https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/04/opinion/trump-vought-omb-government.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
‘Trump’s Thomas Cromwell’ Is Waiting in the Wings
Feb. 4, 2025
Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.
Three years ago, Russell Vought, President Trump’s choice to become director of the Office of Management and Budget, argued that “the 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, and they have aimed it at us.”
Vought views American politics as a life-or-death struggle between the God-fearing right and a malevolent, secular left. In a 2022 essay in The American Mind, “Renewing American Purpose,” Vought gives his assessment of the Biden administration:
The scary part is that this regime is now increasingly arrayed against the American people. It is both woke and weaponized. The national security state, with organs like the F.B.I., N.S.A., and C.I.A., are aligned against the American people, who are outraged by this revolution they never assented to. The F.B.I. is investigating concerned parents attending open school board meetings as domestic terrorists. They are putting political opponents in jail. The N.S.A. is surveilling the conversations of citizens. Therefore, the hour is late and time is of the essence to expose the charade, rally the country against it toward self-government once again, and seize every leverage point to arrest the damage.
In times past, Vought — who famously asked “Is There Anything Actually Wrong With ‘Christian Nationalism?’” in Newsweek in 2021 — would have been seen, and dismissed, as an over-the-top extremist well outside the boundaries of mainstream politics. Today, he is a lauded Trump loyalist on the verge of his second tour of duty with the president, in one of the most powerful posts in the federal government.
In Vought’s vision of the apocalyptic battle for the soul of America, Democrats are “increasingly evil.” The federal work force, in turn, is the enemy that must be forced into submission. “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,” Vought, who is 48, declared last year. “We want to put them in trauma.”
Vought, if all goes according to plan, will be confirmed as O.M.B. director by the Senate this week.
In that role, Vought is determined to wipe out any vestiges of Democratic control of the United States government. In December 2022, he wrote that Democratic control had resulted in
the emergence of political prisoners, a weaponized, SWAT-swaggering F.B.I., the charges of “domestic terrorism” and “disinformation” in relation to adversaries’ exercise of free speech and the reality that the National Security Agency is running a surveillance state behind the protective curtain of “national security.” The immediate threat facing the nation is the fact that the people no longer govern the country; instead, the government itself is increasingly weaponized against the people it is meant to serve.
The protest over the killing of George Floyd, in Vought’s view, “obviously was not about race. It was about destabilizing the Trump administration,” part and parcel of “the left’s belief that structures in society are the problem. Pulling society down for purposes of revolution is exactly what they want.”
Perhaps the most effective tool for defanging the deep state, according to Vought, is the attack on job protections for the 50,000 federal workers who manage the details and enforce policy. Under the proposal, originally known as Schedule F — it has been renamed Schedule Policy/Career — President Trump would be free to fire anyone in this civil service category who does not comply with his orders.
Trump’s “roiling actions,” The Washington Post reported last week,
have generated workplace fear, confusion and anger — never good traits for any organization. The breathtaking scope and sudden implementation of his moves, some with dubious legality, stunned workers and citizens alike, as Trump tries to significantly and controversially expand the powers of the presidency.
Sarah Binder, a political scientist at George Washington University and a senior fellow in governance studies at Brookings, described by email the significance of Vought’s selection:
Trump’s appointment of Russell Vought as head of O.M.B. is enormously consequential. Think of O.M.B. as the “central nerve system” for the executive branch — developing the president’s budget, implementing and managing his policy priorities and existing government programs, and overseeing agency rule-making. That makes the O.M.B. director something like the orchestra conductor for the executive branch.
Vought is not just conducting an orchestra. Far from it! He is spearheading nothing less than an existential challenge to Congress’s core constitutional “power of the purse” — the authority to direct and control how federal funds are spent.
Despite Vought’s assault on this fundamental congressional prerogative, Senate Republicans are showing few, if any, doubts about Vought’s nomination to run O.M.B.
“He’s going to fly like green grass through a goose,” as Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana put it.
Stanley Feldman, a political scientist at Stony Brook University, emailed his response to my queries:
The broader audience for Vought’s invective is the substantial minority of Americans with authoritarian predispositions. Over the past 30 years, white authoritarians have become more consistently conservative on a wide range of issues — from immigration, to gender, to racial attitudes, to gay rights.
Feldman continued:
The villains in this right-wing account of American politics are liberals and Democrats. What is the “deep state” that Vought and his reactionary confederates want to crush? Anyone in government who is liberal, a Democrat, or who supports the liberal, Democratic agenda.
This reactionary agenda is not supported by a majority of Americans and not by all those who voted for Trump in November. But it does resonate with a large minority of the population (MAGA Republicans) who have come to believe that liberals and Democrats are an existential threat to the nation. Mobilizing those people has led to the capture of the Republican Party and, with Republican control of all branches of government, the ability to purge liberals and other public servants from the government and bureaucracy.
Largely agreeing with Feldman, Julie Wronski, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi, argued that “not all Americans feel this way, but a significant percentage does.” She cited poll data showing “that about 60 percent of partisans feel that members of the opposing party are a serious threat to the U.S. and its people, and about 40 percent think the opposing party is downright evil.”
Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard, suggested in an email that the share of the electorate holding views similar to Trump, Vought and their allies is much smaller than others think:
Such beliefs are representative of a paranoid anti-government fringe that has never enjoyed widespread support. Until recently, such attitudes would be disqualifying for any high-level government official.
Trump, “in order to rationalize his own crimes and corruption,” Enos contended in his email, “has constructed a series of beliefs in which a ‘weaponized’ government pursues innocent citizens for political reasons.”
What has become truly dangerous, Enos wrote, “is that because of Trump’s hold on the Republican Party, those wanting to be part of his inner circle must express these beliefs as well, whether they truly believe them or not.”
For Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, the extreme language adopted by Vought and others is strategic.
“The apocalyptic tone adopted by the MAGA minions,” Tribe wrote by email,
reflects a rhetorically effective if not especially original plan to confuse and thereby disarm the resistance, such as it is, by disabling the sadly limited critical faculties of those whose political paralysis enables the ascendant to rule largely unchallenged while the policies they push injure the very voters whose ballots cloak them with a patina of popular legitimacy.
Transparently normalizing the aberrant and extreme, they clear the path toward infiltrating, inhabiting and thereby co-opting the political and legal institutions they aim to make their own, in all three branches of government and throughout the federal system.
The results they seek conform to no systematic ideology but reflect the age-old pathology of self-aggrandizing power and wealth, spiked with an added dose of cruelty and retribution for imagined slights, and heavily tinged with scapegoating racism and misogyny, magnified by xenophobia and classic antisemitism.
For Vought, whose job at O.M.B. is to oversee spending, the demonization of Democrats provides a rationale for cutting programs for the poor supported by liberals and Democrats.
How would Vought cut federal spending?
In December 2022, under Vought’s direction, the Center for Renewing Americaproduced a comprehensive budget proposal, “A Commitment to End Woke and Weaponized Government.” The proposal called for enormous cuts in domestic spending, particularly in programs for the poor.
A sampling of the size of Vought’s spending cuts in the first year of reductions: Head Start, $5.4 billion; Low Income Energy Assistance, $3.7 billion; the Department of Housing and Urban Development, $25.8 billion, including $12.8 billion for Tenant-Based Rental Assistance vouchers, better known as Section 8.
Long-term reforms in the center’s budget proposal would cut Medicaid by $1.1 trillion and Medicare by $766 billion over 10 years.
Vought’s cuts are rationalized without legitimate justification. In the case of the Justice Department, for example, the center calls for spending reductions based on ideology:
The highly politicized Civil Rights Division and Environment and Natural Resources Division, full elimination of the “equity” obsessed Community Relations Service, an immediate zeroing out of the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program and a down payment on a transformative restructuring of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to disarm and defang its weaponized posture toward Americans who do not share the political bent of the bureaucratic elite.
While Vought and the center called for the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget to be cut to $6.5 billion from $9.2 billion and the National Science Foundation budget to be cut to $3.9 billion from $8.5 billion, they not only left the Defense Department intact but also gave it $83.4 billion more.
Vought has devoted much of his adult life to the conservative movement, starting as a Senate aide, rising to executive director of the Republican Study Committee and becoming policy director for the Republican Conference of the House of Representatives.
Trump appointed Vought deputy director of O.M.B. in 2017, as acting director in 2019 and as director in 2020.
After Trump lost re-election in 2020, Vought’s Center for Renewing Americaembarked on a mission “to renew a consensus of America as a nation under God with unique interests worthy of defending that flow from its people, institutions, and history, where individuals’ enjoyment of freedom is predicated on just laws and healthy communities.”
In addition, Vought served as a key adviser to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025,writing a crucial chapter in the project’s proposed agenda for the Trump administration, “Executive Office of the President of the United States.”
In that chapter, Vought describes how he sees his role of director of O.M.B. and as the key executor of Trump’s agenda:
The director must view his job as the best, most comprehensive approximation of the president’s mind as it pertains to the policy agenda while always being ready with actual options to effect that agenda within existing legal authorities and resources.
What is at the top of the president’s agenda?
The great challenge confronting a conservative president is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power — including power currently held by the executive branch — to the American people. Success in meeting that challenge will require a rare combination of boldness and self-denial: boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will and self-denial to use the bureaucratic machine to send power away from Washington.
Vought’s Project 2025 chapter anticipated much of what Trump has done since Jan. 20:
The next administration will face a significant challenge in unwinding policies and procedures that are used to advance radical gender, racial and equity initiatives under the banner of science. Similarly, the Biden administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding.
I contacted several experts in government policy to ask how they see the future, both near- and far-term.
Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow at Brookings, responded by email:
Russell Vought was a primary architect of “Schedule F,” a move late in the first Trump administration to politicize the civil service. After the 2024 election, Vought promised mass layoffs and firings. The orders and memos coming down this week demonstrate the seriousness of this commitment in the new administration.
He has also promised to follow through with “impoundment,” adopting a controversial legal theory that would substantially undermine Congress’s constitutional authority over the public purse.
In other words, Vought is a key actor in the Trump administration’s efforts at executive aggrandizement. Vast expansions of executive power, and the concurrent elimination of checks and balances, are a primary mechanism by which democracies decline.
As director of the Office of Management and Budget, Vought will have enormous power.
Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, also answered by email: “Vought is Trump’s Thomas Cromwell: the behind-the-scenes fixer who enables his master’s goals.”
Vought, Moynihan added,
has spent the past four years mapping out what a second Trump administration would look like. He was given responsibility by Project 2025 to map out a secret 180 Day Playbook that we are seeing play out now, in the forms of executive orders and memos.
Moynihan believes Vought is an “ideological crank,” which, Moynihan argued, means that
Vought will use his skills in ways that break government, rather than allow it to better serve its citizens. In many respects he does exactly what he accuses his enemies of doing. He almost single-handedly created the “weaponization of government” trope, and now President Trump is promising an era of retribution. Vought complains about a post-constitutional order, while also proposing to ignore the law, such as in the area of impoundments.
The Office of Management and Budget may well be the most influential agency in the executive branch of government, but it generally flies well below the radar, with little coverage of the way it shapes policy.
During Vought’s Jan. 22 confirmation hearing before the Senate Budget Committee, Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, asked him, “Will you, if confirmed, as director, faithfully follow the law, the Impoundment Control Act, yes or no?”
She did not get a straightforward answer.
Instead, Vought replied:
Senator, we will faithfully uphold the law. The president ran on the notion that the Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional. I agree with that.
Murray continued to press her case.
The impoundment law is the law. Will you follow it or not? You can say that we’re going to look at it and might challenge it in court, but it is the law today. Will you follow that law as director?
Vought: “Senator, the reason why the president ran on this is that 200 years of presidents had this authority to manage taxpayer resources.”
Murray: “You’re telling me why you don’t agree with the law, but the law is the law. Will you follow the law?”
Vought did not answer.
Donald Kettl, a professor at the University of Maryland’s public policy school, argued in an email that
Vought has the potential to be the most influential member of the Trump inner circle, for several reasons. He knows his way around the White House and Washington — very well. He served as O.M.B. director at the end of the first Trump administration and gained a reputation as a true zealot — and a very effective one.
One very clear hallmark of Vought’s influence so far, Kettl wrote,
is the assertion in a series of executive orders and directives that the president is THE head of the executive branch, with the power to decide how it ought to administer the laws passed by Congress and with the power to fire any federal official, anywhere in the executive branch, who does not follow his directives. Political scientists have long debated this “unitary executive” theory of the presidency. He actually intends to implement it.
Bridget Dooling, a law professor at Ohio State, contended in an email that the expected confirmation of Vought by the Senate “is accepting that he will oversee a strategic effort to attack one of Congress’s most important powers.”
In theory, Dooling continued, Vought’s “nomination should trigger Republicans in Congress to link arms with Democrats in Congress to stop the nomination, because what’s at issue is much, much bigger than our current president; it is the notion of checks and balances itself.”
The reality, however, is that Republicans in Congress have already linked arms not with Democrats but with Vought and Trump. Or perhaps a better description is that Trump has Republicans in Congress in a chokehold, and they will remain supine as the administration runs roughshod over common decency, poor people, the Constitution and the law.
Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to the Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Wednesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post. @edsall