Incoming Department of Government Efficiency appointee Vivek Ramaswamy told Fox News Channel’s Maria Bartiromo on Sunday that the task entrusted to him and billionaire Elon Musk of dismantling vast swaths of government red tape as directed by President-elect Donald Trump will be a much easier task than many imagine.
“First, we want to go right through executive actions to the failures of the executive branch that need to be addressed. The dirty little secret right now is the 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.
“Think about the Supreme Court’s environment over the last several years. They’ve held that many of those regulations are unconstitutional at a large scale. Rescind those regulations, pull those regs back, and that gives us the industrial logic to then downsize the size of that administrative state,” Ramaswamy continued.
“The beauty of all of this is that can be achieved just through executive action, without Congress. Score some early wins, and then you look at the bigger portions of the federal budget that need to be addressed, one by one,” he told the host. “That’s one way to think about this is, how can the president of the United States, who’s been elected with a historic mandate, actually do thing the voters have voted for? They haven’t voted for incremental change this time, Maria, we have voted for sweeping change, and we’re focused on how to do that as early and quickly as possible.”
Ramaswamy then laid out some more details about what he and co-DOGE chairman Musk are looking to do. “We’re not going to be cutting ribbons, we’re going to be cutting costs. So those recommendations are going to be on a real-time basis. I do want to take a step back and understand the scope of this problem. Over half a trillion dollars that’s spent every year was not even authorized by Congress in the first place.”
Continuing, he said, “The Pentagon has just failed its seventh consecutive audit, nearly a trillion dollars of budget, they can’t even tell you where it goes. Part of this is exposing for the public the extent of that rot and waste — but then to take steps first through executive action, and then laying the groundwork for broader change through legislation as well the rein in that deficit and budget.”
He added: “I know we’re talking about this in terms of efficiency, but there’s something deeper going on here. This is about restoring self-governance and accountability in America as well. Elected leaders, if they make the wrong decisions, voters have a great choice, you can vote them out and remove them. Most of the people making these decisions, from health care to the Department of Defense, are failing in effectiveness because they have no accountability. Historically, it’s been the view of many scholars to say those people could not even be fired. Now we take a different view with the environment the Supreme Court has given us in recent years, and we’re going to use that in a pretty extensive way to move quickly.”
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