Trump’s Worst Instincts Are His Own— & Roy Cohn’s— But His Worst Austerity Ideas Are Russ Vought’s

Vought Plans To Control Every Dollar Decision & Every Regulatory Decision 

Generally, when the media— and even Democrats— talk about the worst Trump’s post-Gaetz nominations, they talk about Hegseth, RFK Jr, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel. And the 4 of them really are beyond horrible. But someone is missing from that list. Yesterday Andrew Desiderio and Max Cohen reported that “Schumer prefers zeroing in on a handful of problematic nominees rather than blanket opposition to all of them. Schumer’s strategy is to focus on Russell Vought, Trump’s nominee for OMB director and a key architect of Project 2025. Democrats boycotted Vought’s Budget Committee vote Thursday and held a press conference instead… Democrats see Vought as the one pulling the strings on key elements of Trump’s agenda. And they believe that once he’s confirmed, nearly every dispute will run through Vought. Vought’s nomination is expected on the Senate floor as soon as next week.

“He is just so bad,” Schumer said of Vought. “He’s going to be a focus for a very long time. And Trump is going to learn that he’s a liability— not as a person, as a symbol— for his policies. Already they’ve had to back off.”

Vought, though, isn’t widely known outside of Washington. And Democrats’ Project 2025-related messaging in last year’s election clearly didn’t resonate enough with voters.

But with the aid freeze, Senate Democrats undertook a coordinated messaging strategy. Schumer did several local TV interviews and urged his colleagues to do the same in order to “localize” the issue.

On Thursday, Branko Marcetic, came to the same conclusion Schumer had: Vought is the pits and was behind this week’s botched attempt to halt all federal grants, “which sent panic spasming through the country as schools, government programs, and charitable organizations ceased to function... Vought’s Trump-aligned think tank, the Center for Renewing America (CRA), has repeatedly advanced the view that the president can pause federally mandated funding or even refuse to spend it through ‘impoundment.’ Meanwhile, both the Project 2025 policy guide and the CRA’s mock budget are replete with proposals to cut or overhaul federal grants and make sure they aren’t funding ‘woke’ programs and groups.”

Marcetic wrote that “The unprecedented move has already been the scene of typical Trump chaos: it was first blocked by a federal judge, before the administration modified the order, rescinded it, then rescinded its rescission, leading a different judge to issue a new block on it. That itself may be part of the plan: Vought and [OMB General Counsel Mark] Paoletta have both insisted the law barring impoundment is unconstitutional, and may want a right-wing activist Supreme Court to settle the matter. As the CRA’s staff wrote about a potential fight between the legislative and executive branches over the issue, ‘it will be a fight that is both necessary and long overdue.’ But if this major chaos-causing Trump move can be traced back to Vought, what else does the OMB nominee have planned for Trump’s second term? A lot, it turns out— and he’s been fairly open about it.”

If Project 2025 is a game plan for remaking the country in the Trump movement’s image, Vought’s specific contribution is a detailed set of instructions for using the powers of the presidency to seize total control of a sprawling federal bureaucracy run by career civil servants and dominated by what he calls an “imperial Congress.”

Vought’s central, seemingly paradoxical goal is to expand the size of the presidency to ultimately shrink the size of the federal government. To do so, Vought wrote, the president must “bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will” while “us[ing] the bureaucratic machine to send power away from Washington and back to America’s families, faith communities, local governments, and states,” all of which the president has the “levers” to do once in office.

“Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies,” Vought more explicitly said last year, unaware he was being filmed. “And we are working doggedly on that, whether it’s destroying their— agencies’ notion of independence, that they’re independent from the president.”

Critical to this goal is the OMB that Vought was nominated to head, which he likens to the president’s “air-traffic control system,” letting him ensure “all policy initiatives are flying in sync” and to decide “to let planes take off and, at times, ground planes that are flying off course.” As he explained in one interview, “every dollar decision goes through OMB, but every regulatory decision goes through OMB,” making it central to ensuring the president’s agenda is actually executed.

“The [OMB] director must view his job as the best, most comprehensive approximation of the President’s mind,” wrote Vought, and so “ensure that OMB has sufficient visibility into the deep caverns of agency decision-making.”

For Trump’s purposes, that means making sure power is put as much as possible in the hands of political appointees plucked from Trump’s movement, and taken out of the hands of career civil servants who act on “the wishes of the sprawling ‘good government’ management community in and outside of government.”

In Vought’s vision, that would involve taking the six massive offices within OMB that oversee separate policy areas, whether health, education, or national security, and not just displacing the “careerists” who normally run them by putting Trump loyalists in charge instead, but also dividing them into many smaller policy subareas, with a proliferation of many more loyalist appointees to run those, too.

…Vought also suggests other, non-OMB-centered strategies for the president to advance this goal, like reviving Trump’s spate of deregulatory executive orders,  “maximiz[ing] the utility” of the Congressional Review Act that Clinton enacted to let Congress overturn some federal rules, or working with Congress to pass a variety of legislation. Vought specifically points to a set of Republican bills that throw as many delays and roadblocks in the way of regulators trying to check corporate actors. Like the REINS Act, which would force Congress to approve any major rule issued by agencies within seventy days before it could take effect. Or the Regulatory Accountability Act, which ties regulators in layers of red tape, including by making the cost to industry one of the factors that go into setting health standards.

There are other ideas Vought outlines— for instance, having the president reinstate “pay-as-you-go” at the administrative level, an austerity measure historically favored by neoliberal Democrats like Nancy Pelosi that mandates federal agencies make spending cuts to offset any move they make that increases spending. He also lays out a similar overall strategy for other offices within the executive branch, like the National Economic and Security Councils, to wrench control of the federal bureaucracy and bend them to Trump’s agenda.

But given how central the OMB is to that agenda succeeding, and that Vought has been nominated to lead it, it’s his plans for the OMB that are arguably most important.

A big part of that is OMB’s central role in developing and enforcing the president’s budget.

The federal budget, Vought writes, is “a powerful mechanism for setting and enforcing public policy at federal agencies”— for example, by putting in place detailed spending plans for each agency. He suggests having the OMB, which puts together the budget proposal the president ends up sending Congress to actually write, set a “fiscal goal” for the president that would drastically rein in spending.

As it happens, the CRA, Vought’s think tank, put out its own 2023 budget proposal last year that gives us a good idea of what this would actually mean in practice. To slash government debt and balance the budget over the course of a decade, Vought’s mock budget takes the same approach tried countless times by the same Republican establishment Trump claimed to be running to defeat: by taking an industrial lawnmower to government programs working Americans depend on, while lavishing tax cuts on the rich and taxpayer dollars on the military-industrial complex.

Vought’s budget is a broad assault on workers and the poor, principally by attacking the Medicaid program, including through cuts to the program worth $2 trillion over a decade and repealing Barack Obama’s expansion of the program, which would throw eighteen million people off their health insurance. This is alongside its plan to cut hundreds of billions more dollars from Obamacare and food stamps, deny health care to veterans, impose onerous work requirements on Americans getting government help, and end the Section 8 vouchers that help low-income families get into affordable housing, as well as hobbling federal departments that are disliked by the GOP establishment— like Education, Labor, and State — by starving them of funding.

Not everyone would feel the pain in Vought’s ideal world, though. His budget revolves around making permanent Trump’s tax cuts for the rich, which added trillions to the deficit to give an average $60,000 tax cut to households in the top 1 percent, while upping funding for the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security.

The fact that Vought’s mock budget spares the major entitlement programs of Medicare and Social Security, and that Trump has promised not to touch either program, shouldn’t put anyone at ease. Despite telling the Heritage Foundation in 2023 that conservatives “should be about the bureaucracy crushing” and that “for too long we have fought about social security and Medicare,” Vought made clear the plan was to eventually go after those programs, too, once the Trump movement had built up the political capital and the public had been softened up for it.

… CRA’s website is explicit about seeing its mission as “to renew a consensus of America as a nation under God”; more candidly, Vought told a pair of undercover reporters, “you have to rehabilitate Christian nationalism.” Vought has publicly defended the concept, and it was reportedly on a list of bullet-pointed second Trump term priorities that the think tank was working on during the election campaign.

He calls the Department of Education “the Department of Critical Race Theory [CRT],” voicing traditional Republican complaints about the teaching of history that are now reframed in terms of “wokeness” and CRT, and even suggested it should be abolished. “I do not know why we need a Department of Education,” he told a C-Span caller; “education should be [at] a local level and parents should be intimately involved.”)

… He is also prepared for any popular outrage at these moves. It was Vought who was at the center of the headline-grabbing revelation last year that Trump is planning to potentially sicc the military on Americans, bragging behind closed doors that he had drafted the legal justifications for troops to put down protesters on US streets.

Vought’s plan for the second Trump presidency is little different from the neoliberal program pushed for decades in Washington by Republicans and Democrats: of cutting taxes for the wealthy and eliminating regulations on corporate power, while slashing spending on government programs the rest of the country depends on. What sets it apart is the scale and ambition with which he plans to carry this out.

Given the GOP’s Senate majority, it is more than likely Vought will be confirmed as OMB director and soon set about trying to realize this vision. But even if he isn’t, it’s more than likely Vought will still be shaping Trump’s presidency from the outside.

So far the Democrats— the ones on the Budget Committee— have just boycotted his confirmation process, calling him a threat to democracy and putting out a statement saying they refused to “vote for someone so clearly unfit for office.” Democrats have to start letting the public know who Vought is.

This morning Trump-Musk-Vought fired Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director Rohit Chopra for taking “protection” too seriously. Public Citizen president Lisa Gilbert: “With Trump’s payback to his billionaire Wall Street supporters, the nation now loses the vital, energetic, compassionate, and intelligent services of a great American. One of the most effective consumer champions in government in American history, Rohit Chopra worked tirelessly to protect vulnerable citizens from financial predators. The CFPB under Chopra eliminated many junk fees, capped credit card late charges, reformed reporting of medical debt, sued giant corporations, and elevated the total relief to consumers beyond $21 billion. An administration that retreats from the many advances the agency made while under his leadership will betray working Americans. That Trump’s oligarchs want this agency ‘deleted’ attests powerfully to Chopra’s effectiveness and the need for the CFPB— and Trump’s firing of Chopra is as clear a sign as there could be of whose side Trump is on. In just the last week alone, the CFPB took enforcement actions against a major credit rating corporation for mishandling consumer disputes, a mortgage lender for racial discrimination, an auto finance company for mishandling credit reports, a peer-to-peer payment app for fraud, debt collectors improperly seeking to collect student debt, a banking company for cheating consumers of interest payments, proposed a rule against unfair contract terms that require consumers to give away their rights, and issued a major study on problems with buy-now-pay-later schemes. The intensity of consumer protection at the agency with Chopra at the helm has been unmatched, and the American people deserve this level of focus as they wage David and Goliath battles against corporate America.”