WHEN: Wednesday, December 4, 2024
WHERE: CNBC CFO Council Summit
Following is the unofficial transcript of a CNBC exclusive interview with DOGE Co-Lead, Author, and Former U.S. Presidential Candidate Vivek Ramaswamy live from the CNBC CFO Council Summit in Washington, DC today, Wednesday, December 4.
All references must be sourced to CNBC CFO Council Summit.
EAMON JAVERS: Vivek, thank you for. being here. What a fascinating moment to talk to you.
VIVEK RAMASWAMY: It’s great to be here.
JAVERS: And with an audience of CFOs. These are people whose jobs it is to balance budgets. And so who better to relate to what it is that you guys are going to be doing up on Capitol Hill. I wanted to just welcome you and start out with just the basic question, which is, what has President Trump told you about what his priorities are for cutting the federal budget? Did he give you any guidance?
RAMASWAMY: Yes. Well, first thing I will say is, I’m really grateful to President Trump for the opportunity, because I think it does take a different kind of president to prioritize this kind of project. This has been attempted before. Conservatives and even some Democrats have talked about for a long time the importance of downsizing the federal government, mostly just to the tune of rhetoric, without a lot of action to go with it. And if you do something the way it’s always been done and it’s failed before, it’s going to fail again. President Trump had the creativity and vision to set this up differently, to say that, if you want a different result, you have got to do this very differently. From the outside, you have got two outsiders, Elon and myself. President Trump in many ways is himself an outsider as the president. And to be able to look at not just — and I think this is important to understand about the project here — not just about cutting cost, but about restoring true self-governance in America, where right now the people we elect to run the government, they’re not the ones who actually run the government. It’s unelected and even in many cases unappointed federal bureaucrats that make most decisions that impact everyday Americans, both through the regulatory state and even through expenditures that go out the door from people who are not elected and not even appointed by those who are elected. So it’s a massive problem we’re taking on, but I do think that it is something that we’re taking on in a very different way. And I hope to have, therefore, a different result.
JAVERS: Is there any one thing that President Trump has told you, I want you to go cut that?
RAMASWAMY: Yes, I think he actually is looking at it the other way, in terms of keeping a very open mind, top down, to say that let’s start with a clean slate. Let’s start fresh and everything is in scope for what counts as government efficiency. It’s not one part of the federal government or the other. It’s actually looking at it as a whole. Are we respecting the taxpayer dollar? In some ways, to use an analogy to those in this room, in the way that a CFO would look at their shareholder capital — in many ways, you are also stewards of capital, right? Your shareholders are the owners of your companies. I assume these are mostly publicly traded company CFOs in the room. Your duty is to the shareholder to ensure that money is spent to maximize the size of their pie. You’re their steward. I don’t think the people who have historically spent government dollars view themselves in that same type of stewardship relationship with the taxpayer, who is like, effectively, the shareholder of the federal government. And I think if you view the way the federal government spends the taxpayer money, and that was in a corporate context, that would be a fiduciary breach hands down. I think the officers of that public company would at minimum be fired and at worst be civilly or worse in court over the dereliction of duty they owe to the people who have entrusted them with that capital.
JAVERS: So let me –
RAMASWAMY: I think that that’s what this exercise is about, is to restore that sense of duty that the government officials and in many cases elected officials owe to their stakeholder, which is the taxpayer. It’s the equivalent of your relationship to the shareholder. I think many of you probably, I know, for sure, because the bar is so low on the other side, do a better job than the government officials do in looking after their fiduciary obligation, you could say, to the taxpayer. And that’s a big part of what we want to restore.
JAVERS: Let me ask you this then. I have been watching Elon Musk’s feed on X and he’s been spotlighting these little ridiculous things that the government spends money on, squirrel mating habit research or whatever comical thing you can come up with. And those are small-dollar. They’re funny and they illustrate the point, but they’re small-dollar things.
RAMASWAMY: Individual.
JAVERS: Can you give us a big-dollar thing that you would be willing to cut on day one, something north of $10 billion, say?
RAMASWAMY: Well, first of all, we’re three weeks in and January 20 is when we officially start. So I’m actually not –
JAVERS: But you’re trying to cut $2 trillion.
RAMASWAMY: Yes, I’m going to resist the idea of cherry-picking something in advance. We will have much more to say when we get started on January 20. But what I will say is people who run companies or who are CFOs of companies will be sympathetic to this is, sometimes, it’s actually the aggregate of a bunch of small things that you can actually use to drive a big change, rather than take aim at something big, but might be strategic in the corporate context to a company. So, CFO is an interesting position, because the CEO sets a strategic mandate, and that often requires expending capital in order to advance that strategy. But that means that everything else that doesn’t align with that strategy is on the chopping block. And so when you look at, for example, the NIH and the fact that, for every grant the NIH makes, it has to give 70 percent of a true up on top of that to the university slush fund for overhead. When private institutions that donate to those same scientific causes only have a rake of 10 percent, that’s a real problem. For taxpayer perspective, it’s not a huge dollar amount individually that NIH grants add up to. You’re talking about billions of dollars in aggregate. It’s not small money. But in terms of moving the federal budget, is that one cost going to do it? No. You talk about foreign aid to China, which I posted about yesterday, right? We’re giving foreign aid to China, but we’re actually using Chinese borrowed money to do it. So we pay back the borrowed money with interest, but then part of that, even if it’s a small amount, goes back to actually aid to that very country. So I actually think that there is a case to be made for looking at the aggregate of a bunch of the small expenses that fly below the radar of actual scrutiny. And in many cases, that adds up to something that could make a dent, even in the comparison to big expenses. So I wouldn’t understate the importance of that.
MORGAN BRENNAN: Yes, and it’s crazy too, just because China is also our number one adversary from a national security perspective, even as we’re having this conversation.
RAMASWAMY: Yes.
BRENNAN: So, you have talked about it. You had this “Wall Street Journal” op-ed a couple of weeks ago. It’s not just cost-cutting. It is restructuring, to your point. It’s regulatory restrictions, administrative reductions, and cost savings is what you said in that op-ed.
RAMASWAMY: That’s right.
BRENNAN: So it raises the question, how much of this is going to be fundamental changes to, for example, the way the government is contracting and interacting with private sector as well, and looking to glean services and looking to run itself?
RAMASWAMY: Yes, look, that’s certainly in scope. But I come back to the broad principle. The people we elect to run the government aren’t the ones who run the government, and we fought a revolution in 1776 expressly to ensure that we had that chain of accountability. That’s created this leviathan of an administrative state, the millions of civil servants who were never elected or even politically appointed to their positions. And part of the problem was, you have millions of people who shouldn’t have a job that are in that position. They find things to do. So it’s not that their head count costs are actually the major issue. It’s the fact that they take on responsibilities that go beyond the scope of what the federal government should have been doing. And the best evidence we have for that is that you look at the Supreme Court over the last few years effectively telling the administrative state that much of what you’re doing is illegal, countless cases in the last several years alone, including at the Supreme Court, the overturning of Chevron deference in the Loper Bright case. Look at the major questions doctrine in West Virginia v. EPA that said many of the coal mining regulations were themselves unlawful because they never actually went through Congress. What we have right now is hard evidence — this is not a political opinion — this is hard evidence delivered by the Supreme Court that much, if not most of what the federal regulatory state is doing is on its terms right now illegal and unconstitutional. That needs to be fixed. Once you fix that, that’s actually the root cause for a lot of the spending overruns and the carelessness with which the government’s contracting with private parties who are charging the federal government far more than they would charge either another government or another private counterparty. Looking at the overruns of just raw waste, fraud and abuse, the unauthorized dollars that are being spent, over half-a-trillion dollars a year of unauthorized expenses are still going out the door. You look at the way in which that money is being spent through Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, people love to have lazy armchair discussions about, oh, are you going to make cuts to entitlements or not, when, in fact, the dirty little secret is that many of those entitlement dollars aren’t even going to people who they were supposed to be going to in the first place. There are hundreds of billions of dollars of savings to extract just from basic program integrity measures to make sure that the person who is actually getting the money was indeed the person for whom it was intended or was supposed to be legally getting the money in the first place. And so my view is, a lot of the political philosophical musing about whether or not we should be cutting entitlements or not or whether or not the president can impound funds, it’s a deflection from the fact that there’s a lot lower-hanging fruit in terms of waste, fraud, abuse, error, program integrity failures that you got to go after first before we ever need to get to those harder political questions. And I hope that’s a big part of what we’re able to accomplish.
BRENNAN: I mean, you’re talking, and I’m thinking, what is it? First rule of the bureaucracy, protect the bureaucracy.
RAMASWAMY: Sure. Yes.
BRENNAN: So it raises the question, because I think, even just earlier this week, you saw 42,000 federal workers striking a deal to be able to continue telework until 2029. So, when you talk about the leviathan, how open are your eyes going into this, especially if you do have, for example, a lame-duck president and administration right now who is taking certain steps, arguably, to put up roadblocks?
RAMASWAMY: Well, even without those lame-duck steps, which I will come back to in a second, this is a hard project. I mean, this is not something that is for the faint of heart. I think we are taking on something that we’re going in eyes wide open to say good, well-intentioned small government crusaders have tried to do this before and have failed not once, but repeatedly. So I would say the betting odds going in anybody take on the same project that somebody’s taken on in the past before to say, that somebody new was going to succeed, your baseline expectation has to be from the outside looking in pretty low. Now, the reason I’m optimistic is that I think that, A, we’re doing it very differently in the way that I talked about. I think we have some of the most talented people in the country, literally, some of the most successful capitalists across the country are — never would have thought about entering government service are raising their hand to say, how can we help?
BRENNAN: Can you name some names?
RAMASWAMY: I hope — I’m not going to do that here, but in due course, starting on January 20, I think a lot of that will even become visible. I will say that that is really encouraging. When I think of the best and brightest over the last 20 years, where do they go? They go to finance. They go to then Silicon Valley. Government and public service has not been a place where especially the younger generation, but even successful capitalists to say that I’m going to actually view that as a place I’m going to have impact on the country. That’s something I think that is actively changing in these few weeks before our plain eyes. So I’m optimistic. But the other reason I’m optimistic is that we do have a historical moment that’s unique, right? You have President Trump winning a popular vote mandate that a Republican has not seen in at least two decades. You have got a decisive majority, not just for a majority mandate, not just for incremental change, but for sweeping change. The voters didn’t vote for incremental change. The voters voted for deep structural change.
JAVERS: You think sweeping change?
RAMASWAMY: I believe that’s what the voters –
JAVERS: The popular vote total was relatively close. The president-elect swept the –
RAMASWAMY: I think that that is the mandate from the voters combined with two Houses of Congress, both under Republican control and a 6-3 Republican — or not Republican, but conservative majority in the Supreme Court. And here, by conservative majority, I mean conservative of the small government majority that’s 6-3 on the Supreme Court. If we don’t get it done now, it’s never going to happen.
JAVERS: I’m so interested in what you said about programmatic failures, particularly in some of the entitlement spending, right?
RAMASWAMY: Yes.
JAVERS: Because one of the biggest beneficiaries, people have argued, of those programmatic failures are the pharmaceutical companies. And you come out of the pharmaceutical industry. Do you think the pharmaceutical companies have been profiting too much from federal spending and from some of those programmatic failures that you’re going to target?
RAMASWAMY: Look, I think that regulated industries, pharma included, often are the greatest beneficiaries of the failures of the regulations that bind them. And it’s part of why I say, in any –
JAVERS: So are drug companies going to get a haircut under your proposals?
RAMASWAMY: Well, I think it’s a question – depends on what they do. If it’s innovation and adding great value through actual new innovation that changes people’s lives, I’m a capitalist through and through, and I believe that we should have a free market system that rewards that. That’s different from engaging in regulatory arbitrage without innovation that’s extracting costs or rent from program failures. And when you talk about health care, then it’s not just pharma, but a whole chain of actors in the health care system that benefit from that. In some ways, I don’t even blame people who respond to the incentives that the government creates for them. What I blame is the government that creates those incentives in the first place. And that’s what we want to go in and actually fix.
JAVERS: How are you going to deal with Elon Musk’s conflicts of interest here? He’s an enormous federal contractor. He’s going to be deciding which federal contracts are good spending and which are wasteful spending. If he decides that a federal contract for one of his competitors is wasteful, how do you handle that?
RAMASWAMY: So, look, I think that anybody who’s offering – this applies to me, it applies to anybody else in government too – is anybody who’s offering recommendations, you should always have a skeptical lens to look at what are their motivations for making that recommendation? I say that’s the best advice I’d give the public always. Be skeptical when somebody’s making a recommendation. That being said, apply that standard 360 degrees. What do we have today? You have regulators who are regularly joining the industries that they regulated. Is that a conflict of interest when they were making that decision as a regulator? Absolutely. So I would just say, apply that standard 360 degrees.
JAVERS: Do you apply that to the Pentagon also?
RAMASWAMY: I absolutely apply that to the Pentagon, right? And I don’t think that’s gotten –
JAVERS: Defense contractors with generals on the board and that sort of thing?
RAMASWAMY: I absolutely apply that same standard. So I think that we need to apply that 360 degrees, and that’s a good spirit to bring to the exercise. I don’t think it should be a substitute for an actual debate on the merits, though. And I think, in many cases, the debate on the merits in some ways is sidestepped through proceduralism. I don’t want to see that happen. So, again, I come back to this principle where basic ideas that we fought the American Revolution for, the people we elect to run the government should run the government. They owe their sole duty to the citizens of this country, not another one. Think about the use of taxpayer dollars in the same way that a corporate steward like a fiduciary, a CFO, would think about their responsibility to the shareholder. Run the government in a way that looks at the taxpayer as a shareholder as well. I think those are basic principles that everybody agrees on. And I think everybody can also agree — I don’t think even Democrats or Republicans alike would disagree with me on this. That is not the way the federal government is run today. So, if that’s the vision, it’s clean. And we have in general, I think, unity across the country in those basic principles, and yet that is still not the way the federal government functions, then we have a problem. And that is the motive — that difference, that delta is the motivating raison d’etre behind DOGE. That is why this exists. And I think that’s why it’s important that we succeed. We have also done something that is unconventional for a government program. I think it was Reagan who famously said that any government-related program, that it’s the closest thing to eternity on Earth is a government program.
JAVERS: Yes. Right.
RAMASWAMY: I think that we want to do things a little differently. We set a clear expiry date for DOGE. The last government program we wanted to delete is DOGE to delete itself on July 4, 17 – on July 4, 2025 – 2026, which is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. And we thought that there was no better birthday gift to the country than to restore a government of a small enough size that would make our founding fathers proud. And so that is a sense of purpose that guides us in this. And I think it is thankfully drawing some of the most talented minds who otherwise would have never entered the government. It’s been one of the positive surprises of the last few weeks to see that talent magnet effect that this has had.
BRENNAN: So recruitment is going well?
RAMASWAMY: It’s going well. And, usually, I mean, it’s going extraordinarily well. I would say, it’s actually shocked me. Usually, in my experience — and I have built multiple companies. I have been a CEO in the past as well. I am biased against inbound recruits. I tend to think that if you want to find the best people for a job, you have to go out and actually find them. You’re always going to get some people who are good inbound, but it’s selection bias for, let’s just say, the lemons that find their way to you, rather than actually going out and finding the best and brightest to fill your own role. That’s the way I run my companies.
JAVERS: Remind me to never apply for a job again.
RAMASWAMY: I think it’s just a general rule of thumb, right? I think, here, that’s obviously not the case, because the people we are getting, there are no better people than the kinds of people who we are attracting to fill these jobs. And I think I have never been in a position like that before. And, if anything, the difficulty is actually sorting through the tidal wave of talent that’s thrown themselves at us to actually find the right places to deploy them. And that only becomes easier after January 20 comes around.
BRENNAN: I do have to ask about working with Musk because there’s been palace intrigue. A report in CNN just today that, before DOGE, you spent years “attacking Musk for ties to China, government funding for his companies.” Your response?
RAMASWAMY: He and I have had different view — all kinds of views that we have exchanged views on. That was all before I actually met him, though. He and I, when we first met, actually, in our early conversations, that was actually one of the things that we ended up discussing, including on our first X Spaces together. But one of the things I have seen about him and he’s really one of the people who I just admire on planet Earth, having gotten to know him, is that he’s made extraordinary sacrifices against his personal financial interest at a scale that we probably have never seen in the United States of America. Think about preserving the free speech policies on X that actually cost probably advertising dollars in the short term for many advertisers who fled the platform. Think about even his public endorsement of Donald Trump, which is something that many other CEOs who are in the same place were unwilling to publicly do. He is somebody who has taken extraordinary personal risk for a cause that he believes is bigger than himself, which in this case is the revival and the saving of our country. And so I respect the hell out of him. I have never been pushed more by somebody who I have worked with even in the short time that we have worked together. I think he has that effect of people around him. And I just think that having gotten to know him over the last year, he is somebody who is every bit as extraordinary as you would imagine based on what he’s accomplished.
BRENNAN: What do you think investors, corporate America, public, what do you think people need to know about Trump, about the incoming administration? I think about the first term, to use the tech term, he was a disrupter. For better or worse, came in, disrupted the narrative, changed the narrative, changed the way I think folks were talking about things and looking at certain policies. And now the second time around, it almost feels like, if term one was unknown unknowns, maybe he’s coming in as a known unknown this time. So what do people need to think about what’s going to come out of this next four years?
RAMASWAMY: So, look, I think the reality is, President Trump is not a politician. And that is not a bug. That is a feature. I think we require somebody who’s willing to say just because it’s been done this way for the past doesn’t mean that that’s the way it needs to be done for the future. But he’s coming in with an experience base that is pretty unique as a U.S. president.
BRENNAN: Should we expect volatility again, messiness?
RAMASWAMY: Well, I think, to the contrary, you actually can expect conviction in doing what’s right for the country, all the way from personnel selection, all the way to early policy prioritization. I was listening to the discussion that you all had — or you were listening to on stage right before, which is a president who was also, Grover Cleveland, in a unique position of having been the president, then had four years sitting it out, the ability to reflect on that experience and then come back for that second term. That’s a rare thing in American history. And so this is a once-in-a-century opportunity that I believe we have been given. It is a great gift as a country to have been given a president who, obviously, I supported President Trump and I stand by it, to say that we had a growing economy. We had declining illegal entry into the country. We were not involved in major conflicts around the world. There were no major conflicts in the Middle East or Russia-Ukraine, and to say that those were four great years as a president. But what I believe is that this second term will even outshine that first term because of the experience that he and the people around him bring in a way that is rare in American history. And I do think that his creativity in thinking outside the box, I think, is going to be an attribute that helps the country.
JAVERS: I want to go back to Elon Musk again for a second, because you talk about freedom of speech.
RAMASWAMY: Yes.
JAVERS: And we were discussing this issue of conflicts of interest. Elon Musk is somebody who has potentially enormous conflicts of interest regarding China, right? I mean, here’s somebody who does an enormous amount of his business is dependent on the Chinese market in many ways. He’s said a lot about freedom of speech in this country. Has he said anything about freedom of speech in China?
RAMASWAMY: So, look, I think we were just talking about the revival of this country. The conflict of interest that most people have as CEOs is that they’re not willing to actually say in public what they say in private. And even many people who supported Donald Trump, I know many of them right now, were afraid to say it until after he won the election. And now they feel like they have to say it on a delayed basis. Elon is a rare person who spoke his mind not when it was easy, but when it was hard in this country and in our hour of need. I think he was an essential part of the revival and mandate that we have.
JAVERS: But do you worry that the Chinese government has leverage over him as he’s making these kinds of important decisions?
RAMASWAMY: No, I don’t.
JAVERS: Why not?
RAMASWAMY: I have gotten to know him. To the contrary, I believe that he’s somebody who’s going to stand for what he believes is right. And I believe that that’s something that actually gives me – you know, it makes it a great honor to work with one of the rare people in America who’s not only a builder, but also has enough conviction to actually share what his viewpoints are in a way that gives other people the courage to do the same. And I think that saving this country is going to require that.
JAVERS: I know we have got a couple –
RAMASWAMY: Because we do have this culture of fear that’s caused people to have fear of losing their job. I don’t want to speak for maybe many in the audience would worry about that culture of fear, even in corporate America, over the last several years. And I think the beauty of this moment we’re in is, I think we can turn the page on that culture of fear, fear of getting a bad grade for your kids in school, fear of losing your job in corporate America, to say that where we’re going to get our country back is all of us starting to speak our minds in the open again. I think that’s the permission that Donald Trump’s victory, if I may say decisive victory, has given the country. We’re seeing, I believe, the beginning of a new revival of self-confidence in America, a new kind of golden age that I hope starts over the next four years, but continues for many more to come. And I feel very good about it.
JAVERS: We have got a couple of questions here in the room, but I do want to ask you one last question from me, which is the question of your authority, right? I mean, history is littered with blue-ribbon commissions that have tried to do what you’re trying to do, most recently maybe Simpson-Bowles. It seems to me that your commission is outside of government. You’re going to be providing recommendations into the executive branch, but ultimately Congress controls the power of the purse. You’re going to have a sales job to go up to Capitol Hill and sell them on these spending cuts. Every dollar that’s spent by the federal government has a recipient who benefits from it, who has a member of Congress up on Capitol Hill. All of those dollars are protected, by and large, by members of Congress who are protecting their own personal fiefdoms. How do you plan on breaking that spending logjam, which has been the thing that’s defeated every previous effort to do what you’re trying to do?
RAMASWAMY: So I am encouraged by a couple of things. I’m encouraged by the early positive signs we are seeing from Congress. I think that there’s a DOGE caucus, a DOGE subcommittee. There’s numerous bodies that have already formed in the House and Senate. We’re here in Washington, D.C. Going to be looking forward to meeting with many of them tomorrow. I think that there is an environment where people who are in Congress now, including those who have been elected, but also many who have been fighting this fight for a long time, feel like now is the moment where they have been given the ability to do what they haven’t really had the license to do in the past.
JAVERS: Until it comes to their districts.
RAMASWAMY: But, that being said, I think that that ignores what can be done through the executive branch already. The executive branch has no obligation to send out a payment if it is wasteful or if it is known to be fraudulent or has a reason to believe that there is error associated with that payment. A lot of the regulations in the existence of the regulatory state we’re talking about, those were never passed by Congress. In fact, that’s the problem. Many of those regulations — in fact, if you think about most of the edicts that exist in America that stop an individual or a company from behaving in a certain way, they were actually never passed by Congress. Most of those binding edicts on your behavior as a person or as a company came from somebody who was never elected to their position and historically was viewed as unremovable from their position. See, that’s not a democracy. But the good news about that is, that type of change can be driven through the executive branch. If the executive branch caused it to come into existence, the executive branch can cause it to come out of existence as well. And I think that that first leap of fixing that problem will hopefully set an example and show the country these are the wins we can score for the American people, how to make people’s lives better, how to restore the American dream, how to restore our civic self-confidence in self-governance, to say that, if we have done it that much through executive power in a proper way, I hope that will give courage to Congress to make the kinds of decisions that they may not have made in the past before to say that this is actually how you serve all Americans.
BRENNAN: We’re getting ready to open this up to the room, but how quickly does that process happen? Come January 20, do you start seeing these announcements, these cuts, these changes immediately?
RAMASWAMY: Look, I think that time is of the essence. We have given ourselves 18 months, so that doesn’t give us a lot of time to dither around and sit on our hands. But I think we want to be thoughtful as well. You want to make sure that you are prioritizing what’s most important, early wins you’re able to score, demonstrate the effects of that, build on that to then go further. So I think we want to be logical, measured, yet aggressive at the same time.
