This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
It’s not likely at this point that the announced 2024 GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is anything but a longshot for the nomination.
So maybe tens of thousands of federal workers won’t have to worry about losing their jobs.
Unless, of course, other candidates pick up on the ideas of the entrepreneur, in that the Constitution doesn’t allow civil service protections or public sector unions.
He says he’d fire “at least half” the federal workforce.
A report at Just the News explained he cited the Constitution’s Article Two to support his position.
“It says the president of the United States runs the federal government, runs specifically the executive branch of the federal government. That means, I think, a lot of those civil service protections are unconstitutional,” he explained.
“If somebody works for you, and you can’t fire them, then they don’t actually work for you,” reasons Ramaswamy, author of “Woke, Inc.: Inside America’s Corporate Social Justice Scam.”
“I actually would just proceed with shutting down agencies, with firing a good portion of the federal workforce. I think it’s going to be at least half the federal workforce. And will that end up in litigation? It will. But I think this Supreme Court, that this has not always been true, but I think this Supreme Court shares that view of Article Two.
“I think we use that to set the judicial precedent to make sure that never again is there a president who’s gobbled up by the administrative state that supposedly works for him, but actually has the relationship the other way around,” he explained.
That provision in the U.S. Constitution lets a U.S. president oversee the federal workforce.
He said other efforts to eliminate agencies haven’t succeeded, but there’s a reason.
“They defer to Congress. The problem is Congress has an institutional bias … The way you run the executive branch is not the purview of Congress. It is the purview of the executive, the person who leads the executive branch of government.”
He said his plans would include eliminating the Department of Education and moving other bureaucracies out of Washington.
“I mean, that’s a good way to just get rid of half of them off of voluntary terminations right there – save the severance costs,” he explained.
Also, something “new” needs to replace the FBI, he said.
And those unions for government workers?
“If you’re a public servant and you’re unionizing, who exactly are you unionizing against? The very public you intend to serve. I don’t think there need to be any special protections for public employee unions, full stop, and I don’t think we should hedge about it.”
