Biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who has been appointed to lead President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed Department of Government Efficiency alongside tech billionaire Elon Musk, promised on Sunday that many government agencies will soon be “abolished.”
“Elon and I are not doing this for the glory,” Ramaswamy said on Fox News.Futures on Sunday morning.” “But I think we’re going to build a consensus to make the kind of deep cuts that haven’t been made in most of our history.”
After host Maria Bartiromo questioned whether the two plan to “close entire agencies,” Ramaswamy said there will be “massive reductions.”
“We expect that certain agencies will be removed completely,” he said. “We expect massive reductions in areas of the federal government that are bloated. We expect massive cuts among federal contractors and others who overbill the federal government.”
Ramaswamy added: “I think people will be surprised by how quickly we can move on some of these changes, given the legal background that the Supreme Court has given us.”
The founder of Roivant Sciences, a pharmaceutical company, which is running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, told Bartiromo that he and Musk will assess the role of the four million US civil servants, claiming that “there are just too many.”
“We don’t need 4 million. We should not have four million civil servants who cannot be elected or removed from office. It is anti-democratic,” he said. (Ramaswamy owns stock in BuzzFeed, JS’s parent company.)
Bartiromo then asked him “which agency is the most bloated,” to which he replied, “That’s tough competition.”
“President Trump has spoken extensively about areas like the Department of Education,” Ramaswamy added. “It is clear that these types of bodies should not even exist and should be returned to the states. But it is a culture that permeates the entire federal government, hiring people who are not accountable to everyday Americans.”
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Noting that it is “not just about cost savings,” Ramaswamy said: “Our work will be completed by July 4, 2026. Unlike any other government project, we do not want this project to last. We want to start solving the problem, solving it and moving forward and setting an example for how our federal government should function.”
The Department of Government Efficiency is not expected to be a government office that would require congressional action. It will probably just be an advisory panel.
Watch a clip of Ramaswamy’s performance on ‘Sunday Morning Futures’.