Ben Carson believes that electing Trump offers the best opportunity to reclaim the federal bureaucracy from the left

Ben Carson, the former neurosurgeon and Trump administration official, says that putting former President Donald Trump back in the Oval Office would be the country’s “best chance” to clear out the federal bureaucracy and replace it with something that works for the people.

“This will be the best chance to transform Washington back into something that actually works for the people,” Carson told The Daily Wire during a sit-down interview. “It’s become so polluted now. They call it a swamp but I think that’s a compliment, it’s really a cesspool.”

Carson’s comments come amid wide-reaching efforts from the Biden administration to embed leftwing ideologies, such as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), throughout the practices of the federal bureaucracy. Carson said that he experienced bureaucrats attempting to obstruct the Trump administration’s agenda while serving as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

“Their tendency would be to try to slow-walk things that they disagreed with,” he said of bureaucrats who opposed Trump, though he noted that other agencies faced harsher opposition from their own staff to undermine the president’s agenda.

“This is the chance to bring in people who actually believe the Constitution and understand the concept of representation and will work for the benefit of the people,” he added. “We need effective people if we’re going to try to save this republic.”

Trump has signaled that he will take steps to gut the administrative state if he is reelected, using tools like Schedule F, an executive order, to strip civil service employment protections from bureaucrats who have influence over the policy-making process.

“We will pass critical reforms making every executive branch employee fireable by the president of the United States,” Trump said at a rally, touting the plan. “The deep state must be brought to heel.”

Carson explained that Trump’s plan to gut the administrative branch of leftwing bureaucrats has caused panic among those on the Left.

“That’s one of the reasons that I think a lot of people on the Left are so terrified of the concept of Trump getting back into office,” Carson noted. “They do not want him in there, believe me, there is nothing that they won’t do to try to keep him out,” he said, before adding, “I think it’s almost unimaginable what they’ll do.”

The former president would have no shortage of agencies and leftist bureaucrats to scrutinize in the event he is reelected and sets out to fire those who may otherwise undermine his agenda.

The intelligence agencies have pushed far-left dogmas under the Biden administration, with a Daily Wire investigation recently revealing that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence sent out a DEI newsletter to the entire intelligence community, including the FBI, CIA, and DOJ, instructing agents to avoid using “problematic phrases” when discussing Islamic terrorism. The same DEI document also featured an article from an anonymous intelligence official who claimed that crossdressing makes him a “better intelligence officer.”

There’s also the National Security Agency, which produced a DEI glossary exclusively obtained by The Daily Wire with terms like “ze/zir,” “settler colonialism,” and “white fragility,” which directly cited infamous Critical Race Theorists.

Other federal agencies have poured millions of taxpayer funds into DEI initiatives, with the Pentagon spending as much as $270 million under Biden to advance the leftwing agenda. There’s also the State Department, which The Daily Wire exclusively revealed had spent over $77 million over two years under Biden on DEI programs, with hundreds of millions more in requests for DEI-related initiatives.

DEI trainings have become commonplace throughout the federal bureaucracy, with the Internal Revenue Service hosting a mandatory training for criminal investigators that pulled material from a radical transgender academic who called for the “death of whiteness” in an article titled “Dead Honky.”

While Trump is preparing to gut the administrative state, others are preparing to fill the vacancies Left by bureaucrats who could be fired under a future Trump administration. The Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project, an initiative from the Heritage Foundation, seeks to “pave the way for an effective conservative Administration” and is building a personnel database of those who could work in a future administration.

“It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration,” Project 2025 states.

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