Summary
➡ The text discusses plans to improve efficiency and reduce waste in the federal government. It suggests that many government employees don’t work full-time and that this is a waste of money. The text also proposes budgeting reforms, such as eliminating automatic increases for departments and possibly getting rid of the Department of Education. It also discusses the idea of cutting a small amount from every dollar spent to balance the budget. The text criticizes the government for continuing to spend money on programs whose authorization has expired and suggests that business-minded outsiders could help fix these issues. The text also compares the efficiency of private companies and government departments, arguing that private companies are more efficient because they have to justify their budgets and add value, while government departments are more focused on securing their budgets than on efficiency or value.
➡ The government uses taxpayer money to fund various projects, including expensive homeless shelters and the United States Postal Service, which despite being its own entity, receives financial aid for initiatives like electric delivery trucks. This spending is justified by increasing taxes, leading to more money being taken from the public.
Transcript
Vivek Ramaswamy joins us now. All right, so you’re partnering with the smartest guy in the country. There’s no doubt about it. And the richest guy. But you look at Elon Musk and he’s a genius. If you can figure out a way to go save those astronauts that are lost in space, God bless you, I could never figure that out in 500 lifetimes. So I admire that. He’s talking about $2 billion in cuts by identifying waste, fraud and abuse. Doug Dove says, I’d rather have Vivek than Elon Musk auditing the government, big conflict of interest.
Why? They both businessmen. How is it a conflict of interest? I don’t really care. I just want the government audited all across the board. I want every single branch audited. Then I want them to start with each state and then I want to go into the cities. Is that a realistic number? That’s a big number. Yeah, $2 billion is in the big number, but $2 trillion is, Sean. I’m sorry. Look, $2 trillion. I stand corrected. No, no, I want to be very clear about the scale. I want to be very clear about the scale that we’re thinking here.
We’re not thinking small. We’re playing big here because we have a once in a 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 that it is a fourth branch of government, the administrative state that makes most of the rules that creates a federal bureaucracy that’s hampering our economy. What do we want to do? We want to go in and slash and burn that bureaucracy to help Americans stimulate the economy and to restore self-governance against Sean. The people we elect to run the government, they’re not even 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 do think it’s going to take a couple of outsiders. Elon and I have built a great friendship over the last year. We’re working together intensely and we’re not going to stop till we get the job done. Can John hear what he said? Elon and I have built an incredible friendship over the last year and we’re going to work together and we’re not going to stop to get the job done. Let me tell you why this works, okay, from my lens as a person that looks at it from a business perspective.
The reason why this works is because Vivek is a businessman that is successful, self-made, outsider. Elon is a businessman that is successful, self-made, outsider, not a career politician. That’s number one. Number two, Elon Musk is an expert at making things and putting things together and making sure that things are operating efficiently. One of his philosophies, in the philosophy of Tesla, and I don’t know it right off the top of my head, but it’s a lot that has to do with if it doesn’t deserve to be there or if it doesn’t serve a purpose, then we got to get rid of it.
We need to run efficiently. We need to increase margins. We don’t need to have anything more than what we need in order to be successful, so on and so forth. So they run lean. One of the things that he did in Twitter, and they predicted that Twitter all of a sudden would crash and it wouldn’t be working and all of that. Twitter is running, or X, formerly known as Twitter, is running better. It has gotten bigger. It has a better audience, and the first thing that he did was get rid of all of that bloat and all of the people in there that was hiding.
They had masseuses. They had all of this stuff, and he ran more efficiently than ever before, and he’s actually profitable for the first time on X, and Twitter had never been profitable since its inception. But here’s how it benefits to have both, because some people said you only want one. No, I think that it benefits to have both. A, they have a great friendship. B, they look at things from a business perspective, but they both serve from different perspectives. But here’s the caveat. Elon Musk, I don’t think that he has the full capacity, but I think that he has the mindset to understand exactly what you need to look for in order to create government efficiency.
Vivek, dedicating himself 100% of the job, can execute on not only his own vision, but also Elon Musk’s expertise, because he understands things from a business perspective. This is a match made in heaven. A person that was potentially going to run to be President of the United States of America, and Vivek, an expert businessman, but the person that was running for President of the United States of America ran from a business perspective. He can execute not only on his own vision, but also in partnership with Elon Musk. He has the resources and then they can go in with no kind of agenda because they’re not lifetime politicians and create government efficiency, which would trim the national debt and hopefully get rid of over $2 trillion worth of bloat.
What more do you want from these guys? When Ronald Reagan became President, on the issue of defense, he called it a gap of vulnerability. China, Russia, they have hypersonic missile technology. We do not. We’re going to have to spend a lot of money on defense to catch up and to surpass our enemies. Social security, Medicare are headed towards insolvency. We’ll have to spend money there. To me, that money is going to be made up through energy dominance. That’s 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.
Look at the regulations coming out of the Department of Interior, the slow permitting requirements, how hard it is to open a new refinery. So I think that is the root cause of our failure as a country, is this unelected fourth branch of government. And I think they look at elected officials as these cute little puppets that come and go every little while. Not anymore. There’s a new sheriff in town. Donald Trump’s the president. He has mandated us for radical, drastic reform of this federal bureaucracy with the learnings of that first term. And you look, Elon and I, I mean, Elon’s solving major problems of physics.
I came from the world of biology. What we’re solving here now is not a natural problem. This is a manmade problem. And when you have a manmade problem, you better darn well have a manmade solution. That’s what we’re bringing to the table. We’re assembling the brightest minds in the country. This is the equivalent of a modern Manhattan project to take on. I think the major problem holding our country back, it’s the federal bureaucracy. Target that cost, save the money, restore self governance. I think we did something pretty novel here. If I may say so, if I just want to say this government department of government efficiency, it is built with an end to date.
We want to be done by July 4th, 2026. So for the first time in history, creating a department, creating a new government project that is designed to end when its work is complete, that’s on the 250th anniversary of America’s declaration of independence. And that’s the gift we want to give this country on that birthday. They don’t even want to sit there and hold on to positions and then leverage that in order to continue to have lifetime positions for the people that’s assembled in order to solve for this problem. What more do you want from these guys? They are basically giving back.
You got Iron Man and whoever else, Iron Man and Bruce Banner without, but the other Bruce, that’s just smart without the rage, the Hulk rage. You got Iron Man and Bruce Banner that came together in order to solve for a problem. And they said, listen, and this ain’t going to be forever. 2026, we’re going to be done with this, is the target date. And we want to pair all of this now, get all of this, root out all of this waste, hopefully save the country $2 trillion a year and then be done with this by 2026 and move on with our lives and go accomplish other things.
What more do you want from this guy? This is what draining the swamp looks like. Well, I hope Congress adopts your recommendations. They did not do so in the Reagan years with the grace commission. What are the first things you’re going to look at? Look, we got a long list and a lot of this is to stay tuned for what’s coming on January 20th because some of this we do want to come as in a big way swinging on day one. But I’ll give you some examples, Sean. Most federal employees right now, most Americans don’t recognize this.
They don’t even show up to work. So if you tell people you have to affirm that you want a job, that you have to show up to work five days a week, how many of those employees are going to quit right out the gate? That’s a question we should ask. Those are the kinds of inefficiencies, low hanging fruit that Democrats and Republicans or black or white Americans alike can agree on. We should not be wasting that kind of money as a federal government. And so in that sense, tackling this kind of waste, fraud, abuse, bureaucratic bloat, we’re going for the stuff that’s basic common sense that most Americans actually agree on.
And I hope we’re going to actually be able to help unite the country by eliminating waste, which is something that all Americans, regardless of partisan affiliation, can get behind. And that’s how Ilana and I are thinking about it. I have 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 somebody said, didn’t Tony start the end games war? Nope, he didn’t.
Tony was right about building a thing in order to prevent the. Listen, they were already coming. I’m not about to get into the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe. I’m not doing it. We’re going to focus. It’s the nickel plan where you cut, you know, a nickel out of every dollar every year for five years. You balance the budget, which has not been done since New Gingrich was the Speaker of the House. You have about 30 seconds. Well, yeah, well, funny enough, Sean, actually, much of our spending is even for programs whose authorization has lapsed.
So the authorization to spend the money, the appropriation has lapsed and yet still the money still goes out the door. That’s how broken the bureaucracy is. So I think it’s going to take a couple of business guys to come in, do this from the outside. We’re going to have fun while we’re at it. It’s going to be the most transparent effort. We’re certainly aiming to make this a transparent process so the American people can see how their money is being wasted. So we’re all in it on the same team to fix it.
I can’t wait for Donald Trump to get back in that White House on January 20th. He’s given us a broad mandate with his full support to get this done. I’m grateful to him for that. And you and I are pretty excited to get started. So let me, let me break this down and shout out to the Cartier family. I love them. They are great content creators. I absolutely watch their stuff and they phenomenal. I love the Cartier family. All right. I’m subscribed to their stuff and all of that. Let me say this.
In corporate America, this is what happens. Okay. What happens is the budgets are allocated based off of what’s used. Okay. So let me break it down like this. I work for a bank. In that banking system, they have different departments. Okay. Which includes maybe a technology department that then have sub departments that need resources from the bank in order to continue to add value and keep the bank up and running. You got branches, upper management, mortgage, services, IT services, innovation, research and development, all of these different departments, right? Now, at the end of the fiscal year or going into the next fiscal year, how do they determine what kind of budget do they allocate to different departments? Well, one of the things that they do is they have a timekeeping system, not necessarily to prevent you from getting paid, but to determine exactly how much is costing them every single week every single month and every single quarter of how much money is coming into the bank and how much they have to allocate to different departments.
Well, your managers are going to say, hey, make sure you get your time in, make sure you get your time in. Now you’re going to get your paycheck no matter what. They say, hey, make sure you build to this particular project and make sure you put this inside of this particular project and make sure you bucket this amount of money, this amount of time in this particular project. Make sure you get your time in, make sure you get your time in these systems. Then at the end of the fiscal year, they then say, hey, y’all didn’t even need that much money over there for what y’all are doing.
We need to take some money from over here and then we’re going to put it over there or this is how much we’re going to save for the bank. And then they start to develop their budgets based off of how much money they think is going to be allocated to different departments. So now the directors and the managers and the me’s can go back and they can say, well, listen, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We need 10 people from this department. We need this. We need this budget. We need this budget because this is how much it’s going to cost us or this is how much we need to allocate in order to deploy this project.
This is how much it’s going to cost us to be able to develop this new app, whatever so on and so forth, right? So they’re just going based off of the numbers, the data, what’s being input to then advocate for getting the budget to hire new people or keep that department open because why? Because it’s not so much about whether or not you’re doing things great for the bank or the corporate environment. It’s more about whether or not you allocate money to keep people’s jobs because we’re humans. We got the human element in it.
Oh man, I need to make sure that I got everybody’s job. I got seven employees, three contractors, 10 people. Hey, listen, don’t worry about it. I’m going to make sure that we advocate for that budget. Make sure y’all get y’all time in or whatever so on and so forth. That way we can go in and say, hey, we actually operating under capacity and we still getting a lot done. Let me make sure I keep that budget. It’s also about keeping the department open. It’s also about keeping jobs. It’s also about justifying why you should still be there.
And so what we see in the government is that times 1000 because the government is more or less focused on making sure that they get budget allocation than they are about creating efficiency and adding value into the United States of America. So then what Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswami would do, they go in and say, hey, wait a minute, wait a minute. Y’all just billing and y’all just charging money, but what value do you actually add into the federal government? Because it’s different when you’re talking about a private company or a publicly traded company.
We talking about something that’s being supported by American tax dollars. You operate much more efficient when you operate in a small business. You operate much more efficient when you got to answer the chairman, but the federal government don’t have to answer to anybody, which is why you’ve never seen any department that’s been created finish the job and then be dismantled and they go a separate ways. Why? Because they’re more focused on making sure they allocate for the budget instead of being focused on whether or not they’re actually doing a job and creating efficiency within the government.
And so now when we say all of these jobs are being added in a quarter of October and this and that and so on and so forth, they added this many government jobs, but not this many private equity jobs. That’s why you see places like the postal service, not turning a profit whatsoever, but they keep taking advantage of taxpayer dollars. Nowhere near as efficient as maybe an Amazon, a FedEx, UPS, because they’re not a private business. They’re supported by taxpayers, so they know that y’all always going to be able to give them money.
Why would they have to create government efficiency? Why would they have to speed up the process of getting better vehicles? Amazon enrolled out a whole bunch of electric vehicles made by Rivian way faster than we can allocate all of the budget that they’ve created in order to create EV vehicles. They still ran around in these busted vans delivering mail, created no efficiencies. Why? Because they don’t have any incentive to do so because all they can do is say, hey, we want more money. We don’t have to be profitable. We don’t have to be efficient.
We are needed by the government. We have to be here. And so what you need is somebody that’s from the outside to come in and run it like a business because it’s your money, your taxpayer dollars, that’s going out. That’s why they’re able to build homeless shelters to the tune of a half a billion dollars, $165 million, $600,000 per unit over in California. They’re allocating your monies towards permanent homeless places that cost $600,000 per unit. Well, they never had to justify it because they could just tax you more and take more of your money and then say, hey, we got a budget deficit.
We’re going to fill that gap by taxing more money, more property taxes, so on and so forth. Somebody said the Postal Service does not use government funds. Oh, yeah? You sure about that? Interesting. Okay. You know, I’m always open to being wrong. Whoo-whoo-whoo-whoo! I’m always open to being wrong. I have no problem whatsoever. Always want to make sure that I’m given the right information and I’m not given false information, all right? So let’s deep dive into it. Okay. The government has provided some assistance to the United States Postal Service, Postal Service Reform Act of 2022.
The 2020 CARES Act, the USPS received $10 billion in funding from this act, 2022. USPS received $3 billion in taxpayer funding in 2022 to purchase electric delivery trucks and charging. Oh, just like I just said, huh? Just like I just said. So, technically, they are supposed to be their own entity, but guess what? They still receive funds from the United States of America, your tax dollars, in order to supplement the fact that they are not a profitable entity. They 100% are receiving money from taxpayers. So, technically, you’ll say, well, no, no, no, no, no, no.
They just sell stamps and, you know, they just make sure that, you know, they sell PO boxes. Who do you think funding these electric vehicles, like I just said? Who do you think funding these initiatives, like I just said? I don’t know, but like I said, I could be wrong. I could be wrong. I could be off. I’m always open to the possibility that I’m wrong and I may be wrong. So, I apologize if I’m wrong. [tr:trw].