The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that President-elect Donald Trump has tasked Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk with leading will look to eliminate some federal agencies in their entirety.
Ramaswamy discussed DOGE’s cost-cutting focus in an appearance on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” and told host Maria Bartiromo that DOGE will pursue major reductions in the federal bureaucracy which could result in some agencies being shuttered.
“We expect certain agencies to be deleted outright,” Ramaswamy said. “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 over-billing the federal government.”
“So yes, we expect all of the above, and I think people will be surprised by… how quickly we’re able to move with some of those changes given the legal backdrop the Supreme Court has given us,” he said.
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Ramaswamy was asked about the potential of relocating certain federal agencies’ headquarters outside the District of Columbia and said that is something DOGE will consider as a means of making the bureaucracy more responsive to the American public.
“It’s funny you bring up this point. ‘Yes’ is the answer, but here’s why – they’ll say, ‘what happens to the people who live in Washington, D.C.?’ Here’s the dirty little secret in the federal bureaucracy today, most people don’t even show up to work,” Ramaswamy said.
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“So if you require most of those federal bureaucrats to just say, like normal working Americans, you come to work five days a week, a lot of them won’t want to do that,” he added. “And by the way, that creates a logic for many of those agencies being outside of DC in the first place.”
DOGE will look to downsize the workforce of those federal agencies regardless of whether they are relocated outside of Washington, D.C., Ramaswamy said.
“Many of these agencies should be downsized wherever they are, and for whatever does remain, move many of them out to be more accountable to the people. And by the way, if you have many voluntary reductions in force of the workforce in the federal government along the way, great, that’s a good side effect of those policies as well,” he said.
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“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,” Ramaswamy noted.
“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 aren’t elected and can’t be removed from their positions. It’s anti-democratic.”
Ramaswamy and Musk announced last week that DOGE will be reviewing applications for individuals interested in contributing to its cost-cutting efforts. Applicants can send a resume via the DOGE account’s direct messages.
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