Russ Vought, President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget, was a key architect of the Project 2025 plan that the new administration has rushed to put into place: assert virtually dictatorial powers over the executive branch and use that power to gut federal agencies’ ability to carry out their mission to protect American workers, consumers, communities, and the environment.
Vought seems to embody the reactionary agenda of right-wing legal activists whose goal is to overturn the New Deal and return the U.S. to an era when states’ rights trumped civil rights, and the federal government had little ability to regulate corporate wrongdoing.
Vought led the OMB during the first Trump administration, where he launched an attack on anti-racism training in the federal government. After Trump lost, Vought created the Center for Renewing America and fueled a manufactured panic against critical race theory as a tool to mobilize right-wing voters. Trump is continuing the strategy with his aggressive dismantling of federal programs to promote broadly shared opportunity and his threats to go after educational and private sector employers that have their own efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Today, as Trump throws the federal government, research institutions, social service agencies, and international collaborations into chaos with broad gag orders and freezes to distributing funds, it is worth recalling that Vought has developed plans for Trump to deploy the military against U.S. citizens who might rise up in protest against the many ways Trump’s policies will harm people and communities.
Vought has justified his plans by claiming that “The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country.” He said that Democratic warnings about Trump’s authoritarianism were an attempt to discourage the military from acting on Trump’s orders to put down anti-Trump protests, just as military leaders resisted Trump’s desire to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters. Vought told undercover journalists that the George Floyd protests were “obviously” not about race but about “destabilizing the Trump administration.”
Vought’s Project 2025 is an agenda, game plan, and personnel operation run by the Heritage Foundation and backed by more than 100 right-wing groups. Project 2025 supporters publicly salivated over the chance for Trump to strip federal employees of civil service protections, allowing them to be fired at will and replaced with cronies and loyalists.
During the presidential campaign, Trump dishonestly distanced himself from Project 2025 to avoid political fallout from the unpopularity of its extreme proposals. An unbothered Vought saw Trump’s posturing as political expedience, not policy.
One year before the election, Right Wing Watch featured Vought’s support for MAGA’s plans for the “ruthless abuse of power by a new Trump White House.” Indeed, “ruthless abuse of power” could be the theme of the new administration’s first week.
ProPublica and Documented obtained videos of Vought speeches at Center for Renewing America events. In a speech last year, he said, “We are writing the actual executive orders. We are writing the actual regulations now, and we are sorting out the legal authorities for all of what President Trump is running on.”
Vought is intent on eradicating any vestige of independence in the executive branch, including a longstanding bipartisan practice of shielding Department of Justice enforcement decisions from political pressure. “You need an attorney general and a White House Counsel’s Office that don’t view themselves as trying to protect the department from the president,” said Vought, embracing a position that would allow a vindictive Trump to turn the DOJ and FBI into weapons of retribution against his political opponents and personal enemies.
Vought had also urged Trump to use recess appointments to bypass the Senate confirmation process, which is at the core of the Constitution’s system of checks and balances, so that Trump could “move as fast and as aggressively as possible with a radical constitutional perspective to be able to dismantle that bureaucracy in their power centers.”
In two days of confirmation hearings this month, Democratic senators asked Vought to affirm that he would abide by federal law known as the Impoundment Act, a law enacted with bipartisan support more than 50 years ago that prevents the president from unilaterally overruling congressional decisions about federal spending. Sen. Gary Peters said that during Trump’s first term, Vought “consistently ignored laws passed by Congress that directed how taxpayer dollars should be spent.”
Contrary to Supreme Court rulings upholding the law, but in line with Project 2025’s expansive view of presidential power, Trump and Vought assert that the Impoundment Act is unconstitutional. “We’ll be developing our approach to this issue and strategy” once in office, Vought said. Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal said, “I am astonished that someone in this responsible a position would in effect say that the president is above the law.”
As Sen. Patti Murray pointed out, it’s hard to have confidence in Vought’s willingness to follow the law when the incoming OMB General Counsel, Mark Paoletta, recently tweeted, “Impound, Baby, Impound!” In the same tweet, Paoletta urged Trump to “revive” impoundment authority, which would defy federal law and court rulings.
Vought similarly refused to answer questions about slash-and-burn budget proposals put forward by the Center for Renewing America, or his call for abortion bans with no exceptions, even to save a woman’s life. His own opinions don’t matter, he disingenuously told senators, since he would only be carrying out Trump’s wishes if he is confirmed. He disparagde social safety net programs as a “benefit hammock” that keep people from going to work.
Speaking of disingenuous, Vought told senators “Schedule F is not a tool to fire individuals,” saying that stripping them of civil service protections “does not mean that we have any intent to use that to fire career civil servants.” As Sen. Andy Kim noted in a confirmation hearing, Vought said in an interview with Tucker Carlson that in a second Trump term there “certainly is going to be mass layoffs and firings, particularly at some of the agencies that we don’t even think should exist.”
In reality, Project 2025 and participating groups like American Moment have been recruiting, vetting, and training Trump loyalists in anticipation of replacing civil servants ousted in an ideological purge.
Vought’s contempt for the “deep state” or “administrative state” is well documented. Politico reported that in a speech at a Center for Renewing America event, Vought denounced federal bureaucracies that he said have been weaponized, and laid out his sadistic plans for them:
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “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 so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so."
“We want to put them in trauma.”
If you are wondering how seriously to take Vought’s confirmation hearing testimony, you may want to consider that he also told senators, “This administration has the highest ethical standards.”
The Trump administration’s merciless attacks on the legal personhood of transgender people and their ability to serve in the armed forces reflect the kind of attitude Vought has expressed in criticizing what he called the “transgender sewage that’s being pumped into our schools and institutions.”
Vought also supports Trump team plans for mass deportations. Vought described his take in videos recorded by a Centre for Climate Reporting journalist. When deportations begin, Vought said, “you’re really going to be winning a debate along the way about what that looks like. And so that’s going to cause us to get us off of multiculturalism, just to be able to sustain and defend the deportation, right?” In a paper on immigration, the Center for American Renewal argued that “in the American political context, compatibility means an adherence to a Biblical account of the human person and a Western understanding of man’s relationship with government.”
Another troubling aspect of Vought’s nomination is his ardent “Christian nation-ism” and the Center for American Renewal’s characterization of Christian nationalism as a priority for the new administration.
Vought chatted about Christian nationalism with MAGA activist Charlie Kirk at the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference, where Vought argued that the country and conservative movement have been too secular and said the Center for Renewing America exists “to renew a consensus in this country that we are a nation under God.”
CNN reported on conversations captured by undercover journalists at the Centre for Climate Reporting:
In the conservative movement, “we’ve been too focused on religious liberty, which we all support, but we’ve lacked the ability to argue we are a Christian nation,” Vought argued….
He said that conservatives should push to have debates over whether to allow mosques to be built in America’s downtowns, and whether Christian immigrants should be prioritized over those of other faiths – ideas that run contrary to First Amendment protections.
“I want to make sure that we can say we are a Christian nation,” Vought added later.
Vought is closely associated with Christian nationalist William Wolfe, a former Trump administration official who worked with Vought at Heritage Action and later served as a vising fellow at Vought’s think tank. In 2023, Vought declared that he was proud to work with Wolfe “on scoping out a sound Christian nationalism.” That same year, Wolfe warned that Christians in the U.S. were “getting close” to a point where they would need to take up arms. Wolfe is among the contributors to “The Statement on Christian Nationalism & The Gospel,” which declared that the United States must formally “acknowledge the Lordship of Christ” in all its laws, “abolish abortion,” outlaw marriage equality, and “recapture our national sovereignty from godless, global entities who present a grave threat to civilization.”
People For the American Way and other civil and human rights and human needs organizations are urging senators to reject Russ Vought’s confirmation. You can add your name to People For’s petition here.