Vivek Ramaswamy: Grateful for President-Elect Trump for opportunity to cut government costs

...cutting the federal budget. Did he give you any guidance? Yeah, well, first thing I'll say is I'm really grateful to President Trump for the opportunity because I think it does take a different kind of president to prioritize this kind of project. This has been attempted before. Conservatives and even some Democrats have talked about for a long time the importance of downsizing the federal government, mostly just to the tune of rhetoric without a lot of action to go with it. And if you do something the way it's always been done and it's failed before, it's going to fail again. President Trump had the creativity and vision to set this up differently, to say that if you want a different result, you've got to do this very differently. From the outside, you've got two outsiders, Elon, myself, President Trump in many ways is himself an outsider as the president, and to be able to look at not just, and I think this is important to understand about the project here, not just about cutting costs, but about restoring true self-governance in America, where right now the people we elect to run the government, they're not the ones who actually run the government. It's unelected, and even in many cases, unappointed federal bureaucrats that make most decisions that impact everyday Americans, both through the regulatory state and even through expenditures that go out the door from people who are not elected and not even appointed by those who were elected. So it's a massive problem we're taking on, but I do think that it is something that we're taking on in a very different way, and I hope to have, therefore, a different result. Is there any one thing that President Trump has told you, I want you to go cut that? I think he actually is looking at it the other way, in terms of keeping a very open mind top-down to say that let's start with a clean slate. Let's start fresh, and everything is in scope for what counts as government efficiency. It's not one part of the federal government or the other. It's actually looking at it as a whole. Are we respecting the taxpayer dollar? In some ways, to use an analogy to those in this room, in the way that a CFO would look at their shareholder capital. In many ways, you are also stewards of capital, right? Your shareholders are the owners of your companies. I assume these are mostly publicly traded company CFOs in the room. Your duty is to the shareholder to ensure that that money is spent to maximize the size of their pie. You're their steward. I don't think the people who have historically spent government dollars view themselves in that same type of stewardship relationship with the taxpayer, who is like, effectively, the shareholder of the federal government. I think if you view the way the federal government spends the taxpayer money, and that was in a corporate context, that would be a fiduciary breach, hands down. I think the officers of that public company would, at minimum, be fired, and at worst, be civilly or worse, in court, over the dereliction of duty they owe to the people who have entrusted them with that capital. I think that's what this exercise is about, is to restore that sense of duty that the government officials, and in many cases, elected officials, owe to their stakeholder, which is the taxpayer. It's the equivalent of your relationship to the shareholder. I think many of you probably, I know for sure, because the bar is so low on the other side, do a better job than the government officials do in looking after their fiduciary obligation, you could say, to the taxpayer. That's a big part of what we want to restore.