Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said he would attempt to shut down the FBI and replace it with another entity if he’s elected president.
During an interview with “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Ramaswamy, a businessman, suggested that he does not want to “defund the FBI” after host Chuck Todd suggested it.
“I didn’t say defund the FBI. I said shut down the FBI and replace it with something new,” said Ramaswamy on Sunday. “I think it’s a new apparatus built from scratch that actually respects the law instead of making it up.”
“So you’re going to replace the old FBI with a new FBI?” Todd asked in response. “With a new institution built from scratch to carry out federal law enforcement,” Ramaswamy said, “because the existing FBI, the people who work there, have worked there for so long they’ll be getting in their own way.”
“I personally believe someone who’s running to actually run the executive branch of the government, when you have a bureaucracy whose culture becomes so ossified, every once in a while, you need to turn it over,” he told “Meet the Press.” He added: “We need federal law enforcement, but that institution has, in a bipartisan way, become so, I think ossified in its own norms, in its own corruption, that we need to rebuild it from scratch and have something new take its place.”
When Todd suggested that Ramaswamy wants to “replace the old FBI with a new FBI,” Ramaswamy stated: “The problem is there’s people who have worked there for decades.”
“What I say is, if I’m the U.S. president and I can’t work for the federal government for more than eight years—which I think is a good thing—then none of those bureaucrats reporting in to me should either,” he added. “There’s people who have worked there for decades,” he said.
