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Who is Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought?

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A leading author of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, Russell Vought was again tapped by Donald Trump to be Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), a position he previously filled from July 2020 to January 2021 during the first Trump administration and the office that carries out the President’s executive orders. Despite trying to publicly distance himself from Project 2025, Trump (unsurprisingly) is quickly surrounding himself with its major contributors. Vought’s return signals that the White House fully intends to make the radical agenda a reality, including its “bloody” mass deportation plan targeting millions of long-settled immigrants and likely some U.S. citizens

It’s vital to know that Vought, who founded the right-wing Center for Renewing America (CRA) in 2021 and is an avowed white Christian nationalist, will not be any ordinary bureaucrat. The Office of Management and Budget‘s plays a critical organizing role for the White House, allocating funds for other departments and dictating their administrative priorities. As the Brookings Institute described, the office “touches every function of government and every sector of the economy, [making] it central to the business of running the country.” Vought already gave us a glimpse of what to expect from OMB under his leadership on Tucker Carlson’s show:

“We have to solve the woke in the weaponized bureaucracy and have the president take control of the executive branch. So my belief for anyone who wants to listen is that you have to — the president has to move executively as fast and as aggressively as possible with a radical constitutional perspective to be able to dismantle that bureaucracy in their power centers”. 

Vought was more blunt about giving the executive branch overreaching powers in leak taped recordings obtained by CNN, saying:

​​“Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies,” Vought said. “And we are working doggedly on that, whether it’s destroying their agencies’ notion of independence … whether that is thinking through how the deportation would work.”

While Senate Democrats have been divided on Trump’s picks, they showed fierce opposition to Vought’s nomination as the next OMB head, staying overnight in the chamber and using all 30 hours of allotted debate time to stall his vote for as long as possible. While Vought was ultimately confirmed, Democrats remained unified to the end and voted against his nomination along party lines. Meanwhile, Republicans who voted to confirm Vought, such as Susan Collins of Maine, have given Vought the green light to begin implementing Project 2025 across the federal government. As Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said:

“Russell Vought is not a business-as-usual nominee. He is one of the most fringe and hard-right individuals the Senate has seen in a very long time…He’s the chief architect of Project 2025. He is going to make Project 2025 the official policy of the federal government. And at the OMB, he has the power to implement it, to hurt every American.”

KEY POINTS:

  • Vought is a leading author of Project 2025 and will have massive power over the federal government, including mass deportation
  • Vought wants mass deportation to, in his word “save the country” through the “largest deportation in history.”
  • Vought  is a Christian Nationalist, his self-described “Christian nation” vision for America is “to end multiculturalism in the United States”
  • Vought supports the use of military and local forces under guise of mass deportation as a way to “craft the legal rationale to invoke the Insurrection Act” and stifle protests, as reported by ProPublica.

MASS DEPORTATION

His career’s stink has said everything when it comes to how Vought’s leadership at OMB will play out in the MAGA White House, particularly on immigration. Vought’s self-described “Christian nation” vision for America is “to end multiculturalism in the United States”– a.k.a., establish a white, Christian-only America. And how do you do this? Vought tells all in the undercover interview video captured by the British non-profit organization Centre for Climate Reporting, saying that the solution is to “save the country” through the “largest deportation in history.”

Trump’s main campaign promise of “bloody” mass deportation tells you that his administration’s number one priority is to make that a reality. However, in his first term, this white nationalist goal was delayed by inexperienced, underprepared officials who often botched policy rollouts. But learning from these failures, Vought and his team already thought of “correctives”. He eagerly explains in the same video that he is in charge of the “350 different” executive orders, memos and documents so that concrete plans are set when Trump returns to office. Specifically, he tells the undercover reporters he knows exactly what to do on immigration. “OK, DHS, we want to have the largest deportation — what are your actual memos that a secretary sends out to do it?’ Like, there’s an executive order, regulations, secretarial memos. Those are the types of things that need to be thought through so you’re not — you’re not having to scramble or do that later on”. 

His nomination to OMB gives him vast control over the 100 executive orders Trump promised – and that is dangerous. He has spent the last four years creating said executive orders and memos to supercharge the “largest deportation” agenda and take crucial steps to assure their success. And if there are protests because of the mass deportation? Vought has a solution for that too. His plan, as others like “border czar” Tom Homan and Stephen Miller have explained before, is to use military and local forces under guise of mass deportation as a way to “craft the legal rationale to invoke the Insurrection Act” and stifle protests, as reported by ProPublica. In Vought’s eyes, “bloody” mass deportation and family separation is a crucial step to implement their one overarching goal: to remake America under his white Christian nationalist vision. 

THE GREAT REPLACEMENT THEORY

Vought’s CRA has endorsed white nationalist talking points like the deadly great replacement conspiracy theory to villainize immigrants and fearmonger to the American public about an alleged “invasion” at the southern border. Last fall, the Center’s Vice President, Wade Miller, published a defense of the great replacement theory. Vought, along with ally Ken Cuccinelli, senior fellow on Immigration and Homeland Security at CRA and an unlawfully appointed former Trump official, has personally called for state governors to use “war powers” over a supposed “invasion.” In January 2022, Vought said he was “glad to see our plan for governors to unilaterally secure the border is gaining momentum in AZ,” and linked an Arizona Capitol Timesarticle titled, “Border ‘invasion’ theory gains steam.” He noted in the same thread that “If successful in just the red states, this plan would secure the vast majority of the border 2-3 years before Biden leaves office,” supporting Cuccinelli’s stance on enacting Article IV of the Constitution. 

A year prior, CRA released a “legal roadmap” to support their legally dubious claims that states have a constitutional right to declare undocumented immigration an “invasion” and expel immigrants by force, with Vought then launching public pressure on Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) to declare “an invasion under the constitution for states to interdict and return aliens.” In 2024, Abbott acted, declaring that there was a border “invasion,” and blamed the “failure of the Biden Administration to fulfill the duties imposed by Article IV Section 4”. 

CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM

This isn’t Vought’s first foray into an extreme far-right agenda. He started as a legislative aide and worked his way up to executive director at the Republican Study Committee, the self-described “conservative caucus” of House Republicans. Ed Fuelner, a previous Republican Study Committee executive director, cofounded the Heritage Foundation. Vought then became the Vice President of Heritage Action for America, which authored the extreme Project 2025 agenda and is the C4 arm of the Heritage Foundation. His far-right extremist ideology was confirmed again during his first Senate confirmation hearing in 2017, when Vought was questioned by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) after he “condemned” Muslims in an article for rejecting Jesus Christ. He was confirmed by a single vote majority to be the deputy director of OMB. 

During his time as the deputy director, OMB was engaged in endless amounts of controversy, from defying subpoenas during Trump’s impeachment to intentionally delaying Biden’s administration from meeting with OMB staff, as well as advocating for massive spending cuts. Trump’s loss didn’t stop Vought from continuing on his Christian nationalist agenda. In order to accomplish his mission to “be the person that crushes the deep state,” he founded CRA in 2021. The organization’s sole mission is to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God,” and even wrote a Newsweek op-ed titled: “Is There Anything Actually Wrong With ‘Christian Nationalism?’” CRA’s parent foundation is the Conservative Partnership Institute, which was also founded by Jim DeMint, who previously served as president of the Heritage Foundation. Vought’s deep ties to the Heritage Foundation makes him the perfect candidate in Trump’s MAGA swamp.

TRUMP’S SECOND TERM

Vought and his allies have played critical roles in developing the extreme Project 2025 plan, with Cuccinelli authoring Project 2025’s chapter on the Department of Homeland Security and making Project 2025’s immigration agenda a white nationalist playbook for the U.S. As we pointed out earlier, it includes: 

  • Family separations
  • Deportations of long-term residents like Dreamers and TPS and their family members
  • Raids at sensitive locations like schools, hospitals, churches
  • Mass detention camps
  • Red state armies conducting raids in blue states

Vought already tried to dismantle the current federal civil system we have in place. In 2020, he wanted to create a new class of civil servants known as Schedule F, which would be “loyal to the President, and not the institutions they work for,” thereby chipping away at democracy and placing dictatorial powers for Trump. The failure of implementing Schedule F made Vought even more meticulous in his 1000-page dystopian playbook. It calls for the firing of tens of thousands of federal workers in an attempt to replace them with CRA’s “conservative LinkedIn” personnel that are loyal to Project 2025’s white nationalist priorities. At a private speech last year for a CRA event: 

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. We want — when they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are so — they are increasingly viewed as the villains. 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. We want to put them in trauma.”

At his first hearing with the Senate for re-nomination, he reaffirmed his vision for Schedule F when Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) asked about the “purpose” of Schedule F. Vought explained that Schedule F is “to ensure that the president who has policy setting responsibility has individuals who are also confidential policymaking positions are responding to his, his views, his agenda”. Vought aims to transform the federal government to have followers, rather than brilliant minds to work for the people of the United States.

In the same hearing, Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) asked Vought if he thought the Impoundment Control Act was constitutional. The act was to “prevent the President and other government officials from unilaterally substituting their own funding decision”. It meant the President couldn’t withhold funds for programs they disagreed with. Vought didn’t “believe it’s constitutional”. A very important question that can affect a variety of programs and functions of the government that could significantly affect their ability to execute their mass deportation agenda. 

At the end of the day, Vought is a number one example that Trump’s detraction of Project 2025 was another lie and will “be the person that crushes the deep state” by making Project 2025 come alive and allowing Trump to run roughshod over the federal government and oust anyone who fails to bend their knee to his extreme agenda.