David Pierce is editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.

Elon Musk and the team at the Department of Government Efficiency figured out one thing really fast: if you control the computers, you control everything. And so Musk and his merry band of engineers have spent the last week or so parading into various US government agencies and taking control of their systems. There’s so much about what’s really happening here — who has what access, when anyone will try and stop them, whether this small group really will successfully shut down agencies and convince thousands of federal employees to leave their jobs — that we don’t know. But however it shakes out, the X-ification of the US government is not a good thing.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we start by trying to, if not make sense of things, at least try and explain them. Nilay, David, and The Verge’s Richard Lawler talk about why DOGE is operating the way it is, how it has been able to so quickly assume so much control over the government, and what might come next.

After that, the hosts pivot to talking about tariffs, which are at least slightly less complicated and confusing. But only slightly! We talk about how the in-place tariffs will affect everything from gadgets to Shein hauls, what the now-delayed Mexico and Canada tariffs would mean, and why both the cost and the confusion surrounding your gadgets are about to go up. The phrase “de minimis” comes up more than you might think.

After all that, we dispense with the politics (mostly) and talk about streaming. Fox is planning a new streaming service, not to be confused with its existing streaming service… you know, the one that’s about to stream the Super Bowl? Meanwhile, Disney is firmly back to betting on a cable strategy and hoping that ESPN will raise its prices everywhere, and Comcast is doing some more half-measures on Super Bowl streaming. (Disclosure: Comcast is also an investor in Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company.)

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, beginning with DOGE and tariffs:

And in streaming:

And in the lightning round: