Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy on Wednesday laid out his ideas to shut down the FBI and fire more than 1 million federal workers, lining up with increasingly sweeping conservative proposals targeting the federal government and particularly law enforcement.
Candidates trying to beat former President Donald Trump have responded to growing anger among GOP primary voters about the indictments against Trump as well as federal investigations and policies seen as unfairly targeting conservatives.
Ramaswamy’s proposals are among the broadest in the field. Speaking at the America First Policy Institute in Washington, he said he would try to reduce the federal employee headcount by half in his first year in office and by 75% during his first term if he makes it to the White House.
He wants to shut down five federal agencies, including the FBI and the Department of Education. He said he would also eliminate the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the Food and Nutrition Service.
Ramaswamy is not the only Republican candidate to suggest slashing the federal workforce. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has said he would eliminate the Internal Revenue Service, or IRS, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Education.
And there’s a larger effort to dismantle the federal government that is being fueled by conservative organizations along with former Trump administration officials. They have been working on drafting a plan for when Trump returns to the White House to oust federal employees and replace them with like-minded officials.
I’m sorry Republican voters, literally all your candidates compete for who can declare who will hurt the most people to appeal to you, the people that vote for them on that metric.
For this reason, I cannot entertain the notion that you care about this nation, the people in it, or really even yourself.
Yeah, there’s clearly a market for these extreme beliefs, otherwise they wouldn’t win any elections, gerrymandering aside. At this point, a vote for most republican candidates is a vote against your own best interests and the interests of the country as a whole.
Also, firing a million federal employees is a “fuck around and find out” type situation. I don’t think most people realize how much of their shit gets done by faceless bureaucrats that you’ll never hear about. You like the air you breath to be clean-ish? I guarantee you can’t name the actual day to day people who keep it that way. Many of them would love it if you knew what they did. Fire them and you’ll quickly find out why they were important.
Also, you can’t just fire federal workers, most of them have protections. Most are unionized, too. So, good luck.
The GOP hasn’t had a positive agenda for 20 years.
Lmao. Shut down the FBI.
We sure ol’ Five Head here isn’t a Martian?
I half expect him to rip off his mask, go “ACK ACK ACK ACK!” and disintegrate someone in the crowd.
He sounds like the bad guy from a dystopian film.
Yeah but not a good film. More like a z-grade movie. Not even worth a straight to Netflix release, it’d go straight to a shitty ad supported streaming service like Crackle.
This is part of their plan to load of the government with fascist lackies to make sure the next Republican coup is a success.
The CIA are fucking asleep. Isn’t it their whole job to assassinate political corruption descretely?
I thought their job was to destabilize and overthrow democratic governments and install dictators in other countries
I thought it was to arm insurgents in foreign wars that in no way could backfire ever
I thought they primarily smuggled drugs into the US.
Well now their absence is leading to dictators being established in our country… Based I guess?
No. It’s their job to protect the interests of the connected.
Wait. The NRC? What the fuck? Why? I mean the others too, but the NRC especially. No more oversight of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy?
Republicans see government as having one purpose: enforcing hierarchy. So it should be big enough to keep everyone (read: the not wealthy) in their place, and all useful government services should be privatized.
They want some private business that can suck billions of dollars from taxpayers to oversee nuclear energy.
Case in point: Russia. They want what Russia is.
If they shut down the Dept. of Education can I keep not paying stucldent loans lol
Nope, those will be transferred to the new Department of Collections before the Edu department is shuttered.
They’ll shutter everything but the collections arm and stuff it into Treasury or something cartoonishly evil like that.
I think you mean their own pockets.
Just stop saying his name. That rat weasel will go back under the rock he came from.
Eliminating the IRS eliminates the income for the entire government to function? (Desantis) what a moron. All of them. Hopefully by next November they will have alienated themselves from the 75% of us who know better.
I country that mints its own currency isn’t dependant on taxation to spend. ALL money starts at the federal level.
You’re sort of right but painfully wrong on so many things. The US government doesn’t mint its own currency, it borrows from the Federal reserve. Congress spends money into existence (by borrowing from the Fed), but then we pay back the Fed via taxes.
I country that mints its own currency isn’t dependant on taxation to spend. ALL money starts at the federal level.
This is a good way to get those federal employees to vote for you /s
I’m sure kool-aid drinking federal employees in red states will still do so thinking leopards won’t eat their faces.
He’s not running against Donald trump in 2024 He’s running against Kamala Harris in 2028
But he has all this lead up time to spew his poison. Matt Gaetz rapt attention face has me worried.
I’m not sure how a ramswamy vs Harris race would end up to be honest
A rotting piece of lumber can win an election against Kamala, we’re doomed if she’s the nominee
She won’t be, for that reason. She won’t win the primary.
So many smaller communities that employ a lot of the people who would be hosed would be completely fucked.
People don’t think about that aspect of things like this, they just think about the bureaucracy in DC. And a lot of those communities have GOP representatives.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Speaking at the America First Policy Institute in Washington, he said he would try to reduce the federal employee headcount by half in his first year in office and by 75% during his first term if he makes it to the White House.
He said he would also eliminate the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the Food and Nutrition Service.
Attempting a purge of that size would immediately lead to huge pushback from federal employees who have civil service protections, interest groups, and lawmakers of both parties who support the work of some or all of those agencies.
While in office, Trump often railed against what he saw as a “deep state” of bureaucrats working against his administration’s priorities, but he did not carry out firings of rank-and-file employees.
They have been working on drafting a plan for when Trump returns to the White House to oust federal employees and replace them with like-minded officials.
“Part of the problem when you have a bureaucracy that runs the state is that they find things to do that they shouldn’t have been doing in the first place,” he said, claiming that the workers had no specialization in the areas.
The original article contains 515 words, the summary contains 204 words. Saved 60%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Yes, lay off most of the military. Then cut the defense budget by 80%. Maintain the nukes… beyond that, we can mothball pretty much everything else.
How about the military? We are never going to get into a fight with another nuclear power (and if we do - what good is a military if everyone in the world is dead?), so we should just keep enough military to launch nukes, protect against natural disasters, and defeat any country that doesn’t have nukes.
You make a very good point; and I say this while being very pro military, if you read through the stupidity of my comment history.
Can you elaborate on the role of the military in protecting against natural disasters? It’s not clear to me how this is already part of their function.
That was a late edit. I was referring to things like the army corp of engineers and the navy hospital ships, more reactionary. Though it would be cool if the military would be proactive. Remember’s Trumps question about nuking hurricanes Or, maybe just stay reactionary.
