Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy used a speech at the California Republican Party Fall Convention in Anaheim Saturday to outline changes he would make if he was elected president.
“The real threat we face in the United States is the rise of that managerial class from our universities to corporate America to the ultimate mother of the managerial class, the administrative state in the federal government,” Ramaswamy said in the speech at a luncheon banquet at the Anaheim Marriott.
“Today, the people who we elect to run the government are no longer the ones who actually run the government. It is the deep state in the shadow government of those three-letter agencies that wield power today. That is why I’ve said that as your next president, I will shut down the unconstitutional federal administrative state.”
Ramaswamy pledged to shut down the FBI, IRS, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Department of Education.
“Mass layoffs are absolutely what I would bring to the DC bureaucracy,” Ramaswamy said.
With the Constitution limits the president to two four-year terms, Ramaswamy would put an eight-year limit on federal bureaucrats.
Ramaswamy was the fourth and final presidential candidate to speak at the three-day convention, which concludes Sunday. Former President Donald Trump, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis spoke Friday.
Ramaswamy announced his candidacy Feb. 21, releasing a 3 1/2-minute video, declaring, “We are in the middle of a national identity crisis. Faith, patriotism and hard work have disappeared, only to be replaced by new secular religions like COVIDism, climateism and gender ideology. We hunger to be part of something bigger than ourselves, yet we cannot even answer the question of what it means to be an American.
“Today, the woke left preys on that vacuum. They tell you that your race, your gender and your sexual orientation govern who you are, what you can achieve and what you’re allowed to think. This is psychological slavery, and that has created a new culture of fear in our country that has completely replaced our culture of free speech in America.”
Ramaswamy has released a set of 25 policy commitments “to take America First further than Trump.”
They include reviving American national identity by using the military, including drones, to secure the southern border; ending affirmative action; banning “addictive social media under age 16 & gender confusion `care’ for minors”; “make political expression a civil right & end unlawful DEI indoctrination” (referring to corporate and collegiate efforts supporting diversity, equity and inclusion); and withholding “federal funding for cities that refuse to protect Americans from violent crime.”
The policy commitments also include reducing taxes and regulation, increasing competition and promoting investment to achieve annual gross domestic product increases of over 5%; and declaring “independence from communist China.”
Ramaswamy, who turned 38 on Aug. 9, was born and raised in Cincinnati, and graduated summa cum laude in biology from Harvard and from Yale Law School. He founded the biotechnology company Roivant Sciences in 2014 seeking to revolutionize drug development.
Ramaswamy oversaw the development of five drugs that went on to become FDA-approved, according to his campaign biography. He was the company’s CEO through January 2021 and chairman until Feb. 20, when he resigned to concentrate on his campaign.
Ramaswamy is the author of “Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam,” “Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence,” and “Capitalist Punishment: How Wall Street is Using Your Money to Create a Country You Didn’t Vote For.”
If elected, Ramaswamy would be the nation’s youngest president — Theodore Roosevelt was 42 when he ascended to the presidency in 1901 following the assassination of William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy was 43 when he was elected in 1960.
Ramaswamy would be the first Indian American president and the first Hindu to hold the office.