MANCHESTER, New Hampshire – Anti-woke Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy told Breitbart News he plans to “shut down” federal agencies such as the Department of Education for good and replace others like the Federal Bureau of Investigation with new entities built from scratch if elected president.
Ramaswamy unveiled his 25-point “America First 2.0” policy platform, which he organized into five overarching themes, through a Breitbart News exclusive Friday morning. One such focus is the dismantling of “Managerial Bureaucracy” in government.
Speaking with Breitbart News on his tour bus in Manchester on Friday morning amid his ten-county blitz of the Granite State, Ramaswamy detailed that he sees three categories of federal agencies and entities: ones that should be shut down for good, others that have a legitimate function to perform but because they have turned “so toxic,” they must be shut down and built anew, and a third category of agencies that cannot be terminated but need transformative reform.
“There’s the category that should have never existed in the first place, like the Department of Education,” Ramaswamy explained. He further contended:
The federal government should have no business in education, and that’s not because I’m anti-education – I’m saying that because I’m pro-education. The U.S. Department of Education is actually foisting a lot of the toxic agendas onto kids through local schools in this country by using their funding as a sort of cudgel, as a condition, to get them to adopt these toxic race and gender ideologies. And they’re, you know we can have a long conversation about this, but even tilting the scales to four-year gender studies majors in California, without actual vocational training for people who want to be builders or welders or carpenters, etc. So anyway, those agencies should not exist. They need to be shut down.
“Then there’s agencies who perform a function that needs to be performed, but whose culture has become so toxic, whose bureaucracy has become so ossified that the only answer left is to shut them down and create something new to take its place. I put the FBI in that category,” he added.
Ramaswamy further claimed that the FBI has been “weaponized” against both sides of the political spectrum:
This is J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. It still is the J. Edgar Hoover Building that people walk into at the FBI in Washington DC – it’s amazing. And that has been weaponized against Republicans, against Democrats… against Democrats a long time ago, Republicans today. This should not be a partisan issue. This should be an issue about restoring the integrity of the administrative police state.
He also noted that Hoover “weaponized” the FBI against Dr. Martin Luther King during the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Moreover, he identified the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) as another agency that must be dismantled.
“The Nuclear Regulatory Commission – I’ve identified – that’s an agency whose culture is fundamentally hostile to the existence of nuclear energy,” he said. “That’s why we haven’t seen major advances in nuclear energy. This is the greatest and most replenishable and sustainable form of energy known to mankind; the U.S. needs to lead. The NRC is in the way.”
Finally, he outlined a third group of agencies like the U.S. Federal Reserve, which “you can’t shut down,” though they require “dramatic reform.”
“So I’ve said I would reduce the headcount of the U.S. Fed by over 90 percent and put that agency back in its place to focus on the one purpose it was supposed to fulfill, which was stabilizing the U.S. dollar, rather than a much broader mandate that it’s, you know, assumed and caused a lot of damage in the process,” Ramaswamy explained.
“But that gives you a sense of how I think. This is not a one-trick pony here. This is a total reform, a gutting of the managerial bureaucracy in the federal government,” he emphasized before arguing that a “career politician like Ron DeSantis is not gonna get that done.”
“It is going to take an outsider. That’s what I’m bringing to the table,” he concluded.
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