Ramaswamy, Vivek (1985- )

Subterms

    Latest story

    75 Shares189 Views

    Elon Musk and DOGE vs. Regulators

    by

    The billionaire has needled government agencies, armed with potential influence over their budgets. But some of these organizations are also looking into his interests.Elon Musk’s attacks on the agencies that regulate his businesses are raising questions about conflicts of interest.Eric Lee/The New York TimesMusk vs. regulatorsElon Musk remains perhaps the most consequential figure in President-elect Donald Trump’s orbit, with a commission for cutting government spending headed by him and Vivek Ramaswamy — widely known by its acronym, DOGE — promising huge reductions.Federal regulators have become prominent targets for Musk and his allies. But those agencies are continuing to scrutinize the tech billionaire’s interests, raising questions about conflicts.“The SEC is just another weaponized institution doing political dirty work,” Musk posted on X on Thursday, joining a flurry of right-wing attacks on the agency. The impetus for the ire: an appeals court ruling that Nasdaq can’t require diversity on the boards of companies that list on the exchange, a longtime bugbear of conservatives.Ramaswamy wrote on X of the commission: “When an agency like the SEC is so repeatedly & thoroughly embarrassed in federal court for flouting the law, it loses its legitimacy as a law enforcement body.”That comes after Musk took aim at the I.R.S. last month, when he polled his X followers about what to do with the tax authority’s budget. The overwhelming response: “Deleted.”But the S.E.C. is renewing scrutiny of Musk. He disclosed on X that the regulator had given him an offer to settle an inquiry into unspecified charges. A letter from Alex Spiro of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, Musk’s lawyer, claimed that the agency had given them 48 hours to accept or face punishment, as part of an “improperly motivated campaign.” Spiro’s letter also revealed that the commission had reopened an investigation this week into Neuralink, Musk’s brain-implant start-up.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 113 Shares139 Views

      in Elections

      Republicans Would Regret Letting Elon Musk Ax Weather Forecasting

      by

      One way Donald Trump may try to differentiate his second term from his first is by slashing the federal work force and budget and consolidating and restructuring a host of government agencies.For people who care about weather and climate, one of the most concerning proposals on the table is to dismantle the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The authors of Project 2025, a blueprint for the administration crafted by conservative organizations, claim erroneously that NOAA is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry” and should be “broken down and downsized.” An arm of Mr. Trump’s team, the Department of Government Efficiency, to be led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, wants to eliminate $500 billion in spending by cutting programs whose funding has expired. That could include NOAA.With the rising costs of and vulnerability to extreme weather in a changing climate for the United States, dismantling or defunding NOAA would be a catastrophic error. Rather, there is a golden opportunity to modernize the agency by expanding its capacity for research and innovation. This would not only help Americans better prepare for and survive extreme weather but also keep NOAA from falling further behind similar agencies in Europe. While the incoming administration may want to take a sledgehammer to the federal government, there is broad, bipartisan support for NOAA in Congress. It is the job of the incoming Republican-controlled Congress to invest in its future.NOAA was established via executive order in 1970 by President Richard Nixon as an agency within the Department of Commerce. Currently its mission is to understand and predict changes in the climate, weather, ocean and coasts. It conducts basic research; provides authoritative services like weather forecasts, climate monitoring and marine resource management; and supports industries like energy, agriculture, fishing, tourism and transportation.The best-known part of NOAA, touching all of our daily lives, is the National Weather Service. This is where daily forecasts and timely warning of severe storms, hurricanes and blizzards come from. Using satellites, balloon launches, ships, aircraft and weather stations, NOAA and its offices around the country provide vital services like clockwork, free of charge — services that cannot be adequately replaced by the private sector in part because they wouldn’t necessarily be profitable.For most of its history, NOAA has largely avoided politicization especially because weather forecasting has been seen as nonpartisan. Members of Congress from both parties are highly engaged in its work. Unfortunately, legislation introduced by Representative Frank Lucas, Republican of Oklahoma — a state with a lot of tornadoes — that would have helped NOAA to update its weather research and forecasting programs passed the House but languished in the Senate and is unlikely to move forward in this session of Congress. However, in 2025 there is another opportunity to improve the agency and its services to taxpayers and businesses.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Trump Cabinet: Inside the Many Ideologies of His Nominees

      by

      One faction of prospective nominees appears focused on revenge, another on calming markets and a third on relentlessly — perhaps hopelessly — cutting people and budgets.President-elect Donald J. Trump’s final flurry of cabinet picks and other appointments rounded out what his aides described as a unified, loyal, MAGA-driven administration. But scratch the surface and there are at least three distinct factions and a range of ideologies, barely suppressed to get through the rigors of the confirmation process.There is a revenge team, led by prospective nominees with instructions to rip apart the Justice Department, the intelligence agencies and the Defense Department, hunting down the so-called deep state and anyone who participated in the prosecutions of Mr. Trump.There is a calm-the-markets team, which Mr. Trump hopes will be led by Scott Bessent, the Wall Street billionaire who Mr. Trump chose for Treasury secretary. Mr. Bessent can recite the MAGA lines about deregulation and lower taxes but would likely try to make sure Mr. Trump’s most extreme solutions, like inflation-inducing tariffs on foreign goods, do not end the post-election stock market surge.And then there is a government shrinkage team, led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, whose goals are wildly ambitious, to put it mildly. They want to carve what Mr. Musk says will be “at least” $2 trillion from the annual federal budget, a figure that exceeds the annual cost of salaries for every federal employee. (For the record, the total federal budget in the 2024 fiscal year was $6.75 trillion.)How these missions will mesh and where they will collide is one of the biggest unknowns of the incoming administration.Diversity of ideology and opinion is usually seen as a strength, not a defect, of presidential cabinets. But if there is a surprise about Mr. Trump’s choices in recent days, it is the range of experiences and worldviews that in some cases lie just beneath a veneer of recently declared Make America Great Again loyalty — and loyalty to Mr. Trump himself. It is hard to imagine a few of his picks sitting comfortably at a Trump rally.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 188 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Marjorie Taylor Greene to Lead ‘DOGE’ Panel and Work With Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy

      by

      When she arrived in Congress in 2021, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, was quickly stripped of her two committee assignments by Democrats and shunned by her colleagues on Capitol Hill.Almost three years later, Ms. Greene is poised to hold a gavel for the first time, a sign of the ascendancy of the MAGA wing of the G.O.P. in Congress, where President-elect Donald J. Trump’s most loyal allies will occupy prominent posts next year.Representative James Comer of Kentucky, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, is planning to create a new subcommittee to partner with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to “eliminate government waste.” The committee, which has yet to be created, will work with the new Department of Government Efficiency, known as “DOGE,” and leading Republicans have agreed to allow Ms. Greene to serve as its chairwoman.Republicans said the committee would be charged with investigating waste and corruption within the federal government.Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene during a House Homeland Security Committee meeting on Capitol Hill, in Washington, in January.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesEven though she is not yet the chairwoman of a committee that does not yet exist, Ms. Greene’s new position appeared to be a done deal, with top Republicans confirming it would be hers to lead when the new Congress convenes in January.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 50 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Dissecting the DOGE Playbook

      by

      Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have unveiled their first plans to trim government spending, a blueprint that mirrors how the tech mogul cut costs at Twitter. Layoffs and spending cuts are on Elon Musk’s government agenda.Carlos Barria/ReutersThe Twitter approach to government efficiencyDonald Trump picked Elon Musk and the financier Vivek Ramaswamy to tackle one of his administration’s biggest priorities — reducing the size of the federal government.The two have now shed some light on what Trump has called the Department of Government Efficiency plans to do. They appear to be taking a page from Musk’s playbook for extreme cost-cutting.“We won’t just write reports or cut ribbons,” Musk and Ramaswamy wrote in an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, addressing skepticism that their initiative, known as DOGE, can achieve. “We’ll cut costs.”How they plan to do it: Musk and Ramaswamy said they would focus on razing agency regulations, laying off government employees and cutting costs, including appropriations for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Planned Parenthood. (That said, Congress created the public broadcasting organization and authorizes its budget.)They’ll lean heavily on two recent Supreme Court rulings, West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which together sharply curtailed agencies’ ability to act. “These cases suggest that a plethora of current federal regulations exceed the authority Congress has granted under the law,” Musk and Ramaswamy write.DOGE will present a lengthy list of regulations to gut to Trump, who they say would then be free to use executive action to halt their enforcement and then move to rescind them.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Trump Taps Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to Lead ‘Dept. of Government Efficiency’

      by

      How do you slash, cut, restructure and even dismantle parts of the federal government?If you’re President-elect Donald J. Trump, you turn to two wealthy entrepreneurs: the spaceship-inventing, electric-car-building owner of a social media platform and a moneymaking former pharmaceutical executive who was once one of your presidential rivals.Mr. Trump said on Tuesday that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will lead what he called the Department of Government Efficiency. It will be, he said, “the Manhattan Project” of this era, driving “drastic change” throughout the government with major cuts and new efficiencies in bloated agencies in the federal bureaucracy by July 4, 2026.“A smaller Government, with more efficiency and less bureaucracy, will be the perfect gift to America on the 250th Anniversary of The Declaration of Independence,” Mr. Trump wrote in a statement. “I am confident they will succeed!”The statement left unanswered all kinds of major questions about an initiative that is uncertain in seriousness but potentially vast in scope. For starters, the president-elect did not address the fact that no such department exists. And he did not elaborate on whether his two rich supporters would hire a staff for the new department, which he said is aimed in part at reducing the federal work force.Mr. Musk, who became one of Mr. Trump’s biggest campaign contributors, said before the election that he would help the president-elect cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. But he did not explain in any detail how that would be accomplished or what parts of the government would be slashed.“This will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in Government waste, which is a lot of people!” Mr. Musk said in the statement.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 175 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Trump, Appealing to Bitcoin Fans, Vows U.S. Will Be ‘Crypto Capital of the Planet’

      by

      Former President Donald J. Trump vowed on Saturday that he would turn the United States into a “Bitcoin superpower” if returned to the White House, wielding much of the same rhetoric of persecution that he has applied to himself and his supporters to appeal to cryptocurrency enthusiasts who want to see less regulation.“Sadly, we see the attacks on crypto,” Mr. Trump told a gathering of cryptocurrency fans in Nashville. “It’s a part of a much larger pattern that’s being carried out by the same left-wing fascists to weaponize government against any threat to their power. They’ve done it to me.”He added that, if he were elected, “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s anti-crypto crusade will be over” and that “the moment I’m sworn in, the persecution stops and the weaponization ends against your industry.”Mr. Trump has been competing with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent presidential candidate, for the support of cryptocurrency holders, and his remarks represented one of his most direct pitches yet.Three large crypto firms have invested about $150 million to elect pro-crypto candidates in congressional races. In his speech, Mr. Trump promoted himself as “the first major party nominee in American history to accept donations in Bitcoin and crypto,” adding that his campaign has raised $25 million from cryptocurrency donations in the last two months.The former president offered promises of sweeping deregulation and the establishment of a “strategic national Bitcoin stockpile.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      In J.D. Vance, Donald Trump Selects an Inheritor

      by

      For nearly nine years, Donald J. Trump has been the singular face of Republican politics and the undisputed leader of the Make America Great Again movement. On Monday, the former president came as close as he may ever come to anointing a successor.The choice of J.D. Vance as Mr. Trump’s running mate, a politician nearly 40 years his junior, immediately vaults the first-term senator to the forefront of a G.O.P. future that is not so far away.If elected in November, Mr. Trump, 78, can serve only a single term — the 22nd Amendment states that no person shall be elected president more than twice — a rarity for a candidate naming a potential vice president. That short tenure has added extra urgency to the question of what comes next for Trumpism, a movement inextricably tethered to one man who has so thoroughly transformed the Republican Party.Mr. Vance, 39, is the first millennial to make a major presidential ticket, a Marine veteran and a politician who has thoroughly remade himself as a full-throated MAGA enthusiast. In recent months, it was Mr. Vance’s aggressive defense of Trumpism and Mr. Trump, even on mainstream news outlets, that helped him stand out for the former president as a worthy inheritor.“Trump is going to hold on to the MAGA baton for as long as he can,” said Chip Saltsman, a longtime Republican strategist. But Mr. Vance, he added, is “somebody that’s going to have an inside track, a head start on getting the MAGA baton in four years.”The changing of the ideological guard was clearly, and at times uncomfortably, apparent on the convention floor on Monday. Mentions of Mr. Vance’s name earned roars of approval. The face of Senator Mitch McConnell, an avatar of the pre-Trump G.O.P., inspired boos when he appeared on the big screens above delegates.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More