Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) incoming co-leader Vivek Ramaswamy has promised that aggressive cost-cutting will start early with executive actions.
Ramaswamy spoke with Fox News host Maria Bartiromo on “Sunday Morning Futures.” He said the executive actions will guide further reductions by Congress.
“The failures of the executive branch need to be addressed, because the dirty little secret right now is 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,” Ramaswamy said.
President-elect Donald Trump tapped Ramaswamy and entrepreneur Elon Musk to lead the new Dept. of Government Efficiency, (DOGE), which will be tasked with restructuring federal agencies. It is an unofficial body and neither Ramaswamy nor Musk are government employees. However, both will have Trump’s ear.
Ramaswamy cited the Supreme Court as a guide to what can be done.
“Over the last several years, they’ve held that many of those regulations are unconstitutional at a large scale. Rescind those regulations, pull those regs back, and then that gives us the industrial logic to then downsize the size of that administrative state. And the beauty of all of this is that can be achieved just through executive action without Congress. Score some early wins, and then you look at those bigger portions of the federal budget that need to be addressed one by one,” he said.
Such actions will begin “as early and as quickly as possible.”
The DOGE work is expected to be done by July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence signing.
“This is about restoring self-governance and accountability in America as well. Elected leaders, if they make the wrong decisions, voters have a great choice. You can vote them out and remove them. Most of the people making these decisions from health care to the Department of Defense are failing on effectiveness because they have no accountability. Historically, it’s been the view of many scholars to say that those people could not even be fired. Now we take a different view with the environment the Supreme Court has given us in recent years, and we’re going to use that in a pretty extensive way to move quickly,” he said.
