What Washington Won't Tell you
Two Conversations - One Week
I spend most of my professional week talking to two kinds of people: those who report on how power operates in Washington, and those who’ve wielded it. It’s an unusual vantage point. And some weeks, the same shape keeps appearing underneath very different conversations.
This was one of those weeks.
On The Friday Reporter, I sat down with Colin Demarest, who writes the Axios Future of Defense newsletter and has been covering the Iran conflict since the first strike. At one point I asked him where the center of information actually lives right now. His answer: most Pentagon inquiries get referred to the White House. Ask the Navy about one of its own ships, he said, and you’ll be told to ask the White House. You can read into that what you like. I’ve been reading into it ever since.
Colin’s beat is the space between the official statement and the operational reality — drone dominance theory meeting a downed F-15E, a defense industrial base with factories but no appropriations to fill them. He doesn’t editorialize. He’s a careful reporter. But the gap he describes is unmistakable.
On Tuesday, The Deciders drops a conversation I’ve been looking forward to for weeks: Rohit Chopra, the CFPB Chair Donald Trump fired, now at Harvard Kennedy School. Chopra spent years inside one of Washington’s most powerful regulatory agencies watching it close — and sometimes fail to close — the distance between the law and its enforcement. Brody Mullins and I asked him the question we ask every guest: what’s the one thing Washington still isn’t thinking about? His answer is worth clearing your Tuesday commute for.
Two conversations. Two institutions — the Pentagon and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The same question running underneath both: what’s the distance between what they’re saying and what’s actually happening?
Some weeks this column writes itself.
Listen to The Friday Reporter with Colin Demarest:
The Deciders with Rohit Chopra drops Tuesday — subscribe so you don’t miss it: The Deciders
— Lisa
P.S. Colin also writes Axios Future of Defense, out every Wednesday. If you’re not reading it, this week is a good time to start — the Iran conflict coverage is some of the sharpest in the business.