Russ Vought is just getting warmed up
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Russ Vought, Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget director (and more), sits in an office across the drive from the Oval Office. But he as much as ally and presidential adviser Stephen Miller is a prime architect of the dismantling of the the country we all grew up in. Miller enjoys the limelight. Vought prefers the shadows. So I suspect Vought whispers in Miller’s ear and Miller whispers in Trump’s.
Let’s let in the sunshine and do some disinfecting.
This story is a few days old, but bears notice. McCay Coppins writes at The Atlantic that Elon Musk’s DOGE antics up to now provided the shadow for Vought to lurk in. Vought denied Coppins’s request for an interview.
“Russ has got a vision. He’s not an anarchist. He’s a true believer,” Steve Bannon tells Coppins. Vought is among the most powerful people in Trump’s orbit (gift link):
Vought’s agenda includes shrinking the government, but it goes deeper than that. His vision of state power would effectively reject a century of jurisprudence and unravel the modern federal bureaucracy as we know it. A devotee of the so-called unitary executive theory, he wants to see the civil service gutted and repopulated with presidential loyalists, independent federal agencies politicized or eliminated, and absolute control of the executive branch concentrated in the Oval Office.
A co-author of Project 2025, Vought wants a king. He is restructuring the government to make Trump into one. As head of OMB he has his hands on the entire federal budget. He’s taking a hatchet to it:
In his early days as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—an independent agency that was designed to be insulated from partisan pressure—Vought sent layoff notices to 1,500 employees, closed the office, canceled contracts, and declined funding for the agency from the Federal Reserve. Across hundreds of other federal agencies, he is spearheading an effort to simply stop enforcing many regulations. And last month, Trump proposed a rule that would convert 50,000 federal workers into Schedule F employees, whom the president can fire at will—a policy that Vought has championed since the first term. Vought’s ideas, once seen as radical, are now being realized.
Vought’s critics have warned that elements of his agenda—for example, unilaterally cutting off funding for congressionally established agencies such as USAID—are eroding checks and balances and pushing the country toward a constitutional crisis. But in interviews over the past several weeks, some of his allies told me that’s the whole point. The kind of revolutionary upending of the constitutional order that Vought envisions won’t happen without deliberate fights with Congress and the judiciary, they told me. If a crisis is coming, it’s because Vought is courting one.
Vought the true believer doesn’t want to roll back the 20th century like a Donald Trump or a Grover Norquist. He wants to roll back the last 200 years. If it takes defying the Supreme Court, so be it. And his deep knowledge of how government works complements Trump’s lack of it. Vought knows where the pressure points are and likely provided DOGE a roadmap.
“After Republicans failed to recapture the White House in 2012, Vought joined a small group of activists and operatives who began gathering a few blocks from the Capitol, at the Judicial Watch offices, to strategize,” Coppins writes. Their conviction? Republicans were not radical enough. This Who’s Who of the Beltway’s right-wing fringe “wanted more confrontation, and were open to more extreme ideas.” Like dismantling the separation of powers.
As Al Pacino’s Lt. Col. Frank Slade once said, Vought is just getting warmed up.
Make him famous.
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