2024 Presidential Candidate Wants to ‘Shut Down the FBI,’ Replace It

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy speaks at the National Rifle Association annual convention in Indianapolis, Ind., on April 14, 2023. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

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.”

The FBI headquarters—the J. Edgar Hoover building—in Washington on March 22, 2023. Richard Moore/The Epoch Times

“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.

Republicans in recent years have become increasingly critical of the FBI, accusing the agency of targeting the political opponents of Democrats while not investigating actual criminals. Former President Donald Trump has perhaps been the chief critic of both the FBI and the Department of Justice and said both agencies have engaged in a longstanding witch hunt to politically wound him.

Days after announcing his candidacy in February, Ramaswamy wrote that if elected, he would attempt to shut down a range of government agencies, put eight-year term limits on “government bureaucrats,” remove civil service protections for federal employees, fire about 50 percent of federal employees, and move the “remaining agencies out of” Washington, D.C. He said, “If the [Department] of Transportation was in Ohio, it’d be a different story right now.”

He’s also proposed placing limitations on the Federal Reserve, accusing the central bank of “playing god” with its monetary policy decisions over the past two decades or so. “Time to go back to focusing the Fed on stabilizing the dollar, period. If elected, I will,” he wrote, while in another social media post, he said he would limit the Fed’s headcount by more than 90 percent.

But since announcing his 2024 candidacy, Ramaswamy has struggled in the polls against Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. A recent aggregate from RealClearPolitics shows that he has about 2.3 percent of support among GOP voters, compared to Trump’s 51.3 percent and DeSantis’s 23 percent.

However, according to the poll, he’s close to former Mike Pence, the former vice president who hasn’t yet declared his candidacy but is polling at 5.3 percent, and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who is polling at 3.9 percent. He’s also currently ahead of Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who hasn’t declared his candidacy.

An internal memo that was obtained by multiple news outlets last week shows that Ramaswamy’s manager, Ben Yoko, predicts that GOP voters may turn to the candidate as an alternative to Trump or DeSantis, who hasn’t yet declared his candidacy but has made overtures signaling that he might do so.

“As Trump and DeSantis continue to destroy each other over the summer and into the fall, GOP voters will be looking for a third alternative who is an outsider and embraces the Trump/America First agenda,” Yoho said in the memo, reported Politico. Ramaswamy’s campaign has not issued a public comment on the memo.