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Demetrius Freeman

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/candidates/vivek-ramaswamy-2024/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Vivek Ramaswamy</a> 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<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/09/15/republicans-problems-with-young-voters-go-far-deeper-than-trump/" target="_blank"> struggling to attract younger voters</a>, 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.

Newcomer Vivek Ramaswamy is taking flak ahead of Republican debate

“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 <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/08/23/vivek-ramaswamy-republican-presidential-candidate/" target=_blank>youngest and least experienced candidate onstage</a>, Ramaswamy emerged from <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2023/08/23/republican-debate-ramaswamy-trump-desantis-pence/" target=_blank>last night’s debate</a> as one of the candidates most likely to compete with former president <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/donald-trump/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Donald Trump</a> 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. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/candidates/ron-desantis-2024/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Ron DeSantis</a> (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 <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/08/22/republican-debate-vivek-ramaswamy/" target=_blank>faces criticism</a> 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.”

Republican rivals clash sharply in combative debate with no Trump

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

Matt McClain

1. 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.

“Voting is more than a physical act. It is the expression of a duty we bear as citizens. Serving your nation, knowing something about your nation, or at least living in your nation for a short time as an adult isn’t too much to ask,” his website states. “Our lost civic pride won’t reappear automatically. Reviving it will require boldness.”

Yet some critics say Ramaswamy’s proposal, if enacted, could have the opposite of its intended effect, by making young people even more detached from politics. Roughly 9 percent of the population — or more than 20 million people — are between the ages of 18 and 25 and could lose the right to vote under this proposal. Several hundred thousand of them are also in the military.

Who is Vivek Ramaswamy, on center stage at Republican debate?

Ramaswamy’s plan would amount to the biggest reduction in the U.S. franchise since the Ku Klux Klan created barriers at the polls to prevent Black Americans from voting after the Reconstruction era, said Svante Myrick, president of People for the American Way, a left-leaning nonprofit that promotes wider access to the ballot. “Vivek should just be honest about what he’s trying to achieve and why: He thinks that lower turnout improves Republican odds,” Myrick said.

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Law, added in an email: “Never has the Constitution been amended to take away the rights to vote, which is exactly what this proposal would do.”

Heidi Levine

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.

“I would not, and I think that this is disastrous,” Ramaswamy said. “I find it offensive that we have professional politicians on the stage that will make a pilgrimage to their Pope Zelensky without doing the same thing for people in Maui or the South Side of Chicago.”

Ramaswamy’s position reflects a deepening schism within the Republican Party over support for Ukraine, even as the GOP leadership has largely backed the White House’s requests for funding thus far. Ramaswamy has also <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2023/08/18/vivek_ramaswamy_as_president_i_will_visit_moscow_and_flip_russia_out_of_chinese_influence.html" target=_blank>said that he would prioritize a visit to Moscow</a> in his first year in office and that Ukraine should be forced to give up territory to Russia.

A look at the amount of U.S. spending powering Ukraine’s defense

Ukraine is a “pro-American country that was invaded by a thug,” former South Carolina governor <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/candidates/nikki-haley-2024/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Nikki Haley</a> said Wednesday night to Ramaswamy. “You have no foreign policy experience, and it shows.”

The United States has already <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/08/04/ukraine-war-us-spending/" target=_blank>directed more than $60 billion in aid to Ukraine</a>, including more than $40 billion in direct military assistance. But that reflects only a small fraction of U.S. military spending, which was set to total close to $800 billion for this year alone.

Ramaswamy has also faced criticism from other GOP contenders for suggesting Washington should phase out its financial support for Israel and for saying he would only discourage China from invading Taiwan until the United States no longer needs Taiwan’s semiconductors.

3. Fossil fuels are essential in the long term

Mark Felix

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.

Ramaswamy, however, takes this position further, arguing not just against the pace of the transition away from carbon, but also against the need to move away from fossil fuels at all, even in the long term.

“Climate change is a hoax. … The reality is more people are dying because of climate change policies than they are of actual climate change,” Ramaswamy said. He has <a href="https://twitter.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1694546918662193510" target=_blank>frequently said</a>, “Human flourishing requires fossil fuels,” a refrain he reiterated Wednesday.

GOP presidential candidates blame China, not U.S., for climate change

The scientific consensus is that failure to reduce carbon emissions will lead to devastating impacts for communities across the globe, including virulent disease outbreaks, widespread food and water shortages, and increasingly deadly and destructive weather extremes. Several Republicans at the debate, including Haley, emphasized that climate change is real and man-made.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which comprises the world’s leading climate experts, has concluded that the costs of transitioning away from fossil fuels are far outstripped by the savings from avoided climate impacts. Already, some clean technologies — such as solar and wind energy — are cheaper than polluting alternatives.

“We could also say we needed horses to maintain our economic growth, and then technology came in and disrupted it,” said Robbie Orvis, senior director of modeling and analysis at Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan think tank. “We have a new set of technologies that allows us to continue to grow the economy in a more sustainable and, honestly more cost-effective, way.”

4. Eliminate 75 percent of the federal workforce

Matt Roth

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.

These proposal would probably not come to pass even if Republicans held the House, the Senate and the White House. “It is totally unworkable, would be economically destabilizing, and Congress would never consider anything even close to that,” Riedl said.

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

Kerem Uzel

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.

Ramaswamy has said the dollar must be tied to commodity prices to make it “a stable unit of measurement.” This idea has gained traction in conservative circles, particularly during the inflationary spike under the Biden administration, as a way to rein in the amount of discretion the Federal Reserve has over the economy, said Paul Winfree, who served as Trump’s deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council and is now president of the Economic Policy Innovation Center, a center-right think tank.

But many economists say tying the value of the dollar to gold would deprive the United States of one of its best tools to fight economic downturns and tame inflation — the ability of the central bank to raise or lower interest rates. Commodity prices can <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/08/23/campaign-2024-ramaswamy-s-plans-for-the-dollar-don-t-make-much-sense/21460166-41a0-11ee-9677-53cc50eb3f77_story.html" target=_blank>also fluctuate wildly</a>, Winfree pointed out.

“It would completely constrain the most effective economic crisis tool we have,” said Adam Ozimek, an economist at the Economic Innovation Group, a centrist think tank. “This is an idea economists have not taken seriously for at least a half-century.”

Ramaswamy has also proposed cutting the staff of the Federal Reserve by 90 percent. Most of those employees are involved in oversight of Wall Street and the banking system, and such cuts would leave central bank effectively unable to execute the oversight it has carried out for decades, according to Mark Zandi, an economist at Moody’s.

Whitney Leaming

Jorge Ribas

Julia Wall

Ramaswamy has vowed to “use our military to annihilate Mexican drug cartels.” This position is similar to those of most of the other GOP <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/presidential-candidates-2024/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">presidential candidates</a>, including Trump and DeSantis.

Both the Mexican government and the Biden administration have warned against pledges to use the U.S. military, including drones, to strike Mexican territory without its approval. “In addition to being irresponsible, it is an offense to the people of Mexico,” Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/mexico-president-rejects-us-lawmakers-calls-military-intervention-against-2023-03-09/" target=_blank>said in March</a>, according to Reuters. Federal agencies are already involved monitoring and wiretapping Mexican drug cartels, but the GOP plan, including Ramaswamy’s, would represent a major escalation against a key U.S. trading partner and ally.

U.S. wiretaps tracked Gulf Cartel after Americans abducted, leak shows

“You don’t invade your partner like that, and these suggestions should not be taken seriously,” said Ariel Cohen, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. “But people say things during election campaigns.”

Akio Kon

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.”

It was not clear which federal program Ramaswamy was referring to, and a spokeswoman for his campaign did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

Thirty years ago, Republicans crusaded against a federal welfare benefit that they argued deterred mothers from getting married and working. But that program was eliminated under the Clinton administration. There remain some programs that penalize marriage for some lower-wage workers, including the Earned Income Tax Credit, said Joshua McCabe, director of social policy at the Niskanen Center, a center-right think tank.

New York State Associated Press Young Journalist of the Year

Cornell University, BA in history

Jeff Stein is the White House economics reporter for The Washington Post. He was a crime reporter for the Syracuse Post-Standard and, in 2014, founded the local news nonprofit the Ithaca Voice in Upstate New York. He was also a reporter for Vox.

Jeff Stein

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How Vivek Ramaswamy’s policy proposals would transform the U.S.

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2023 Iowa State Fair

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