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.
Interesting that the only post to get any response in a while is this one, showing, I think, how Democrats this time around are more interested in personalities and images rather than real policy issues. Pretty sad.
Thanks, folks, for the comments. I’d like to specifically address Gregg’s, since his there-are-plenty-of-other-veep-options argument against the unity ticket is one you hear from a lot of people (viz., Mark Schmitt’s post in the TNR colloquoy).
It’s true there are a lot of good names floating around out there, but that’s the problem: there are as many rationales for a particular choice as there are candidates. What kind of running-mate does Obama need? A woman? A “populist?” Someone with a strong national security background? Someone from a battleground state? There’s probably no one choice who covers as much political ground as HRC.
Ed Kilgore
In discussions I’ve had about this, the usual comment is why would Obama want Hillary as VP? With Hillary comes Bill, and between them they would be constantly trying to take the spotlight off Obama.
But the VP is powerful only to the extent that the President yields power. Hillary in the Senate has her own power base, and we can expect her to have a leadership position there.
I can envision a situation like that in the late 1970s and 1980, when Ted Kennedy and Tip O’Neill joined forces to destroy the Carter Presidency [at least, that’s how I saw it at the time]. In this scenario, Hillary has too much “integrity” to compromise on health care, or whatever, and noisily protests this and that until, finally, in 2012, she MUST run against Obama for the sake of the country.
Maybe keeping Hillary close at hand is the best course.
As someone who supported Obama during this primary campaign, I would have to say there were times when Hillary said things that were offensive to me, and seemed un-Democratic. These sorts of things happen in all campaigns, and will come back, as they always come back, to hurt Obama in the general campaign. But I am not a Hillary hater, and winning this election is too important to the future of our country to allow my personal pique to undermine my understanding of the big picture.
Really? Perhaps you would like the Clintons and their Dem voters to sit silently behind a curtain, the way the women delegates were forced to do at the First Anti-Slavery Convention.
Of course, it would have to be an awfully big curtain, since the Clinton voters make up half the Dems.
While you’re at it, maybe you can tell the Clintons and their voters; “You can vote for us and send money to us, but we don’t want any input from you, much less sharing any power with you. After all, the Democratic Party has a long tradition of losing nobly, and the only Dem President who’s won two terms is an awful embarrassment to us.”
That way, you can be assured that the Dems lose again in 2008. That’s what you want, right?
You may count me as one who would fall off the Obama wagon if HRC is his running mate. Whether I would then vote Republican is an open question I will reserve judgement about. With McCain running, given his age, I would see HIS VP selection as at least as important as Obama’s.
The arguments against Hillary as VP are well stated above, and resonate with me. To me, his biggest vulnerability is that he is painted by the GOP as “just another pol”, and choosing Hillary as a political ploy would give that theory real legs.
I probably represent the “swing voter” bloc pretty well, based on my history and views. I also have concluded, after 5 decades as a voter that that current Democratic Party has an uncanny penchant for shooting itself in the foot, for pulling defeat out of the hot fire of potential victory. This “dream ticket” (read: nightmare scenario) would be the proof positive of that view, in my opinion.
I could be wrong, I admit, but why risk it? If Obama is not strong enough to craft a winning campaign without a Clinton flavor, then he does not deserve the office of President.
I see two issues: whether such a “unity”ticket would sell and whether it would work in an Administration.
There might be some plausibility that it would sell and help get Obama elected. I think a more interesting question would be who else would help deliver voter segments that Mrs. Clinton has some strength with and who could make inroads into segments that McCain has strengths.
When I heard Sam Nunn’s name mentioned in this regard, my gut reaction was that would make a formidable team. And Mr. Nunn is a real statesman. Self-serving is not a term I would ever attribute to him. There are others.
Whether having Mrs Clinton as VP in an administration– not to mention Bill with time on his hands– would work, c’mon! That would be a situation that would have to be so highly managed. I think Sara Powers’ remark that Hillary was a monster that would say anything was very revealing. It would be very surprising if Obama perceived Clinton as not bringing severe risk factors into his administration.
–Gregg
Ed, besides the repudiation issue you mention, there are two more reasons for Obama not to want Clinton on the ticket. 1) Hillary’s traditionally high negatives and the fact that she is sure to be a GOTV organinzing bonanza for the Right (since McCain is their nominee it is possible that, without Hillary on the ticket, many GOPers will stay home); and 2) Bill. If I were Obama I would not want him on the loose as even a tangential part of the Administration.