Presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy detailed his vision for the administrative state at a New Hampshire town hall on July 20.
Mr. Ramaswamy appeared on stage at Saint Anselm College’s New Hampshire Institute of Politics to the strains of Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town.”
Mr. Ramaswamy began by explaining why he chose the song.
“You want to understand the best measure of America’s health? Here’s what it is: it is the percentage of people who feel free to say what they actually think in public,” the biotech entrepreneur told the crowd.
“I respect—whether it’s a musical artist, whether it’s a parent, whether it’s a corporate executive who will say in public the things that you are otherwise supposed to keep to yourself.”
The candidate reiterated some of his past promises with respect to the administrative state—for example, instituting eight-year term limits for bureaucrats.
Yet, he went beyond that over the course of an in-depth speech that made ample use of org charts. He explained in specific terms how he intends to “shut down the administrative state and the bureaucracy that sucks the lifeblood out of our constitutional Republic.”
The Founders, he said, “fought a revolution to say that ‘We the People’ decide how to settle our political differences, for better or for worse.”
Mr. Ramaswamy argued that the sprawling administrative state has betrayed that revolutionary promise.
Plans for Ending FBI, Department of Education
Mr. Ramaswamy argued that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is structurally anomalous, which enables it to “[escape] cabinet-level accountability.”He pointed out that there’s no FBI-like independent investigative body between local prosecutors and local police, as there is between the Department of Justice and the U.S. Marshals.
“That is a formula for corruption,” the 2024 hopeful stated, arguing that the agency is vexed by waste, redundancy, and mission creep. Its mission creep only worsened after 9/11, he said.
Presenting a diagram outlining the dismantling of the FBI during his first year in office, Mr. Ramaswamy said he'd shift some of its employees to the U.S. Marshals, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and other agencies less “politicized” than the brainchild of J. Edgar Hoover.
“The corruption investigations will move to the Secret Service. The counterintelligence investigations—which is a tiny portion of their employees, but important, I acknowledge—will move to the Defense Intelligence Agency under the DOD [Department of Defense],” Mr. Ramaswamy continued.
He then explained how he would take apart the Department of Education (DOE), which he said “should have never existed in the first place.”
“This is the head of the snake when it comes to the spread of woke-ism, transgenderism, [and] indoctrination of our kids,” the anti-woke investor told his audience, adding that the radicalism at some local schools was often downstream of incentives created by the federal agency.
Mr. Ramaswamy said districts seeking money from the DOE must toe the line on those hot-button issues. He said former President Donald J. Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, couldn’t bring her charges to heel.
“I do not believe we can reform this agency,” he said.
“What we really need more of in our educational system is decentralized choice that belongs to the parents.”
Mr. Ramaswamy said the agency’s financial incentives “tip the scales” toward college, even for students who would do better in a vocational program.
He vowed to end the department after his first year as president.
“Half of its budget will be disbursed back to the states and to the people,” he said to applause, adding that outstanding loans and grants would fall under the authority of the Department of the Treasury.
Reveals Nuclear Regulatory Commission as New Target
The candidate announced that he intends to shutter a third, more obscure agency—the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).He called it “the single wet blanket, the damper on the revival of nuclear energy in the United States of America.”
Mr. Ramaswamy pointed out that nuclear plants in the United States currently take decades to come online, pinning the blame on expansive NRC regulations.
He argued that those burdens have counterintuitively increased the risk from nuclear power for Americans by making it harder for new, safer reactors to join the country’s fleet.
“The culture of the agency itself is hostile to the existence of nuclear energy in the United States of America,” he said.
Mr. Ramaswamy said he'd put an end to the NRC, transferring what he sees as useful functions to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Energy, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
“Are these bureaucracies perfect? They are not,” he said.
As president, Mr. Ramaswamy said, he could legally make these moves without Congressional authorization.
“Next week,' he pledged. ”I will lay out the Constitutional and statutory authority that the U.S. president has, as the duly elected president, to actually do it.”
