Trump’s Budget Director Could Usher In an Age of Unfettered Presidential Power

As Donald Trump’s cabinet takes shape, one name ought to stand out: Russell Vought, slated to head the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

Vought’s is not a household name, and the OMB, which was established during Richard Nixon’s first term, is not one of the headline-making departments. It has neither the cachet nor the name recognition of the Departments of State, Defense, Justice or Treasury. Yet, in many ways, it is every bit as important.

The OMB’s mandate, implemented by its several hundred employees, is to serve a coordinating role across departments, ensuring that political appointees and bureaucracies alike move toward the president’s political vision and goals. It oversees regulatory agencies, helps develop budgets, navigates the complex byways of coordinating discussions between the executive and legislative branches of government, and assists in bringing executive orders and memoranda to agency heads. Consider it the institutional “wingman” of the presidency.

In an era in which huge policy decisions — from Obama’s creation of DACA to Trump’s Muslim travel ban to Biden’s efforts to reduce student loan debt — can be rolled out via executive action, the OMB has an outsized role in oiling the gears of government. It also means that, when an administration comes in determined to shake up (and in many cases, eliminate) entire government departments, as the incoming Trump administration has pledged to do, control of the OMB allows for a full-frontal assault on the institutions of government — what MAGA supporters deride as the “deep state.”

And that is where Russell Vought, who has a history of pushing a hard-right political and economic agenda throughout his career, comes in. Vought served as the OMB director during the last year of the first Trump administration, and he has a long track record of working with various branches of the Republican Party as well as with the Heritage Foundation — the brain trust out of which many of the ideas that define the U.S. right originate.

After he left office in 2021, Vought founded a think tank, the Center for Renewing America, where he has spent the past several years fine-tuning a hard-right MAGA vision for a potential second Trump presidency, as well as urging Republicans in Congress to shut down the government rather than accept budget compromises negotiated with the Biden administration.

Vought was the lead figure in bringing to fruition the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a blueprint for a vast scaling-back of the welfare state, a concerted effort to dismantle the non-partisan federal civil service, and a concentrating of power within the executive branch. Knowledgeable about how to use all available levers of power to further the Project 2025 agenda, he reputedly helped draft a slew of executive orders to be signed in the early days of a new Trump presidency. He has made comments broadly supportive of the ideals of Christian nationalism and a diminution of the separation of church and state. And, despite Trump’s protestations on the campaign trail that he wasn’t familiar with the details of Project 2025, in reality his administration is shaping up to be stocked full of veterans from this effort to radically reimagine the role of government. Vought’s role as the project’s ringmaster, his knowledge of the fine-print details of its policy suggestions and his close involvement with project authors who are now migrating into senior government roles, position him to be uniquely influential over the coming years in Washington, D.C.

It will fall to Vought, in his role as head of the OMB, to unveil the president’s budget priorities each year — and his record suggests these budgets will be massive exercises in austerity.

Trump’s aides believe that the mere threat of firing so many career civil servants will have a chilling effect, essentially intimidating the federal bureaucracy into toeing the MAGA line. On this, Vought is all in.

Vought subscribes to an expansive understanding of presidential powers, one that allows the president to “impound” individual line item spending instructions in bills that Congress has approved — or, to put it in plain English, to simply refuse to spend money on items that Congress has backed. He has advocated for Trump to ram through controversial cabinet picks by recessing the Senate and essentially abrogating its constitutional role of “advise and consent.”

Even more menacingly, Vought advocates for extreme politicization of the massive federal civil service, seeking to implement a Schedule F reform that would reclassify tens of thousands of federal employees as political appointees, strip them of union and other labor protections, and allow for them to be hired and fired at will. Trump’s aides believe that the mere threat of firing so many career civil servants will have a chilling effect, essentially intimidating the federal bureaucracy into toeing the MAGA line. On this, Vought is all in. He wants, he says, to put federal workers “in trauma.” Coming from a man who will soon have a central role in shaping how the various parts of the federal government operate together, that’s a serious threat.

Vought’s ambitions don’t stop with simply making the lives of civil servants miserable. In private, he has advocated for invoking the Insurrection Act in order to sic the military on protesters and “save” the country from a “Marxist takeover.” He has also suggested breaking down the barriers that prevent a sitting president from using the Department of Justice to carry out revenge operations against political opponents.

With Trump’s January 20 inauguration nearing, the scale of his administration’s transformative ambitions is becoming clearer with each new cabinet nomination. Putting a man like Russell Vought in charge of the OMB speaks volumes about how much power Trump hopes to concentrate in the office of the presidency; how much he hopes to sideline Congress; politicize federal bureaucracies; and marshal the full force of the federal government against people, movements and organizations he considers to be “the enemy from within.” If, as many observers fear, Trump’s second presidency does irreversible damage to U.S. democracy and ushers in an age of unfettered presidential power, it’s a fair bet to assume that Vought will serve as midwife to this new regime. He may not be a household name now, but as consigliere to a lawless president, Russell Vought may ultimately be one of the most consequential figures in this next chapter of U.S. history.