If presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswasmy gets elected and ends up leading the nation’s executive branch, he wants to gut it through unprecedented means — including a 75% decrease in government employees and the elimination of at least five agencies.
The biotech entrepreneur worth hundreds of millions has never held elected office and only sparingly voted in elections as an adult. But in a speech on Tuesday, he laid out a vision of a federal government so small it would unwind an American bureaucracy hundreds of years in the making.
“Do we want incremental reform or do we want revolution?” Ramaswamy asked an audience at a Washington, D.C., think tank started by Trump administration alumni in 2021.
The agencies slated for complete elimination in a Ramaswamy administration: the FBI; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; the Department of Education; the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Services.
“A radical dream that I have, that many of us in this room share today as citizens in 2023: that the people who we elect to run the government ought to be the ones who actually run the government,” he said. “Not the managerial bureaucracy in three letter government agencies, not elite leaders in the back of palace halls in old world England, not enlightened elites in the back of BlackRock’s corner office in Park Avenue of Manhattan today, not monarchs sitting in three letter government agency buildings here in Washington, DC.”
“This is not a Black idea or a white idea. This is not even a Republican idea or a Democratic idea. This is a fundamentally American vision that we fought a revolution to secure in 1776 that we the people create a government that is accountable to us, not the other way around,” the Republican presidential candidate continued.