Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy has big plans for his new role in the Trump administration, which could include “deleting” multiple federal agencies. But not everyone is convinced that’s advisable or even possible.
“We expect mass reductions, we expect certain agencies to be deleted outright,” Ramaswamy said on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo. “We expect mass reductions enforced in areas of the federal government that are bloated. We expect massive cuts of federal contractors and others who are overbilling the federal government.”
Ramaswamy, a member of the newly minted “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, has spoken in the past of eliminating the Department of Education, the IRS, the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
He said that a Supreme Court ruling last summer can supercharge President-elect Donald Trump‘s plans to slash the federal bureaucracy.
“I think people will be surprised by, I think, how quickly we’re able to move with some of those changes, given the legal backdrop the Supreme Court has given us,” he said.
That legal backdrop is last summer’s Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo decision, which overturned a 1984 precedent that allowed federal agencies broad interpretive freedom over ambiguous statutes, known as the Chevron doctrine. Overturning Chevron was a longtime conservative cause, and Ramaswamy sees it opening doors to the GOP’s goals.
But not all legal scholars, or Democrats, agree.
Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) knocked Ramaswamy’s claims in a post on X, saying he lacked basic knowledge of how the government works.
“Government 101: No federal agencies will be ‘deleted’ without an Act of Congress,” he wrote. “The President cannot undue by executive order what Congress has done by statute. Congress, not the President, is the final word on the fate of federal agencies.”
Mark Chenoweth, president of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, agreed that the situation is not as simple as Ramaswamy envisions, though he said plenty can be done short of deletion.
“If you’re talking about agencies that are congressionally approved, then the executive doesn’t have unilateral authority to delete agencies without getting Congress involved,” he said. “But if the agencies are overreaching their statutory authority, that’s a different question.”
Chenoweth said Loper Bright can help Trump in cutting regulations and possibly trimming agencies down to their core mission, even if he cannot cut them outright without getting Congress involved.
That may not stop Trump from trying, and certainly won’t stop Republican Party leaders from talking about eliminating federal agencies.
Cutting various government departments has long been a favorite promise of GOP presidential candidates. The top target is usually the Department of Education, which wasn’t created until 1978 and is viewed on the Right as a favor to teachers unions from Democratic President Jimmy Carter.
Promises to cut departments have even led to famous political gaffes. In 2012, then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry was listing the three agencies he wanted to scrap — or try to. After rattling off the departments of Commerce and Education, he struggled to find the third, which was later revealed to be the Department of Energy.
“Oops,” he said, ending his 2012 run in the process.
But the dream lives on.
Trump tried to knock out 19 independent federal agencies during his first term in office, without success. He named Perry to lead the Department of Energy, the very department he couldn’t remember the name of five years earlier, but neither of them got it eliminated.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) called for eliminating the Perry trio of Energy, Commerce, and Education during his 2024 run, along with defunding the IRS, while Ramaswamy wanted to hack off Education, the FBI, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Some of Trump’s Cabinet picks have even called for eliminating their own departments.
Former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz has been controversially tapped to lead the Department of Justice, an agency he mused about killing in 2023.
“I don’t care if it takes every second of our time and every ounce of our energy,” he said at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “We either get this government back on our side or we defund and get rid of, abolish the FBI, the CDC, ATF, DOJ, every last one of them if they do not come to heel.”
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Based on his comments, Ramaswamy agrees, and he plans to test the limits of just how far the Trump administration can go, whether that’s streamlining the federal bureaucracy or taking it a step further.
“We wanna go right in through executive action,” he said on Fox News. “The people we elect to run the government, they’re not the ones who actually run the government. It’s the unelected bureaucrats in the administrative state. That was created through executive action. It’s going to be fixed through executive action.”
