Russ Vought picked for repeat performance at Trump's budget office

WASHINGTON — Russ Vought, the hard-driving budget director from President-elect Donald Trump’s first administration, will be nominated for a second stint in the job.

An unapologetic fiscal and social conservative, Vought is an aggressive advocate of cutting nondefense spending — but not what he calls the earned entitlements, Social Security and Medicare — and using presidential powers to shape government spending during Trump’s first term.

Vought is “an aggressive cost cutter and deregulator who will help us implement our America First Agenda across all Agencies,” Trump posted Friday on Truth Social, his social media platform. “Russ knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end Weaponized Government, and he will help us return Self Governance to the People.”

Vought has stressed the need for a president to exert control over the bureaucracies in agencies and departments, which he said have gotten used to pursuing their own agendas.

In a chapter he contributed to “Project 2025,” a Heritage Foundation-sponsored report to help the next president to “deconstruct the administrative state,” Vought wrote that the “great challenge confronting a conservative president is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power — including power currently held by the executive branch — to the American people.”

He said success in doing this requires “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will and self-denial to use the bureaucratic machine to send power away from Washington and back to America’s families, faith communities, local governments, and states.”

And during a recent interview with Tucker Carlson posted on X, he said the Office of Management and Budget has a central role to play in this effort.

OMB is “the president’s most important tool to dealing with the bureaucracy, administrative state,” he said. “And the nice thing about President Trump is he knows that and he knows how to use it effectively.”

Among the ways to achieve this, Vought said, are to make clear that federal agencies are accountable to the president and not “independent,” and to restore “impoundment” authority, allowing the president to spend less than appropriated by Congress.

Since Trump lost his reelection bid in 2020, Vought has been laying the groundwork for a second Trump term. He founded the Center for Renewing America, a think tank populated by former administration officials. And he served as policy director of the committee that wrote the 2024 GOP convention platform.

In a fiscal 2023 budget blueprint put out by the center and dubbed “A Commitment to End Woke and Weaponized Government,” Vought challenged the view that the projected exhaustion of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds is the most serious fiscal priority.

His plan has no cuts for Social Security or to Medicare beneficiaries.

Instead, Vought proposed cutting nondefense discretionary programs by $3.5 trillion over a decade, trimming Medicaid by more than $2 trillion and repealing the 2010 health care law’s insurance subsidies, among other reductions.

He argued that Americans “are simply not going to buy the notion that their earned entitlements must be tweaked while the federal government is funding Bob Dylan statues in Mozambique or gay pride parades in Prague.”

Vought joined OMB early in the Trump administration, rising to deputy director and then acting director before he was confirmed as director in a party-line 51-45 Senate vote in July 2020.

No Senate Democrat voted to confirm him for either post.

Senate Appropriations Chair Patty Murray, D-Wash., charged during a Budget Committee confirmation hearing in 2020 that he was “unfit and unqualified to lead” OMB “or any office.” She cited Vought’s role in temporarily withholding $400 million in aid to Ukraine, an action that led to Trump’s impeachment by the House and later acquittal in the Senate.

In a 2017 confirmation hearing for deputy director, Democrats questioned whether he would comply with oversight requests from minority Democrats on committees. And they faulted him for writing in a conservative blog in 2016 that Islam was a “deficient theology.”

Democrats cut him off before he could answer their questions about his religious views. Then-Colorado GOP Sen. Cory Gardner warned Democrats not to question Vought’s faith.

He has been under a microscope lately, with news organizations releasing video of speeches and conversations in which he said, among other things, that he wants to put bureaucrats “in trauma.”

“We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so,” he said in speech obtained by ProPublica. “We want to put them in trauma.”

In the Carlson interview, Vought acknowledged the “trauma” comments. But he added that “there’s a lot of people there who have come to serve and do great public service” in the agencies, “and we want to affirm that.”

In speeches and conversations, Vought said his think tank has been drafting potential executive actions and building “shadow offices” of OMB, the Office of Legal Counsel and National Security Council.

“We’re trying to build a shadow Office of Legal Counsel so that when a future president says, ‘What legal authorities do I need to shut down the riots?,’ we want to be able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community or the defense community come in and say that’s an inappropriate use of what you’re trying to do,” he said in a speech obtained by ProPublica.

Before going to work for OMB, Vought was a vice president at Heritage Action. Earlier, he had served as policy director for the House Republican Conference under then Indiana Rep. and later Trump Vice President Mike Pence. Vought also worked as executive director of the conservative Republican Study Committee and as an aide to former Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas.