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On the afternoon of Feb. 12, Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, summoned a small group of career staffers to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for a meeting about foreign aid. A storm had dumped nearly 6 inches of snow on Washington, D.C. The rest of the federal government was running on a two-hour delay, but Vought had offered his team no such reprieve. As they filed into a second-floor conference room decorated with photos of past OMB directors, Vought took his seat at the center of a worn wooden table and laid his briefing materials out before him.<\/p>\n
Vought, a bookish technocrat with an encyclopedic knowledge of the inner workings of the U.S. government, cuts an unusual figure in Trump\u2019s inner circle of Fox News hosts and right-\u00adwing influencers. He speaks in a flat, nasally monotone and, with his tortoiseshell glasses, standard-issue blue suits and corona of close-cropped hair, most resembles what he claims to despise: a federal bureaucrat. The Office of Management and Budget, like Vought himself, is little known outside the Beltway and poorly understood even among political insiders. What it lacks in cachet, however, it makes up for in the vast influence it wields across the government. Samuel Bagenstos, an OMB general counsel during the Biden administration, told me, \u201cEvery goddam thing in the executive branch goes through OMB.\u201d<\/p>\n
The OMB reviews all significant regulations proposed by individual agencies. It vets executive orders before the president signs them. It issues workforce policies for more than 2 million federal employees. Most notably, every penny appropriated by Congress is dispensed by the OMB, making the agency a potential choke point in a federal bureaucracy that currently spends about $7 trillion a year. Shalanda Young, Vought\u2019s predecessor, told me, \u201cIf you\u2019re OK with your name not being in the spotlight and just getting stuff done,\u201d then directing the OMB \u201ccan be one of the most powerful jobs in D.C.\u201d<\/p>\n
During Donald Trump\u2019s first term, Vought (whose name is pronounced \u201cvote\u201d) did more than perhaps anyone else to turn the president\u2019s demands and personal grievances into government action. In 2019, after Congress refused to fund Trump\u2019s border wall, Vought, then the acting director of the OMB, redirected billions of dollars in Department of Defense money to build it. Later that year, after the Trump White House pressured Ukraine\u2019s government to investigate Joe Biden, who was running for president, Vought froze $214 million in security assistance for Ukraine. \u201cThe president loved Russ because he could count on him,\u201d Mark Paoletta, who has served as the OMB general counsel in both Trump administrations, said at a conservative policy summit in 2022, according to a recording I obtained. \u201cHe wasn\u2019t a showboat, and he was committed to doing what the president wanted to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
After the pro-Trump riots at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, many Republicans, including top administration officials, disavowed the president. Vought remained loyal. He echoed Trump\u2019s baseless claims about election fraud and publicly defended people who were arrested for their participation in the melee. During the Biden years, Vought labored to translate the lessons of Trump\u2019s tumultuous first term into a more effective second presidency. He chaired the transition portion of Project 2025, a joint effort by a coalition of conservative groups to develop a road map for the next Republican administration, helping to draft some 350 executive orders, regulations and other plans to more fully empower the president. \u201cDespite his best thinking and the \u00adaggressive things they tried in Trump One, nothing really stuck,\u201d a former OMB branch chief who served under Vought during the first Trump administration told me. \u201cMost administrations don\u2019t get a four-year pause or have the chance to think about \u2018Why isn\u2019t this working?\u2019\u201d The former branch chief added, \u201cNow he gets to come back and steamroll everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe President loved Russ because he could count on him,\u201d said OMB general counsel Mark Paoletta of Vought, seen at the microphone in the White House in 2019.<\/span><\/p>\n At the meeting in February, according to people familiar with the events, Vought\u2019s directive was simple: slash foreign assistance to the greatest extent possible. The U.S. government shouldn\u2019t support overseas anti-malaria initiatives, he argued, because buying mosquito nets doesn\u2019t make Americans safer or more prosperous. He questioned why the U.S. funded an international vaccine alliance, given the anti-vaccine views of Trump\u2019s nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The conversation turned to the United States Institute of Peace, a government-\u00adfunded nonprofit created under Ronald Reagan, which worked to prevent conflicts overseas; Vought asked what options existed to eliminate it. When he was told that the USIP was funded by Congress and legally independent, he replied, \u201cWe\u2019ll see what we can do.\u201d (A few days later, Trump signed an executive order that directed the OMB to dismantle the organization.)<\/p>\n The OMB staffers had tried to anticipate Vought\u2019s desired outcome for more than $7 billion that the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development spent each year on humanitarian assistance, \u00adincluding disaster relief and support for refugees and conflict victims. During the campaign, Trump had vowed to defund agencies that give money to people \u201cwho have no respect for us at all,\u201d and Project 2025 had accused USAID of pursuing a \u201cdivisive political and cultural agenda.\u201d The staffers proposed a cut of 50%.<\/p>\n Vought was unsatisfied. What would be the consequences, he asked, of a much larger reduction? A career official answered: Less humanitarian aid would mean more people would die. \u201cYou could say that about any of these cuts,\u201d Vought replied. A person familiar with the \u00admeeting described his reaction as \u201cblas\u00e9.\u201d Vought reiterated that he wanted spending on foreign aid to be as close to zero as possible, on the fastest timeline possible. Several analysts left the meeting rattled. Word of what had happened spread quickly among the OMB staff. \u00adAnother person familiar with the meeting later told me, \u201cIt was the day that broke me.\u201d<\/p>\n What Vought has done in the nine months since Trump took office goes much further than slashing foreign aid. Relying on an expansive theory of presidential power and a willingness to test the rule of law, he has frozen vast sums of federal spending, terminated tens of thousands of federal workers and, in a few cases, brought entire agencies to a standstill. In early October, after Senate Democrats refused to vote for a budget resolution without additional health care protections, effectively shutting down the government, Vought became the face of the White House\u2019s response. On the second day of the closure, Trump shared an AI-generated video that depicted his budget director \u2014 who, by then, had threatened mass firings across the federal workforce and paused or canceled $26 billion in funding for infrastructure and clean-\u00adenergy projects in blue states \u2014 as the Grim Reaper of Washington, D.C. \u201cWe work for the president of the United States,\u201d a senior agency official who regularly deals with the OMB told me. But right now \u201cit feels like we work for Russ Vought. He has centralized decision-\u00admaking power to an extent that he is the commander in chief.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n At the start of Trump\u2019s second term, Elon Musk\u2019s Department of Government Efficiency, which promised to slash spending and root out waste, dominated the headlines. A gaggle of tech bros, with little government experience, appeared to be marching into federal buildings and, with the president\u2019s blessing, purging people and programs seen as \u201cwoke\u201d or anti-Trump. The sight of Musk swinging a chainsaw onstage at a conservative conference captured the pell-mell approach, not to mention the brutality, of the billionaire\u2019s plan to bring the federal government to heel.<\/p>\n But, according to court records, interviews and other accounts from people close to Vought, DOGE\u2019s efforts were guided, more than was previously known, by the OMB director. Musk bragged about \u201cfeeding USAID into the wood chipper,\u201d but the details of the agency\u2019s downsizing were ironed out by Vought\u2019s office. When DOGE took aim at obscure quasi-government nonprofits, such as the United States Institute of Peace, OMB veterans saw Vought\u2019s influence at work. \u201cI can\u2019t imagine that the DOGE team knew to target all these little parts of the government without Russ pointing them there,\u201d the former OMB branch chief told me. Vought also orchestrated DOGE\u2019s hostile takeover of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, crippling a regulator that Republicans had hoped to shutter during Trump\u2019s first term. \u201cDOGE is underneath the OMB,\u201d Michelle Martin, an official with Citizens for Renewing America, a grassroots group founded by Vought, said in May, according to a video of her remarks. \u201cHonestly, a lot of what Elon began pinpointing … was at the direction of Russ.\u201d<\/p>\n Vought, who declined to be interviewed for this story, voiced concerns about some of DOGE\u2019s tactics \u2014 canceling budget items that the OMB had wanted to keep, for instance \u2014 but he mostly saw the department as a useful battering ram. An administration official who has worked with Vought and Musk told me that DOGE showed Vought it was possible to ignore legal challenges and take dramatic action. \u201cHe has the benefit of Elon softening everyone up,\u201d the official told me. \u201cElon terrified the shit out of people. He broke the status quo.\u201d<\/p>\n Vought is a stated opponent of the status quo. One of the few prominent conservatives to embrace the label of \u201cChristian nationalist,\u201d he once told an audience that \u201cthe phrasing is too accurate to run away from the term.\u2008…\u2008I\u2019m a Christian. I am a nationalist. We were meant to be a Christian nation.\u201d American democracy, he has said, has been hijacked by rogue judges who make law from the bench and by a permanent class of government bureaucrats who want to advance \u201cwoke\u201d policies designed to divide Americans and silence political opponents. \u201cThe stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country, in which our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus,\u201d Vought said in 2024, during a conference hosted by the Center for Renewing America, a nonprofit think tank that he also founded. \u201cAnd they have aimed it at us.\u201d<\/p>\n Listen to Vought Talk About Christian Nationalism<\/p>\n The central struggle of our time, he says, pits the defenders of this \u201cpost-\u00adconstitutional\u201d order \u2014 what he calls the \u201ccartel\u201d or the \u201cregime,\u201d which in his telling includes Democrats and Republicans \u2014 against a group of \u201cradical constitutionalists\u201d fighting to destroy the deep state and return power to the presidency and, ultimately, the people. Vought counts himself as a member of the latter group, which, in his view, also includes right-wing stalwarts such as the political strategist Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump\u2019s mass-deportation campaign. \u201cWe want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,\u201d he said in a private speech in 2023. \u201cWhen they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.\u201d<\/p>\n Watch: \u201cWe Want the Bureaucrats to Be Traumatically Affected\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n The ultimate radical constitutionalist, Vought says, is Donald Trump. In Vought\u2019s view, Trump, the subject of four indictments during his time out of office, is a singular figure in the history of the American republic, a once persecuted leader who returns to power to defeat the deep state. \u201cWe have in Donald Trump a man who is so uniquely positioned to serve this role, a man whose own interests perfectly align with the interests of the country,\u201d Vought said in his 2024 speech. \u201cHe has seen what it has done to him, and he has seen what they are trying to do to the country. That is nothing more than a gift of God.\u201d As Bannon put it, sitting onstage with Vought at a closed-door conference in 2023, Trump is \u201ca very imperfect instrument, right? But he\u2019s an instrument of the Lord.\u201d<\/p>\n In Vought\u2019s vision for the U.S. government, an all-powerful executive branch would be able to fire workers, cancel programs, shutter agencies, and undo regulations that govern air and water quality, financial markets, workplace protections and civil rights. The Department of Justice, meanwhile, would shed its historical independence and operate at the direction of the White House. All of this puts Vought at the center of what Steve Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown, described to me as the Trump administration\u2019s \u201ccomplete disregard\u201d for the law. \u201cThe president has no authority to not spend money Congress has appropriated \u2014 that\u2019s not a debate,\u201d he told me. \u201cThe president has no authority to fire civil servants who are protected by statute \u2014 that\u2019s not a debate.\u201d He added, \u201cWe are seeing exertions of executive power the likes of which we have never seen in this country.\u201d<\/p>\n Vought, who is 49, has spent his entire adult life in Washington. He met his wife, Mary, on Capitol Hill, where they both eventually worked for Mike Pence, at the time a Republican congressman from Indiana. (The Voughts divorced in 2023.) Yet, after nearly 30 years in the nation\u2019s capital, he still views himself as an outsider. He once described his upbringing, in Trumbull, Connecticut, as \u201cblue collar\u201d and his parents as part of America\u2019s \u201cforgotten men and women.\u201d<\/p>\n Vought\u2019s father, Thurlow, served in the Marines and worked as an electrician. His mother, Margaret, spent more than 20 years as a schoolteacher and administrator. Before they married each other, Vought\u2019s parents had both been widowed in their 30s and left to raise families on their own; Russ was their only child together. In 1981, when Russ was 4, one of Thurlow\u2019s daughters died in a car crash. Not long after the accident, Thurlow had a religious awakening. \u201cThat completely changed the direction of our immediate family,\u201d one of Vought\u2019s half sisters later wrote on social media.<\/p>\n Vought as a senior in the 1998 yearbook of Wheaton College<\/span><\/p>\n Vought\u2019s mother helped launch a Christian school, where the curriculum relied heavily on the Bible. One history book the school considered using included the instruction to \u201cDefend the statement that all governmental power and authority come from God.\u201d America was built on Judeo-\u00adChristian values, she told a local newspaper, and if the American people gave up on those values \u201cthen they\u2019re going to have to pay the price based on sin, sickness, disease and anarchy.\u201d<\/p>\n Vought attended a private Christian high school, then went to Illinois to study at Wheaton College, which is known as the \u201cevangelical Harvard.\u201d He moved to Washington after graduation and, in 1999, landed a job in the office of Phil Gramm, a Republican senator from Texas. Vought, who started in the mailroom, would later say that working for Gramm laid the \u201cconservative foundation\u201d for the rest of his life.<\/p>\n Gramm was an uncompromising budget hawk. He was famous for the \u201cDickey Flatt test,\u201d named after a printer Gramm knew in Texas. For every dollar of federal spending, Gramm said, lawmakers must ask themselves: Did it improve the lives of people like Dickey Flatt? (In Gramm\u2019s estimation, the answer was often no; every year, he introduced legislation designed to ruthlessly slash the budget.) Years later, when Vought testified before Congress, he said that people like his parents \u201chave always been my test for federal spending. Did a particular program or spending increase help the nameless wagon pullers across our country, working hard at their job, trying to provide for their family and future?\u201d<\/p>\n Under Gramm\u2019s tutelage, Vought developed a reputation as a master of the arcane rules that can get legislation passed or killed. He climbed the ranks of the Republican Party, going on to advise Pence, who was then the leader of the House Republican Conference. But the closer Vought got to the center of congressional power, the more disillusioned he became. In the late 2000s, when Republican lawmakers, who professed to care about deficits and balanced budgets, voted in favor of bills loaded with corporate giveaways and pork-barrel spending, Vought felt that they were abandoning their principles and duping their constituents. He later recalled of this time, \u201cI would say, \u2018If there\u2019s an opinion in this leadership room, I\u2019m telling you it\u2019s 95% wrong.\u2019\u201d A former Capitol Hill colleague of Vought\u2019s told me, \u201cI think he thought the Republican leadership was a bigger impediment to conservative causes than Democrats were.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2010, Vought quit working for House Republicans and helped launch Heritage Action for America, an offshoot of the influential conservative think tank Heritage Foundation. The foundation was known for dense policy papers and its voluminous \u201cMandate for Leadership\u201d governing guide. Heritage Action had a different purpose \u2014 to strong-arm Republicans in Congress into acting more conservatively.<\/p>\n Vought was instrumental in turning Heritage Action into the interest group that congressional Republicans feared most. He picked fights with party leaders over agriculture subsidies and greenhouse gas regulations, and published a scorecard that rated how lawmakers voted on key bills. In Heritage Action\u2019s first year, according to a person familiar with Vought\u2019s work there, he came up with an idea for a mailer that attacked Bob Corker, a Republican senator from Tennessee, for his vote to approve a nuclear \u00adweapons treaty with Russia. The mailer featured a photograph of Corker alongside images of Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin and the Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Heritage Action\u2019s tactics so infuriated the Republican leadership that \u00adSen. Mitch McConnell called on Heritage donors to stop funding the group. (McConnell did not respond to a request for comment.)<\/p>\n In 2013, Heritage Action announced a campaign to defund the Affordable Care Act. Vought and his colleagues toured the country, whipping up the grassroots, and poured millions of dollars Heritage Action saw the 2016 presidential election as an opportunity to put a true conservative back in the White House. The group\u2019s CEO, Michael Needham, openly supported Sen. Ted Cruz, of Texas, who, three years earlier, had helped orchestrate the shutdown. Trump, at least initially, was treated with disdain. During an appearance on Fox News in 2015, Needham called him a \u201cclown\u201d who \u201cneeds to be out of the race.\u201d<\/p>\n Vought and Trump couldn\u2019t have been more different: One was a deacon at his Baptist church; the other was a twice-\u00addivorced philanderer who had been caught on camera bragging about grabbing women \u201cby the pussy.\u201d But, after Trump won the election, Vought was offered a job as a senior adviser at the OMB, where he\u2019d dreamed of working since his days in Phil Gramm\u2019s office. Years later, Vought would say that, at the time, he had no ambition of one day running the agency. He had planned to help with the transition and some of the OMB\u2019s early efforts, then go to seminary to become a pastor. But, he later said in a podcast interview, \u201cGod had other plans.\u201d<\/p>\n In March 2017, Trump signed an executive order that called for a top-to-bottom reorganization of the federal government. Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman, served as Trump\u2019s first budget director, but, inside the OMB, Vought took the lead. According to a former senior staffer at the agency, Vought initially pushed for the president\u2019s plan to eliminate USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He also wanted to fold the Department of Health and Human Services, along with food stamps programs, into a new Department of Health and Public Welfare. \u201cThey wanted to call it that because they think it sounds bad,\u201d a former OMB analyst told me. In one meeting, according to a person in the room, Vought asked, \u201cWhy do we do economic assistance abroad at all?\u201d The former OMB analyst said, \u201cThere were very few, if any, debates where Russ wouldn\u2019t take the most extreme option available to him, the most conservative, the most budget-cutting.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s Cabinet secretaries resisted wholesale cuts. The former senior staffer recalled, \u201cThe general counsels at these agencies are calling the White House counsel and saying, \u2018We\u2019re not trying to introduce legislation to delete ourselves, are we?\u2019\u201d Few of the recommendations in Vought\u2019s final reorganization plan, which was released in 2018, were implemented. But the document now reads like a guide to the second Trump administration. \u201cI didn\u2019t realize it then,\u201d the former OMB senior staffer told me, \u201cbut I was writing the first draft of Project 2025.\u201d<\/p>\n Vought increasingly clashed with the OMB\u2019s staff over proposed cuts to popular programs. Meals on Wheels, the food delivery program, was a topic of intense debate. Even after OMB staff explained how the program, which received more than $900 million in funding from Congress, acted as a lifeline for homebound seniors, Vought and Mulvaney pushed for major cuts that would have hobbled its operations, according to the former OMB senior staffer. The staffer added that it was often hard to reconcile Vought\u2019s deeply held Christian faith \u2014 he hosted a prayer session for select colleagues \u2014 with his eagerness to cut programs that helped the vulnerable. \u201cIt always struck me as a strange thing,\u201d the person said. \u201cThere\u2019s compassion, but it only extends to certain people.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2018, Mark Paoletta, a former attorney in the George H.W. Bush White House, joined the OMB as general counsel. Paoletta was best known for publicly defending Clarence Thomas, who, during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing, in 1991, was accused of sexual harassment by his former colleague Anita Hill. Paoletta had worked on Capitol Hill, then entered private practice, where he advised politicians under scrutiny by Congress. Paoletta and Vought quickly forged an alliance. The former OMB branch chief told me that the office\u2019s culture changed after Paoletta arrived. \u201cThere was a shift that we were all deep state,\u201d he said. \u201cThey thought we were pushing back because we had our own leftist-leaning agenda.\u201d (Paoletta declined to comment.)<\/p>\n It was Vought\u2019s idea to use an obscure budgetary maneuver called a rescission to claw back funds that Congress had already appropriated, according to Paoletta\u2019s remarks at the conservative policy summit. In 2018, at Vought\u2019s urging, Trump sent Congress the largest rescission request in decades, asking lawmakers to roll back more than $15 billion, including money for USAID\u2019s Ebola response, the Children\u2019s Health Insurance Program and an Energy Department loan program for auto manufacturing. OMB employees \u201clooked at us like we were crazy,\u201d Paoletta said. \u201cThey just thought it was something they didn\u2019t do.\u201d Once again, Vought\u2019s own party thwarted him: The measure failed by a single vote in the Republican-held Senate.<\/p>\n Vought also encountered resistance inside the White House. When Congress refused to give Trump billions in funding to construct new border fencing, Vought and Paoletta devised a novel strategy. Trump could declare a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border, giving him the authority to seize money from other parts of the government. According to Paoletta, John Kelly, the president\u2019s chief of staff, kept the plan from Trump. Paoletta said that Kelly\u2019s message to the OMB was \u201cWe don\u2019t want to tell the president he has that authority, because God knows what he\u2019ll do.\u201d<\/p>\n Eventually, Trump \u00adbadgered Mulvaney, the OMB director, to find him the money for his wall. Mulvaney told the president that he\u2019d been trying to meet with him about the issue, but that Kelly had blocked him. Within days, Trump replaced Kelly with Mulvaney. Vought took over as the acting director of the OMB, and money from the Defense Department was tapped to fund the wall. (Kelly did not respond to requests for comment.)<\/p>\n Under Vought, the OMB produced budgets that called for more cuts than any in modern history. Congress all but ignored them. A former staffer in the OMB\u2019s legislative affairs office recalled that Republicans didn\u2019t believe Trump cared about the sweeping reductions included in his own annual budgets. \u201cThey kept saying, \u2018The president\u2019s not really pushing this or that cut \u2014 that\u2019s a Russ Vought thing, isn\u2019t it?\u2019\u201d the legislative affairs staffer said.<\/p>\n Vought in 2019, a few months before he agreed to freeze hundreds of millions of dollars in security assistance to Ukraine, a step that helped lead to Trump\u2019s first impeachment<\/span><\/p>\n In July 2019, Trump asked the OMB to freeze hundreds of millions of dollars in security assistance to the government of Ukraine. The request coincided with a phone call Trump had with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in which Trump pressured him to investigate Biden and Biden\u2019s son Hunter, who had served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. The money for Ukraine had already been approved by Congress, but Vought agreed to hold back the funds. Paoletta signed off on a memo authorizing the freeze. Under the law, the move was known as an impoundment. (The Government Accountability Office, an independent nonpartisan agency, later deemed it illegal.)<\/p>\n Any fan of \u201cSchoolhouse Rock!\u201d knows that the first job assigned to Congress in the Constitution is the power of the purse. The president, meanwhile, must \u201ctake Care that the Laws be faithfully \u00adexecuted,\u201d according to Article 2 of the Constitution. Most legal scholars interpret this to mean that the president\u2019s duty is to spend the money Congress appropriates, and that the president does not have the power to withhold funds. In 1969, William Rehnquist, the conservative future Supreme Court chief justice, wrote that the impoundment power was \u201csupported by neither reason nor precedent.\u201d<\/p>\n The question of impoundment\u2019s legality came to a head in the 1970s, when President Richard Nixon withheld billions in congressio\u00adnally approved funds for environmental \u00adcleanup efforts. Courts undid Nixon\u2019s actions, and Congress eventually passed the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which outlawed the maneuver, leaving only narrow exceptions \u2014 rescissions \u2014 that required congressional sign-off. (Democrats are calling for restrictions on the rescission process as part of the current shutdown negotiations.) Over the years, the Impoundment Control Act would come to be viewed as sacrosanct at the OMB. That didn\u2019t stop Vought. \u201cI had been personally told, \u2018Look, I want the money cut off until we can figure out where it\u2019s going,\u2019\u201d Vought later said of the Ukraine funding in an interview with the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson. \u201cIt was like all hell broke loose within the bureaucracy.\u201d<\/p>\n The impoundment triggered congressional investigations and, ultimately, Trump\u2019s first impeachment. (Ukraine eventually received the money.) Vought refused to cooperate with investigators, calling the probe a \u201csham process that is designed to relitigate the last election.\u201d One of the impeachment articles named Vought, saying that the president had pressured him and others not to respond to subpoenas. Trump, for his part, continued to express support for impoundment, calling it the \u201csecret weapon\u201d that could tame the \u201cbloated federal bureaucracy.\u201d<\/p>\n In early 2021, on one of the final days of Trump\u2019s first term, Vought visited him in the Oval Office. Both men felt a sense of unfinished business, Vought would later recall. Only a few months earlier, when Vought was sworn in as the OMB director, Trump had told him that, after 3 1\/2 years as president, he had finally got the hang of the job. \u201cRuss, we\u2019ve got to get another term,\u201d Trump said. \u201cWe finally figured out how to do this.\u201d<\/p>\n Vought, frustrated by what he saw as years of obstruction by civil servants, had recently pushed through a new policy to vastly expand the number of at-will employees in the government, making them easier to fire. But the COVID-19 pandemic had dashed any chance of leaving the government smaller than he\u2019d found it. Trump had signed trillion-\u00addollar stimulus bills to prop up the American economy; by the time he left office, the national debt had swelled by $7.8 trillion. After the violence on Jan. 6, a second Trump term looked less likely than ever. Vought, however, had not given up hope.<\/p>\n Before Vought, second from left, departed at the end of Trump\u2019s first term, the president asked him to find a way to counter the Black Lives Matter movement. As Vought would later say, \u201cI\u2019m the budget guy. If I can talk about race, you can talk about race.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n In the Oval Office, he told Trump that he would soon launch a new political operation that would keep the MAGA movement alive while attacking the policies of the incoming Biden administration. Trump blessed the venture, with one request. That summer, in the wake of George Floyd\u2019s murder, national protests had forced a racial reckoning in the country. Trump wanted Vought, who as OMB director had scrubbed training materials for federal employees of any references to \u201cwhite privilege\u201d and \u201csystemic racism,\u201d to find a way for conservatives to push back against the Black Lives Matter movement. \u201cThis was an assignment I was given from President Trump,\u201d Vought later recalled. \u201cI\u2019m the budget guy. If I can talk about race, you can talk about race.\u201d<\/p>\n Listen to Vought: \u201cIf I Can Talk About Race, You Can Talk About Race\u201d<\/p>\n A few days after Trump left office, Vought announced the launch of the Center for Renewing America, a MAGA think tank that aspired to act as an incubator for future Republican administrations. Its activist arm, Citizens for Renewing America, would mobilize grassroots supporters to pressure elected officials to embrace the think tank\u2019s agenda. The overarching goal, Vought wrote in an op-ed for The Federalist, was to \u201crestore an old consensus in America that has been forgotten, that we are a people For God, For Country, and For Community.\u201d<\/p>\n At the Center for Renewing America, Vought surrounded himself with other radical constitutionalists from the first Trump administration. He brought on Jeffrey Clark, the Justice Department official who had tried to use his agency to help Trump overturn the 2020 election. (A D.C. disciplinary board recently recommended that Clark, who now works at the OMB, lose his law license as punishment for those efforts, an outcome that Clark is appealing and that his lawyer called a \u201ctravesty of justice.\u201d) Kash Patel, Trump\u2019s current FBI director, and Ken Cuccinelli, a top immigration official in the first Trump administration, joined as senior fellows. Working at the center, Cuccinelli explained at the conservative policy summit, allowed him to \u201cstake out the outer boundary of reasonable constitutional law.\u201d<\/p>\n The Center for Renewing America\u2019s ideas included how the president could invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy military troops to American cities to put down protests, how the White House could freeze billions in federal funding without waiting for a vote in Congress, and how agency leaders could defy government unions and fire workers en masse. The think tank also set out to create shadow versions of the OMB and of the Justice Department\u2019s Office of Legal Counsel to anticipate legal challenges and counter internal pushback. In his 2024 address, Vought explained, \u201cI don\u2019t want President Trump having to lose a moment of time having fights in the Oval Office about whether something is legal or doable or moral.\u201d<\/p>\n Vought and his colleagues at the center also worked closely with the House Freedom Caucus to urge other congressional Republicans to use government shutdowns as a way of forcing through major policy changes. One of their first targets was critical race theory, a once obscure academic concept that had become a flashpoint during the 2020 racial \u00adjustice protests.<\/p>\n According to previously unreported recordings of briefings held by Citizens for Renewing America, Vought said that he had pressured members of the Freedom Caucus to yoke a ban on critical race theory to must-pass bills on raising the debt limit and funding the government. \u201cWe have to have a speaker that goes into these funding fights with a love for the shutdowns,\u201d Vought said during a November 2022 briefing call, \u201cbecause they create an opportunity to save the country.\u201d<\/p>\n But Republicans never shut down the government during the Biden presidency, and Vought grew increasingly frustrated with them for not using more aggressive tactics. On one briefing call, he praised Cori Bush, a progressive Democrat from Missouri, after she camped out for several days on the Capitol steps to protest the end of a pandemic-\u00adera moratorium on evictions. Vought called her politics \u201cvery, very bad,\u201d but he admired her methods: \u201cWe need this from Republicans.\u201d<\/p>\n The centerpiece of Vought\u2019s work during the Biden years was his campaign to popularize the concept of \u201cwoke and weaponized\u201d government. The tagline brought together two of Vought\u2019s rallying cries: \u201cwoke\u201d policies, like diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and transgender rights, and a \u201cweaponized\u201d FBI and Justice Department that had allegedly been wielded against the Democrats\u2019 political enemies, including, most notably, Trump. When the Center for Renewing America released a federal budget blueprint in late 2022, calling for nearly $9 trillion in cuts in the course of 10 years, the word \u201cwoke\u201d appeared 77 times across 103 pages.<\/p>\n Jessica Riedl, a budget expert who works for the conservative Manhattan Institute, told me that it was \u201cjust silly\u201d to claim, as the Center for Renewing America\u2019s budget did, that Veterans Affairs, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and farm subsidies required enormous cuts for being too woke. \u201cIt\u2019s a way to dress up spending cuts that aren\u2019t popular on their own merits,\u201d Riedl said. Vought described his framing as an attempt to \u201cchange paradigms.\u201d \u201cWe have to be able to defund agencies,\u201d he said in the private speech in 2023. \u201cThat is why these things have to be indelibly linked, and that is why we are focussing so much on \u2018woke and weaponized.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Listen to Vought Talk About Using the Phrase \u201cWoke and Weaponized\u201d<\/p>\n Any hope that Vought had of implementing his ideas in a second Trump administration nearly ran aground last summer. He had written a chapter of Project 2025\u2019s 887-page report, arguing for an expansion of executive power that would put the Justice Department and other traditionally independent agencies fully under presidential control. Center for Renewing America fellows had written two more chapters in the report. But, as Election Day neared, Project 2025 became a liability for the Trump campaign. Polls showed that a majority of Americans opposed its most aggressive proposals, including removing the abortion drug mifepristone from the market, eliminating the Department of Education and implementing Vought\u2019s plan to more easily fire nonpolitical federal workers. As criticism of Project 2025 grew, Trump insisted that he knew \u201cnothing\u201d about it, while also claiming that \u201csome of the things they\u2019re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.\u201d<\/p>\n The month before the election, Politico reported that Donald Trump Jr., had compiled a list of people who would not be allowed to serve in a second Trump administration, including a number of leading contributors to Project 2025. But, according to a former Trump campaign official with close ties to the White House, Vought deftly navigated the controversy. \u201cRuss is a consummate team player,\u201d the official told me. \u201cHe was the one person at Project 2025 that we could have a conversation with during the course of the campaign.\u201d<\/p>\n A week after Trump\u2019s victory, the president-\u00adelect announced his plans for the Department of Government Efficiency. \u201cIt will become, potentially, \u2018The Manhattan Project\u2019 of our time,\u201d Trump said in a statement. He tapped two of his biggest backers to run it: Elon Musk, who had donated nearly $300 million to help elect Trump and other Republicans, and the biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who briefly ran for president on an anti-woke platform. Two days after the announcement, Vought met with Musk and Ramaswamy at Mar-a-Lago. Vought and Musk \u201chit it off,\u201d according to The New York Times; both were \u201con the same wavelength in terms of taking the most extreme action possible.\u201d Soon after the meeting, Trump nominated Vought to run the OMB.<\/p>\n One of DOGE\u2019s first targets was the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB had first been proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who, as a law professor, argued for the creation of a regulator that could protect Americans from predatory mortgages and hidden fees. Created by law in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the bureau developed a reputation as an aggressive enforcer of fair lending and consumer \u00adprotection laws. The bureau\u2019s work has led to nearly $20 billion in direct relief to consumers and $5 billion in civil penalties for alleged wrongdoing. For Vought, the bureau embodied the gross regulatory overreach that he loathed; outside of government, the agency\u2019s biggest foes, Wall Street and Silicon Valley, were major funders of Trump\u2019s second campaign.<\/p>\n On Feb. 7, Trump named Vought the bureau\u2019s acting director, a role he would perform on top of his duties at the OMB. That morning, a small team of DOGE staffers arrived at the CFPB\u2019s headquarters. According to previously unreported emails and depositions, the members of DOGE took orders from Vought as they disabled the CFPB\u2019s website and decided which of the agency\u2019s employees to fire. Musk weighed in on X: \u201cCFPB RIP.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump had targeted the CFPB during his first term. \u201cThere were days in Trump One where it felt like we were getting punched in the face,\u201d one longtime employee told me. Over time, however, the president seemed to lose interest, and the CFPB\u2019s last \u00addirector under Trump, a political appointee named Kathy Kranin\u00adger, supported the bureau\u2019s mission. In 2020, under Kraninger, the CFPB filed the second-\u00adhighest number of enforcement actions in its nearly 10-year existence.<\/p>\n Current and former CFPB staff told me that they assumed a second Trump administration would look like the first one. \u201cGenerally, we thought there would be a conservative agenda we\u2019d be handed, and we\u2019d figure out how to enact it,\u201d the veteran employee said. Soon after taking over, Vought informed Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, which funds the CFPB, that the agency would not need any more money. He barred CFPB employees from doing most types of work and told them not to go to the office. When confusion arose over what duties, if any, remained for the staff to do, Vought clarified the matter in a Feb. 10 email, telling employees to \u201cstand down from performing any work task.\u201d<\/p>\n In the following weeks, Vought and Paoletta stopped oversight activities, quashed ongoing investigations and froze active enforcement cases, which included matters involving some of the largest banks in the nation, such as JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Capital One. Rohit Chopra, the bureau\u2019s director under Biden, said that Vought\u2019s actions had put the CFPB \u201cin a coma.\u201d The bureau\u2019s top enforcement officer resigned in June, writing in a letter to colleagues that the CFPB\u2019s leadership \u201chas no intention to enforce the law in any meaningful way.\u201d<\/p>\n The final blow came when Vought announced a plan to lay off more than 80% of the CFPB\u2019s employees. A federal appeals court ruled in August that the mass-firing plan could proceed. It took Vought four months to accomplish what the previous Trump administration had been unable to do in four years.<\/p>\n The unwinding of the CFPB, however, was quickly overshadowed by another Vought victory. That same month, he completed his assault on foreign aid. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who had been running what was left of USAID, announced that, with Trump\u2019s approval, he had empowered Vought to officially eliminate the agency. \u201cRuss is now at the helm to oversee the closeout of an agency that long ago went off the rails,\u201d Rubio announced. \u201cCongrats, Russ.\u201d<\/p>\n Vought\u2019s agency is \u201clike a giant funnel that everything has to go through in order to happen,\u201d a former OMB employee said. \u201cYou can get agencies to agree to things just to get the funnel to open back up.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Four months before the 2024 election, the Center for Renewing America had welcomed a small group of congressional staffers to its headquarters, a few blocks from the Capitol. Some of them worked for the House and Senate budget committees, which every year help set spending levels for the federal government. The purpose of the meeting was to brief the staffers on the center\u2019s latest policy fight \u2014 an attempt to build the case for the use of impoundment.<\/p>\n At the briefing, Paoletta argued that the Impoundment Control Act was unconstitutional. Spending laws passed by Congress were a ceiling, not a floor, Paoletta argued, according to a person in the room. In that view \u2014 which most legal experts dismiss as a fringe position \u2014 the White House is not permitted to spend more than a law calls for, but it has the power to spend far less. \u201cCongress passes statutes episodically, and often with conflicting purposes and demands,\u201d Paoletta later wrote in an essay for the Center for Renewing America. \u201cIt is left to the President and his subordinates to harmonize their execution in a coherent manner.\u201d<\/p>\n According to Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee, the Trump administration has since frozen or canceled more than $410 billion in funding on everything from energy subsidies for low-income households and Head Start after-school programs to President George W. Bush\u2019s HIV-reduction initiative, PEPFAR, and artists\u2019 grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Vought directed the National Institutes of Health to withhold \u2014 illegally, according to the Government Accountability Office \u2014 an estimated $15 billion in grants for outside research projects. The NIH also moved to cap funding for so-called indirect costs, which research universities rely on to pay for their buildings, utilities and administrative staff. Scientists I interviewed said that these cuts would inevitably lead to less medical research, including into a drug that Vought\u2019s ex-wife credited with improving the life of their 11-year-old daughter, who was born with cystic fibrosis. A scientist who receives government funding to study cystic \u00adfibrosis treatment told me that, without sufficient money for indirect costs, \u201cwe probably won\u2019t be able to do the research and will have to relinquish the grants.\u201d<\/p>\n The OMB claims that it is vetting federal spending to ensure that the money does not fund \u201cwoke\u201d programs. \u201cWe can confirm that President Trump and Director Vought are carefully scrutinizing spending that has previously run on autopilot or worse \u2014 toward transing our kids, the Green New Scam, and funding our own country\u2019s invasion \u2014 just as the president promised,\u201d an OMB spokesperson told the Times in August. But blocking funds is also a way to pressure officials and agencies to comply with the administration\u2019s demands. \u201cOMB is like a giant funnel that everything has to go through in order to happen,\u201d Lester Cash, a former OMB employee, told me. \u201cYou can get agencies to agree to things just to get the funnel to open back up.\u201d<\/p>\n In March, the OMB took down a legally mandated public website that made it possible to track the funding freezes. The move elicited a rare show of bipartisanship. In a letter to Vought, the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and Senate appropriations committees urged him to \u201crestore public access to apportionment data in accordance with statute.\u201d Vought said the information listed on the site was \u201cpredecisional\u201d and a risk to national security. The OMB restored the site only when a judge ruled that taking it down was illegal, saying that the government\u2019s position relied \u201con an extravagant and unsupported theory of presidential power.\u201d<\/p>\n The OMB\u2019s funding freezes have wreaked havoc. On June 30, the Department of Education told state agencies that congressional appropriations for after-school activities and English-as-a-second-language instruction would not arrive the next day, as planned. The unexpected shortfall affected thousands of school districts, which served millions of students, in all 50 states. The administration only backed down after both Democrats and Republicans criticized the move. \u201cWhen something\u2019s been appropriated, signed into law, and people are writing contracts based on the commitment of the federal government, and then they don\u2019t know if they\u2019re going to get it or not, it creates such chaos,\u201d Don Bacon, a Republican House member from Nebraska, told me. \u201cI\u2019m not sure what the OMB director thought he was doing.\u201d (A spokesperson for Vought at the OMB would not comment on the record in response to a detailed list of questions.)<\/p>\n Vought faces senators this summer during an Appropriations Committee hearing on the administration\u2019s proposed $9 billion rescission, which was later voted into law, of foreign aid and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.<\/span><\/p>\n In June, Trump sent a rescission request to Congress, seeking to cancel roughly $9 billion in funding for foreign aid and for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports NPR, PBS, and other public radio and TV stations nationwide. The programs were viewed, the senior agency official told me, as \u201csoft targets,\u201d a test to see if Vought could persuade Republicans to put aside their concerns about undermining Congress\u2019 power of the purse. Unlike in Trump\u2019s first term, Vought\u2019s rescission plan succeeded. The measure, which faced opposition from Democrats and a few Republicans, passed after Vice President JD Vance cast two tie-\u00adbreaking procedural votes. Jeff Merkley, the top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, told me, \u201cYou\u2019ve basically said to Congress, \u2018Hey, compromise all you want, but we\u2019re going to undo that in the way we want as soon as you\u2019ve signed the bill.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n On the Friday before Labor Day, Vought made his most audacious move yet. The White House sent Congress a new rescissions package, targeting nearly $5 billion in foreign aid. But this time Vought informed lawmakers that he didn\u2019t need their approval. He asserted that the president could make the request, putting a temporary freeze on the funds, then simply wait for the fiscal year to expire, on Sept. 30, at which point the money would be canceled out. Vought called it a \u201cpocket rescission,\u201d but it was impoundment by another name. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, said it was a \u201cclear violation of the law.\u201d<\/p>\n \n \u201cPut Them in Trauma\u201d: Inside a Key MAGA Leader\u2019s Plans for a New Trump Agenda<\/strong>\n <\/p>\n The Government Accountability Office can sue the OMB over an impoundment or pocket rescission to get the money released. In April, Gene Dodaro, who leads the Government Accountability Office, testified that his office had opened 39 investigations into potential violations of the Impoundment Control Act by the Trump administration. The OMB has responded by attacking Dodaro\u2019s agency. In one letter, Paoletta said that the OMB would cooperate with the Government Accountability Office only if its demands didn\u2019t get in the way Vought\u2019s actions could provoke a challenge to the Impoundment Control Act in the Supreme Court. In the meantime, a number of current and former government employees told me that they worried about the long-term consequences of what he has already done: the terminating of vital research projects that could have led to lifesaving breakthroughs, the nation\u2019s lost standing as an international leader, the uncertainty cast over the fundamental workings of government. \u201cThey\u2019ve given up on the idea that they need to persuade anybody,\u201d Bagenstos, the former general counsel at the OMB, said of Vought and Paoletta. They\u2019re \u201cjust going to use brute force and dominance.\u201d As the former OMB analyst told me, \u201cThey\u2019ve dropped a grenade into the system.\u201d<\/p>\n The government shutdown has illustrated, in the starkest terms, Vought\u2019s expansive theory of executive power and his willingness to ignore Congress. On Oct. 2, Trump posted on Truth Social that he would meet with Vought to decide which \u201cDemocrat Agencies\u201d to cut on a temporary or permanent basis. A few days later, the OMB released a memo claiming that, seemingly in defiance of a 2019 law, furloughed federal employees were not guaranteed back pay following a shutdown. Then, on Oct. 10, Vought announced that his campaign of mass firings across the bureaucracy had begun. So far, more than 4,000 employees have been laid off, disrupting government services devoted to, among other things, cybersecurity efforts, special education programs, substance abuse treatment and loans for small businesses. A federal judge put a temporary stop to the cuts, but that same day Vought predicted that the total number of firings would be \u201cnorth of 10,000.\u201d As one official texted me, \u201cTrauma achieved.\u201d<\/p>\n Kirsten Berg contributed research.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they\u2019re published. This story is exempt from ProPublica\u2019s Creative Commons license until Dec. 19, 2025. On the afternoon of Feb. 12, Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, summoned<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28704,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[1059,247,4773,3947,71,17034],"class_list":{"0":"post-28703","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-president","9":"tag-propublica","10":"tag-russell","11":"tag-shadow","12":"tag-trumps","13":"tag-vought"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28703\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/28704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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into advertisements and lobbying. They wanted Republicans in the House and the Senate to insist that any spending bill passed to avert a shutdown must also defund Obamacare. The Republican lawmakers who embraced the strategy came to be known as the \u201csuicide caucus,\u201d and their protest led to a 16-day government shutdown. In the end, Republican leaders cut a deal to reopen the government, leaving Obamacare intact.<\/p>\n
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of Trump\u2019s agenda. In another letter, Paoletta told the Department of Transportation to ignore a Government Accountability Office ruling that found that the OMB had illegally impounded money for electric car development. Vought, for his part, has flatly declared that the Government Accountability Office \u201cshouldn\u2019t exist.\u201d<\/p>\n