Hard on the heels of the announcement of President-elect Trump’s choice for Treasury Secretary, he’s now revealed the new director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), calling the nominee “an aggressive cost cutter”….”who will help us implement our America First Agenda across all Angencies.”
He wrote:
I am very pleased to nominate Russell Thurlow Vought, from the Great State of Virginia, as the Director of the United States Office of Management and Budget (OMB). He did an excellent job serving in this role in my First Term – We cut four Regulations for every new Regulation, and it was a Great Success! Russ graduated with a B.A. from Wheaton College, and received his J.D. from the Washington University School of Law. Russ has spent many years working in Public Policy in Washington, D.C., and is an aggressive cost cutter and deregulator who will help us implement our America First Agenda across all Agencies. Russ knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end Weaponized Government, and he will help us return Self Governance to the People. We will restore fiscal sanity to our Nation, and unleash the American People to new levels of Prosperity and Ingenuity. I look forward to working with you again, Russ. Congratulations. Together, we will Make America Great Again!
Russ was a very successful OMB chief in Trump 1.0. He’s a budget hawk and will work well with other members of Trump’s immediate staff and the DOGE duo of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Beyond that, Russ has spent four years on the bench thinking about how to do what didn’t happen last time around—it’s called Project 2025.
As a bonus, the New York Times loves him.
Mr. Vought’s role in Project 2025 was to oversee executive orders and other unilateral actions that Mr. Trump could take during his first six months in office, with the goal of tearing down and rebuilding executive branch institutions in a way that would enhance presidential power.
In an interview with The New York Times in 2023, Mr. Vought laid out an agenda of eliminating the independence of certain regulatory agencies that operate outside the direct control of the White House, such as the Federal Communications Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The independent structure of those agencies has been a central part of how Congress has set up the administrative state since the New Deal. But Mr. Vought sees the modern structure of government as a theft of the president’s rightful powers.
“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” Mr. Vought said at the time, adding of the Federal Reserve: “It’s very hard to square the Fed’s independence with the Constitution.”
Mr. Vought has proved more radical than others in the conservative movement in another way. In the first Trump administration, lawyers in the mold of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group, at times acted to constrain Mr. Trump’s impulses.
But Mr. Vought is among a faction of MAGA supporters who have come to see the Federalist Society as too soft for an era in which, they believe, liberals and Democrats pose an existential threat to the nation.
“The Federalist Society doesn’t know what time it is,” Mr. Vought declared in an interview last year.
Russ is an inspired choice for one of the most important but underrated positions in the executive branch.
