Global Courant
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said Wednesday that if elected president, he will seek to close four federal agencies as part of an effort to reduce the size of the government.
“We’d do education, we’d do commerce, we’d do energy, and we’d do IRS,” DeSantis said in an interview with Fox News’ Martha MacCallum when asked if he favored closing agencies.
“If Congress cooperates with me on this, we can reduce the size and scope of government,” he added. “If Congress won’t go that far, I’m going to use those agencies to push back against the waking ideology and against the leftism that we see creeping into all institutions of American life.”
DeSantis’ campaign did not immediately respond to a request for more information about the GOP candidate’s comments.
DeSantis has attempted to differentiate himself from Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, including moving further to the former president’s right on a number of issues. On Tuesday, he unexpectedly vetoed a criminal justice reform bill that had received substantial bipartisan support in the Republican-led legislature.
While Trump has not said he would seek to eliminate the education department if elected in 2024, he has proposed scrapping federal funding for “any school or program that promotes critical race theories, gender ideologies, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content.” pressure on our children. ”
“We need to fundamentally re-constitute the government,” DeSantis said Wednesday. “We talked about draining the swamp in 2016, that didn’t happen. I think the better analogy is breaking the swamp.”
It wasn’t the first time DeSantis had floated the idea of doing away with the IRS, a frequent target of Republicans. On “The Dana Show” last month, DeSantis called the IRS a “corrupt organization” when radio host Dana Loesch asked him if he would sign a measure to abolish the service.
“The answer is yes,” DeSantis said at the time. “We need something completely different.”
Asked about how he would replace the existing tax structure, DeSantis said he “supported all single-rate proposals,” referring to a flat tax.
“I would welcome this tax system, throw it out the window and do something more beneficial to the average people,” he said at the time.
The Tax and Customs Administration, which is supervised by the Ministry of Finance, has cut costs almost 20% of the staff since 2010. The debt ceiling agreement eliminated $1.4 billion in IRS funding and diverted approximately $20 billion of the $80 billion provided to the agency through the Inflation Reduction Act to non-defense funds.
In the current fiscal year, budgets for the commerce, energy and education departments were $109 billion, $160 billion and $194 billion, respectively, according to government spending data.
DeSantis is not the first GOP presidential candidate in recent election cycles to call for the abolition of federal agencies.
In 2011, then-Governor of Texas Rick Perry said during a primary debate that he would eliminate three federal agencies, but couldn’t remember the Department of Energy after mentioning the other two: commerce and education. He later served as Secretary of Energy during the Trump administration.
