Ramaswamy’s Big Plans

Politics

Ramaswamy’s Big Plans

Vivek Ramaswamy speaks to The American Conservative on DOGE and the future of American development.

(Leon Neal/Getty Images)

This article appears in the January/February 2025 issue of The American Conservative as ‘The Biggest Obstacle.’

The American Conservative sat down to talk with Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur, former presidential candidate, and current joint head of the Department of Government Efficiency alongside Elon Musk. Mr. Ramaswamy and Mr. Musk have been entrusted by President-elect Donald Trump as outside advisers to initiate drastic streamlining of the federal government. 

The American Conservative: Mr. Ramaswamy, first of all congratulations on DOGE. Your catchphrase, “Shut It Down,” was popular during the campaign. Let me start with a broad question. What are the key areas you intend to highlight for reform, and why will some bureaucracies resist such efforts?

Vivek Ramaswamy: We are focusing on three major kinds of reforms: regulatory recessions, administrative reductions, and cost savings. Our reforms will aim to restore the spirit of our founders and the Constitution. That founding spirit has been reinvigorated by two critical recent Supreme Court rulings: West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (2022) and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024).

The West Virginia case gave lawmakers the charter to get rid of all regulations that fail the Supreme Court’s “major questions” doctrine. Meanwhile, Loper Bright overturned the Chevron doctrine that had long held that federal courts should defer to federal agencies’ interpretations of the law and rulemaking authority. We stand with the Court and maintain that the people we elect to run the government should actually run the government. Taken together, these two decisions provide a roadmap to undo a plethora of current federal regulations.

On the spending side, DOGE will examine wasteful contracts and highlight pork barrel projects. The bloated spending is created not just by bureaucrats but also by Congress, and we need to call it all out. Line-items will of course be examined, but so will whole agencies. We’ve been given an unambiguous mandate to shut it down.

Our critics will surely allege overreach. In fact, our project will correct the overreach of thousands of regulations promulgated by administrative fiat and without Congressional authorization. Bureaucrats may oppose us out of self-interest, and so will other special interests that have benefited from wasteful spending or industry-favored regulations. It’ll require a new mindset for the federal government to overcome these objections, and there could be no better team to do it than the disruptors President Trump has named to the cabinet.

TAC: You have talked often about National Libertarianism, as opposed to National Protectionism. Can you elaborate for our readers what the difference is and why you prefer the former?

VR: President Trump’s emergence in 2016 was especially compelling because he rejected Republican economic orthodoxy. Against a consensus at the time that saw America as an “economic zone,” within which immigration and trade were inherently good, he asserted that America First meant maximizing the wealth of American workers and manufacturers as key to restoring our national identity. As the America First movement has grown, two main schools have emerged: national libertarians and national protectionists.

There are good America First leaders in both schools, but they approach key issues of trade, immigration, and the regulatory state from different angles. Consider immigration.

To be an American isn’t simply to be a resident of an economic zone; it is something far deeper than that. It is an identity rooted in the ideals of 1776. I view the goal of immigration policy as protecting U.S. national security, preserving U.S. national identity, and promoting U.S. economic growth, in that order. The national-protectionist viewpoint sees most immigration as a threat to working class Americans’ wages. In both cases, it will mean turning away many immigrants.

Many national-protectionists say we ought to commandeer the administrative state and use its powers against our opponents. I reject that idea in favor of shutting it down altogether. We don’t want to replace a left-wing nanny state with a right-wing nanny state; we want to shut it down.

TAC: Speaking of the nanny-state, the Department of Education just failed to receive a clean audit for its third time in a row (budget: $242 billion). One key point people miss when they talk of higher education is the massive growth in university bureaucracy and tuition, as opposed to faculty growth. What tools can the federal government use to force universities to correct course?

VR: These issues are deeply interconnected—the rising cost of college tuition and the massive expansion of university bureaucracies. The cost to educate a student hasn’t really changed much. If anything, with new distance-learning opportunities that many colleges piloted during the pandemic, this cost is likely to come down. What isn’t going down is the number of administrators, especially in the DEI departments across many major universities.

The pushback against this anti-meritocratic agenda is starting to make headway in corporate boardrooms, with Walmart announcing just recently that it would be ending a number of its race- and sex-based policies. But we aren’t seeing this same trend in higher education. 

Despite the Supreme Court ruling against race-based affirmative action in college admissions in 2023, colleges have sought to find workarounds. If the federal government really wanted to get serious about this, we’d follow the money. That includes reforms to accreditation, which is how a university qualifies for its students to be eligible for federal aid. The main accreditors have imposed DEI requirements on universities for them to remain eligible for this federal funding source. That is one specific area in higher education, largely behind the scenes, that is ripe for reform.

TAC: You once said that the $36 trillion debt problem is a symptom of a deeper illness: “We’ve replaced self-governance with a nanny state, administered by a cancerous bureaucracy. Fix that and the debt problem disappears.” How would you tackle the massive depression that might happen from the loss of such a massive jobs program? Is there a way to pad up the shock, lest it looks like Russia circa 1993?

VR: America’s debt, now over $36 trillion, is definitely a great threat to our nation’s well-being—but it really is a symptom and not the disease itself. The real disease is the loss of self-governance in this country. What made America great the first time wasn’t our Founders’ fiscal prudence. It was the mission statement and operating manual that they left us: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

There was a study a few years back that estimated the number of private sector jobs that each regulatory bureaucrat was responsible for killing. It found that, for every one regulator, there were 135 jobs killed. This was before the Biden administration let regulators run amok with the American economy. So, to me the bigger concern is that we’re stifling our innovation by keeping these regulators.

TAC: One might argue that nothing will change without massive tax reform, not just tax cuts. What do you think a better tax system in the U.S. might look like?

VR: When we talk about the cost of federal paperwork, the single greatest example is the tax code. According to federal data, taxpayers will spend a total of 7.9 billion hours complying with the Internal Revenue Code. That is roughly equivalent to the entire population of Los Angeles doing nothing but tax reporting, filing and compliance all year long. So it is definitely an area ripe for an overhaul.

Beyond the compliance burden, too much of the tax code is being used as a form of welfare-in-disguise. Refundable tax credits are designed to be stealthy; individuals think they are paying taxes but in reality are receiving more in their rebate than they ever paid in the first place. So, the entitlement state is not only writing checks through programs like food stamps and Medicaid, but it is also writing checks through the IRS! That runs counter to the best practice for tax policy, which is a broad base with a low rate.

Finally, I know that the Trump administration will be focused on working with Congress to extend the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act to continue some of those important reforms from 2017.

TAC: You’re a successful entrepreneur. How can we nearshore manufacturing and incentivize more private enterprise in the U.S.? 

VR: Onshoring, nearshoring, and friendshoring are essential components of any effort to reduce reliance on China. The United States is far too heavily reliant on China for basic necessities. Two-fifths of all semiconductors used by the Department of Defense come from China, which is also the largest foreign supplier of “critical technologies” to the Army, Navy and Air Force. We’re reliant on China for 95 percent of our imported ibuprofen, an extremely basic pharmaceutical. These trade realities put us in a weaker position in any negotiations we may have with them.

That is why bringing manufacturing, particularly in important sectors, back to the U.S. and to our allies and partners is so important.

Arguably the biggest obstacle to making things in America is actually the regulatory burden. According to the National Association of Manufacturers, the cost of all federal regulations is about $3 trillion. That is before you consider the recent spate of eleventh-hour Biden administration rules. When roughly 12 percent of our GDP is suffocated by red tape, that is a major disincentive to making things in America again. One of America’s key advantages is our respect for the rule of law, but the unaccountable fourth branch poses a real threat to our constitutional order.

TAC: How do you plan to structure DOGE working alongside the OMB, and what type of enforcement and advisory authority do you foresee it having?

VR: Stay tuned for more details on DOGE. For now, I’ll just say that one thing I love about the way we’ve set this up is that DOGE has an expiration date—July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. If all goes according to plan, we will have reaffirmed our commitment to self-governance in this country.

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