(RightWing.org) – For decades, politicians on both sides of the aisle have said that the federal government is too bloated, at least those are their public statements, but since the problem keeps expanding, it is not unreasonable to question their sincerity. Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy came out swinging with his proposal for trimming things down on September 13, and it seems his choice of object to swing is a very large axe.
Platform Plank
After giving a speech on the topic, the Ramaswamy camp published a white paper and a series of infographics to help explain his vision. He describes the problem as a “fourth branch of government… the administrative state,” which generally describes the glut of executive branch agencies and the career bureaucrats who work within them.
Ramaswamy appears to believe that there is too much overlap among the agencies, for example, he will close down the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) “and [relocate] the 15,000 special agents who solve cases” to other departments such as the U.S. Marshals Service and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). In a similar vein, he sees an advantage in abolishing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and shifting employees to other agencies that investigate the same sorts of crimes.
The prospective Republican candidate then lays out his legal justifications for why the power to accomplish this rests with the person occupying the White House alone. Part of his argument rests on the remaining parts of the 1977 Reorganization Act that are still in effect and emphasizes that the law states that “the President shall from time to time examine the organization of all agencies and shall determine what changes” are necessary within them.
Ramaswamy also relies on historical precedent, noting all the executive orders signed from the time of President Harry Truman through the administration of Donald Trump. Lastly, he claims that Article II of the US Constitution gives any president the power and authority to do exactly what he has laid out.
The presidential hopeful has also referenced a Supreme Court decision in the case West Virginia v. EPA where the justices by a 6-3 margin (split along Conservative/Liberal ideologies) declared that the federal agency did not have the authority to issue many of their rules that President Barack Obama dictated under the Clean Air Act. Ramaswamy believes that many if not most of the new rules promulgated by many of the three letter agencies were likely put in place in a similarly illegal manner, and he has promised to rescind them.
In the end, what the mainstream media is focusing on is the GOP candidate’s plan to deal with the overloaded administrative state. It is estimated there are 2.25 million civilian employees working in the government, and Ramaswamy says he will initiate mass layoffs removing 75% of them by the end of his first term. The Left sees that as putting 1.6 million people on the unemployment line and negatively impacting things, including their families, while the candidate has said he believes it would stimulate the economy as those people move to the private sector.
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