Former Obama Speechwriter Jon Lovett Questions Democrats' 'Data Driven' Habit

Former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett said on Sunday's episode of Pod Save America that Democrats' faith in data can leave them with a government that looks fine on paper, while President Donald Trump wins on instinct.

Lovett, a co-host of the Crooked Media podcast, made the remark while interviewing author Michael Lewis about Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State, Lewis's book about federal employees who resisted the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). W.W. Norton publishes the book on Tuesday.

"I think sometimes Democrats valiantly believe in making data driven decisions," Lovett said. "But then you end up with a bureaucracy that's 99.9% effective."

This was a critique of his own party, not a break with it. Lovett hedged with "sometimes" and "valiantly," and the figure called back to a Project 2025 complaint about federal performance ratings that he had raised earlier in the interview.

Jon Lovett Contrasts Democrats' Data With Donald Trump's Instinct

Lovett set up the line by recalling a conversation with Barry Diller, the longtime media executive. Lovett said Diller talks in his book about sitting in meetings where people handed him research data on what viewers wanted to see on television. "And of course that data is always wrong," Lovett said.

Trump, by contrast, "comes in and has no respect for ... numbers and no respect for facts," Lovett said. "But knows how to wield power." He described "an instinct that defies the polls and often shocks Democrats by being effective."

He was not praising the results. Moments earlier, Lovett said Trump had used executive power from the White House "to great ill effect."

What the Record Shows on Federal Performance Ratings

Earlier in the episode, Lovett said Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led policy blueprint for a second Trump term, argued that "the civil service is rated as being 99% effective and only 0.1% performing poorly." He called that critique fair. "There are too many bureaucratic hurdles to giving people good feedback," he said, adding that "the hard work of addressing that problem is not something the administration's interested in."

The record puts the figure closer to 99 percent than 99.9. A Government Accountability Office review found that about 99 percent of permanent, non-Senior Executive Service employees at the 24 largest agencies were rated "fully successful" or higher in 2013. More than 98 percent were rated "fully successful" or above in fiscal 2025, Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor wrote in December.

Trust in Government Near Historic Lows

Lewis argued that Trump targets institutions people rely on. "He's coming for the trust and you feel it," he said. Lewis also said that Americans who tell pollsters they distrust Washington still drink the water and hold the dollar: "People still basically trust the government even if they say they don't and they act as if they do."

The stated distrust is real. Just 17 percent of Americans said in September 2025 that they trust the federal government to do what is right always or most of the time, Pew Research Center found, down from 22 percent in 2024 and 77 percent in 1964. Among Democrats, trust fell to 9 percent, the lowest Pew has ever recorded for the party. Among Republicans, it stood at 26 percent.

Who Is Running on Rebuilding Government

Lovett asked Lewis whether any Democrats saw the gutted agencies as an opening. "I keep waiting for this," Lovett said.

Lewis said the same. "I keep waiting for the candidate to arise who says we're going to rethink how we govern ourselves," he said, describing the opening as "an explainer and a builder role."

Representative James Walkinshaw, a Virginia Democrat, has asked Democratic leadership to prioritize protecting federal workers, pointing to the harm DOGE has done to workers in his district and saying he plans to investigate the cuts if Democrats win the House, Bloomberg Government reported.

Democrats lead by 8 points in PolitiKool's polling average of the generic congressional ballot. But the party is still underwater, with 40.4 percent viewing it favorably and 56.5 percent unfavorably in PolitiKool's polling average.

Lovett closed with a question rather than a name. "Where is the person that can understand power?" he asked, someone who "actually respects and cares about the civic purpose of our government."

"And that to me is the opening that I see," he said.