On Monday afternoon, former Republican presidential candidate, short-lived adviser to President Donald Trump’s plans to slash government spending, and one-time “libertarian-minded rap artist” Vivek Ramaswamy announced his bid for Ohio governor.
In his effort, Ramaswamy is promising something specific: to bring Ohio the same cost-cutting measures that Trump is implementing in the federal government. “President Trump is reviving our conviction in America,” Ramaswamy said. “We require a leader here at home who will revive our conviction in Ohio.”
“I spent most of last year working tirelessly to help send Donald Trump back to the White House because it was a fork in the road for the future of the country,” Ramaswamy said on Monday—conjuring up the “fork in the road” emails that the Office of Personnel Management sent to federal government employees that offered a resignation option to “retain all pay and benefits” or risk layoffs.
While he didn’t explicitly mention the group by name—possibly due to the over 55,000 civilian federal employees in Ohio as of March 2024—the Republican hinted at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the body tasked by a day-one executive order to eliminate wasteful spending, in his speech. Ramaswamy calls his vision more “expansive” than DOGE. But perhaps that is because of the potential unpopularity brewing. In just over a month, it has already slashed government departments and agencies—some even to the point of nonfunctioning.
As I previously wrote, DOGE plays with a rehash of conservative austerity. Is it really that innovative for Republicans to want to cut government programs? Although Ramaswamy has since left the initiative for tech billionaire Elon Musk to run on his own, he is still pushing discipline for poor folks under the guise of “government efficiency.”
“We’re going to end the war on work in America—starting right here in Ohio—by reattaching work requirements to Medicaid and welfare,” Ramaswamy said on Monday, assuring the crowd that doing so would address the state’s apparent worker shortage.
“It’s not compassion to make somebody more dependent on the government,” he continued. “The compassionate thing to do is to help them achieve their independence from it.”
Here, Ramaswamy echoes former House Speaker Paul Ryan talking about his Path to Prosperity budget proposals or Ronald Reagan blaming people who needed government assistance on becoming “virtual wards of the State…that robs them of dignity and opportunity.”
But Amy Acton, the former health department director who led Ohio’s initial response to the Covid pandemic and the only Democratic gubernatorial candidate in the reliably-red state so far, took issue with Ramaswamy’s perspective. “Where he sees an opportunity to gut Medicare, Medicaid, and attack a woman’s right to choose—I know my job as governor will be to stand up for Ohioans against powerful billionaires,” she said in a statement on Monday.
Like the president, Ramaswamy vowed to return people back to their former glory. “This is our modern-day Northwest Ordinance,” Ramaswamy stated on Monday. According to him, at the turn of the century, Ohio was the third-most populous state in the country and was an economic powerhouse, pioneering industries like steel, rubber, and glass, as well as pork. But since then, there has been a “national identity crisis” where taxes, regulations, and a bureaucratic government have scaled back prosperity.
At the forefront of Ramaswamy’s proposals were economic and education reforms. He called for more capitalism so that Ohio’s manufacturing industries would flourish as the leader of a “Second Industrial Revolution” and financial insecurity would vanish, and he demanded policies like school choice and merit-based pay for teachers and administrators as the equalizer that builds a path for families to “realize their American Dream” through hard work.
Both Trump and Musk endorsed his candidacy late Monday night.
