His reputation for being “Trump’s Holy Warrior” during the 45th president’s first term didn’t stop him. His intimate involvement with the Project 2025 agenda for Trump’s second administration, which became so controversial that the Trump campaign all but disavowed it, didn’t stop him. His espousal of radical ideas about presidential power during his confirmation hearings didn’t stop him. His suspected association with a wildly unpopular federal funding freeze imposed by the agency he was nominated to run didn’t stop him. And Senate Democrats, who belatedly mobilized a boycott of the a committee’s vote endorsing him and then launched an all-night “talk-a-thon” on the Senate floor to warn of his malevolent designs, couldn’t stop him. And so on Thursday night, with a vote along party lines, Russell Vought was confirmed to return to the directorship of the Office of Management and Budget, which he has described as the “nerve center” of the federal government.
With this vote a very important piece of the Trump 2.0 machinery was snapped into place. Other Cabinet-rank appointees are much flashier and get more attention. Their departments do things that everyone understands and that touch millions of lives directly. But far beyond his specific responsibilities (preparing the president’s budget and reviewing fiscal and regulatory decisions), the new OMB director is a particularly valuable player in the planned MAGA transformation of the federal government. To borrow a sports term, Vought is a “glue guy.” He’s the team member who lifts the performance of everyone around him without necessarily being the big star himself. And if you are alarmed by the counter-revolutionary ambitions of this administration, that should make him a very scary man for real.
In the shake-up of the federal government that MAGA folk generally call an assault on the “deep state,” there are three main forces. One is a Congress controlled by a Republican Party that has sworn an unusually intense allegiance to Trump, and that has its own ideological reasons (mostly related to the need to pay for tax cuts and Trump’s mass deportation program, while making at least a stab at reducing deficits and debt) for taking a sledgehammer to the parts of the federal government that don’t involve GOP sacred cows like Social Security and defense. Another is DOGE, Elon Musk’s pseudo-agency that is already wreaking havoc in agency after agency as he applies his radical corporate-takeover methods to the public sector with a giant social-media troll army at his back. Each is engaged in demolition work that could be at least temporarily stopped by federal court orders (in Musk’s case) or by internal wrangling (in Congress’s). Vought’s OMB is the third force that will make sure Trump’s agenda moves forward one way or the other. And he is perfectly equipped to coordinate these disparate forces and supply blows to the bureaucracy if and when others fall short.
The funding freeze showed us what a single memo from OMB can do, spawning nationwide chaos and panic. A more sustained effort, and one that relies less on “pauses” and more on a true freeze of grants and contracts backed up by explicit presidential executive orders, can do a lot more damage to the programs and services that MAGA folk don’t like anyway. Meanwhile OMB can exchange intel with DOGE on potential targets in the bureaucracy, while OMB will definitely guide congressional Republicans as they put together massive budget-reconciliation and appropriations bills.
Vought’s personality, worldview, and experience make him a lot more pivotal than his job description, believe it or not. He’s in sync with deep wellsprings of the conservative infrastructure as a committed Christian nationalist (he is a graduate of the old-school fundamentalist Wheaton College, and is closely associated with the theocratic neo-Calvinist wing of the Southern Baptist Convention), a think-tank veteran (at the Heritage Foundation and his own Center for Renewing America), an heir of the budget-slashing tea-party movement, and as someone who perfectly synthesizes the hardcore right of both the pre-Trump and Trump eras.
Just as importantly, Vought is the one person other than Trump himself who may be able to keep his budget-cutting allies working together and not fighting for power. He spent many years working on Capitol Hill and knows the House GOP culture particularly well; he is a natural ally of the fiscal radicals of the House Freedom Caucus, who currently have enormous influence (and perhaps even control) of 2025 budget decisions thanks to their willingness to blow up things if they don’t get their way. But he’s also as radical as Musk in his antipathy to the deep state, as the chief apostle of the idea the president should have vast powers to usurp congressional spending decisions if he deems it necessary. And unlike Musk and his team of software engineers, he knows every nook and cranny of the enemy territory from his earlier stint at OMB. Vought has also forged personal links with the turbulent tech bro, according to The Wall Street Journal:
“A senior administration official said Vought and Musk have been building a partnership since just after Trump’s victory in November.
“’They share the same passion for making the federal government more efficient and rooting out waste, corruption and fraud, so I think they are very aligned,’ said Wesley Denton, a longtime adviser to former Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.) and a Vought friend.”
So Musk may get the headlines, and Mike Johnson and John Thune may flex their muscles on Capitol Hill as they compete to turn Trump’s lawless impulses into laws. But the hand on the wheel may really belong to Russ Vought, who is trusted implicitly by a president who isn’t interested in the details of governing and appreciates a loyal subordinate who shuns the spotlight as much as his radical views allow.
Are you spamming Paul?
Not too much sence in your comment.
Regards,
Steeveguy
It’s very pleasant to find wise words here.
Good job, Paul!
Paul
The latest headlines are about terrorism and so that is what we are concerned about at the moment regarding Kerry’s abilities in that area. I completely agree with both Joe and Paul C–this fight will be about national security AND the economy. We cannot afford to cede either.
I see two conflicting strains in polling. Kerry has lost 6 points in the Rasmussen Reports tracking poll in the last 2 days. He’s down by four from being up by two. However individual state polling by this group shows Kerry with narrow leads in Ohio, Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Can someone explain?
I think the war is an issue because it is all Bush has. Therefore all of us need to be assertive truth squad members in every way we can. i really hope that anyone who has not signed the MOveon censure petition yet wil do so quickly. Also write to your Congressional delegation to get their support. Even if the censure doesn’t pass Congress the debate itself will help spread the truth about the war. Also Moveon is a good place to send money since they are willing and able to put ads out there that are much more clearly expressed and to the point than what Kerry is going to present.
I am frustrated by the Democrats who continue to pussyfoot around the war afraid to say anything. my Congressman and one of my Senators are in this wimp catagory and, even after the exposure of Bush’s lies, are still unwilling to speak up. The Democrats have not yet cured themselves of moral cowardice.
I’m afraid I completely disagree. Presidential elections are almost always decided on economic issues. Jobs will mean a lot more to a swing voter in Ohio or Missouri than vague feelings about a terrorist threat. I think the electoral judo should be the opposite — use Kerry’s status as a war veteran and hero to neutralize Bush’s status in national security (actually a Republican advantage, not Bush’s personal advantage) and pound him on the economy.
This also helps with the “October Surprise” (which may be happening as I type this.) If we do capture bin Laden between now and the election, people can breath a sigh of relief, declare the worst part of the war to be over, and turn to someone who can manage the economy. We can and should start to argue right now that the best way to remain safe and secure is for our economy to boom, create good jobs at home and reduce or eliminate our dependence on foreign oil. If we make the election turn on national security, we lose our best trump card and make ourselves hostage to Rove’s manipulation of world events.
I second Joe. My guess (completely unsupported by facts, of course) is that national security is threshold issue for swing voters.
It’s like judo — use your opponent’s strength against him. National security is Bush’s greatest strength with voters. Kerry and his supporters should keep criticizing Bush for failing to pursue the fight against Al Qaeda and terrorism. If the facts and the message get through, Bush loses.
(I want to throw up every time a right-winger argues that if Bush loses, Osama wins. Please. Bush won’t even mention Osama’s name.)
I went over the numbers in the Gallup survey and I see big problems for John Kerry. What came through to me was that voters believe George Bush is doing an OK job of protecting America from terrorist acts and that he’s a focused and strong leader.
Kerry’s problem is that those views trump all of the negagtive perceptions about Bush and the economy, the deficit, his tax policies and his handling of health care and social security.
Bush is talking about national security because he knows that issue is his trump card and that he can win with it, even though he has put the economy and our future in the ditch.
Kerry will need to fight on that national security terrain because the economy and all the other issues that would seem to favor him aren’t going to move appreciably one way or the other between now and election day so as to weaken Bush any further. In fact they could move in the direction of helping Bush, although that doesn’t seem likely.
Simply put, Kerry needs to do three things: first, he should name his choice for Veep as soon as possible to rebut Cheney on national security. That means it needs to be someone credible; say Wesley Clark or Bob Graham. Second, he needs to be speaking about homeland security every day in ways that the American people can relate to. He needs to demonstrate that our security could be enhanced under a President Kerry. Third, he needs to dispatch surrogates with national security credentials into all of the major media markets for the duration of the campaign to point out Bush’s mistakes and Kerry’s obviously superior plan of agressively fighting terrorism.
Events between now and election day will have a greater bearing on the outcome of the contest than any voter attitudes on social and economic policies. Kerry has gained all the benefit from those issues that he will ever get. The trick for Kerry is to position himself to mitigate losses on security events and leverage gain from those events that can be seen as helpful.
It’s astonishing how many people out there believe that it’s all the Democrats fault that the economy isn’t doing better, or that the Democrats are lying and if people can’t find work it’s because they are lazy bums.
People are going to be bullied into voting based on hatred of gays and based on terrorism. Rove was bragging about this yesterday. Those are the 2 big issues and he says they are already getting more and more popular. And he’s right. Just look at the glee in the media over Kerry’s “foreign leaders” flap. Or the federal government banning any anti-discrimination laws for gay employees. Or the Tenn. county which is going to keep gays out of their town.
I don’t know about the large number of independents, but the large preponderence of Bush voters is probably due to people misreporting their 2000 presidential votes. People like to vote for winners, and after any election the percentage of people who *claim* to have voted for the winning candidate is higher than the percentage that actually voted for him/her.
I don’t know whether these people are lying or just remembering incorrectly. I suspect both.
Could you please comment as someone who knows about polling what it means when the number of Republicans in the poll is @386 and the number of Dems is less at @368 and the number of independents seems enormous at @441. (This is from memory)
Second, when asked about their 2000 votes, the percentage of Bush voters at 375 WAS SIGNIFICANTLY HIGHER THAN THE GORE VOTERS AT 27%. What impact does that have on the preference breakdown for 2004. Is there some weighting thing to make up for that?
Given the preponderance of Bush to Gore voters does it seem significant that Bush is polling below his 2000 numbers?
Why are the Nader numbers so high? And how high were they in 2002.