Andy Kroll

I think about 50 briefings that he gave that I got a recording of saying, Republicans need to love shutdowns because shutdowns are the way you save the country.

It's not just about using a shutdown as leverage to threaten or actually fire tens of thousands of federal workers.

It's also the way that you try to achieve these really dramatic policy changes.

Right now, this shutdown is all about these really critical subsidies for Obamacare.

The next shutdown could be trying to get Democrats to concede to major policy changes, funding cuts on clean energy or infrastructure, unwinding, say, Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act.

Vote sees these shutdowns as chances to get what you can't otherwise achieve.

You can't otherwise get the opposing party to agree to when Congress is normally in session.

That's why he's so eager for them.

I think it says that his loyalty to President Trump is so central to how he believes he is going to enact this larger vision for radically changing the federal government here in the United States.

If he had broken with the president...

over the 2020 election.

Like a lot of other senior officials in the administration did, he loses the ability to be a part of the MAGA movement, to harness the political support, the energy of Donald Trump, America first, toward really things that Vote has been trying to do since long before Donald Trump has been on the political scene.

I'm talking 20, 30 years back in time.

So he stays loyal to the president and he spends those four years between the two Trump presidencies remaining close to the president saying that the 2020 election was stolen.

And that gives him the ability to come back in office this time and have far more influence and leeway to do what he wants to do than he did even the first time around.

Vote has spent nearly 30 years working in Washington and has toiled away as a staffer on Capitol Hill, as an activist for the Heritage Action Group, and then, of course, in the Trump administration, to try to find ways to convince the public to rally behind and then members of Congress to actually shrink the size of the federal government in a dramatic way.

These were always arguments being had about

the debt, the deficit, the specific dollar amounts of these programs, what I learned in my reporting, largely drawing on these recordings that I obtained for this story,

is that Vogt comes to this realization that he has to link together the culture war and the fiscal wonky budgetary agenda if he's going to be successful.

It's not enough to just talk about impoundment, to talk about how much this or that program costs.