Russ Vought listens during a television interview at the White House.Alex Brandon/AP
Continuing the string of MAGA loyalist picks to serve in his administration, President-elect Donald Trump on Friday evening tapped Russell Vought to serve as director of the Office of Management and Budget—again. Vought, a self-avowed Christian Nationalist and key contributor to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda for a conservative presidency, led OMB during Trump’s first term, transforming the powerful agency—charged with developing and executing the federal budget, and reviewing executive branch regulations—into a vehicle to deliver on the president’s wildest dreams.
In a recent appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show on X, in which the former Fox News host said he was “very likely to run OMB again,” Vought described the agency as the “nerve center of the federal government, particularly the executive branch.” He recounted having provided Trump with a plan to divert funding from the Department of Defense to fund his border wall without congressional approval, a move disavowed by the White House counsel and later ruled illegal. “Presidents use OMB to tame the bureaucracy, the administrative state,” Vought said, characterizing it as “the president’s most important tool to deal with the bureaucracy.”
Vought described what kind of person would be best suited to wield the power of this agency on behalf of President Trump. “What you need is people who are able to absorb political heat,” he told Carlson. “They don’t have a fear of conflict. They can execute under withering enemy fire. They are up to speed and they are no-nonsense in their own ability to know what must be done. And they’re unbelievably committed to the president and his agenda.” Vought also advocated for doing away with the notion of independent agencies, singling out the Department of Justice as a target.
Vought most recently led the conservative Center for Renewing America, which he has described as a “shadow” OMB outside the government. He is a big proponent of reviving an executive order from the final days of the first Trump administration that would upend the federal workforce in service of Trump’s goals. Known as Schedule F, the order would reclassify potentially thousands of career civil servants working in policy-related positions as at-will employees and strip them of job protections, making it easier for political appointees to fire them and fill the openings with candidates hand-picked to support MAGA priorities.
At OMB, Vought tried to reclassify almost 90 percent of the agency’s workforce as at-will employees, hoping to set an example for other government heads. As a former OMB worker and author of Trump and the Bureaucrats: The Fate of Neutral Competence put it to me, Vought’s first round leading the agency was nothing short of “traumatic.”
Inside the Trump administration, Vought came across as fiercely dedicated to the America First cause, even if it meant a colossal increase in the federal debt. Trump was prone to outbursts, but to Vought that aggression equaled power. Vought made it his mission to weaponize OMB on behalf of the president, who had long perceived the civil service bureaucracy as an obstacle to his haphazard rule. “We view ourselves as the president’s Swiss Army Knife,” he once said. “How do you come up with options that work and then talk through the pros and cons?” Vought interpreted his job as being inside Trump’s head—a “keeper of ‘commander’s intent.’”
And that appears to be the same approach Vought plans to take when restored to his old job next year. In previously undisclosed videos of 2023 and 2024 private speeches obtained by ProPublica, Vought talked about wanting the “bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” adding they should “not want to go to work” when waking up in the morning. “We want to put them in trauma.”
He also suggested creating a “shadow Office of Legal Counsel” to enable a crackdown on anti-Trump dissent. “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.” A new Trump administration,” Vought declared, “must move quickly and decisively.”