politics

Vivek Ramaswamy wants to “shut down” the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Internal Revenue Service, the Education Department and other government agencies.

He opposes efforts to fight climate change, wants to burn more coal and says fossil fuels are essential for “human flourishing.”

And at a time when the Republican Party is struggling to attract younger voters, Ramaswamy is proposing a new citizenship test coupled with raising the voting age to 25 — aiming to strip the franchise from tens of millions of Americans in what could be one of the greatest reductions of the U.S. electorate in the nation’s history, according to voting experts.

“We live in a dark moment, and we have to confront the fact that we’re in an internal sort of cold cultural civil war,” Ramaswamy, 38, said during the GOP’s first presidential primary debate, hosted by Fox News on Wednesday night. “Do you want incremental reform — that’s what you’re hearing about — or do you want revolution?”

Though the youngest and least experienced candidate onstage, Ramaswamy emerged from last night’s debate as one of the candidates most likely to compete with former president Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination. Bolstered by his approach of blanketing the media with interviews, the billionaire biotech entrepreneur has surged in polling in recent weeks and may be in a position to overtake Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who had been widely seen as the biggest threat to Trump’s nomination.

Ramaswamy’s policy positions overlap in many respects with those of both his debate sparring partners and the former president. He shares the other GOP candidates’ proposals to radically cut the size of the federal government, use the U.S. military to strike drug cartels inside Mexico and rescind federal funding for major U.S. cities that support undocumented immigrants. But Ramaswamy faces criticism for adopting numerous outside-the-box policy proposals — such as eliminating 75 percent of the federal workforce and tying the U.S. dollar to gold — that even conservative experts say are unrealistic and would prove highly damaging if ever implemented.

“He does not seem to have done his homework on any policy issue — he comes up with these half-baked ideas that sound great to a conservative audience but show no thought, research or feasibility behind them,” said Brian Riedl, a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank, and a former aide to Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio). “That’s him.”

Here are seven of Ramaswamy’s policy proposals — and how they would change the United States.

Raise the voting age to 25, with a new citizenship test

Perhaps Ramaswamy’s most distinctive idea is to raise the voting age from 18 to 25 through an amendment to the Constitution. He would allow people in this age group to vote, however, if they serve in the military, work in “first response services” (for instance, as a police officer or fighter) or pass the civics test that is required of citizens seeking naturalization.

Ramaswamy characterizes this drastic proposal as essential to reverse what he characterizes as a lack of civic pride among young people in the United States.

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Stop U.S. aid for Ukraine

Asked at the debate Wednesday night whether he would support more U.S. aid to Ukraine, Ramaswamy responded simply: No. Then he insulted GOP politicians who backed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

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Fossil fuels are essential in the long term

Many Republican lawmakers have been skeptical of President Biden’s efforts to rapidly decarbonize the U.S. economy to fight climate change, arguing that Democrats want to wean the country off fossil fuels more quickly than is realistic.

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Eliminate 75 percent of the federal workforce

Ramaswamy is also proposing a 75 percent reduction in the number of federal employees, including a 50 percent reduction in his first year in office. This would amount to laying off more than 1 million workers.

As part of his restructuring of the federal bureaucracy, Ramaswamy’s website also vows to “shut down” several federal agencies, while instituting a new eight-year term limit for federal workers that would lead to enormous brain drain of the civilian workforce.

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Peg the U.S. dollar to gold, gut the central bank

Ramaswamy has also called for transforming U.S. monetary policy with two radical actions: pegging the U.S. dollar to gold and other commodities, while also gutting the Federal Reserve.

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Deploy troops in Mexico

Ramaswamy has vowed to “use our military to annihilate Mexican drug cartels.” This position is similar to those of most of the other GOP presidential candidates, including Trump and DeSantis.

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Reduce marriage penalties

On the debate stage Wednesday night, Ramaswamy said the United States “pays single women more not to have a man in the house than to have a man in the house, contributing to an epidemic of fatherlessness.”