House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Friday that Republicans have an ambitious plan to restructure and reduce the federal government if they win congressional majorities and former President Donald Trump wins the White House.
In a wide-ranging interview with Just the News, the Louisiana Republican also discussed a proposal to ‘deport’ tens of thousands of federal bureaucrats from Washington and relocate them to middle America.
Johnson expressed that he and other GOP leaders aim to move federal agency offices, personnel, and assets away from the nation’s capital to bring them closer to the people they serve and further from the influence of wealthy special interests that often manipulate policy and spending.
“There’s a lot of talk about uprooting, you know, these entrenched bureaucracies and putting them out elsewhere around the country,” Johnson said.
He described this reinvention of the extensive federal bureaucracy, which employs over 2 million workers and contractors, as aligning with Trump’s vision to appoint billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk to head a government efficiency office.
The plan includes fiscal conservatives’ vision of eliminating federal bureaucracies and reallocating taxpayer funds to the states through block grants.
The Speaker stated that the deportation of Washington bureaucrats would lead to a natural reduction in both the size and cost of government.
“That accomplishes a lot of important goals, but the first would be that you don’t have all these career civil service law-protected bureaucrats,” he said. “Some of them have been camped out of these agencies for decades. They’re nameless, faceless. We don’t know who to hold accountable.
“The idea is, if you move the agency to, you know, northern Kansas or southwest New Mexico, or wherever it is around the country, then some of the swamp dwellers will not desire to follow the job to the new, less desirable location,” he added. “They love the swamp. You know they want to stay. They’ll turn them into lobbyists or something to stay in D.C.”
The mass transfer and departure of bureaucrats will then lead to a “business reorganization proposition” for the federal government, he said.
“You’ve got agencies that you can scale down because you have empty cubicles and … almost all the agencies are bloated and inefficient,” Johnson continued. “So you can scale that down. And then in the cubicles that you do need to fill, we’ve had America First Policy Institute and some of our other think tanks that have been working to develop a notebook full of highly qualified, previously vetted, limited government conservatives who have expertise in these areas.”
Johnson’s remarks were the most extensive he has made regarding a congressional vision for reducing the budget and restructuring government finances. He stated that the process would take a “blowtorch” to the regulatory state and reorganize government agencies following a historic Supreme Court ruling this summer that overturned the decades-old “Chevron doctrine.”
Under the new ruling, federal bureaucrats can no longer create or interpret their own regulations; they must strictly enforce those authorized by Congress, Just the News noted.
“We have a once in a lifetime, yeah, once in a lifetime opportunity to really claw back Article 1 authority to the Legislative Branch under the Constitution and have an administration that is in tune with that whole agenda,” the Speaker continued. “So look, I just think there’s almost unlimited potential in front of us, and we’ve got to seize that moment.”
On other issues, Speaker Johnson emphasized that a GOP-led Congress would fully align with Trump’s previously stated agenda, which includes closing the border, deporting illegal aliens, reducing inflation, renewing the Trump tax cuts set to expire next year, and swiftly enhancing national security in an increasingly turbulent world.
“I think within the hour of President Trump taking this oath of office, he’ll issue an executive order to secure that border,” Johnson said. “We’ll come behind that with legislative action to secure it, seal it up, and then we’ll work on having to deal with the fallout of everybody who was allowed in, and that’s a whole agenda thing.
“But immediately after the border is secured, we go to the economy, because the cost of living is unsustainable, unaffordable, and we know how to fix it … Then we’re going to do that and then somewhere you’re going to have an extension of the Trump era tax cuts,” he noted further.