Deporting millions of immigrants. Deploying the military to quell riots in the U.S. Eliminating the Department of Education and the EPA. Firing tens of thousands of insufficiently loyal federal employees.
If Donald Trump’s ambitious campaign promises are to become reality, Russell Vought is the most qualified true believer to lead the assault.
Vought served in the first Trump administration and spent the last four years leading the Trump-aligned Center for Renewing America, which works “For God. For Country. For Community.” He says he’s ready to reprise his role as the president’s “toolkit” and “holy warrior” (as The Economist called him), or Trump’s “Swiss Army Knife,” according to a Mother Jones profile.
President Donald Trump listens as acting director of the Office of Management and Budget Russ Vought speaks during an event on “transparency in federal guidance and enforcement” in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2019, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Vought, 48, accepted Jesus as his Savior at age 4, graduated from evangelical Wheaton College in 1998, and has spent much of his adult life promoting a culture-warring Christian nationalism.
He worked for Republican groups and the Heritage Foundation’s lobbying arm, Heritage Action for America, and was a major force behind Heritage’s Project 2025 blueprint for expanding executive power in a second Trump administration.
When Vought led the Office of Management and Budget during Trump’s first term, he helped the president exert his will over Congressional legislation, using taxpayer dollars allocated to the Defense Department to build portions of a southern border wall, a wall candidate Trump formerly claimed Mexico would pay for.
Vought also helped illegally freeze security assistance for Ukraine while Trump pressured President Zelenskyy to do him a “favor” by investigating Joe Biden. This meddling led to Trump’s first impeachment. Vought refused to testify about the freeze to the House of Representatives.
Vought also helped illegally freeze security assistance for Ukraine while Trump pressured President Zelenskyy to do him a “favor” by investigating Joe Biden.
Trump has nominated Vought to head the OMB again, praising his effectiveness the first time around: “We cut four regulations for every new regulation, and it was a great success!”
Trump called Vought “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.”
As Vought told Steve Bannon, the second Trump administration will be populated by “an army of people that could serve in government, believe fully in what he believes in, and can execute it with enemy fire that’s coming over the target.”
Like other Trump loyalists invited to serve in the upcoming administration, Vought insists the 2020 election was rigged and the Trump supporters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6 were “patriots” and now are “political prisoners.”
In speeches, Vought has promised to use the OMB to defund government programs and agencies that don’t align with Trump, who is “God’s gift” to America and was elected to restore the nation’s Christian calling “as a nation under God.”
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.”
Vought help create Heritage’s Project 2025 and the Center for Renewing America’s Agenda 47, which address conservative Christian concerns:
- Opposition to abortion, pornography, all things “woke” and transgender treatments. CRA says Trump “will sign a new executive order instructing every federal agency to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age.”
- Support for home-schooling families and religious liberty, at least for Christians, if not Muslims, who should not be permitted to build mosques in U.S. cities.
Vought speaks of crushing the “Deep State” and says he wants to inflict “trauma” on government employees to stop the work they do, according to ProPublica: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. … When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because 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.”
Such tactics may seem harsh, but extraordinary measures must be used to save America from the “corrupt Marxist vanguard” that has taken over the country, Vought believes. “God put us here for such a time as this.”
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