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WASHINGTON — The Trump administration may have hired teenagers earlier this year in a misguided effort to make the federal government more efficient, but it’s 49-year-old Russ Vought who might really have a chance to fulfill his adolescent dreams.
That’s according to Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who said this week that Vought, the director of the Office of Management of Budget, is relishing the government shutdown that started Wednesday.
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“Russ Vought, the OMB director, has been dreaming about this moment, preparing this moment, since puberty,” Lee told Fox News.
In the lead-up to the shutdown that began Wednesday, conservative Republicans and Trump administration officials have been portraying Vought as an unstoppable boogeyman who is ready to slash government relentlessly if the shutdown gives him a chance. But it’s far from clear if the GOP has the political will to actually enact the cuts they’re threatening in order to gain leverage in shutdown negotiations.
The Trump administration’s first round of cuts to the government earlier this year, led by billionaire Elon Musk, ended when the political backlash — seen at rowdy town hall meetings with Republican members and in an embarrassing defeat for Musk in one of the nation’s premier swing states — became too great. With public opinion surveys already showing voters blaming Trump and the GOP for the shutdown, letting Vought go wild could easily blow up in the GOP’s face.
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So far, Democrats have said they’re not intimidated by Vought’s antics. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) called him “a malignant political hack” and said he should “get lost.”
Vought is the mastermind behind the Trump administration’s efforts to maximize the president’s power by seizing greater control over federal spending. In the process, he’s been stepping all over Congress’ constitutional role in deciding federal spending levels.
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Once the shutdown started, Vought immediately moved to retaliate against Democrats, taking the lapse in appropriations as free rein to work the president’s will. He swiftly announced a hold on federal funding for major infrastructure projects in New York, home to the top two Democratic leaders in the House and Senate, and followed up with the cancellation of green energy projects in several Democrat-led states.
“Russ Vought has a plan, and that plan is going to succeed in empowering — further empowering Trump,” Lee said. “This is going to be the Democrats’ worst nightmare and it’s of their own making.”
The government shut down Wednesday after most Senate Democrats voted against a GOP bill to keep it funded. They said the measure failed to address health care problems, namely the looming expiration of insurance premium subsidies for 22 million people. Democrats have also said that Vought’s habit of illegally impounding congressionally authorized spending — that is, the White House refusing to spend funds already appropriated by Congress — made it harder for them to accept the Republican-authored bill.
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“Is it helpful for Russ Vought to announce he’s freezing funding in New York in the middle of all this? No, it’s not helpful at all,” Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), one of the Democrats who voted for a Republican funding bill in March, told HuffPost this week. “It’s unfortunate that they’re engaged in that activity when all we’re trying to do is lower health care costs for people across the country.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) claimed Thursday that Vought was not actually having a good time.
“Whomever is seated in the chair at OMB during a shutdown has to do the same thing,” Johnson told reporters. “He takes no pleasure in this, because Russ has to sit down and decide, because he’s in charge of that office, which policies, personnel and which programs are essential and which are not. That is not a fun task, and he is not enjoying that responsibility.”
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Except Vought is not handling the shutdown the way his predecessors did. No previous administration ever threatened to fire federal workers, as Vought has. Instead, they’ve typically furloughed people without pay, and brought them back when the government reopens. Vought has explicitly said not only does he want to fire people, he wants to make them unhappy.
Even some Republicans think Vought’s gleeful attack on the bureaucracy is counterproductive, as it might make Democrats less willing to cut a deal on reopening the government. Others said Vought’s aggressiveness could harm the GOP’s position in public opinion because the ideologue is less “politically in tune” than Trump.
“They need to be really careful with that, because they can create a toxic environment here,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) told HuffPost. “So, hopefully, they’re working with the leader, and the leader with them, on not creating more work to get us out of this.”
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Vought has never been shy about his dreams of dismantling the government and turning it into a bare-boned operational shell of itself. He was a key architect of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s conservative policy blueprint for Trump’s second term in office. Among other things, the sweeping 920-page manifesto calls for cutting up to 1 million federal jobs and eliminating or privatizing various federal agencies.
Trump insisted during the 2024 presidential campaign that he didn’t know anything about Project 2025. On Thursday, Trump made light of his past denials with an enthusiastic post about his plans to plot destruction with Vought.
“I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity.”
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Vought, who also served as Trump’s OMB director in his first term, spelled out in Project 2025 how he envisioned his emboldened role in this job in Trump’s second term, making it clear he’s been eager to wield more power than his predecessors.
“The Director must view his job as the best, most comprehensive approximation of the President’s mind,” Vought wrote. The OMB, he said, “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.”
His disdain for federal employees is implicitly clear throughout the policies he advocates in Project 2025. But he’s said it out loud, too, in private speeches he gave in 2023 and 2024.
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“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in one speech at the Center for Renewing America. “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 [Environmental Protection Agency] 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,” he said.
During a July roundtable with reporters, Vought was visibly pleased with the administration’s success thus far in firing or forcing out tens of thousands of federal workers, and in imposing sweeping spending cuts across virtually every federal agency. He hailed the success of a $9 billion rescissions package the White House had recently sent to Congress — a proposal to cancel previously appropriated federal spending — and said to expect more such packages, in addition to possible impoundments.
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“How many times do you have a good chance to think about a job that you did once and then to hit the ground running?” Vought asked. “We’re having fun.”
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