Wait - Can They Do That?

An interview with Sam Bagenstos, former HHS, OMB, and DoJ lawyer, who explains the legal carnage now underway in the federal government.

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You have probably asked yourself the question in the title of this post a dozen times in the last two weeks. To begin to answer it, I interviewed Sam Bagenstos, a University of Michigan law professor who until recently was the general counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services. Before that he was general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget, and during the Obama administration he served as the second-highest-ranking official in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. We talked about Donald Trump, Elon Musk, the Supreme Court, and what happens when the party in power decides that obeying the law is optional.

This interview is the first episode of my relaunched podcast, which used to be called Boundary Issues but is now known as The Cross Section, just like this newsletter (the relaunch and renaming occurred because my sister Ayelet, with whom I co-hosted Boundary Issues, has decided to retire from podcasting).

The full audio of the episode is below, but I’d also encourage you to subscribe in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whatever your favorite podcast app is, so new episodes can be delivered right to your phone.

UPDATE: I received a request to publish a transcript of this interview, so here it is:

Paul Waldman:

To start today's discussion, I want to say something about The West Wing. Now for our younger listeners, it was a show that was on television in the 1990s about a noble, enormously talented liberal president who was kind of everything liberals wanted to see in the White House.

The whole show is kind of a liberal fantasy. But one of the things that I've been thinking about recently is that there was a character on that show played by Oliver Platt who was the White House counsel. And periodically, the White House aides would be sitting around thinking about doing something, and he would come in and say, “I'm sorry. That would be illegal. You cannot do it.”

And then whatever idea they had would be shut down. He was the representative of the government as an institution and even the law itself. And my impression was always that that is what the White House counsel is supposed to be. That's what counsels who serve in various departments are supposed to be. There are people there who are appointed by the president who nevertheless are there to tell you what the law is and what you can and cannot do.

But we are now confronted with an administration that has decided that obeying the law is just optional. Some of the things that they are doing are essentially symbolic. Trump declared in an executive order that birthright citizenship no longer exists. That was almost immediately shut down by a judge who was appointed by Ronald Reagan. But some of it is less symbolic.

They are firing inspectors general. He fired members of the National Labor Relations Board and the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, which is not legal for him to do without cause. They've suspended all grants and then brought them back, but they're still sort of suspended. There are all kinds of things that are happening that I think the reasonable response is, and it's a response I've been hearing from other people and that I've been saying myself over and over again is: “Wait. Can they do that?”

So I wanted today to have a guest who would explain to us what they actually can and can't do and how things are going to work when they try to do things that they can't do. So I couldn't think of anyone better than Sam Bagenstos. He is a professor of law and public policy at the University of Michigan, and until recently, he was the general counsel for the Department of Health and Human Services. And before that, he was general counsel to the Office of Management and Budget.

That was in the Biden administration. In the Barack Obama administration, he served as the second highest ranking person in the in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. He's also argued cases before the Supreme Court many times. He's one of the foremost legal advocates on behalf of people with disabilities in the country, and I'm hoping he is going to be able to explain to us how things are actually working and how panicked we should be. So, Sam, thank you very much for joining me.

Sam Bagenstos:

Oh, thank you. Really happy to be here.

Paul Waldman:

So when I talk about the White House counsel and counsels of the department as being sort of the representative of the government and of the law itself, there to act as a check on the impulses of the political appointees or anybody else in the government, is that is that an accurate description of how that that office, those people are supposed to work?

Sam Bagenstos:

Well, I when I was a general counsel first at OMB and then at HHS, I always thought of my job as having a couple of components. One was exactly what you're describing. You know, defining the scope of legal authority. If one of my clients, if the secretary or if someone in the White House were to say, we want you to do this thing, and there's no legal authority to do it. It was my job to say, sorry. Can't do it that way. That that's not something we can do.

And then the other piece of the job was to help the policy clients, the folks who are elected officials or who are appointed by elected officials, figure out what are ways to achieve the policies of the administration consistent with the laws that congress has passed and the Constitution. I think what we're seeing now is a complete refusal to care about whether the policies are consistent with the laws or the constitution.

Paul Waldman:

And that's something that I think is striking. When we think back to the first Trump administration, there were a lot of sort of high profile occasions where the White House counsel actually did act as a check on Donald Trump's impulses, especially at the end when he was trying to overthrow the 2020 election. You had people who were people who he appointed, who at various times said to him, you just can't do this. And there were also people within the Justice Department who threatened to resign, who told him that what he was trying to do was illegal. And on a number of occasions, he backed down. Now the current White House counsel is one of his former lawyers who helped him during his criminal trials. I don't think that person is going to act as a check on him.

But it does seem to me that throughout the government, they are making sure to put people in these positions who have been chosen especially for the fact that they are not going to say, you can't do this. It's illegal. Is that the impression that you're getting?

Sam Bagenstos:

I think that's right. You know, I think these are people who are chosen either for their incredibly broad understanding of presidential power or for just simply being personally beholden to Trump and to Trump's own interests.

It is extraordinary when lawyers in the government feel like they have to say to the president, what you're doing is illegal, because most of the time, there actually is legal authority to do most things that presidents would tend to want to do. And if there's not legal authority to do it in the particular way the president wants, well, you know, there are usually ways of getting pretty close to what the president wants while following legal structures. And in our democratic system, the president gets to carry out his policies consistent with the law. What was really striking about the first Trump administration was the incredible number of times when the president wanted to do things where there was no good faith, legitimate legal basis for what he wanted to do. And, obviously, attempting to overturn the election was the ultimate example of that, but there were so many others throughout.

And I think one of the lessons that Trump and the people around him learned from last time was they don't want to be surrounded by people who are going to tell him the law keeps him from what he's going to do what he wants to do. Even if all it does is make him do it more slowly or do it in a slightly more indirect way, he doesn't want any constraints at all on what he's doing.

Paul Waldman:

Maybe we could talk about Elon Musk for a minute because he is kind of rampaging through the federal government. You know, I've seen these things on social media where someone says, somebody spotted him going into the Office of Personnel Management. And, he is, you know, posting things on X that talk about agencies he's destroying.

And maybe you can explain to us a little bit, like, there are supposed to be laws about what people who are not actually part of the government are allowed to do and what they're allowed to have access to. Isn't just he violating some kind of regulation or other, it seems like, a dozen times a day with all this. Maybe you could tell us, like, what that structure -- how that's supposed to work?

Sam Bagenstos:

Oh, almost certainly. You know, I think one of the real issues here is we don't know exactly what Elon Musk is doing. He is certainly saying a lot of things on social media or even directly to the press and to senators, about what he's doing. Some of which is, it seems to me, clearly bravado and maybe a statement of intent about what he wants to do even though he's framing some of it in the past tense. So I don't take at complete face value everything he says he's done, because he clearly hasn't done it all yet, but he clearly wants to. We don't even know what exactly is the role that Elon Musk holds within this administration. We don't know what kind of ethics agreements he has signed.

Usually, ethics people who are who are working for the government even on a part time temporary basis from the private sector have various ethics restrictions. Obviously, a huge issue with Elon Musk where he is at once trying to seize control of the federal payment system, and at the same time, is the owner of some significant federal contractors who would benefit from various payment actions by the government. You know, he is trying to seize control of various information technology functions of the government while at the same time being a major information technology investor himself. Right? So there are serious conflict of interest issues here.

There are issues of cybersecurity and privacy, trying to get access to information that includes some very sensitive data about individuals and entities. You have significant issues simply about constitutional government that he seems to be wanting and bragging about wanting to shut down particular programs or spending to particular grantees that he doesn't like, that he doesn't think the government should be funding. When Congress has passed laws funding these programs, Congress has passed laws creating agencies that he says he will shut down. You know, a president doesn't get to come along later and say, I don't agree with the law. I'm not going to follow it.

And, certainly, some outside centibillionaire who the president has deputized to be his chaos agent throughout the government doesn't have the power to disregard those laws either. So yeah. I mean, you sort of asked, well, how worried should I be when you start to talk about everything that Elon Musk is doing in the interstices of the government right now, I think you should be incredibly worried.

Paul Waldman:

That's one of the things that's so striking is that every president has things that happened before when they come in that they don't like. And they may try to find ways to undo them and see what kinds of authority they have, and maybe we'll see if we can get around this program or whatever.

But Trump is just coming in and saying kind of wholesale, well, I don't like any of this, so I'm just going to shut it down. And as you say, let's take for example, there is a bunch of climate related programs that the Biden administration passed that give money to community solar efforts and things like that. And congress passed a law with the funds in it. Funds are appropriated. The law was signed by the president at the time. There have been contracts that have been signed between on the ground local agencies and the Department of Energy or whichever department is distributing the money. And now they're just coming in and saying we're freezing the money. And it's something that that I don't feel like I've ever seen before. Every president, they push a little bit against executive authority. Sometimes they get frustrated.

This is what happened, for instance, with the DACA program, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. President Obama very much wanted to give legal status to Dreamers. Congress kinda couldn't get it done, and so he used his ability to prioritize different kinds of immigration enforcement to say that essentially, kicking out people who have been here since they were kids, That's going to be the lowest priority, and we'll create this program so that people can register so we know who they are. And then even though technically they're still subject to deportation, they're not going to get deported because it's the lowest enforcement priority. Republicans were very mad about that.

They said he was doing an end run around the law. Every president does some things like that, but this kind of wholesale ignoring of laws that have already been passed seems new. And the freezing of the money, they froze all foreign aid, and they froze essentially all domestic programs. I mean, you had people who were like National Science Foundation grantees whose entire salary is being paid by a grant from the federal government who all of a sudden are not getting paid. And we don't know how long it's going to last, and there's this sort of chaos sweeping through the federal government and everyone who depends on the federal government.

But I want to ask you another question too because, for instance, they've taken particular aim at, USAID, the Agency for International Development. Now what they are saying is there was this kind of purge at the top of the agency, and they've now announced that it's going to be folded in to the State Department and that Marco Rubio is now the acting director of USAID. And so my question is, this kind of wholesale reorganization of an agency, how is that legal? You know, I think that if Congress creates an agency as it did with USAID, the president doesn't have the power just on his own to say, I disagree with Congress creating this agency. It shouldn't exist. I'm just going to make it part of another agency.

Sam Bagenstos:

You know, the presidents have, at various points in time, had authorities to re reorganize the government in that way. There are authorities to reorganize smaller parts of the government, within agencies that way. But Congress has very explicitly refused to give the president this sort of broader scale authority to get rid of an agency it's created.

Now I I think one of the dodges, one of the end runs there that you saw Trump use in his previous term is this idea of appointing someone who is the head of one agency as the acting head of another agency, and that as a formal technical matter may keep the agencies separate. Right? I mean, we saw him do that with putting the head of the Office of Management and Budget as the acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the last Trump administration. I understand today, he did the same thing with the treasury secretary, made him the acting director of the CFPB. And that may avoid some of the legal issues here, but though the entities remain at least formally separate entities, I think the bigger problem with USAID is, you know, he's stopping spending the money that congress passed a law to spend, and this will have horrible effects on people around the world.

The idea that what we want to do is cut off funding, which is often for health and basic needs of incredibly impoverished people, often to protect the United States. Because if infectious diseases start to spread abroad, they will easily move here. So we want to protect the health of people abroad and to protect the interest of the United States in in the world at large and being understood to be a good rather than bad actor so that we can get other countries to cooperate with us.

But Donald Trump may disagree with all those judgments. He may think, yeah, as a policy matter, I'm America First. I don't believe in sending a dime of our money for foreign aid. If that's what he believes, then he should convince Congress of that. But he can't just decide he disagrees with the law that Congress passed to spend money doing that.

Paul Waldman:

And it's a good reminder that there are two things going on that are problematic at the same time. The first is procedurally, they may be breaking the law in how they're going about attacking these agencies. And then there are the substantive impacts of the changes that they're making, whether that's shutting down the distribution of AIDS medications in Africa or people not getting grants for medical research here in America. Both of those things are going to be happening at the same time. Now maybe you can help us understand what's going to happen procedurally now because, okay, all of this different stuff is going on.

I assume, maybe I'm wrong, that that, like, every morning, there's a conference call with all of the liberal legal eagles who are getting together and saying, okay, here are the 10 things they did yesterday. Who's going to do the lawsuit on number one? Who's going to do the lawsuit on number two? Is that happening? And then once those suits are filed, how can we expect that to kind of move through the system?

Sam Bagenstos:

There clearly are a lot of folks engaged with bringing lawsuits against these violations of law coming from the Trump administration. And as these matters develop, we see more and more of these suits. A lot of what Trump is doing, I know it's catching a lot of people flat footed. A lot of people feel like they're having trouble keeping up. I think you need to remember, he promised to do all this stuff. There was a lot of willful disbelief that a lot of the chattering class had. I think, fortunately, the folks who are in a position to bring challenges here, the lawyers and folks affiliated with them, understood exactly what Trump was going to do. I think we're seeing a degree of recklessness in carrying it out that is shocking even to all of us.

But I think we understood the basic contours of what he was going to do and how quickly he was going to do it. And so that's why you're seeing lawsuits get filed so quickly, challenging all of these. And so that's great. And I think the legal and judicial process will make a difference. I mean we've seen already two injunctions against the OMB memo freezing funding.

Further proceedings will happen in those cases. We'll almost certainly expand the coverage of the injunctions to make clear that just because you pulled the memo, it doesn't mean you get to keep doing the same thing. Right? And the judges said that at the time, but it doesn't look like the administration has heated that point. So I think we'll see more about that.

I think we'll see more efforts in these cases to get information about what exactly Trump and Musk are doing, in terms of shutting off funding. Right? So all that all that's going to happen. But I think the thing to also keep in mind is, we have a judicial system that has a lot of very good appointees who were put In by President Biden, but that is basically stacked by appointees of prior Republican presidents, notably Donald Trump. You know, it took the Democratic Party until the Biden administration to really prioritize judicial appointments.

We have a judicial system that particularly as you go up in the hierarchy, especially to the Supreme Court, is dominated by very right wing conservatives and on which Trump appointees, in particular, play a crucial role. So the expectation that these lawsuits will solve the problem, the courts will come along to save us, is not an expectation people should have. People should see these lawsuits as one in a series of efforts to raise the salience for the public and for the political system of what Trump is doing, and that is what Trump is doing on both of the dimensions you just talked about. Both substantively that it's causing real harms to real people and in terms of subverting basic aspects of our constitutional system. You know, we've seen Trump come in and take this view that he should not be bound by any laws, and that's been clear in the actions he's taken, suspending funding, trying to get rid of agencies, all that stuff, firing people he doesn't have the power to fire as you said.

But also look at some of the significant categories of people he's fired or reassigned or suspended. Right? They are inspectors general who have been fired on a mass basis without providing the notice or explanation to Congress that's required by law. They are prosecutors who were involved in either Trump prosecutions or January 6 prosecutions. They are FBI agents who have either been fired or reassigned or been threatened with mass firings and reassignments for being involved in any way in Trump related or January 6 related events and investigations.

We're talking about potentially thousands, literally, of FBI agents who might be who might have their jobs at risk. Right? What's the common thread there? The common thread there is those are all institutional actors whose job would be to hold the president to account if the president were to violate the law, if the president were to exceed his authority or abuse his authority. This president, this term, understands that where he went wrong the last time was allowing people to be in place who might challenge his authority.

And so he's trying to get rid of those folks. So we need folks to go into the courts and try to get the courts involved. We also need folks in Congress to step up. Our three branch system of government is based on a premise, right, that goes back to Madison, ambition checks ambition, that the ambitions of the legislative branch will check the ambitions of the executive branch. And that idea that people in the legislative branch will stand up for the legislative prerogative against a president of their own party, you know, forget about it.

The Republican Party at this point is enthralled to Trump. And to the extent that individual Republican legislators know that he's doing something wrong and disagree with him, they're not going to say it. Either they agree with him or they have no courage to stand up against him because they've seen what happens.

Paul Waldman:

And some of them have, over the course of the last few years, said that they didn't stand up to him because they're literally afraid for their lives and the lives of their families. There is just this undercurrent of violence and threat that has taken over Republican politics. It's come comes from people like Mitt Romney, not Democrats saying it, but Republicans saying it. Some of these sort of dissenters, him, Adam Kinzinger, I think, talked about this that that colleagues of his had had said to him, you know, they were worried that if they stood up to Trump, then that meant someone was going to put a bomb in their house. And that's a very effective way of ensuring partisan solidarity.

And I wonder if you have been talking to people that you know who are still in the government because it does seem like one of the goals of what's happening now is literally to terrorize people, that there's so much chaos. All these memos coming down, emails coming down, threatening people, and then some very sort of high profile firings, people being literally escorted out by security, that it does seem like for those people who are civil servants, who have been serving their country loyally for however long they've been in there, part of the goal is to terrorize them.

And Trump has said, basically, he would like just everybody to quit. And, you know, if you were someone working in the Department of Agriculture right now who was not sort of full on MAGA wearing a red hat at your desk, why wouldn't you be thinking about quitting? Are you getting the sense that there is that that real atmosphere of fear right now?

Sam Bagenstos:

Oh, I think there definitely is. And and as you say, that's exactly the point. I think Trump and the folks around him have actually not tried at all to hide that. You know, I think about the agency that I just came from, the Department of Health and Human Services. And, you know, what RFK Jr, the nominee to head HHS, said after Trump was elected was that people who work at FDA and at HHS should be afraid, should be preserving their records, should be preparing for bad things to happen to them because he believes that they have been bad actors. Now what they've been doing is doing their jobs.

And you have this sort of effort to scare people who work incredibly hard for less money often than they could get working in the private sector. I think one of the things people like Elon Musk and his Silicon Valley friends don't appreciate, you know, they sort of think that if you're making less money, that means you're less valuable. I mean, often these are people who are doing far more socially valuable work, work that we all depend on, and who've made a decision in their lives that what they want to do is serve the public. I was just blown away every day that I worked at HHS by how focused and committed on the mission the folks who work at HHS are. The mission of just helping people live longer and better lives, and then you have someone who comes along and says, you know, we're going to put you in fear for your job.

We're going to potentially make your private information public so that people on the outside can threaten and terrorize you, and we're going to attack your integrity for the work that you've been doing. And then we're going to dangle for you this idea that, hey, you know, if you want to leave, well, maybe we'll let you not come to work for the next few months, but don't read the fine print too carefully because maybe what we'll do is just fire you anyway. It's really, I think, putting everybody in a terrible situation.

Paul Waldman:

And in that letter, there was some line in there that I found so vulgar and offensive, something about how they should leave their low productivity jobs working for the government and search out higher productivity jobs in the private sector, as though public service is necessarily less valuable, less important than, you know, working for some app company, trying to make something else that keeps you addicted to your smartphone.

That one really just stuck in my craw. And, also, I should say that that one of the things that is so striking about this is, as you say, they're going after people who just did their jobs, not just for saying, you know, you can't be here anymore because you're not aligned with the president's priorities, which is the expression we keep hearing. But things like looking to investigate people in the FBI, in the Justice Department for just working on January 6 prosecutions. Everybody who was involved in that, and that was the biggest prosecution in American history. They had 1,500 people or whatever it was who were investigated, who pled guilty to crimes, who were convicted of crimes, and it was extremely successful in a lot of ways.

But now they're saying that even if you were just some prosecutor who was assigned to that case and you did your job and you figured out this person committed a crime and you got a conviction, now you're going to be under investigation. Then you might be prosecuted just for doing something that made Donald Trump unhappy. And that has to have incredibly deterrent effect or the effect of terrorizing people. Everybody now has to be worried that somehow they're going to come after them, not just that they might lose their job, but that the consequences might even be more severe.

Alright. I have a question about the Supreme Court. Now no one has been more critical of this Supreme Court than me. They are corrupt and dishonest and ignorant, they cloak their naked partisanship and absurd ideas they don't even believe in, like originalism. Now you may not put it in those terms as someone who has argued before them in the past and may once again. But that's my general perspective. But even I am inclined to think that there must be perhaps five or six votes on the court against a lot of the things that the Trump administration is doing.

Because, you know, yes, of course, Alito and Thomas are going to do whatever is most destructive to humanity. And Neil Gorsuch has a kind of venomous hatred for the federal government. He's always going to be for allowing maximal executive power. But Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Kavanaugh, Justice Barrett, you would think that on a lot of these cases, they are going to do as they have sometimes done in the past to say, hold on a second. You're going a little far.

And it's important to remember, Trump lost a lot of cases at the Supreme Court in his first term. But, of course, you know, these things always have to wind their way up, and that's part of the strategy too is to, you do the illegal thing, and then somebody files a lawsuit against them. Maybe there's an immediate injunction to stay what you're doing, but maybe not, and you can delay and you can appeal, and it could take weeks or months or years. And in the interim, you've managed to do a lot of the things that you wanted to do and accomplish your goals. But do you feel like when these, all these actions come before the Supreme Court, as many of them inevitably will, that even this conservative supermajority is going to find a lot of what the Trump administration is doing hard to swallow?

Sam Bagenstos:

I think they're going to find a lot of it hard to swallow. You know, that doesn't mean they're going to invalidate all of it, even all of it where I think there's a very powerful argument that it's unlawful. I think, fundamentally, this is a very conservative court. They believe very strongly in, executive power at least when Republicans are president. We've seen that this is the Supreme Court that did not enforce and made it impossible to enforce section three of the Fourteenth Amendment.

This is the Supreme Court, and it was John Roberts who wrote that incredibly broad presidential immunity decision. So I wouldn't overstate the degree to which the Supreme Court's going to be a check, and I think that's why you have the willingness on the part of Trump to push these issues up in addition to all the very good points you make that even if they do lose stuff in the Supreme Court, they might be able to get their policies in place in the interim. They might be able to cause terror and uncertainty in the interim because it'll just take the court a while. You know, I think on birthright citizenship, I'm quite confident that there will be a majority on the Supreme Court to reject the Trump effort to unwind birthright citizenship. On the power of the purse, the congressional power of the purse, I think at least on the core issue, I feel quite confident that there is a majority on the Supreme Court that says Congress has the power of the purse.

The president doesn't get to just disregard it. I think once we get to applying that to particular cases, you know, who knows what they're going to do. And I think where Trump ended up losing cases in the prior Trump administration was when he went about things particularly ham handedly and a majority on the court, particularly at that point, Chief kustice Roberts couldn't look himself in the mirror and say, you know, I'm a judge. I am deciding this according to balls and strikes as opposed to according to political ideology if he ruled in favor of Trump.

So I think about cases like the census case where, you know, Trump tried to add a citizenship question to the census questionnaire that everybody gets, which it was completely clear that they were lying about why they were doing it. They said they were doing it because it was necessary to enforce the Voting Rights Act. Everybody who knew anything about the Voting Rights Act could have told them and would have told them and did tell them at the time, actually, what you're doing harms voting rights. And it was just patently obvious that they were telling a falsehood, and Roberts wouldn't go along with that. Same with when they got rid of the DACA program.

You know, John Roberts said, basically, you didn't do this the right way. He didn't say you can't get rid of the DACA program, but it was, again, totally clear that they had completely skipped all the procedural steps that they needed to follow under the law. I think that was a case for Roberts where if he'd gone the other way, he wouldn't be able to look himself in the eye and say, I'm a judge, not a politician. But I think, unfortunately, for people who believe in the things that I believe in and that you believe in, you know, this is just a very conservative court. And so they're going to lean very heavily in favor of presidential prerogative, particularly when a Republican is president even if they find this Republican president somewhat distasteful.

Paul Waldman:

That's the thing is that that these rules are all going to be broken down for this guy. And that's one of the things that I found so maddening about the immunity decision. You know, we made it through two hundred and fifty years without telling the president that it's okay for you to do crimes. But for this president, you had to make it okay for him to do crimes, the one who is the most likely to do crimes? Anyway, I think the part of the problem that we're facing, what the struggle is that we don't really have the kind of mental models and language to describe what's going on.

We spent all this time debating in the campaign whether or not Trump was really a fascist. And you can take either side of that position, but it was like, we have this model from history, and we're trying to see if he fits into that box. And this is something entirely new. The assault is so broad based, and it's happening in so many different ways and happening so fast that one of the problems is if it was just fascism, we could say, oh, well, we're against fascism, so this is bad.

But it's a hundred different things that we've never faced before. So I think it's going to be a real struggle for everybody who is so disturbed by this to keep up with it and try to figure out ways to stand up against it. Sam Bagenstos, thank you so much for joining me. And hopefully, over the course of the next four years, as we tumble into the abyss, we'll get to talk again, but thanks a lot.

Sam Bagenstos:

Thank you. That is it for this episode of The Cross Section. If you like what you heard, you can give us a rating on your little podcast app. And if you want to get in touch, you can email me at waldemanpodcast@gmail.com. See you next time.