Vivek Ramaswamy Returns to Push His Plans to Slash the Government

The wealthy entrepreneur, tapped by Donald Trump to co-lead an outside effort focused on “efficiency,” campaigned on an assertion that the president has the power to fire 75 percent of the federal work force.

As he ran for the Republican nomination for president, the wealthy entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy took daily digs at his more powerful rival, Donald J. Trump, saying that the former president’s heart was in the right place but that only Mr. Ramaswamy had the knowledge and street smarts to enact the policies that would truly “make America great again.”

His plan, he freely said, was radical: slashing the federal work force by 75 percent, 50 percent in Year 1, and eliminating large swaths of the federal government.

Now, as the co-leader of what President-elect Trump has called the Department of Government Efficiency, Mr. Ramaswamy might actually have the chance to prove his ideas could work. Whether the American people will buy what he and his co-leader, Elon Musk, are selling is a different question.

“There will be no political messiah coming from the White House on high to save us,” he said last year in a lengthy speech laying out his plans. “If we are going to be saved, we have to save ourselves.”

With around 2.2 million civilian employees, not counting the military or the U.S. Postal Service, the kind of downsizing that Mr. Ramaswamy outlined during his presidential bid — as many as 1.65 million layoffs — would have repercussions for the economy and communities across the country.

There is skepticism about what the Department of Government Efficiency can do, however, and how great its influence will actually be. In announcing its creation with Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy at its helm, the president-elect said the department is not actually a department — “it will provide advice and guidance from outside of government” — and it is not permanent. Its “work will conclude no later than July 4, 2026,” the nation’s 250th anniversary, Mr. Trump said.