Senate confirms Project 2025 architect Russell Vought as ...
AP News
https://apnews.com › article › trump-russell-vought-con...
Feb 6, 2025 — The Senate confirmed Russell Vought as White House budget director on Thursday night.
Vought has often advanced a maximalist approach to conservative policy goals. After leaving the first Trump administration, he founded the Center for Renewing America, part of a constellation of Washington think tanks that have popped up to advance and develop Trump’s “Make America Great Again” agenda. From that position, Vought often counseled congressional Republicans to wage win-at-all-costs fights to cut federal programs and spending.
Writing in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, Vought described the White House budget director’s job “as the best, most comprehensive approximation of the President’s mind.”
The OMB, he declared, “is a President’s air-traffic control system” and should be “involved in all aspects of the White House policy process,” becoming “powerful enough to override implementing agencies’ bureaucracies.”
ProPublica's Russ Vought Reporting Outlined Trump's ...
ProPublica
https://www.propublica.org › article › propublica-russel...
Mar 20, 2025 — Vought has returned to his post as the budget office's director, and his plans for eviscerating entire agencies.
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in one recording. “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.”
Vought spoke openly about the ongoing planning to defund independent federal agencies and demonize government scientists. “We have detailed agency plans,” he said. “We are writing the actual executive orders. We are writing the actual regulations now, and we are sorting out the legal authorities for all of what President Trump is running on.”


