14 hours ago
3
If federal employees are feeling traumatized right now, Russell Vought, the new head of the office of management and budget (OMB), probably has something to do with it.
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in a video revealed by ProPublica and the research group Documented in October. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down … We want to put them in trauma.”
Vought’s words, delivered at an event hosted by his thinktank, Center for Renewing America, were striking. They reflected a view, long-espoused by Vought, that the government should be brought to heel by a sweepingly powerful executive branch.
Now the head of the office of management and budget – the powerful agency in the executive branch that oversees federal agencies and administers the budget – Vought is positioned to help Donald Trump do just that.
This will be Vought’s second time in the position: he spent six months directing the OMB at the end of the president’s first term, trying unsuccessfully to set in motion a policy recategorizing workers’ employment status in the agency to more easily fire them.
Since then, he has worked with his thinktank and the Heritage Foundation to chart a course for a second Trump term.
Already, the most jarring of Trump’s executive actions reflect Vought’s vision for a reduced and demoralized civil service. When the acting director of the OMB issued a memo instructing federal agencies to freeze all grant funding, halting the flow of funding to programs like Head Start, Meals on Wheels and other federally-supported services for poor and low-income Americans, it was Vought who Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said she was consulting.
Leavitt told the press she had already spoken “with the incoming director of OMB this morning, and he told me to tell all of you that the line to his office is open for other federal government agencies across the board”.
Radical constitutionalism
Vought has said he embraces an ideology of “radical constitutionalism” and in a 2022 essay urged the right wing to “throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last two hundred years”.In his work with the rightwing Heritage Foundation, Vought helped outline a vision for a president engaged in an active power struggle with the other branches of government.
In this power struggle, Vought wrote in his chapter of Project 2025, the president would be called on “for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch”. At the heart of the executive branch, Vought wrote, was the office of management and budget.
“OMB cannot perform its role on behalf of the President effectively if it is not intimately involved in all aspects of the White House policy process and lacks knowledge of what the agencies are doing,” he wrote.
Vought’s thinktank has recommended policies such as invoking the Insurrection Act to quell protests and stop immigration at the southern border and doing away with the Impoundment Control Act, a law that limits the president’s ability to temporarily block the flow of congressionally-appropriated funds.
Center for Renewing America’s work dovetails neatly with the ideology of other extreme figures in the Trump administration such as Pete Hegseth, who has written that he believes factional political violence in the US is inevitable and describes US politics as a struggle of good versus evil. Similarly, Vought’s group claims that the left in the US poses an “existential” threat to the country.
“The threat of radical philosophies, rooted in Marxism, such as critical race theory, is vast, real, and increasingly existential,” reads a line of text in a section of the website titled Woke and Weaponized.
Vought has also openly embraced Christian nationalism, the political movement that seeks to infuse Christianity into public life and government.
Before Hegseth’s Senate confirmation hearing, Democrats on the budget committee urged their Republican counterparts to delay advancing Vought’s confirmation, noting his apparent link to the freeze on funding for federal grants and the chaos it had sowed. Vought, wrote Washington state senator Patty Murray, the vice-chair of the Senate budget committee, “feels emboldened to defy Congress, the Constitution, and the Impoundment Control Act”.
When Republicans moved forward, Democrats on the budget committee boycotted the vote to advance his nomination to a Senate floor vote, and then held an overnight marathon session giving speeches registering their opposition to the nominee the night before the vote.
Vought, said Wisconsin senator Tammy Baldwin at 10.30pm, “has openly called for the president to defy Congress and take control of federal funding decisions that are constitutionally vested in the legislative branch”.
Many also seized on Vought’s role in the development of Project 2025 to discredit the nominee.
“Russell Vought is an extremist who will betray working families, will betray your family, and there’s simply no other way to put it,” said Nevada senator Jacky Rosen Thursday morning. “After all, he was the main architect behind Project 2025.”
But if the Trump campaign sought to distance themselves from the unpopular Heritage Foundation policy proposal, that separation was a campaign season mirage.
“God be praised,” wrote Vought on Twitter/X, after he was confirmed by a narrow, party-line vote of the Senate on Thursday evening.
“Grateful to the President and the US Senate. Incredibly thankful for all the many who prayed me through. Now. Let’s. Go.”
