CNN’s Fareed Zakaria Lauds ‘Brilliant’ Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy: They Can ‘Deliver’ on GOP’s Central ‘Promise of the Last 70 Years’
CNN’s Fareed Zakaria praised Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy on Sunday as “brilliant” as they prepare to use the newly-announced Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Zakaria told his audience he appreciated an effort to cut federal spending while noting Musk and Ramaswamy might get a chance to help the GOP make good on a seven-decade-old promise to roll back big government programs instituted by former President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
While the CNN host did not necessarily argue for or against two tech entrepreneurs targeting FDR’s legacy, he praised them for an attempt to cut spending and for having a chance to offer conservative voters something their elected officials have failed to deliver since the 1950s – change.
“Of Donald Trump’s recent announcements, the one that intrigues even excites me the most is the establishment of DOGE,” he said. “Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who will be in charge of DOGE, are both brilliant and the Federal Government has clearly become too expansive and its writ too cumbersome.”
Zakaria made note of regulations that he said could be retired or altered to help the federal government stop hemorrhaging money. He also noted there were some aspects of the national budget that were off-limits to cuts, such as military spending and programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and unemployment insurance. Zakaria added:
What is now left is about 15% of the federal budget, which includes certain veterans benefits, agricultural subsidies, spending on roads and highways, etc. To achieve the $2 trillion spending cuts that Musk has often talked about. He would need to eliminate all of the spending and all of the Pentagon spending, and then he’d still have work to do. But I do support the impulse to reform and not just because I think it will force greater scrutiny and efficiency to government, which needs it.
The duo will also force the country, and especially the Republican Party, to confront a reality that it has danced around for decades. The moderate Republican Party was forged in opposition to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Ever since the 1930s, the party’s strongest ideologues have promised to repeal the New Deal and dismantle the architecture of the federal government that was largely constructed by FDR. But they never did.
Zakari went on to note that every Republican president since Dwight Eisenhower had failed to challenge government spending in any meaningful way while Democratic President Bill Clinton was the last chief executive to balance a federal budget. Zakaria concluded:
The US federal government is smaller than much of the industrialized world in terms of spending as a percentage of GDP. It still desperately needs reform and streamlining. But conservatives have long argued that it needs to be much, much smaller. In fact, a good part of the rage that has built up among parts of the Republican base over decades has been centered on the notion that party leaders have promised repeal again and again, but never delivered. With DOGE, we may finally get an effort to actually deliver on the central Republican promise of the last 70 years. And we will find out what America thinks of it.
Watch above via CNN.
