Vivek Ramaswamy wants fed budgeters to start from scratch if elected
Vivek Ramaswamy wants Washington to start from zero.
The Republican presidential candidate pitched his solution to the exploding national debt Monday, saying that if elected, he would require the executive branch to adopt zero-base budgeting.
“Start from zero for every department and ask what (if any) spending is required instead of just taking last year’s budget as the default,” the 38-year-old entrepreneur argued in a policy proposal shared with The Post.
Nearly all of Ramaswamy’s rivals have floated policies meant to solve the national debt – which hit $33 trillion for the first time ever, the Treasury Department announced last week – but no contenders have proposed zero-base budgeting.
Ramaswamy argued members of both parties could get behind his policy and lamented that “there isn’t a single red or blue state in this country that actually does it.”
Similar to Donald Trump in 2016, Ramaswamy has touted his private sector experience throughout his campaign and did so again on Monday.
“I built a multibillion-dollar biotech company from scratch by developing five medicines now FDA-approved that the bureaucracy in big pharma abandoned,” he said. “I built an insurgent asset manager to compete head-on with BlackRock & Vanguard by leading the crusade against the ESG bureaucracy. Now, I’m taking on the biggest bureaucracy of all: the federal government. Our national debt is at $33 trillion and rising — we need a true outsider to fix it. Sign me up.”
Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni told The Post adopting zero-base budgeting in any presidential administration would be both feasible and “highly desirable.”
“Forcing every department of the government to justify its existence and financial costs each year would go a long way in returning fiscal sanity to Washington,” said Antoni. “While the president does not have the budget allocation authority that Congress does, he can certainly rein in wasteful spending of that money, in the same way a chief executive from the private sector closely monitors the spending within his company,”
In last month’s first Republican primary debate, Ramaswamy proposed embracing domestic energy production and reforming unemployment.
“Unlock American energy, drill, frack, burn coal, embrace nuclear. Put people back to work by no longer paying them more to stay at home. Reform the US Fed, stabilize the US dollar and go to war. The only war that I will declare as US president will be the war on the federal administrative state that is the source of those toxic regulations acting like a wet blanket on the economy,” Ramaswamy said Aug. 23 in Milwaukee.
The longshot candidate is set to appear on the debate stage Wednesday night at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Calif., along with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), former Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.