Vivek, you've proposed cutting giant ports of the United States government at the federal level and at the executive level. So without getting into all of it, let me just name three of them Department of Education, FBI, and IRS. So to most people, that sounds a little crazy. [00:00:20] Are we not going to collect taxes? Are we not going to do law enforcement? So tell us why getting rid of the IRS as an example makes any sense at all. >> Speaker 3: Well, I think that's just an administrative reorganization. Downsize it, move it to the US treasury so it's a revenue collection process. [00:00:38] I can tell you about the FBI, I mean, this is the one I get a lot of questions about and I think is the most understandable pushback that people have. And I can do the education one, too. There's 35,000 employees at the FBI. 20,000 of them are in back office functions in [00:00:53] the J Edgar Hoover Building and back offices in this bureau. They can go home and find honest work in the private sector. But the 15,000 agents on the frontline should be moved to agents like the agencies like the US Marshals or to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network [00:01:10] at the US treasury or the DEA, where they will have far greater specialization and be much more effective than the agents are at the FBI right now in investigating child sex trafficking crimes, which the FBI has not been very good at. The US Marshals has done a better job at specialized white collar investigations, [00:01:28] where people at the FBI lack the specialization that people at the US treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network actually have. And this is also a way of addressing what I see as generational corruption in the FBI. The same bureau of investigation that used to go after the likes of [00:01:45] Martin Luther King Jr. threatening him with suicide over improperly collected tapes is now going after individuals of a different political persuasion. And it was wrong then as it is wrong now. Bureaucracy is a formula for breeding corruption. And I think the right answer is you can't just incrementally reform that, [00:02:03] you have to shut it down, but do it in a pragmatic way that increases effectiveness while reducing cost and corruption. And same thing with the Department of Education, tilting the scales to four year college degrees over one or two year vocational programs, holding local schools hostage, saying, you don't get that money unless you adopt [00:02:23] certain agendas at the local level that's not useful when the federal government has nothing to do with local education, I'd say shut it down. Give that $80 billion mostly back to the people, to parents, so that every parent can choose to send where their kids go, actually go to school, and [00:02:39] the tiny sliver that relates to vocational training that they've recently added, move that to the department of labor where it belongs. So, yes, I do think it's gonna take somebody with a CEO mindset and, if I may say, anti-bureaucracy experience, to come in and reorganize and [00:02:55] gut much of that federal bureaucracy. That's not a left wing idea or a right wing idea, but it is a fundamentally American idea because we have three branches of government in the US Constitution, legislative, executive, and judicial. Not this fourth branch of the administrative state where most of [00:03:12] the policymaking takes place today. And so I would say that's the top of my domestic agenda shut down that fourth branch, revive the integrity of our constitutional republic. >> Speaker 4: So the fourth branch that you're referring to consists of individuals, leadership, at least that's been appointed in the executive [00:03:30] branch by the president of the United States, the Department of Education, of course, to give you an example. Your favorite politician in the world, Donald Trump, appointed Betsy DeVos, and she engaged in the reversal of certain policies of the Education Department [00:03:46] that did seek to help students who had been defrauded by for profit colleges. So what do you propose happen in a situation in which students have been defrauded by for profit colleges like Phoenix Online, ITT Tech? [00:04:02] They get an unaccredited, nonsense degree that leads to nowhere. They're drowning in debt after being defrauded. How exactly would you deal with those situations with the elimination of the Education Department? >> Speaker 3: If it is a true case of fraud, that's a violation of the law. [00:04:18] They can be prosecuted under the law. They can be sued in civil suits by the people who are defrauded, no different than any other commercial relationship that exists in the private sector. However, when you have a bureaucracy at the Department of Education that's spending that $80 billion at a moment where school choice programs across [00:04:36] the country are underfunded, it's not even close, which is a better use of money. Put that $80 billion budget in the pockets of parents across this country, it'd be about 1.6 billion per state in this union. It's not even close, which is a better use of funds. [00:04:51] And I think you avoid a lot of the bureaucratic corruption. And you're right, the people who sit on top of those agencies are appointed by a democratically elected US president. 99.99% of those employees do not fit that description. To the contrary, they're protected by, I think, bad policy, but [00:05:10] so called civil service protections that have stopped the US president or the duly elected representatives or even cabinet secretaries from firing those employees, which creates a culture of rot, of laziness, of ineffectiveness, and, yes, even of corruption in many of those agencies. [00:05:27] And so I have a simple proposition, I think the people who we elect to run the government, they ought to be the ones who actually run the government. And if they're people who disagree with me, if they're the people who I don't vote for, I accept that. But we live in a constitutional republic where at least the people who we elect to [00:05:43] run the government ought to be the ones who are actually running it, when most of the policy decisions made regulating our energy sector to our healthcare sector to financial markets, to education come from unelected bureaucrats in the federal government. And that serves neither Republicans nor Democrats nor any American well. [00:06:01] And that's gonna change on my watch as president.