There will be “mass reductions” in the federal government under President-elect Donald Trump‘s second administration, Vivek Ramaswamy predicted this weekend.
Ramaswamy, whom Trump picked to lead the brand new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) along with Elon Musk, spoke to Fox News anchor Maria Bartiromo on “Sunday Morning Futures” about plans to cut the federal bureaucracy.
“We expect mass reductions,” Ramaswamy said. “We expect certain agencies to be deleted outright. We expect mass reductions in force in areas of the federal government that are bloated. We expect massive cuts among federal contractors and others who are overbilling the federal government … I think people will be surprised by, I think, how quickly we’re able to move with some of those changes, given the legal backdrop the Supreme Court has given us.”
Today on @SundayFutures with @MariaBartiromo, @VivekGRamaswamy spoke about the goals for the newly created Department of Government Efficiency.@FoxNews pic.twitter.com/Sh9CA5KZZ6
— SundayMorningFutures (@SundayFutures) November 17, 2024
Ramaswamy argued that slicing down parts of the Executive Branch can begin right away through executive action. He indicated that “over half-a-trillion dollars that’s spent every year right now was not even authorized by Congress in the first place,” and said that would be their area of focus.
“The dirty little secret right now … is people we elect to run the government, they’re not the ones who actually run the government. It’s the unelected bureaucrats in the administrative state. That was created through executive action. It’s going to be fixed through executive action,” he said.
Rescinding federal regulations “gives us the industrial logic to then downsize the size of that administrative state,” Ramaswamy explained, adding that “the beauty of all of this is” that Trump could get the ball rolling through executive actions without approval from Congress and then “you look at those bigger portions of the federal budget that need to be addressed one by one.”
He noted that “our goal is not to be cruel, by the way, to the individual federal employees. Most of them, I do want to say this, are individually good people, and we want to be compassionate and generous in how we handle this transition. But the real issue is, there’s just too many of them. We don’t need 4 million and we shouldn’t have 4 million civil servants who can’t be elected — who aren’t even elected or can’t be removed from their positions. It’s antidemocratic.”
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Ramaswamy also suggested some departments could be moved away from Washington, D.C., to where they can “be more accountable to the people,” but stressed that downsizing would be the main focus. Though he did not explicitly name any particular agencies that would be shut down, he acknowledged how Trump has spoken about getting rid of the Department of Education.
“President Trump [has] talked extensively about areas like the Department of Education,” Ramaswamy said. “Obviously, those kinds of agencies shouldn’t even exist and should be returned to the states. But it’s a culture, Maria, that’s pervaded the entire federal government of hiring people who have no accountability to everyday Americans.”
