‘President of Government Shut Down’: 2024 GOP Hopeful Says He Will Clean House of Gov’t Agencies If Elected

Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy says if elected he will clean house at the top federal government agencies.

If elected, Ramaswamy will go through agencies such as the Department of Commerce, the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Department of Education. Ramaswamy told Fox News prior to his speech at the libertarian conference FreedomFest in Memphis, how many of these agencies are redundant and “should not exist.”

“I’m going to be the president of government shut down, as in literally shutting down the administrative state that sits under the executive branch,” Ramaswamy said Wednesday. “That will be a big part of my domestic policy legacy because that will also stimulate our economy. The regulatory state is the wet blanket on businesses across this country. So not only will we restore our three branch constitutional republic, we will also restore 4-plus percent GDP growth in this country. That’s two wins.”

Ramaswamy provided an example of how many of the government agencies do similar things.

“At the federal level, we have the U.S. Marshals, and we have the DOJ. We don’t need that separate J. Edgar Hoover-style FBI sitting in between either,” Ramaswamy said, adding that the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) pursued similar drug “cases separately from the FBI,” adding that it was “a redundancy” and a “waste of money.”

During his speech in Memphis, Ramaswamy looked to the future, saying how he expects to have lowered “the federal employee headcount by over 75%” by the end of what would hopefully be his second term.