A Most Dangerous Nomination: Russell Vought

Meet the man who plans to overthrow the American government

Today, the Senate will likely confirm Russell Vought as the head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Under a normal presidency, the actions currently being undertaken by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) would be the responsibility of the OMB. The OMB turns the President’s ideas into realities; it is responsible for the federal budget; it supervises the wider government, dictating the policies, rules, funding, and spending of all federal agencies; it is responsible for the coordination and creation of executive orders (EOs) and executive legislative proposals; and it is the main line of communication between the executive and legislative branches of government.

Given the distraction of DOGE and the other personalities nominated, it is easy to overlook the OMB, but out of all of Trump’s political appointees, Vought is the most dangerous.

There is no question that Vought appears qualified to take over the OMB. Vought served as Director of the OMB during Trump’s last term, and he has the requisite experience and skillset to do the job. His aptitude and resume is a stark contrast to the cartoonish incompetence of Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, and RFK Jr. But it is precisely Vought’s competence that makes him such a threat. Vought is a radical ideologue who has no intention of preserving the American government or adhering to its Constitution.

The Senate’s role in confirming presidential appointments, as outlined in The Federalist Nos. 76-77 (Alexander Hamilton), is to ensure stability in the administration and to prevent the appointment of unfit characters. The original idea was that a President would be ashamed to present someone who was unqualified or put forward purely to advance his own interests, knowing that such a nominee would be publicly rejected if forced upon the Senate. The system is not working as intended. The “portion of virtue and honor among mankind” which has “been found to exist in the most corrupt periods of the most corrupt governments” cannot be found in the current American Senate. The suggestion “that [the President] could in general purchase the integrity of the whole [Senate]” is no longer “forced and improbable.” It is almost certain that Vought will be confirmed by the Senate.

The professional experience which qualifies Vought as technically-fit for office also demonstrates why he should be disqualified.

Vought is not a Fox News anchor. He is a savvy political operator boasting a long career working both with and within the Republican Party. Vought started as a low-level staffer, eventually becoming a congressional aide for the now-retired Senator from Texas, Phil Gramm. Following his stint with Senator Gramm, Vought continued to work on and off the Hill. He served as the Executive Director for the House Republican Study Committee and then the Policy Director for the House Republican Conference—two groups associated with the more conservative wing of the GOP. During Obama’s first term he joined the lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation, Heritage Action, before accepting a position with the Trump administration in 2016. In government, Vought served as Deputy Director of the OMB before stepping up to be director in the last year or so of the administration.

Despite his relatively short time in office, Vought made a big impact and demonstrated what the OMB can achieve with the right leadership. It was Vought who controversially redirected funds from the Pentagon to the border wall after Congress rejected Trump funding proposal. It was Vought who delayed military aid to Ukraine to pressure the Ukrainian government to criminally investigate Joe and Hunter Biden. It was Vought who was the major advocate for Schedule F (now Schedule C/P)—the policy which makes career civil servants more easily removable by the President. When Biden won the 2020 election, it was Vought who deliberately tried to stall and sabotage the transition. Vought demonstrated how powerful the OMB can be.

After leaving office, Vought became more ideologically driven. He founded his own Christian Nationalist organisation, the Center for Renewing America, which aimed to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God" and keep the Trump political movement alive. While working with his organisation, he also wrote the section on EOs for the Project 2025 policy agenda. Privately, he led the effort to write the 180-day playbook[1] for the next Trump administration which has still not been made public. In 2024, recordings were leaked of Vought admitting that he had already drafted hundreds of EOs and regulations for the President, including one outlining the mass deportation of over 20 million people.

In May of last year, Vought signed on to be the Policy Director for the Republican 2024 platform committee, without objection, despite his public ties to Project 2025. Today, he will be confirmed as the Director of the OMB.

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When Vought speaks about the Constitution, he has a strong emphasis on the original intent of the founders. However, Vought is not a constitutional originalist. Vought describes himself as a “post-constitutionalist,” a term that requires some unpacking.

Today’s Republican party is intellectually distinct from Reagan revolution or even the Tea Party. There are two schools which ideologically dominate the contemporary Republican party: the East Coast Straussians and the West Coast Straussians. These two groups hate each other, and predictably, neither group faithful adheres to the political thought of Leo Strauss.[2] Strauss himself wasn’t all that interested in electoral politics, but he was very interested in practical, American, liberal democracy. Modern Straussians are united by the concern that the United States has lost its connection to the self-evident truths expounded in the Declaration of Independence, and they agree that the consequences of rejecting the natural right upon which America was founded have been disastrous. Beyond that, there is not much they share. East Coast Straussians tend to be Never Trumpers, and West Coast Straussians are MAGA Evangelists. Russell Vought, a West Coast Straussian, has literally described Donald Trump as a “gift from God.”

West Coast Straussians are more politically active and populist. They are aggressive in their rhetoric, invoking the language of war and revolution. They believe that America is already in the final stages of a civil war, with progressives on the cusp of destroying the fabric of the nation. By West Coast Straussians account, the eternal laws and morals enshrined in the country’s founding documents have been destroyed by progressives, alienating America from the timeless spirit it once embodied. As a result, West Coast Straussians are not interested in conserving or preserving anything. They are convinced there is nothing left to preserve. They believe the government is compromised, the universities are compromised, the media is compromised, and the legal system is compromised. As such, all existing structures must be ripped apart and remade.