Biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who has been named to lead President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed Department of Government Efficiency alongside tech billionaire Elon Musk, promised on Sunday that many government agencies will soon be “deleted.”
“Elon and I aren’t in this for the credit,” Ramaswamy said on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures. “But I think we’re going to build the consensus to make the kind of deep cuts that haven’t been made for most of our history.”
After host Maria Bartiromo questioned whether the two plan to “close down entire agencies,” Ramaswamy said “mass reductions” will be made.
“We expect certain agencies to be deleted outright,” he said. “We expect mass reductions in force in areas of the federal government that are bloated. We expect massive cuts among federal contractors and others who are overbilling the federal government.”
Ramaswamy added: “I think people will be surprised by how quickly we’re able to move with some of those changes, given the legal backdrop the Supreme Court has given us.”
The founder of Roivant Sciences, a pharmaceutical company, who ran for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, told Bartiromo that he and Musk will assess the roles of America’s 4 million civil servants, claiming “there’s just too many of them.”
“We don’t need 4 million. We shouldn’t have 4 million civil servants who can’t be elected or can’t be removed from their positions. It’s anti-democratic,” he said. (Ramaswamy holds shares in BuzzFeed, HuffPost’s parent company.)
Bartiromo then asked him “which agency is the most bloated,” to which he replied, “That’s a tough competition.”
“President Trump’s talked extensively about areas like the Department of Education,” Ramaswamy added. “Obviously, those kinds of agencies shouldn’t even exist and should be returned to the states. But it’s a culture that’s pervaded the entire federal government, of hiring people who have no accountability to everyday Americans.”
Noting that it’s “not just about cutting cost,” Ramaswamy said, “Our work is done by July 4, 2026. Unlike every other government project, we don’t want this one to last. We want to go and fix the problem, dissolve and move on and set an example for how our federal government should run.”
The Department of Government Efficiency is not expected to be a government office, which would require congressional action. It is likely to only be an advisory panel.
Watch a clip from Ramaswamy’s appearance on Sunday Morning Futures.