Vivek Ramaswamy, who has been picked by US president-elect Donald Trump to run the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), along with billionaire Elon Musk, had earlier in September shared a “thought-experiment”, which if run on a large scale, would not only reduce the government by 75 per cent, but also avoid a bunch of discrimination lawsuits.
In an interview with American computer scientist and podcaster, Lex Fridman, Ramaswamy said, “In there on Day 1, anybody in the federal bureaucracy who’s not elected, whose social security number ends in an odd number, you’re out, if it ends in an even number, you are in. There’s a 50 per cent cut right there. Of those who remain, if your social security number starts in an even number, you’re in, and if it starts with an odd number, you’re out. That’s a 75 per cent reduction.”
“One of the virtues of that…it is a thought experiment, not a policy prescription…is that you don’t have a bunch of lawsuits dealing with gender or racial discrimination or political viewpoint discrimination. I guarantee you, do that on Day 1 and step two on Day 2. On Day 3, not a thing would have changed for the ordinary American, other than that their government being a lot smaller, spending a lot less money to operate it. And most people who run a company know this, it is 25 per cent of the people who do 80-90 per cent of the work. These government agencies are no different,” he said in the podcast.
He then said: “Now imagine you could do that thought experiment and not just doing it at random but on a large scale with some metric of screening for those who actually have both the greatest competence as well as the greatest commitment and knowledge of the Constitution. That I think would immediately raise not only the civic character of the United States, it would also stimulate the economy. The regulatory state is like a wet blanket on the economy, most of it is unconstitutional.”
TRUMP’S DOGE
His remarks have sparked a discussion in the light of the DOGE department that Trump indicated would operate outside the confines of the government. Trump said that Musk and Ramaswamy will together dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies.
The new department would realise long-held Republican dreams and provide advice and guidance from outside of the government. Their roles would be informal and would not require Senate approval. DOGE would work with the White House and Office of Management & Budget.
