Vivek Ramaswamy Discusses Potential Leadership Role for DOGE with Elon Musk

President-elect Trump continues to make key appointments for his next administration. Yesterday he announced that Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk would lead the new department of government efficiency. Earlier today Vivek Ramaswamy took to Twitter, saying, in part, if we are ever going to crush the bureaucracy, it's going to happen from the outside.

Just the hard truth. Today the department X account was launched with a tweet saying, "Working overtime to ensure that your X dollars will be spent  wisely." Ramaswamy joins us now. So you are partnering with the smartest guy in the country, no doubt about it. And the richest guy. But you look at Aelon Musk, and he's a genius.

If you can figure out a way to go save astronauts that are lost in space, bless you; I could never figure out that or 500 lifetimes. So I admire that. He's talking about $2 billion in cuts by identifying waste, fraud, and abuse. Is that a real number? That's a big number. 2 billion is not a big number, but 2 trillion is.

Sean: 2 trillion, and it was corrected.  I want to be clear about the scale of that thinking. We are not thinking small; we are playing big. We have a once-in-generation mandate right now. The American people have voted for drastic reform of the government, and our federal government is broken. It's no secret it's a fourth branch of government that makes most of the rules and rates for the bureaucracy that's hampering our economy.

So we want to go in and slash and burn the bureaucracy of LP Americans, stimulate the economy, and restore self-governance. The people we elect to run the government are not the ones who run the government anymore; it's these unelected bureaucrats. Republican politicians have talked about fixing this for a long time.

Not with a lot of progress. I think it will take a couple of outsiders. Musk and I have built a great friendship; we are working together intensely, and we won't stop until we get the job done. Sean: When Ronald Reagan became president, on the issue of defense, he called it a gap, a vulnerability. China and Russia have hypersonic missile technology; we do not.

We are going to have to spend a lot of money on defense to catch up and to surpass our enemies. Social security and Medicare are headed towards insolvency. We will have to spend money there. To me, that money is going to make up their energy dominance. That is where I think our greatest opportunity is. Your thoughts?  Look, part of what's holding back energy dominance in this country is that administrative state.

Vivek Ramaswamy

Look at the regulations of the Department of Interior, the slow permitting requirements, and how hard it is to open a new refinery. I think this is the root cause of our failure as a country—this unelected fourth branch of government. I think if you loot elected officials as these cute little puppets that come and go every while, not anymore.

There's a new sheriff in town; Donald Trump is the president. He's mandated us for radical, drastic reform of the federal bureaucracy with the learnings of that firsterm. Elon is solving major problems in physics. I came from the world of biology. What we are solving is not a natural problem. This is a man-de problem, and when you have a man-de problem, you better have a man-de solution.

That's what we are bringing to the table. We are like the brightest minds in the country. This is the equivalent of a modern Manhattan project. I think the major problem holding our country back is a federal bureaucracy. Target that cost, save money, and resource self-governance. I think we did something pretty novel, if I may say so.

This department of government efficiency is built with an d date. We want to be done on July 4, 2026. For the first time in history, creating a department is a new government project that is designed to end when its work is complete. On the 250th anniversary of Americans—America's declaration of independence—and that's the gift we want this country to receive at birth.

Sean: I hope Congress adopts your recommendations. They did not do so in the Reagan years. Under the first things he will look at?  We have a long list. A lot of this is to stay tuned for what's coming on the 20th. Some of his we want to come in a big way swinging on da one, but some examples: most federal employees, most Americans don't recognize this; they don't even show up to work.

If you tell people you have to affirm you want a job that you have to show up five days a week, how many employees are going to quit right out of the gates? Those are kinds of efficiencies, low-hanging fruit that Democrats and Republicans were black-and-white Americans alike, can agree. We should not be wasting that kind of money on a federal government.

In that sense, acknowledging this kind of waste, fraud, and a bus bureaucratic blo, we're going for the stuff at basic common sense that most Americans actually agree on, and I hope we will be able to help unite the country by eliminating waste, which is something that all Americans, regardless of their political affiliation, cage behind.

That's what we are thinking about it. sean: less than a minute, but I think part of it has to be baseline budgeting; eliminate the built-in increases every year that we have for every department. I think getting rid of the department of education, giving that money directly to states, or maybe adopting something like the penny plan; maybe it's the nickel plan, where you can't, you know, a nickel out of every dollar every year for five years, you balance the budget, which has not been done since Newt Gingrich was the speaker of the house.

About 30 seconds.  Funny enough, much of our spending is EV for programs whose authorization has lapsed. The authorization to spend the money, the appropriation has lapsed, and yet still the money goes out the door. That is how broken the bureaucracy is. I think it will take a couple of business guys to come in, this from the outside, and we will have fun while we are at it.

It will be the most transparent effort. We are aiming to make it transparent process so the American people can se how their money is bng wasted so we are all in it other same team to fix it. I can't wait for Donald Trump to get back in the whith out generation 20th. He's given us a broad mandate with his full support to get this done.