(AFP) – He is perhaps the most powerful man in Washington at the moment, after Donald Trump. Russell Vought, the right-wing ideologue who heads the Office of Management and Budget, is using the US government shutdown to deliver his brand of shock therapy to American bureaucracy. Shutdowns usually result in hundreds of thousands of federal workers being placed on temporary unpaid leave. But this time, the White House has said mass firings are “imminent.” Trump has tapped Vought to tell him “which of the many Democrat Agencies… he recommends to be cut.” He even posted on his Truth Social platform an AI-generated video depicting the budget chief as the grim reaper walking through Washington, scythe in hand.
Vought is following a far-right governance blueprint, Project 2025, which he helped author. During his reelection campaign, Trump distanced himself from the ultra-conservative policy plan, which envisions vastly expanded executive control over sharply reduced federal government. Now Trump is referring to the 49-year-old Vought as “he of PROJECT 2025 Fame.” Lawmaker Rosa DeLauro, the ranking Democrat on the committee that allocates government money to federal agencies, accuses Vought of having “engineered” the shutdown. “He has been scheming, hoping, and planning for this since he was last in office, building his plan to dismantle essential government functions with no regard for the working class, the middle class, and vulnerable Americans who depend on them,” she said on Wednesday, day one of the shutdown. Shutdowns are brought about by lawmakers’ failure to pass an annual budget bill that funds the government.
Born in the northeastern state of Connecticut, Vought graduated from a small evangelical Christian college before earning a law degree and becoming a staffer for Republican lawmakers, then a lobbyist for the conservative Heritage Foundation. He joined the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and became its director during Trump’s first term. Vought spent President Joe Biden’s term in office planning for a fresh conservative takeover of government from his own think tank, the Center for Renewing America. The goal: instituting efficiency in what he saw as a bloated government. Trump “has to move executively as fast and as aggressively as possible, with a radical constitutional perspective, to be able to dismantle that bureaucracy,” he told conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson after Trump’s reelection in November 2024. In September, he called the US government “the woke and weaponized administrative state” of civil servants who resist the directives of an elected president.
Vought was swiftly confirmed by the Senate for a second stint as OMB director in February 2025. But it was tech tycoon Elon Musk who wielded the cost-cutting chainsaw in the early months of the Trump administration. That reportedly irritated Vought, who disagreed with parts of Musk’s approach, sources told The New York Times. But the OMB director was on board for the abrupt dismantling of government agencies. “Yes, I called for trauma within bureaucracies. Bureaucracies hate the American people,” he said in November. “It’s quite simple: all executive power must be vested in the executive branch,” he declared. Burying foreign aid, ending federal funding for public broadcasting, and rolling back dozens of regulations: “It’s exciting to be involved in this,” Vought recently said.
– Ulysse BELLIER
© 2024 AFP
