Oct 16, 2023
Vivek Ramaswamy Wants To Dismantle Administrative State
Ramaswamy said he wants to dismantle the Department Of Education, the FBI and the IRS.
- 6 minutes
Vivek, you've proposed cutting giant
ports of the United States government
at the federal level and
at the executive level.
So without getting into all of it,
let me just name three of them
Department of Education, FBI, and IRS.
So to most people,
that sounds a little crazy.
[00:00:20]
Are we not going to collect taxes?
Are we not going to do law enforcement?
So tell us why getting rid of the IRS
as an example makes any sense at all.
>> Speaker 3: Well, I think that's
just an administrative reorganization.
Downsize it, move it to the US treasury so
it's a revenue collection process.
[00:00:38]
I can tell you about the FBI, I mean, this
is the one I get a lot of questions about
and I think is the most understandable
pushback that people have.
And I can do the education one, too.
There's 35,000 employees at the FBI.
20,000 of them are in
back office functions in
[00:00:53]
the J Edgar Hoover Building and
back offices in this bureau.
They can go home and
find honest work in the private sector.
But the 15,000 agents on the frontline
should be moved to agents like
the agencies like the US Marshals or to
the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network
[00:01:10]
at the US treasury or the DEA, where they
will have far greater specialization and
be much more effective than the agents
are at the FBI right now in investigating
child sex trafficking crimes,
which the FBI has not been very good at.
The US Marshals has done a better job at
specialized white collar investigations,
[00:01:28]
where people at the FBI lack
the specialization that people at the US
treasury Department's Financial Crimes
Enforcement Network actually have.
And this is also a way of addressing
what I see as generational corruption in
the FBI.
The same bureau of investigation
that used to go after the likes of
[00:01:45]
Martin Luther King Jr. threatening him
with suicide over improperly collected
tapes is now going after individuals
of a different political persuasion.
And it was wrong then as it is wrong now.
Bureaucracy is a formula for
breeding corruption.
And I think the right answer is you
can't just incrementally reform that,
[00:02:03]
you have to shut it down,
but do it in a pragmatic
way that increases effectiveness
while reducing cost and corruption.
And same thing with the Department of
Education, tilting the scales to four year
college degrees over one or
two year vocational programs,
holding local schools hostage, saying,
you don't get that money unless you adopt
[00:02:23]
certain agendas at the local level that's
not useful when the federal government has
nothing to do with local education,
I'd say shut it down.
Give that $80 billion mostly back
to the people, to parents, so
that every parent can choose to send where
their kids go, actually go to school, and
[00:02:39]
the tiny sliver that relates to vocational
training that they've recently added,
move that to the department
of labor where it belongs.
So, yes, I do think it's gonna take
somebody with a CEO mindset and,
if I may say, anti-bureaucracy experience,
to come in and reorganize and
[00:02:55]
gut much of that federal bureaucracy.
That's not a left wing idea or
a right wing idea, but
it is a fundamentally American idea
because we have three branches of
government in the US Constitution,
legislative, executive, and judicial.
Not this fourth branch of
the administrative state where most of
[00:03:12]
the policymaking takes place today.
And so I would say that's the top of
my domestic agenda shut down that
fourth branch, revive the integrity
of our constitutional republic.
>> Speaker 4: So the fourth branch
that you're referring to consists of
individuals, leadership, at least
that's been appointed in the executive
[00:03:30]
branch by the president of the United
States, the Department of Education,
of course, to give you an example.
Your favorite politician in the world,
Donald Trump, appointed Betsy DeVos,
and she engaged in the reversal of certain
policies of the Education Department
[00:03:46]
that did seek to help students who had
been defrauded by for profit colleges.
So what do you propose happen
in a situation in which students
have been defrauded by for profit
colleges like Phoenix Online, ITT Tech?
[00:04:02]
They get an unaccredited,
nonsense degree that leads to nowhere.
They're drowning in debt
after being defrauded.
How exactly would you deal with those
situations with the elimination of
the Education Department?
>> Speaker 3: If it is a true case of
fraud, that's a violation of the law.
[00:04:18]
They can be prosecuted under the law.
They can be sued in civil suits by
the people who are defrauded, no different
than any other commercial relationship
that exists in the private sector.
However, when you have a bureaucracy
at the Department of Education that's
spending that $80 billion at a moment
where school choice programs across
[00:04:36]
the country are underfunded, it's not even
close, which is a better use of money.
Put that $80 billion budget in the pockets
of parents across this country,
it'd be about 1.6 billion
per state in this union.
It's not even close,
which is a better use of funds.
[00:04:51]
And I think you avoid a lot of
the bureaucratic corruption.
And you're right, the people who sit on
top of those agencies are appointed by
a democratically elected US president.
99.99% of those employees do
not fit that description.
To the contrary, they're protected by,
I think, bad policy, but
[00:05:10]
so called civil service protections
that have stopped the US president or
the duly elected representatives or
even cabinet secretaries from
firing those employees, which creates
a culture of rot, of laziness,
of ineffectiveness, and, yes, even of
corruption in many of those agencies.
[00:05:27]
And so I have a simple proposition,
I think the people who we elect to
run the government, they ought to be
the ones who actually run the government.
And if they're people
who disagree with me,
if they're the people who I
don't vote for, I accept that.
But we live in a constitutional republic
where at least the people who we elect to
[00:05:43]
run the government ought to be
the ones who are actually running it,
when most of the policy decisions
made regulating our energy sector to
our healthcare sector
to financial markets,
to education come from unelected
bureaucrats in the federal government.
And that serves neither Republicans nor
Democrats nor any American well.
[00:06:01]
And that's gonna change
on my watch as president.
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