After a year of claiming he had nothing to do with Project 2025, President-elect Donald Trump is appointing one of its chief architects to lead the Office of Management and Budget, multiple outlets reported. Russ Vought, who previously occupied the role for two years in Trump's first term, will return with wide-ranging powers to shape Trump's budget and examine the federal bureaucracy to ensure that it complies with his chosen policies.
No formal announcement has yet been made. But if Vought is appointed and confirmed by the Senate, he will once again be working in an office that he has sought to drastically downsize. He wrote the Project 2025 chapter, "Executive Office of the President," supporting proposals to give the president total power over all federal agencies. To that end, he has suggested reclassifying federal workers as political appointees so they can be fired en masse and ending the autonomy of some federal offices, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Amtrak, which currently operate independently of the president's direction.
“My belief, for anyone who wants to listen, is that 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 and their power centers,” Vought said on Tucker Carlson's podcast this week, claiming that there was no such thing as independent agencies.
Vought also has an expansive view of the historical moment, claiming in a 2022 essay that the United States is in a "post-constitutional time" in which Americans "need to be radical in discarding or rethinking the legal paradigms that have confined our ability to return to the original Constitution."
When serving as Trump's budget chief in his first term, Vought pushed the president and Republicans in Congress to maintain a hardline stance in budget negotiations with Democrats and threaten to breach the debt ceiling in order to get budget cuts passed. During his years in exile, he increasingly couched his policy arguments in the framework of culture war, promising to take the axe to a "woke and weaponized" federal government.
