Shrinking capital: DeSantis vows to reduce federal 'footprint' in DC by half if elected president

Seeking to invigorate his GOP presidential campaign, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is vowing to reduce by half the government's footprint in Washington D.C. by eliminating agencies and programs and moving jobs out of the nation's capital so federal workers can be closer to the voters they serve.

"We've had this massive accumulation of power in D.C., and it's been really, really toxic," DeSantis told Just the News in a wide-ranging televised interview which aired Wednesday night. "So we want to take power out of D.C. and shift it around the country."

Currently, nearly every Cabinet agency has its headquarters in the Washington D.C. area, with satellite offices scattered around the country. That construct has assembled about 400,000 federal workers, hundreds of thousands of military service members and government contractors, and millions of square feet of office space in the capital city area.

DeSantis revealed plans during a Just the News presidential town-hall forum sponsored by the Association of Mature American Citizens (AMAC) and airing on Real America's Voice TV network to reverse that dynamic if elected to the White House.

"One of the things I'm going to do is every Cabinet secretary is going to be ordered to reduce their footprint of bureaucrats in D.C. area by 50%," DeSantis said. "Some of that will be reducing the total number of employees writ large in the agency through attrition. Some of it may be laying off. Some of it may be transferring to other parts of the country."

The Florida governor has championed education and parents rights in his state, and he vowed to tip the balance of power back to local school districts and states by shrinking or eliminating the U.S. Education Department.

"We can go as far as the Congress wants to go on some of that," he said. "Clearly, agencies like [the Department of] Education have not worked since they were created in the late 1970s, and we understand education should be a state and local issue."

He added that a constructive way to address concerns that federal agencies like the FBI and IRS have been politically weaponized against school parents, Catholics or conservatives is to decentralize federal power outside Washington, a city where more than 80% of voters lean Democrat.

"At the end of the day, the founding fathers created three branches of government: legislative, executive and judicial," DeSantis said. "They did not create a fourth branch of government. They did not create an administrative state that basically governs us without our consent."

DeSantis, who is running a distant second to former President Donald Trump in the GOP primary race and now facing pressure from the rear of the field from UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, addressed a host of other domestic and foreign policy issues, including the wars now raging in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

He pointedly opposed allowing any Palestinian refugees to immigrate to the United States or any effort by President Joe Biden to send U.S. dollars to the Palestinians as long as Hamas remains in control of Gaza. Biden on Wednesday proposed $100 million in U.S. humanitarian aid to Gaza and the West Bank.

"We know Hamas runs the show down there. You are aiding Hamas when you're sending tax dollars down there," DeSantis said. "So I've been very clear over the last week. First, no Gaza refugees in the United States, and second, no taxpayer money to Gaza.

"They still have people that are being held hostage, our own people, US citizens are being held hostage. A lot of Israelis, of course, are being held hostage," he added. "Why would you want to pump money into the coffers of the Hamas organization? Any money that goes down there, any of those groups will all get commandeered by Hamas."

On the Russia-Ukraine war, he suggested the Biden administration strategy of funding Ukraine indiscriminately was playing into the hands of Russia and China, who want to prolong the conflict to drain Western resources and attention from other areas of the globe without changing much in terms of land control.

"I think what Biden is doing is his policy is a blank check, for as long as it takes," he said. "People are saying this is going to go on for another four or five years. That will end up costing this country probably a half a trillion dollars. But nobody is arguing that the ultimate resolution in terms of the facts on the ground is going to be much different than what we're looking at here today. Every time you're involved in something like this, there's a cost to what you can do in other parts of the world. China, for example.

"We've been drawing down ammunition, we've been drawing down weapons, stocks in ways that you're not able to do things to fortify our position in the Far East," he added. "I think you hear a lot about what China thinks of the conflict. I think China wants to see that conflict drag on, I think they want to see the West expend a lot of resources. I think they quite frankly, don't mind if Russia gets weakened a little more, because what Russia will end up just being more of a client of China. So I think it's in China's interest that this thing drags on.

"I think it's in our interest that we bring it to a conclusion in a way that, you know, Ukraine will of course, retain sovereignty, we're not going to have wars breaking out in Europe, but is not going to require us to put hundreds of billions of dollars into the effort without achieving a clear cut victory."

On abortion, DeSantis urged Republicans to stop getting bogged down in a debate over where each state sets limits and instead to turn the debate on how Democrats implicitly or explicitly support abortion on demand until the time of birth.

"There's different opinions on this issue in terms of how Americans largely feel about it. But the most unpopular position to take to the extent these Republicans are looking at, like polls, is the Democrats' position, which is you can have abortion all the way up until the moment of birth," he said.

"So Republicans need to go on offense against the Democrats' extremism on this issue, because a lot of Americans don't necessarily know how extreme the Democrats are. We know the media run interference for them on that. But that doesn't relieve us of our responsibility to hit back when they're hitting us," he added.

On taxation, DeSantis signaled he supports renewing the Trump tax cuts set to expire in 2025 and not imposing any new taxes.

"Well, we clearly aren't going to allow any taxes to go up," he said. "I mean, the federal government has been taking in, I think, a record high tax revenue in terms of as a percentage of our GDP. Gotta go all the way back to World War Two. So we don't have a tax problem, we have a spending problem. And I'm going to make sure to protect taxpayers. And we're going to do like we did in Florida, we cut taxes by record amounts, yet we generated big, big budget surpluses. And we've paid down almost 25% of our state's total outstanding debt that it incurred since the inception of Florida as a state."