By Coral Davenport

Copyright nytimes

She added: “It’s a fundamental challenge to liberty for every single person in America.”

Mr. Vought, who declined through his spokeswoman to be interviewed, sees it differently. He said in a speech earlier this month that his mission was to bring to heel an unelected federal bureaucracy he likened to a “cartel working behind closed doors.”

“We have now been embarked on deconstructing this administrative state,” he said. “Step after step, it’s to move quickly, trying to think through what the founders would have done in the circumstances, and be aggressive.”

Over the years, Mr. Vought has made clear how he views his targets. He has said the Education Department promotes “woke-rot” propaganda like “grooming minors for so-called gender transition.” That the Federal Reserve has “been wrong for decades.” That the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development “actively embarrass the United States.” That the Internal Revenue Service targets “struggling families in a craven effort to sustain the broader bureaucracy’s radical progressive agenda.” And, in a remark captured on video unearthed by ProPublica that stung many in Washington, he said he wanted federal employees to be “in trauma.”

Once the budget director has the power to starve those government agencies, Mr. Vought has said, they can whither away. “We want to make sure that the bureaucracy can’t reconstitute itself later in future administrations,” he said on Mr. Kirk’s podcast.

MAGA’s ‘Bulldog’