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.
Here’s how I see the refusal of both Clintons to acknowledge the fact that she is defeated: neither saw Obama coming; and neither can accept defeat graciously, especially in light of their initial anticipation at the beginning of the primary campaign that Ms. Clinton simply would walk away with the nomination.
The Clintons have run a deeply flawed campaign and, much like Bush ceaselessly changing the goal posts in determining success in Iraq, they have tried to change the parameters of this campaign. Now, for instance, we are told solemnly by the Clinton campaign that the votes needed to win the nomination are significantly more than the number set by the DNC, when Michigan and Florida fell into primary date apostasy and lost their delegates as a result. Who are THEY to declare this? The Clintons will now dictate the rules of the DNC?
They have run an awful campaign. For starters, theirs has been a top-down and old-fashioned campaign (surprising for the long computer-literate Bill Clinton), relying on large donors and assuming unquestioning allegiance from various minority blocs – traditionally Democratic – who have gone over to Obama. When it appeared that Obama was taking the momentum, they resorted to racist-tinged comments and ads. And finally, the refusal of Clinton to deal with the facts on the ground instead of wishes in the air, has only added fuel to the fire of speculation that both she and her husband will stop at nothing to secure this nomination.
I had supported Bill Clinton during and after his Presidency; a New Yorker, I voted twice for Clinton for senator. I was a Clinton partisan when this primary campaign began. But, after Bill Clinton’s South Carolina remarks and the “3:00 AM” ad, as well as the continuing negative screeds from her camp, I have had done with the both of them.
This is a “change” election, much like 1932, 1960, and 1980. The Clintons are a day late and a dollar short, and they just don’t get it. Moreover, if the Clintons’ campaign is an indication of how the White House would be run, then I fear we would get another George Bush, only in a different candy wrapper.