The Cabinetry Continues (4)
/Russ Vought – the (B)OMB guy
Well, now, it’s much easier to approach Mr. Trump’s pick for Office of Management and Budget (OMB) than the others. Why? Because the nominee himself wrote the book on OMB! That is to say, in Project 2025, he authored the plan for how the next conservative administration should handle OMB – and I’ve read Project 2025, so I simply need to review. Therefore, rather than begin with biographical information, as I usually do, let’s first have a quick summary of what Russ Vought prescribed in his little section of the 922-page mandate for leadership.
In my own summary of Project 2025, I devoted only 3,428 words to Vought’s advice on OMB – just a bit more than one standard typed page. My summary was primarily direct quotes from his original, and I’m happy to say that, in that short space, I quoted him as mentioning the word “policy” 14 times. Makes sense. The words “priority” and “manage” showed up only once each in my summary, and “bureaucracy” and “funding” showed up twice each. But, gosh, so do “race/racial” and “sex/uality” and “climate.” Huh? And what did I find myself quoting five times from Vought’s original? “Biden” and “gender” and “woke.”
Specifically, Russ Vought characterizes the current state of the federal government as “constitutionally dire” and “unsustainably expensive.” He recommends that power be sent “away from Washington and back to America’s families, faith communities, local governments, and states.” (Note: “faith communities.” That seems central to his views.) He refers to the “wide vistas of oversight” the first Trump administration opened to override the bureaucracy – all reversed by Biden.
Vought advises that the Director of OMB must be “aggressive in wielding the [statutory] tool on behalf of the President’s agenda.” He urges that director (who will be Russ Vought himself, I assume) to “push back against woke policies” within the Office of Federal Procurement Policy. As for Regulatory and Information Policy, Vought advises: “focus resources on major new regulatory reforms rather than ... undoing the final rulemakings of the Biden Administration.”
The National Security Council, he says, should “prioritize the core roles and responsibilities of the military over social engineering and non-defense matters, including climate change, critical race theory, manufactured extremism, and other polarizing policies.” He advises the return of “all nonessential detailees to their home agencies on the first day [and] replace all essential detailees with staff aligned to the new President’s priorities.”
Leading the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Director of OMB should “unwind policies and procedures that are used to advance radical gender, racial, and equity initiatives under the banner of science.” He refers to Biden’s “climate fanaticism” and says the “woke agenda” should be reversed and scrubbed from all manuals, policies, etc., in order to restore “scientific excellence” as the top priority.
Concerning the Office of National Drug Control Policy, Vought cautions the director to ensure these programs are not funding “woke nonprofits with leftist policy agendas.” And finally, he offers this advice regarding the Gender Policy Council: Immediately revoke the Executive Order and every policy to “eliminate central promotion of abortion, sexuality education, and the new woke gender ideology.”
As I said, it’s a very, very short section of Project 2025, and my own summary was even shorter. But that gives us a taste of what’s on the mind of the man who, we might assume, will soon be the new Director of the Office of Management and Budget. So now let’s learn a little more about the man himself.
The son of a US Marine veteran and an elementary teacher, Vought graduated from the evangelical Christian Wheaton College and earned a Jurisprudence degree from George Washington University. He worked for Heritage Action, the lobbying arm of The Heritage Foundation, and he was the executive director and budget director of the Republican Study Committee, the policy director for the Republican Conference of the United States House of Representatives, and a legislative assistant for U.S. Senator Phil Gramm.
In the first Trump administration, Mr. Vought was the acting director of OMB for one year, the deputy director for less than a year, and the actual director for six months. We are told from several sources that the Biden team accused him of hindering a smooth transition of power, which he denied.
In 2021, Vought founded the Center for Renewing America to combat Critical Race Theory. Here is a sample of what CRA says about Critical Race Theory: “The imposition of state sanctioned racism by progressive ideologues corrupts children and future generations into both self-loathing and hatred toward their fellow countrymen.” It says the goal is to destroy “the American idea that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and that it “poses an existential threat to the American way of life.” Mr. Vought’s organization refers to the theory as “Marxist” and born of “militant identity politics.” The policy brief goes on to allege that CRT “necessitates destroying purported white cultural values such as the nuclear family, delayed gratification, and objectivity.”
I’m going to pause briefly here to admit that, a few years ago, this “critical race theory” was all new to me, so I did what I always do in such cases: I dedicated my time and energy to learning about it. It was a struggle, to be sure, that took several months, and I am quite sure my understanding is not perfect. That said, I went into the study with an open, curious mind, and I published the results of my learning here in the Speakeasy. I invite you to pause now and read my reports on Critical Race Theory or come back to them later. I’m no expert but, probably unlike the vast majority of Americans who run their mouths, I have made a serious effort to wrestle with the terms and concepts myself. I don’t buy into the version in the CRA policy brief cited above.
But Center for Renewing America is about more than combatting Critical Race Theory. In February 2023, CRA published a paper arguing for a "dormant NATO, wherein Europe is the primary security provider of the European front." Note that the Center for Renewing America was on the advisory board for Project 2025, that its founder wrote the guidelines for a conservative OMB, and said founder is now nominated to run that federal office.
That takes us back to Russ Vought himself. He identifies as a Christian nationalist, which seeks to establish an exclusivist version of Christianity as the dominant moral and cultural order. Christian nationalists generally espouse "a commitment to an institutional separation between church and state, but not the separation of Christianity from its influence on government and society," according to The Washington Post.
In 2019, Vought was one of nine government officials who defied a subpoena to testify before Congress in relation to the Trump–Ukraine scandal and the administration's decision to freeze military aid to Ukraine, for which Trump was later impeached. (The scandal referenced above was about Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden.)
As mentioned, Russ Vought served as director of the Office of Management and Budget from July 2020 to January 2021. Before that he was deputy director of the OMB for part of 2018, and acting director from 2019 to 2020. In May 2024, he was named policy director of the Republican National Committee platform committee.
During Vought’s confirmation hearing, after which he was confirmed 51-45, Bernie Sanders asked him about a previous statement he had made: "Muslims do not simply have a deficient theology. They do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ his Son, and they stand condemned.” As Director of the OMB, Vought stopped publishing updated economic forecasts, claiming disruption by Covid. In September 2020, responding to a directive by Donald Trump, he instructed all federal agencies to identify any contracts or spending related to training on critical race theory or “white privilege” and seek avenues to cancel such contracts or divert federal dollars from such training.
Finally, let’s return to a summary of Vought’s plans for the next administration, this time from Wikipedia. Consistent with my assessment in the early paragraphs, he is said to believe the federal bureaucracy is “woke and weaponized” and in need of “radical constitutionalists.” He recommends sweeping expansion of presidential power, including the right to withhold congressionally appropriated funds (illegal since 1974) and the use of our military for domestic law enforcement. He urges the next administration to “gut the FBI.”
We shall see whether Congress affirms his nomination.