Three Out of Four Federal Bureaucrats Should Go Home, Vivek Ramaswamy Says

Lex Fridman opens by asking Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur, author of *Truths: The Future of America First*, and 2024 Republican presidential candidate, what conservatism actually is. Ramaswamy treats the question as an indictment of his own side. The modern Republican Party, he says, has become excellent at naming what it opposes: wokeism, transgender ideology, climate ideology, COVID policy, the Biden agenda, the Harris agenda. The list can be extended indefinitely. What has gone missing is a vision of what conservatives stand *for*.

He dates the cost of that vacuum to the 2022 midterms. Party insiders blamed Donald Trump, blamed abortion, blamed this or that discrete issue. Ramaswamy's diagnosis is plainer: Republicans had practiced criticizing Joe Biden so thoroughly that they forgot to say who they were. His own campaign, he says, was an attempt to fill that hole. The positive list he offers is four founding ideals from 1776: merit, so the best person gets the job without regard to genetics; free speech, including opinions he calls heinous; self-governance, meaning elected officials rather than bureaucrats actually run the government; and the rule of law, which for him includes the southern border.

Culturally he adds a fifth layer: the anchors of identity should be truth, the individual, the family, the nation, and God, ranked ahead of race, gender, sexuality, and climate. Self-governance is the one he treats as most urgent. The people Americans elect to run the government, he says, are no longer the people who run it. That claim will organize most of the next two hours.

Fridman asks him to steelman progressivism. Ramaswamy does it without a smirk. The most powerful left-wing argument in the American setting, he says, is that the country has been imperfect at living up to the ideals it preached. Founders spoke of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness while many of them owned slaves and while women and other disempowered groups were shut out. That history, the argument goes, built a power structure that still lasts. Eighteen sixty is not ancient on a human timescale. Correcting those imbalances may require severe steps before equality of opportunity is real.

His first rebuttal is that the cure recreates the disease. He says something he knows will isolate him among prominent conservatives: in the last year and a half he has seen a rise in anti-Black and anti-minority racism. That is curious, he argues, because the prior decade had brought the country as close as it has ever been to Martin Luther King's promised land — every American able to vote, and the highest jobs in the land open without race as a barrier. The backlash, in his telling, is downstream of twenty years of left-wing obsession with racial equity. Take something from a person because of genetics, and you foster animus toward the groups around them.

He uses Springfield, Ohio, where he was born and still lives about an hour away, as a present-tense example. Put 20,000 newcomers into a town of 50,000, he says, people who do not know the language, do not follow traffic laws, and do not assimilate, and a reactionary backlash is predictable. He does not blame the native residents or the Haitians themselves. Many arrived after the 2010 earthquake under Temporary Protected Status, a program whose first word is *temporary*. What began in sympathy, he argues, produced the division it claimed to avoid.

The second rebuttal is philosophical. "Merit and group quotas are incompatible," he says. "You can have one or the other, you can't have both." No two people have the same skill set; that inequality of gifts is, for him, the beauty of human diversity. A true meritocracy lets each person reach the maximum of God-given potential with nobody standing in the way, which necessarily means different outcomes in different spheres. Group equity, he concludes, is purchased at the cost of meritocracy, and often ends up hurting the people it claimed to help.

Fridman brings up Ramaswamy's debate with Mark Cuban. Before answering Cuban's best point, Ramaswamy unpacks the acronym people repeat by muscle memory. DEI, as practiced by companies, nonprofits, and universities, strives for specific racial, gender, and sexual-orientation representation and for equal group outcomes. The advertised *D* is diversity. The effect he cares about is the opposite: a vehicle for sacrificing diversity of thought. If some opinions are deemed hostile to minorities, those opinions must be excluded in the name of diversity, which means actual viewpoint diversity dies.

The case he cites landed at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. A woman wore a red sweater on Fridays to honor veterans — her son had served — and invited colleagues to join her. A minority employee called it a microaggression. The employer told her to stop. She hung the sweater on the back of her chair. That was forbidden too. In the name of a welcoming workplace, he says, the regime produced hostility to thought, and often legal liability for any organization that even permits certain viewpoints. That, not anti-meritocracy, is his number-one complaint.

Cuban's argument, which Ramaswamy calls a good one, is that diversity sends you looking for talent in places you had not looked, so you find special people. His reply: great, and you do not need a three-letter acronym to do it. In a truly free market, firms already have an incentive to hire the best or lose to competitors. The market he sees is not free. To be a government contractor today, he says, you must adopt racial and gender representation targets. Capitalists cannot have it both ways: if the practice is good for companies, let them do it; if the government must force it, the market case has already failed.

Fridman wonders why committees assembled to do good so often bully people. Ramaswamy takes the question out of left-versus-right and into institutional logic. A bureaucracy's top goal is its own existence. What looks like wokeness is often the appearance of virtue used to dodge accountability. After 9/11 the United States invaded Iraq, a country he says was not responsible for the attacks, a move the foreign-policy establishment now regrets. If you are General Mark Milley, he says, you would rather talk about white rage or systemic racism than about the military's substantive failures. He calls the move blowing woke smoke.

Schools offer the same pattern. It is easier, he says, to claim that math is racist because test scores differ by demographic group than to admit that inner-city public schools have failed to teach Black children mathematics, or to unwind a zip-code system that traps kids in bad schools. The signaling is not really about advancing a social cause. It strengthens the bureaucracy and insulates it from criticism. That is why his own focus has shifted from combating wokeness, which he now treats as a symptom, to combating the managerial class itself — in government, companies, nonprofits, and universities.

Fridman agrees you need managers, but as few as possible. Ramaswamy goes further: the phenomenon is not left or right, it is anti-American. The founders were inventors, not committee professionals. Benjamin Franklin signed the Declaration and also invented the lightning rod, the Franklin stove, and musical instruments later used by Mozart and Beethoven. Thomas Jefferson designed the Virginia State Capitol dome and, Fridman is reminded, invented the swivel chair while writing the Declaration of Independence at thirty-three. Old World England needed bureaucracy because a monarch cannot govern directly. America, Ramaswamy says, was founded on a rejection of the idea that the people cannot be trusted to govern themselves and must be protected from their worst impulses by enlightened technocrats. "What made America itself is we said hell no to that vision."

Asked how to make government smaller, Ramaswamy starts with risk. There is no free lunch. One risk is gradualism: imagine the ideal end state, then cut with a chisel like a work of art. Conservatives have tried that for years, he says, and an eight-headed hydra grows the head back. The other risk is cutting too much — not only fat but some muscle. He cannot offer option C, a cut of exactly the right amount, because nobody knows that amount in advance. In this moment he would take the second risk. Donald Trump in 2016 was the closest any politician has come; a second term, he thinks, could come closer.

The method he would use is a 75 percent headcount reduction across the federal bureaucracy, sending people home, shutting agencies that should not exist, and rescinding every regulation Congress never passed. In a self-governing democracy, elected representatives make the laws, not unelected bureaucrats. He calls that both the largest economic stimulus available and the most effective way to restore self-governance. Fridman cites Javier Milei's whiteboard video, striking ministries in Argentina, and asks whether America can do anything similar when the economy still looks strong and the country is still a hub of culture and innovation.

Ramaswamy's answer depends on the benchmark. America is not built on complacency, he says; it is built on the pursuit of excellence. It may still be the greatest nation on earth and still be in decline relative to its own past. The managerial class, in his telling, is sucking the lifeblood out of innovative culture. Then comes the thought experiment he is slightly glib about: on day one, unelected federal workers whose Social Security number ends in an odd digit are out; of those who remain, those whose number starts with an odd digit are out. Two filters, 75 percent gone. The virtue is legal, not managerial: no lawsuits over gender, race, or political viewpoint. Anyone who has run a large company, he adds, knows that 25 percent of the people do 80 to 90 percent of the useful work. Government agencies are no different.

Fridman notes that a purge of that scale would attract the ultra-competent, who today feel the machine would swallow them. Ramaswamy agrees: clear 75 percent of the deck and real innovators can show up. The random lottery is a thought experiment, not a policy prescription. The live version would still cut at large scale, but screen for competence and knowledge of the Constitution. What it requires, he says, is leadership with a spine — something conservative presidents have gestured toward and never quite done.

As CEO of Roivant, years into a company that had already grown large, Ramaswamy still tried to interview every candidate, screening for culture. The starter question was basic: why did you leave your last job? "I wasn't paid enough" almost never appeared, even in the top ten. The number-one answer was that people felt unable to do the true maximum of their potential in the prior role. The same force, he says, also explained who left Roivant. Capitalism and meritocracy, in this telling, are systems that let individuals flourish; when a person's skills point at a different mission, leaving is not a failure.

Bring that observation back to government and the missions have been obfuscated. He doubts that anyone at the Department of Health and Human Services, including the person who leads it, could give a coherent account of what HHS is for. The Department of Defense is easier: win wars, and more importantly avoid wars through strength, and protect the homeland and the people who live there. A committee class dilutes mission until the best people will not come, which then recruits more of the committee class — a self-perpetuating downward spiral he calls the blob.

Fridman describes the individual version: a person has capacity to do something excellent, then barriers appear. Great companies minimize friction; the managerial class is incentivized to create it. Ramaswamy agrees that some sand in the gears can be a defensive mechanism, but past a point it becomes cancer and kills the host. He sketches a three-way balance among a creator class, everyday citizen-stakeholders, and a managerial class that should liaison between them. All three have a role. For a century, starting with Woodrow Wilson's administrative state, metastasizing through FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society, and aided even by Richard Nixon, the committee class has taken far too much of the power.

Fridman asks him to steelman the pain of closing the Department of Education. Ramaswamy starts with a question most defenders skip: why was the department created? Its original purpose, he says, was to stop states — especially in the South — from siphoning taxpayer dollars from predominantly Black school districts to white ones. That was not theoretical sixty years ago. It is not a relevant purpose today. Inner-city districts, many of them predominantly Black, now often spend more per student for worse results, which suggests that extra dollars can reward bureaucratic failure rather than buy learning.

Having lost the old mission, the department extrapolated racial equality into a racial-equity vision imposed through curriculum. Federal money is only about 10 percent of public-school funding, but it comes with strings. He cites a Great Plains school denied funding because archery was in the curriculum — a sport he likes for combining mental focus and physical aptitude, though the preference is beside the point. A locality found archery educational; the federal government, in his view, has no business withholding money over that. The pattern is general: when the founding problem is gone, the standing bureaucracy finds new purposes and does more damage along the way.

His constructive alternative is the difference between a task force and an agency. A task force finishes, celebrates, and moves on. A standing bureaucracy hunts for work after the first reason for its birth is solved. American culture, he says, does not celebrate institutions that achieve a purpose and close; government is a one-way ratchet, which is how a century of metastasis arrived. Asked what government should do that capitalism cannot, he names two functions that cover 80 to 90 percent of a proper role: protect the border — "a nation without borders is not a nation" — and stop private parties from externalizing costs, the river you may not dump chemicals into. Interstate highways he will not die on; infrastructure tied to national security is different.

Fridman asks about Elon Musk's proposed Department of Government Efficiency. Ramaswamy is biased: he and Musk have discussed the idea for a year and a half, having become friends during the presidential campaign. Who is more hardcore? Musk, he says, is pretty hardcore. Ramaswamy said 75 percent; Musk said *at least* 75 percent. The shared trait is a willingness to take the risk and see what happens. The sun will still rise. There will be broken glass. Once you accept that, the cut is less frightening. The operational question is ranking. A 75 percent thinning of the federal government has frictional costs that make other policy goals harder in the short run. That scale of cut happens only if it is the top priority.

If he had to summarize his ideology in a nutshell, it would be to terminate the American nanny state in all its forms: the entitlement state, the regulatory state, and the foreign-policy nanny state that subsidizes allies who do not pay their share. Do that, he says, and you revive a republic that would make George Washington proud. On defense, he is not a simple cutter. If protecting allies serves American interests, do it — if the allies pay. The lesser reason is money: a $34 trillion debt, with interest soon the largest federal line item. The greater reason is skin in the game. Most NATO countries, he says, still fail the 2 percent-of-GDP test; Germany in particular is arbitraging the United States.

The irony is that homeland defense is what America does most poorly. Other than the Coast Guard, the military is barely used to stop southern-border crossings. The country is more vulnerable, he argues, to hypersonic missiles, electromagnetic-pulse attacks, and cyberattacks that could drop planes from the sky because chips depend on the grid. He is not in the increase-versus-decrease camp. The money is spent in the wrong places. Number one should be protecting the physical homeland, which is different from foreign interventionism for its own sake. Eisenhower named the military-industrial complex; Ramaswamy thinks the deeper corruption is cultural conceit — an expert class that scares you into treating its beliefs as automatically right.

Fridman asks whether Joe Biden is not in control because of age or because of the presidency itself. Ramaswamy says both, accentuated in Biden's case: after the June debate, nobody believes he is a functioning president, yet the deeper problem predates him. The people Americans elect have not really been running the government. He illustrates with a late-night dinner in Japan. A pharmaceutical CEO told him he could order a research head to kill a project, hear "yes, sir," come back six months later, and find the same money on the same project. In a culture where firing is nearly impossible, the employee does not work for you; in a perverse sense, you work for them. That, Ramaswamy says, is how the U.S. executive branch has operated. About four million federal bureaucrats sit behind civil-service protections; 99.9 percent, on the conventional view, cannot be touched by the president. He thinks a constitutionally trained president could find more daylight than conventional wisdom allows.

Inside the conservative movement he sees a fork. Some want to seize the regulatory state and point it at pro-conservative, pro-worker goals. He is sympathetic to the goals and opposed to the method. He does not want a right-wing nanny state replacing a left-wing one. He wants it dismantled. Trump ran on draining the swamp in 2016 and, by most accounts, did not. Ramaswamy's explanation is partly legal. The Supreme Court backdrop is different now. *West Virginia v. EPA* (2022), which he calls perhaps the most important case of the generation, held that a "major question" Congress has not enacted cannot be imposed by an unelected regulator's pen — which, he says, makes most federal regulations unconstitutional. *Loper Bright* discarded Chevron deference, so courts no longer must bow to an agency's reading of the law. *SEC v. Jarkesy* ended in-house tribunals that wrote, enforced, and judged the same rules.

Law-enforcement agencies, the Court has now said, have themselves been breaking the law. That is un-American and untenable, and it is the best chance in a generation to gut the regulatory state — if someone has a spine of steel. Fridman doubts Trump is both the last and the best hope, and notes that in their own conversation Trump's priorities sounded more border-first. Ramaswamy clarifies: last best hope *in this cycle*, and he does not agree with 100 percent of what Trump says. The border is a near-term fix they share. Shrinking bureaucracy is a decade-scale project. Walking into government, Fridman adds, is not walking into Twitter with a sink. Every expert will tell you that you are the asshole. Ramaswamy's answer is the same spine: cut excess as quickly as possible, and let that be how the country is saved.

Fridman poses the tension: an estimated 14 million people in the country illegally, and Ramaswamy has talked about mass deportation, which takes money and manpower that seem to conflict with shutting government down. Ramaswamy goes back to the two proper roles. Protecting borders is one of them. His four-year formula is "a tale of two mass deportations" — of millions who should not be here, and of millions of unelected bureaucrats out of Washington. Border staff, he says, are not even 0.1 percent of federal employees, so a 75 percent cut still leaves room to *increase* that sliver. On family separation, he notes that some 350,000 mothers are in U.S. prisons and did not take their children with them. Enforcing the law has costs in every domain; the border should not be a special exemption.

Practically he would start with people who have committed additional crimes, then with people already in detention, returned to a country of origin or a safe third country — the Australian model, which he says collapsed fraud rates by detaining claimants until cases are adjudicated. If the country has had the largest illegal influx in its history, the largest mass deportation follows as a matter of logic. Springfield's Haitians, he repeats, did not even break the law to arrive; Temporary Protected Status expired in meaning when lawsuits stretched it 8, 10, 14 years past the earthquake. If the real case for keeping people is economic, use an economic visa. Do not launder labor policy through asylum.

The system as designed, he argues, incentivizes lying. He tells of a man with Princeton and Harvard Business School credentials, a former professional tennis player and concert pianist, who cannot get a green card after a decade — while the practically best advice, which Ramaswamy refused to give, would have been to fly to Mexico and claim asylum. A New York Times story he cites involved a Russian woman who claimed persecution as an LGBTQ advocate under Putin and later admitted she was not gay and did not even like gay people. Birthright-citizenship tourism and years of U.S. work followed by a mansion in Mexico are, for him, the same pattern. Forget demonization, he says; build an immigration system on honesty, screening for language, assimilation, and civic ideals, not for the willingness to check an asylum box.

Fridman raises Ann Coulter's "not people like you" line. Ramaswamy treats it as a widely shared blood-and-soil current on the right, not a quirk of one interviewer, and rejects it as anti-American. American identity, for him, is unabiding allegiance to founding ideals, not genetic lineage. Every other nation can outcompete the United States on blood and soil; Italy and Japan have longer, purer ethnic claims. Native Americans would then have a greater claim than the Mayflower. People will die for abstractions, he insists: the Revolution was fought for self-governance, free speech, and free exercise of religion. He gives Coulter credit for saying out loud what many believe. He thinks most of the conservative movement is still with the creedal view, and that the fight over that question will define the movement's future.

Fridman asks for a steelman against Trump and offers his own: the fake-elector scheme, the 2020 aftermath, and a posture of whining instead of winning — the opposite of the standard in Ramaswamy's *Nation of Victims*. Ramaswamy first states a principle he preaches to his children and to the left: "We're not gonna save this country by being victims, we're gonna save this country by being victorious." Life is not fair; the number-one factor in whether you hit a goal is still you. The strongest anti-Trump case he will actually make is not MSNBC's "threat to democracy," which he calls nonsense. It is generational. Young voters asked whether Biden was too old and too far from their concerns; after Biden was swapped out, that question sits more heavily on Trump.

Pressed on 2020, Fridman wants a president with a clear relationship to the truth, who does not play victim, who walks away with honor if he loses. Ramaswamy says he has seen growth and more ambition for a second term, including in Fridman's own interview. Then he widens the frame. On the eve of the election, he says, the Hunter Biden laptop story — potentially showing a presidential candidate's family compromised by foreign interests — was suppressed as misinformation. The *New York Post*'s Twitter account was locked. Censorship decisions, we now know, were made at the behest of bureaucratic actors threatening tech companies. He calls that possibly the most undemocratic event in the country's history, and he believes, based on post-election polling he cannot prove, that without the suppression Trump would be president now.

His constructive fix is specific: single-day voting on Election Day as a national holiday, paper ballots, and government-issued voter ID matched to the voter file — the system used in Puerto Rico. He pledges, as a leader in the movement, to stop complaints about stolen elections once those measures exist. Bias in reporting, he tells Fridman, is a different problem from censorship. He would condemn, with equal force, any case of the government ordering tech firms to bury information that helped Republicans; he says he does not know of one. The 2020 mood, as he reconstructs it, was a year of lockdowns, being told to sit down unless you were a BLM or Antifa rioter, then a systematically information-starved election. The reaction to coordinated censorship, history says, is never good.

Fridman worries about chaos if Trump loses by a whisker. Ramaswamy will not narrow the danger to a close loss. In two months Trump faced two assassination attempts with actual gunshots, something the country had not seen in a generation and has already normalized. It is strange, he says, to obsess over Trump as a threat while he is the one receiving fire from assailants echoing Democratic-machine language. Joe Biden's core message for years was that Trump endangered democracy itself; keep saying that, and a nation skates on thin ice. The way through is a unifying landslide, Reagan 1980 and 1984, not a 50.001 percent margin that cable news calls six days later. On the Taylor Swift posts, Ramaswamy shrugs: Trump is one of the funnier presidents in a long time, and levity in a divided country is not the substance he prefers to debate.

On Ukraine, Ramaswamy puts each side's interest on the table. Russia's fear is NATO shifting the balance west; an uncomfortable American fact, he says, is James Baker's early-1990s assurance to Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand one inch past East Germany — after which it expanded farther than it had during the USSR's life. The Western fact is that Russia was the aggressor across a sovereign border. The deal he wants would give Russia assurances on NATO's scope, extract hard consequences for further violations, reopen economic relations with the West, and, most of all, condition territorial talks on Russia leaving its military alliance with China, pulling forces out of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, and ending joint exercises off the Aleutians. "Vladimir Putin does not enjoy being Xi Jinping's little brother," he says. Combined, Russia's military and hypersonics plus China's navy and economy are a real threat; split, they are less so.

He analogizes to Nixon pulling red China away from the USSR. In June 2022, he claims, Volodymyr Zelenskyy was ready to talk until Boris Johnson, amid his own domestic trouble, convinced him to keep fighting — moral hazard when someone else pays for your security. Hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives later, Ukraine's leverage is not better. Fridman adds levers: EU membership without NATO, and a U.S.-Russia bill for reconstruction. Ramaswamy likes the abundance of chips; if each side has only one immovable red line, there is nothing to negotiate. He would call Putin. Avoiding a U.S.-China war, he continues, starts by lowering existential stakes: 95 percent of American ibuprofen, and even parts of the military-industrial base, depend on China, which even a Hayek libertarian should not accept for an army. Decoupling requires more trade with Japan, South Korea, India, and the Philippines, not less trade with everyone.

Strategic ambiguity, he argues, is how world wars start. His hard red line, stated in the campaign and repeated here, is that China should not annex Taiwan by force in any foreseeable future. The United States, for now, should not suddenly upend decades of One China deference; formal recognition of Taiwan as independent may be Beijing's red line. Strengthen ties with India so that, in a conflict, China would worry about oil moving through the Indian Ocean and the Andaman Sea. The Thucydides trap is a theory, not a law of physics; America need not be the declining power, and conflict need not be inevitable. He points to results: no major wars in Trump's four years, versus major conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine under Biden-Harris. If your single issue is staying out of World War III, he says, the case for Trump is clear.

Nationalism, a chapter title in his book, "isn't a bad word" when it is civic rather than ethnic. He praises Giorgia Meloni for not apologizing for Italian identity and for not reading the papers, and Narendra Modi for curing India's psychological inferiority complex. He quotes Malcolm X: a nation without appreciation for its history is a tree without roots. Asked about 2028, he will not rule it out. A generation is hungry for purpose; Trump is the right person for the next four years; after that, whatever has maximal impact. He would relish debating John Fetterman, Colorado's governor, or Ro Khanna — people who will buck their own tribe. His own heresies include opposing credit-card interest caps as price controls, factory farming's crony exemptions, and mega-money in politics. He thinks in quiet stretches after running, tennis, or lifting, with a notebook. In any disagreement his first impulse is "Are they right?" Curiosity, not performed calm, is how he stays in the heat. Jefferson wrote some 16,000 letters; four books in four years, Ramaswamy says, is nothing next to that.