Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) this week joined a line of Republican candidates who, over the years, have made far-fetched promises to eliminate entire federal agencies if elected president.
“We would do Education, we would do Commerce, we’d do Energy, and we would do IRS,” DeSantis told Fox News this week, laying out which departments would be on the chopping block.
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The GOP presidential candidate conceded that Congress might not approve such a plan, in which case he said he would harness the power of the agencies to “push back against woke ideology.”
But his pitch raises questions about how such an effort would, or could, work.
Practically speaking, the move could leave tens of thousands of people without a job.
The IRS alone employs nearly 80,000 people; the Department of Commerce employs more than 47,000.
Together, the Education and Energy departments have a workforce of nearly 20,000 people.
While most conservatives would agree that the payrolls of federal agencies have grown too bloated, firing so many people at once could prove politically thorny.
Then there is the question of how the government could continue some of the more important functions that those four agencies perform.
The Department of Commerce, for example, houses the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the U.S. Census Bureau, among other offices.
The Department of Energy has offices that oversee nuclear security and efforts to protect the electric grid from cyberattacks, among other functions.
And the IRS is responsible for collecting the revenue that powers the entire federal government, a task that other federal agencies may struggle to complete.
DeSantis is far from the first Republican to suggest an overhaul of the Cabinet agencies that conservatives most despise.
Nor are Republicans alone in floating such proposals; during Donald Trump’s presidency, progressives demanded an end to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement over what they saw as mistreatment of immigrants at the border.
President Ronald Reagan came into office promising to abolish the Department of Education, a pledge he walked back in 1981 in the face of opposition.
Republican nominee Bob Dole vowed during his 1996 presidential run to abolish the IRS, but he did not get the chance after losing to Bill Clinton.
Congressional Republicans in 1996 pushed legislation that would dismantle the Department of Energy. They argued the agency had strayed from its original mandate, and their proposal involved allowing the Pentagon to take over some of its functions and privatizing others. That, too, failed.
Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, while running for president in 2012, made perhaps the most memorable pitch for scrapping agencies in recent memory when, during a debate, he attempted to list the three he’d eliminate.
After rattling off the Departments of Education and Commerce, Perry infamously forgot the third department, and his presidential bid never quite recovered.
The agency he forgot was the Department of Energy, which he went on to lead when President Donald Trump nominated him for energy secretary.
As president, Trump put forward a budget that would have zeroed out funding for 19 smaller, sub-Cabinet-level agencies, including the National Endowment for the Arts and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation.
The Republican-controlled Congress had skeptics, and none got defunded.
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Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) advocated abolishing the IRS during his 2016 presidential run. He elaborated further on how he’d do so than others who have pushed the idea, proposing a radically simplified tax code that would reduce the need for a sprawling bureaucracy to enforce it.
Previously, DeSantis had said he would take on the bureaucracy of the federal government by moving some agencies outside of Washington, D.C., where he said too much power is concentrated.