Had he not withdrawn his nomination under pressure, former CKE Restaraunts CEO Andy Puzder would be heading in to the Labor Department right now — a department the Trump administration proposed merging with the Department of Education just last week.
Asked about the proposal in a Friday interview with the Washington Examiner, Puzder said, “The simple answer to that is I think it’s a good idea. I think anytime you can shrink the size of government make it more effective and less expensive and less burdensome.”
“I think if you if you coordinate their workplace development and career education, if you took those two things and combined the experts in both departments so that they were working on a set of coordinated programs instead of duplicative, expensive, ineffective programs, that that would be a big plus for the American workers,” he argued. “And I think they could make a genuine contribution to to getting people back to work and seeing the labor participation rate go back up.”
[Also read: Unions slam White House plan to merge Labor, Education departments]
Asked whether the effect of a merger could be to create one enormous department, Puzder conceded “the risk would be that it wouldn’t shrink it, that it would expand it,” but argued that risk was mitigated by the proposal’s intent “to shrink the size of government and increase it’s efficiency.”
Puzder withdrew his nomination the day before his confirmation hearing was set to begin amid resurfaced allegations of domestic violence, which had been retracted by his ex-wife. He says he’s in touch with the White House “fairly regularly” and would still serve in the administration is the president asked, though he’s not in active talks about filling any position.
“The administration’s had very, very positive results shrinking the size of the federal government with its regulatory relief where it’s really taking a sickle to this regulatory jungle that Barack Obama had created,” Puzder contended.
“It’s always a good idea to look at how we can make the government operate more effectively and efficiently,” he explained. “The federal government is bloated. We have a fourth branch of government that is not part of our Constitution that has become unmanageable. It’s supposed to be under the executive branch, but I can tell you, you can’t manage it.”
