Former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said Friday that one of President-elect Donald Trump's ideas to cut federal bureaucracy is to force workers back to the office.
The entrepreneur, who was tapped, along with Elon Musk, to head the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), told Tucker Carlson that slimming down staffing in Washington, D.C., is a priority.
After speaking about Trump's focus on immigration, Ramaswamy told The Tucker Carlson Show that he was focused on something else.
"The second mass deportation that we require: the mass deportation of millions of unelected federal bureaucrats out of the D.C. bureaucracy," he said, to which Carlson replied: "You can't do that."
The former Fox News host said those working in the federal government had a stronger tenure than those at Ivy League schools, making it difficult to fire them.
At last estimates, about 2.2 million people worked across a variety of agencies, including the Department of Education, Homeland Security and the Federal Reserve.
"If you literally just mandated that they have to show up for work, Monday through Friday, a radical idea, a good number of them would quit that way," Ramaswamy said, claiming that about 25 percent of the workforce would be lost this way without needing to fire anyone.
The federal government does have a telework policy in place, allowing employees to work remotely within reason.
His argument for cutting the workforce was that unelected officials were writing the rules that govern the U.S., rather than those in Congress, and that Trump will be the president to change that.
"We will put the public on notice to say these tens of thousands of regulations that have been written by federal bureaucrats, they are null and void because they were never written by the people we elected," he said.
"If you have 50 percent fewer regulations, that creates a sort of industrial logic to say we don't need 50 percent of the people around anymore, either."
Carlson then suggested that those workers could be used to fill jobs across the U.S., or that agencies could be placed around the country rather than just around the capital.
While protections are in place for individual employees, Ramaswamy said that they do not necessarily apply to a mass firing of department staff.
One option he floated was that 22,000 people could be let go from the Federal Reserve, leaving behind about 2,000 employees to focus on the stability of the U.S. dollar.
"DOGE will soon begin crowdsourcing examples of government waste, fraud, & and abuse," Ramaswamy said on X, formerly Twitter, after his nomination by Trump on Tuesday. "Americans voted for drastic government reform & they deserve to be part of fixing it."
Trump has pledged to dismantle the Department of Education, while also suggesting other departments could be dramatically downsized during his second term.
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