Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis took part on Wednesday in one of the traditional stunts of Republican presidential primary candidates desperate for attention: He casually listed off vast swaths of the federal government he wants to eliminate.
“So we would do Education, we would do Commerce, we’d do Energy, and we would do IRS,” DeSantis tossed out after Fox News’ Martha McCallum asked if he was in favor of eliminating any agencies, specifically naming the Department of Education as a possibility in what I’m sure was in no way a prearranged question.
We’d do it. Simple as that.
Here’s one example of the complications that might ensue if DeSantis got his way: The National Hurricane Center is part of the Department of Commerce. Florida, the state DeSantis currently governs, has been known to have a hurricane or two.
If challenged on that point, DeSantis would likely say that he wouldn’t eliminate the National Hurricane Center, he’d just restructure it into another part of the government while eliminating the Commerce Department—as if completely restructuring the federal government would be a breeze with no waste or screw-ups. But listeners aren’t supposed to get into the details of that. When Republicans announce they’re going to eliminate big parts of the federal government, it’s supposed to land as bold, decisive, and uncomplicated.
Similarly, DeSantis says he wants to eliminate the IRS, which is supposed to make people think “oh, yippee, no more taxes,” but no matter how much he wants to cut from the services and agencies that help regular people and keep our air and water clean and our workplaces safe, there’s no way he wants to campaign on not being able to fund the military, which currently accounts for more than 16% of the overall federal budget and around half of all discretionary spending. Again, DeSantis would claim he wants to replace the IRS with something, but he’s not getting into what. Last month, he told Dana Loesch he would support a flat tax, saying, “I would be welcoming to take this tax system, chuck it out the window and do something that’s more favorable to the average folks.” (That would not be a flat tax, because those are wildly regressive.)
But DeSantis wasn’t done, because while talking about cutting important federal agencies is an important rite of passage for a Republican candidate, culture wars are where DeSantis thinks he is really going to win over primary voters. So he continued, “If Congress will work with me on doing that, we’ll be able to reduce the size and scope of government.”
“But what I’m also going to do, Martha, is be prepared: If Congress won’t go that far, I’m going to use those agencies to push back against woke ideology and against the leftism that we see creeping into all institutions of American life,” DeSantis went on. “So for example, with Department of Education, we reverse all the transgender sports stuff. Women’s sports should be protected. We reverse policies trying to inject a curriculum into our schools. That will all be gone. We will make sure we have an accreditation system for higher ed, which is not trying to foment more things like DEI and CRT. So we’ll be prepared to do both. Either way it’ll be a win for conservatives.”
If, in 2008, Rudy Giuliani was “a noun, a verb, and 9/11,” Ron DeSantis is quickly turning into “a noun, a verb, and woke ideology.”
DeSantis’ invocation of “the leftism that we see creeping into all institutions of American life” is inadvertently revealing: He’s railing against something that is part of the fabric of our lives. Sure, he wants people to believe–and a good chunk of the Republican base does believe–that the things they identify as creeping leftism are being propelled by some shadowy conspiracy. But the reality, when you start looking at what he’s really talking about, is that it’s mostly stuff with broad public support.
Take DeSantis’ higher education example. He’s suggesting that the federal government is trying to impose “woke ideology” on colleges and universities, but, as Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote this week in The New York Times in a piece focusing on DeSantis’ attacks on education in Florida, “faculty members do not drive the creation of courses in gender studies, ethnic studies and the like. In fields like mine, sociology, year after year, student demand outpaces faculty expertise in race, class, gender and disability studies, for example. These are courses often created because students want them.”
This is DeSantis pandering to an aging Republican base that wants to roll back the clock to when people like them controlled everything and there were no uncomfortable reminders of the humanity and worth of Black people, brown people, LGBTQ+ people, disabled people, and white women who for some inexplicable reason refuse to fit the Casey DeSantis model. It’s telling about the Republican Party that merely calling for the elimination of four federal agencies is not enough, that DeSantis felt he also had to link that to his ongoing high-pitched whine about “woke ideology” and the campaign against an education that allows LGBTQ+ kids and Black kids to see themselves and their histories as legitimate, let alone valued.
Give DeSantis this, though: Unlike Rick Perry, he probably won’t forget the names of any of the agencies he claims he’d eliminate.
