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Pro Publica: The Shadow President: Russell Vought: Project 2025 Christian nationalist
https://www.propublica.org/article/russ-vought-trump-shadow-president-omb?fbclid=IwY2xjawRLPLJleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFmazk2ODdsTFRDSHJOeHdac3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHhWWL3J3EvL1fSH5gRkL7jrQylA8iVFm9H87XszYl9I9JIM1lZ0hBebWdT-w_aem_COSLxEheWsoQf7X2tCr5fQFrom 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.”
(OK, this is from October, but I've never heard of him before)
by Andy Kroll Co-published with The New Yorker October 17, 2025, 6:00 am
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
On the afternoon of Feb. 12, Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, summoned a small group of career staffers to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for a meeting about foreign aid. A storm had dumped nearly 6 inches of snow on Washington, D.C. The rest of the federal government was running on a two-hour delay, but Vought had offered his team no such reprieve. As they filed into a second-floor conference room decorated with photos of past OMB directors, Vought took his seat at the center of a worn wooden table and laid his briefing materials out before him.
Vought, a bookish technocrat with an encyclopedic knowledge of the inner workings of the U.S. government, cuts an unusual figure in Trump’s inner circle of Fox News hosts and right-wing influencers. He speaks in a flat, nasally monotone and, with his tortoiseshell glasses, standard-issue blue suits and corona of close-cropped hair, most resembles what he claims to despise: a federal bureaucrat. The Office of Management and Budget, like Vought himself, is little known outside the Beltway and poorly understood even among political insiders. What it lacks in cachet, however, it makes up for in the vast influence it wields across the government. Samuel Bagenstos, an OMB general counsel during the Biden administration, told me, “Every goddam thing in the executive branch goes through OMB.”
(really long article with full history)
Vought’s actions could provoke a challenge to the Impoundment Control Act in the Supreme Court. In the meantime, a number of current and former government employees told me that they worried about the long-term consequences of what he has already done: the terminating of vital research projects that could have led to lifesaving breakthroughs, the nation’s lost standing as an international leader, the uncertainty cast over the fundamental workings of government. “They’ve given up on the idea that they need to persuade anybody,” Bagenstos, the former general counsel at the OMB, said of Vought and Paoletta. They’re “just going to use brute force and dominance.” As the former OMB analyst told me, “They’ve dropped a grenade into the system.”
On the afternoon of Feb. 12, Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, summoned a small group of career staffers to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for a meeting about foreign aid. A storm had dumped nearly 6 inches of snow on Washington, D.C. The rest of the federal government was running on a two-hour delay, but Vought had offered his team no such reprieve. As they filed into a second-floor conference room decorated with photos of past OMB directors, Vought took his seat at the center of a worn wooden table and laid his briefing materials out before him.
Vought, a bookish technocrat with an encyclopedic knowledge of the inner workings of the U.S. government, cuts an unusual figure in Trump’s inner circle of Fox News hosts and right-wing influencers. He speaks in a flat, nasally monotone and, with his tortoiseshell glasses, standard-issue blue suits and corona of close-cropped hair, most resembles what he claims to despise: a federal bureaucrat. The Office of Management and Budget, like Vought himself, is little known outside the Beltway and poorly understood even among political insiders. What it lacks in cachet, however, it makes up for in the vast influence it wields across the government. Samuel Bagenstos, an OMB general counsel during the Biden administration, told me, “Every goddam thing in the executive branch goes through OMB.”
(really long article with full history)
Vought’s actions could provoke a challenge to the Impoundment Control Act in the Supreme Court. In the meantime, a number of current and former government employees told me that they worried about the long-term consequences of what he has already done: the terminating of vital research projects that could have led to lifesaving breakthroughs, the nation’s lost standing as an international leader, the uncertainty cast over the fundamental workings of government. “They’ve given up on the idea that they need to persuade anybody,” Bagenstos, the former general counsel at the OMB, said of Vought and Paoletta. They’re “just going to use brute force and dominance.” As the former OMB analyst told me, “They’ve dropped a grenade into the system.”
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