Vivek Ramaswamy: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. So, I go back to this question of mission, right? A lot of people who make arguments for the Department of Education aren’t aware why the Department of Education was created in the first place, actually. So that might be a useful place to start, is that this thing was created, it had a purpose, presumably. What was that purpose? It might be at least a relevant question to ask before we decided what are we doing with it or not, what was the purpose of this thing that we created? To me, it seems to be a highly relevant question. Yet, in this discussion about government reform, it’s interesting how eager people are to skip over that question and just to talk about, “Okay, but we’ve got the status quo, and it’s just going to be disruptive,” versus asking the question of, okay, this institution was created, it had an original purpose, is that purpose still relevant? Is this organization at all fulfilling that purpose today? To me, those are some relevant questions to ask. So, let’s talk about that for the Department of Education. Its purpose was relevant at that time, which was to make sure that localities, and particularly states, were not siphoning taxpayer dollars away from predominantly Black school districts to predominantly White ones. And that was not a theoretical concern at the time. It was happening, or there was at least some evidence that that was happening in certain states in the South. And so, you may say you don’t like the federal solution, you may say you like the federal solution, but like it or not, that was the original purpose of the US Department of Education, to make sure that, from a federal perspective, that states were not systematically disadvantaging Black school districts over predominantly White ones. However noble and relevant that purpose may have been six decades ago, it’s not a relevant purpose today. There’s no evidence today of states intentionally mapping out which are the Black versus White school districts and siphoning money in one direction versus another. To the contrary, one of the things we’ve learned is that the school districts in the inner city, many of which are predominantly Black, actually spend more money per student than other school districts for a worse result, as measured by test scores and other performance, on a per-student basis, suggesting that there are other factors than the dollar expenditures per school determining student success, and actually suggesting that even the over-funding of some of those already poorly run schools rewards them for their actual bureaucratic failures. So, against that backdrop, the Department of Education has, instead, extrapolated that original purpose of what was a racial equality purpose, to, instead, implement a different vision of racial equity through the ideologies that they demand in the content of the curriculum that these public schools actually teach. a racial equality purpose, to, instead, implement a different vision of racial equity through the ideologies that they demand in the content of the curriculum that these public schools actually teach. So, Department of Education funding, so federal funding, accounts for about, I’m giving you round numbers here, but around 10% of the funding of most public schools across the country. But that comes with strings attached. So, in today’s Department of Education, this didn’t happen back in 1970, but it’s happening today, ironically it’s funny how these things change with the bureaucracies that fail, they blow oak smoke to cover up for their own failures, what happens with today’s Department of Education? They effectively say you don’t get that funding unless you adopt certain goals deemed at achieving racial or gender equity goals. And in fact, they also intervene in the curriculum where there’s evidence of schools in the Midwest or in the Great Plains that have been denied funding because Department of Education funding, so long as they have certain subjects like Archery… There was one instance of a school that had archery in its curriculum. I find that to be pretty interesting, actually. I think you have different kinds of physical education. This is one that combines mental focus with physical aptitude, but hey, maybe I’m biased, it doesn’t matter. Whether you like archery or not, I don’t think it’s the federal government’s job to withhold funding from a school because they include something in their curriculum that the federal government deems inappropriate where that locality found that to be a relevant locus of education. So, what you see then is an abandonment of the original purpose. That’s long past. You don’t have this problem that the Department of Education was originally formed to solve, of siphoning money from Black school districts to White school districts and laundering that, effectively, in public funds, that doesn’t exist anymore. So, they find new purposes instead, creating a lot more damage along the way. So, you asked me to steelman, and can I say something constructive rather than just pounding down on the other side? One way to think about this is, for a lot of these agencies, were many of them formed with a positive intention at the outset? Yes. Whether that positive intention existed, I’m still a skeptic of creating bureaucracies, but if you’re going to create one, at least make it, what shall we call it, a taskforce. Make it a taskforce. A taskforce versus an agency means, after it’s done, you celebrate, you’ve done your work, pat yourself on the back, and then move on, rather than creating a standing bureaucracy which actually finds things to do after it has already solved or addressed the first reason it was born in the first place. f on the back, and then move on, rather than creating a standing bureaucracy which actually finds things to do after it has already solved or addressed the first reason it was born in the first place. And I think we don’t have enough of that in our culture. Even if you have a company that’s generated tons of cash flow, and it’s solved a problem, let’s say it’s a biopharmaceutical company that developed a cure to some disease, and the only thing people knew at that company was how to develop a cure to that disease, and they generated a boatload of cash from doing it, at a certain point you could just give it to your shareholders and close up shop. And that’s actually a beautiful thing to do. You don’t see that happen enough in the American consciousness, in the American culture of, when an institution has achieved its purpose, celebrate it, and then move on. And I think that that culture in our government would result in a vastly restrained scope of government, rather than, today it’s a one-way ratchet. Once you cause it to come into existence, you cause new things to come into existence, but the old one that came into existence continues to persist and exist as well, and that’s where you get this metastasis over the last century.…

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