This post is a part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news...
Despite being the nerve center of Trump 2.0, Vought continues to fly under the radar. This is shameful but not surprising; even though the OMB director bears so much responsibility for so much avoidable pain, the ostensible opposition party mentions him far too infrequently. Most of the domestic carnage of the second Trump administration is inseparable from Vought-led attacks on the non-military federal workforce (there are 278,000 fewer civil servants now than there were at the start of Trump’s second term) and his unlawful moves to freeze hundreds of billions of dollars in socially beneficial funding appropriated by Congress. The basic formula repeated by Musk’s DOGE and Vought’s OMB goes like this: 1) identify spending that doesn’t align with right-wing priorities; 2) baselessly claim that such outlays are, by definition, riddled with “waste, fraud, and abuse”; and 3) unilaterally defund those programs.
From the wholesale gutting of federal agencies to the ongoing government shutdown, Russell Vought has drawn the road map for Trump’s second term. Vought has consolidated power to an extent that insiders say they feel like “he is the commander in chief.”
A few days after Trump left office, Vought announced the launch of the Center for Renewing America, a MAGA think tank that aspired to act as an incubator for future Republican administrations. Its activist arm, Citizens for Renewing America, would mobilize grassroots supporters to pressure elected officials to embrace the think tank’s agenda. The overarching goal, Vought wrote in an op-ed for The Federalist, was to “restore an old consensus in America that has been forgotten, that we are a people For God, For Country, and For Community.”
At the Center for Renewing America, Vought surrounded himself with other radical constitutionalists from the first Trump administration. He brought on Jeffrey Clark, the Justice Department official who had tried to use his agency to help Trump overturn the 2020 election. (A D.C. disciplinary board recently recommended that Clark, who now works at the OMB, lose his law license as punishment for those efforts, an outcome that Clark is appealing and that his lawyer called a “travesty of justice.”) Kash Patel, Trump’s current FBI director, and Ken Cuccinelli, a top immigration official in the first Trump administration, joined as senior fellows. Working at the center, Cuccinelli explained at the conservative policy summit, allowed him to “stake out the outer boundary of reasonable constitutional law.”
The Center for Renewing America’s ideas included how the president could invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy military troops to American cities to put down protests, how the White House could freeze billions in federal funding without waiting for a vote in Congress, and how agency leaders could defy government unions and fire workers en masse. The think tank also set out to create shadow versions of the OMB and of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to anticipate legal challenges and counter internal pushback. In his 2024 address, Vought explained, “I don’t want President Trump having to lose a moment of time having fights in the Oval Office about whether something is legal or doable or moral.”
Vought and his colleagues at the center also worked closely with the House Freedom Caucus to urge other congressional Republicans to use government shutdowns as a way of forcing through major policy changes. One of their first targets was critical race theory, a once obscure academic concept that had become a flashpoint during the 2020 racial justice protests.
Russell Vought Confirmed as White House Budget Chief: A New Era for OMB.
Russell Vought Confirmed as White House Budget Chief: A New Era for OMB.
In a significant development in U.S. politics, Russell Vought has been confirmed as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for Donald Trump’s second term. This confirmation, which took place on February 6, 2025, was a pivotal moment, especially given Vought’s controversial background and his association…
On Monday, the administration of U.S President Donald Trump requested $2.5 billion from Congress to finance America's response to the new coronavirus (COVID-19). The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) said the cases of pneumonia-causing virus rose to 79,331 and it also includes 53...
On Monday, the administration of U.S President Donald Trump requested $2.5 billion from Congress to finance America’s response to the new coronavirus (COVID-19).
