AMERICA IS Under Siege

[shermann7]

DeSantis Pledges to Push for Closure of 4 Federal Agencies, if Elected

https://thenewamerican.com/desantis-pledges-to-push-for-closure-of-4-federal-agencies-if-elected/

railing former President Donald Trump badly in the contest for the Republican Party presidential nomination, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida told Fox News’ Martha MacCallum on Wednesday that he would push for Congress to eliminate four federal agencies or departments, if elected president next year.

“We would do Education, we would do Commerce, we’d do Energy, and we would do IRS,” DeSantis told MacCallum. “If Congress will work with me on doing that, we’ll be able to reduce the size and scope of government. If Congress won’t go that far, I’m going to use those agencies to push back against woke ideology and against the leftism that we see creeping into all institutions of American life.”

For his part, Trump has promised to ditch any federal spending on programs in the schools “pushing critical race theory, gender ideology or other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content onto our children.”

DeSantis is staking out positions to the right of Trump in his bid to win the Republican nomination. In an obvious shot at the former president, DeSantis said, “We need to fundamentally re-constitutionalize the government. We talked about draining the swamp in 2016; that didn’t happen.”

The Florida governor is not the first Republican presidential hopeful to call for eliminating a federal agency or department. In 1980, Ronald Reagan said he would like to eliminate both the Department of Energy and the Department of Education — then-recently created federal departments by Congress at the urging of President Jimmy Carter. Once in office, though, Reagan’s request went nowhere in the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives, and he said little about his proposal after that.

Then, in 2012, Texas Governor Rick Perry said during a Republican presidential candidate debate that he would like to eliminate three federal departments. When asked which three he would like to axe, Perry named two — Commerce and Education — but could not remember the third.

With Perry struggling to remember the third department, another debate participant, Representative Ron Paul, also of Texas, suggested that it would be good to eliminate five departments, and asked if Perry’s third agency was the Environmental Protection Agency.

Whereupon Perry said, “EPA. There you go.”

But then the CNBC debate moderator asked, “Seriously — is EPA one you are talking about?”

Perry conceded that he was not thinking about EPA, saying rather that that agency needed to be “rebuilt.”

Fifteen minutes later, Perry remembered that the Department of Energy was the third agency he would like to see gone. Later, a Perry spokesman defended his boss, arguing that the governor was still able to name two more federal agencies to get rid of than President Barack Obama had proposed.

It is highly unlikely that DeSantis will forget his four, however. He has frequently called for ditching the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which he has called a “corrupt organization.” After the passage of the 16th Amendment, which allowed Congress to place a tax on personal income, the IRS was tasked with collecting the tax.