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.
I am a Virginia Tech Hokie, and also a proud Democrat. While I lived in Blacksburg, I worked with any of the local elected Democrats. Sad to say, not all of them at the time felt a need to support better gun laws. In fact, one boasted of their endorsements from the NRA.
While I do not want anyone politicizing the tragedy my school and my fellow Hokies have suffered, there are certainly efforts that can be done, much as Gov. Kaine(D) did when he issues the executive order preventing mental patients from obtaining weapons. Every state should have similar laws on the books. It is not much, but if we cannot do even that, we should be ashamed of ourselves.
Ut Prosim
At Americans for Gun Safety (the forerunner of Third Way), we conducted a lot of in-depth research on guns. We wanted to understand how an issue like closing the gun show loophole, which polled 88-9% in SOUTH DAKOTA (!!!!), was universally thought to be bad for politicians.
Here were our conclusions: A lot of voters supported gun safety laws but were unconvinced that they would make a difference in reducing crime.
Many voters felt that when politicians talked about gun safety, they were talking about someone else’s concerns – not their own.
And last, Democrats had real baggage on the gun issue. People thought Democrats were hostile to gun owners and didn’t respect the values that gun owners held.
We counseled Democrats to solve these problems by both pairing the right to own a gun with the responsibility to pass laws that kept them out of the wrong hands. We told Democrats to wrap gun safety proposals around local values (“I’m bringing West Virginia gun values to Washington.”). And finally, we told them to win the crime argument and enlist local chiefs and sheriffs in the fight.
Gun safety isn’t bad politics when it is handled correctly. When it is handled poorly, politicians run from the issue like a stampede. We then see the results in the lives that are lost around the nation.
Jim Kessler.
I doubt that the number of “GUN TOTIN’ MANIACS” out there actually have enough voting power to stop real legislation on gun control. The NRA does. The Emphasis needs to move onto and into the NRA and its’ influence on the US Congress.
Many of us are well aware of this situation, but I believe that millions still see the NRA as that farmer friendly group of good ole boys that hold gun classes for young hunters, not the lobbyists for Remington Firearms and Colt Mfg. Start putting the truth out there on TV and across the internet… Gun Control starts with NRA CONTROL!!!
I think Bruce Reed makes a good point. Most people who want to maintain their right to have guns are not thinking a “criminal” should have the same right.
For some time Democrats have not taken advantage of this dichotomy.
However, I do wonder if there is a need to institute harsher penalties for illegal possession of guns along with tougher gun laws.
Just making it tougher to get a gun may not deter some criminals who will just buy them off the street.
Plus, some voters will perceive of laws making it tougher to get guns less than useful if not supported by measures to really make criminals pay for possessing and using guns.
David