories are both true at the same time. But the common denominator of these stories is that they’re both stories about a lot of action.

I actually think that’s not quite right and that there’s an important story to tell about the absence of action in the past year, too — the absence of traditional uses of presidential power and authority in our system.

There has been very little legislation. It’s true the “big, beautiful bill” is law, but Donald Trump has signed fewer pieces of legislation than any president in the modern era.

The pace of regulatory action is actually slower than the last five or six presidents. If you look at the numbers, the amount that they’re doing that amounts to durable policy change is actually pretty constrained.

So I think the question is: How do you reconcile the amount of activity with the absence of durable action? To me, that’s the story of the first year of this presidency.

Walk me through the numbers you ran comparing federal spending in 2024 under Joe Biden to federal spending in 2025 under Trump.

Well, this is one of the striking things. We spent the first six months of the year watching DOGE take all kinds of actions intended to reduce federal spending and restructure the government.

But at the end of the day, because there was no legislative action to change spending, there was no real change in spending. The government was on a continuing resolution on two of them for the entire year — so we’re still at Biden’s spending levels.

Overall, because the “big, beautiful bill” spent a little more on immigration enforcement and on defense, and because appropriations were even for the year, the federal government actually spent 4 percent more in 2025 than in 2024.

So a lot of times when you see claims and descriptions and assertions of what’s about to happen, it’s worth making a note for yourself and saying: I should come back to this in six weeks and ask, Did this actually happen?

And a lot of the things that everybody got very worked up over this year — not all of them, to be clear, there’s a lot going on, and it’s especially true in immigration and trade and a few other areas — but on the whole, it’s important to see that the way the administration is acting, which is more narrow cast and focused on specific news cycles and specific instances, means they have not gotten nearly as much accomplished as they say. And they’ve not gotten as much accomplished as most presidents do in the first year of a new presidency.

One example is the National Institutes of Health. People might have heard about their gutting spending early in 2025. What happened there?

The story of N.I.H. spending is very interesting because in most areas of government, if you track it month by month — and this is the way to track federal spending — there are a lot of ways to chop up the numbers.

But there’s a monthly Treasury statement that just reports how much money went out the door. And I think that’s the number to look at. It’s public, it’s on the internet. It’s very easy to read. In most departments, those numbers looked identical in 2025 to 2024. Appropriations were the same, and so spending out the door was the same.

There was a long government shutdown, but at the end of it, all the money went out. So in the end, it looks the same.

N.I.H. looks very different. In the first six months of the year, N.I.H. spending was far behind its 2024 levels. There seemed to have been a decision made to withhold spending, to redirect spending, and I would argue, even to force a confrontation over impoundment — the president just ignoring Congress and not spending appropriated money on N.I.H. money.

Then in June or early July, you see a sudden acceleration of N.I.H. spending. Clearly, there was some decision made that the money had to go out the door by the end of the year.

They did that in a way that deformed or distorted some of that spending. They decided to spend multiyear money all in one year, on a broad range of federal grants, in order to be able to get the money out the door so that 100 percent of the appropriated amount would be spent by the end of the fiscal year.

That’s going to create problems down the road because with these multiyear grants, the institutions that receive them are not really equipped to spend them all in one year.

But in any case, a decision was made — I think it’s unavoidable, from looking at the numbers — to avoid an impoundment fight and to spend all the money. And by the end of the year, N.I.H. had spent 100 percent of its appropriated money for the year.

Something you’ve said to me, that I’ve thought about after, is: Trump governs retail rather than wholesale. What does that mean?

I think there are a couple of ways to see that — and it’s important, as a way of reconciling those two stories that we started with.

There’s a way of thinking about what the president does that is about just being in the center of every news cycle. Donald Trump is extremely good at that — focusing on the issue of the day, governing there, being the end of that story.

But broadly speaking, the role that the president of the United States has is an administrative role. It’s a role that has an enormous amount of power over vast terrains of American life — through regulatory action, through administrative action, by setting uniform rules that govern entire sectors of society.

The Trump administration, in the past year, has not been interested in exercising those powers in the ways that presidents normally do.

If you look at the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University, which tracks federal regulations, they have found that economically significant rule making has been slower than in the first year of the Biden administration or the Obama administration or under George W. Bush or Clinton.

There’s been, as I said, much less legislation, and the president has not had a legislative agenda.

I don’t think there is a legislative agenda for the next three years of this administration. If you ask yourself: What do they want Congress to do? — it’s actually very hard to answer that question. What the president has done, though, is use the power of the executive as a way of exercising leverage to drive behavioral change in particular institutions.

We saw this first with DOGE. A lot of what DOGE did was take control of federal grant making in ways that were hyperfocused, that were grant by grant. They were essentially trying to govern one by one.

On the whole, the DOGE experiment didn’t really work. What they tried to do didn’t succeed, and it’s mostly over.

We saw a second way of exercising power one by one like that, and that was through retail deal making in place of wholesale policymaking.

The president has gone deal by deal, one by one, trying to gain some advantage or use some leverage to drive behavioral change: in the universities, maybe to change admissions or hiring; in law firms, he wanted to get some specific concessions; through discounts from drug companies. And that’s his approach to reducing health costs. He’s buying up segments of chip makers.

It’s a very unusual way for the president to think about the role that he has. Deal making gives the president more leverage, more freedom. It allows him, in a focused way, to advance his own priorities and not go through the usual processes of rule making and legislation.

It gives the impression of a lot of action. — but is, in fact, very narrowly focused. Each of these deals achieves something relatively small. It can be significant, it can be important — but it’s not broad governance.

A lot of the institutions that are making these deals see this as a way to get through the next three years. They see it as a way to avoid changes in regulations or in law, and therefore to protect their freedom of action rather than to give ground to the government. Ultimately, these are just not ways of securing meaningful, durable changes.

You see that with the deals made with the pharmaceutical companies, for example, where they agreed to lower prices on specific drugs — and then those same companies started the year by raising prices in general. It leaves them with a lot of room. It’s not the way the government normally achieves its purposes, but it is very much the mode of action of this administration so far.

One thing we saw in Trump’s first year was an assault on the universities — the Ivy League ones, but not only them — picking them off one by one to bring them more into line with what the Trump administration wanted them to be.

What has that achieved? How do you see its status now? I think people are seeing less from it. What did it all amount to?

I think that’s really an instance where policy by deal making shows some of its limits. The administration has had a lot of influence on a small number of universities that it chose as targets, and which it forced into some governance changes — some of which will be good for those universities and some not — but which the administration wanted. It forced them into individual deals.

The administration tried to broaden that out into something more like policy. It put out a Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, which it wanted all universities to sign. The response that compact received from a number of elite universities right away was basically: Well, no, let’s do one-on-one deals.

There’s a fascinating letter to the administration from Brown University’s administration, which basically said: Let’s have an arrangement between you and us that helps us figure out what you want and what we can do out of that.

The compact basically fell apart. It did not succeed. No university signed on, and the administration returned to a process of deal making.

What you find there is that the universities prefer these individual deals to changes in the Higher Education Act or changes in the regulatory structure of the government’s relationship with them because they see the deals as more manageable. They have some more negotiating leverage.

I think that some of what the administration is trying to do would be much better achieved by legislation. I actually think it’s possible to imagine a legislative change to the Higher Education Act that would get some Democratic votes — it wouldn’t do everything the administration wants, but it would do some important things.

The White House has shown no interest in that, and the universities — by acting defensively in this moment — seem to prefer those deals, too, which I think tells us a lot.

There’s an interesting dynamic where retail deal making fits the bandwidth of the news and legislation doesn’t. People do not know one-tenth of what was in the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act or the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, for that matter. Much more change is happening in legislation than people realize.

But you cannot fit it into the size of a news story. You cannot even fit it into a dozen. And people’s attention span — particularly as we’ve gotten down to social media — things are just flying by really quickly.

Whereas these deals — they cut a deal with Nvidia, they cut a deal with Japan — they actually fit. Maybe not everything in the deal, but the sense that something is happening that is graspable: They made a deal with this........

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