Russ Vought
speaker
409 appearances
6 recordings
5 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 18 Apr
Russ Vought’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
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It was really pioneered, honestly, by FDR. And then President Nixon also was really learning from FDR on how to use it to tame the bureaucracy. And we would have seen that- Did he create the office, Roosevelt? The office was formerly the Bureau of the Budget for the last 100 years, right?
And then Nixon renames it Office of Management and Budget, and it becomes kind of more of a statutory thing, reporting directly to the president, no longer within Treasury. And so since then, you've had it – Still there, still really important, viewed by the country largely as a budget cutting exercise.
But it is it is the president's most important tool to dealing with the bureaucracy, administrative state. And, you know, the nice thing about President Trump is he knows that and he knows how to use it effectively.
No. You will be in a situation where you will have, at best, really awesome cabinet secretaries who are dealing on, sitting on top of massive bureaucracies that largely don't do what they tell them to do. And you have to have statutory tools at your disposal that force that bureaucracy from the White House to get in line.
And that is really the main thing that OMB can accomplish in addition to what everyone would think of from a budget office, which is, yeah, you cut spending, you figure out how to deal with your fiscal finances and all of that.
They're incredibly resistant. I mean, think about Ukraine and the president in that first term wanted to cut off funding for Ukraine. Why? Because it's a corrupt country and we didn't know how it was going to be spent. It's totally normal policy process to go through that the people lost their minds about. But the bureaucracy was literally just ignoring it.
And quite frankly, his political appointees like John Bolton were ignoring him as well. And what we then did at OMB was I had been personally told, look, you know, I want the money cut off until we can figure out where it's going. And we cut the money off. And it was like all hell broke loose within the bureaucracy. We got impeached. Yeah. And so.
And so you have the ability at that point to bring them to come to heel and to do what the president has been telling them to do. And we can do that in foreign aid. We can do that all sorts of places.
No, and this is really, the left has innovated over 100 years to create this fourth branch of an administrative state. You and I might call it the regime, this administrative state that is totally unaccountable to the president that lets it move in the direction that it has been going.
Totally unconstitutional. And if you would have seen Woodrow Wilson bemoan our constitutional system, he would have wanted constitutional amendments. The left stopped talking about constitutional amendments because they innovated to this new fourth branch, which is totally different than anything the founders would have ever understood.
The notion of independent agencies that think of and Congress has designed them to be divorced from the president. But even the notion of like, we're supposed to be technocrats and experts, and we don't have to listen to what you say. We work for, and I caught this, Tucker. People would say, well, we work for the office of the president. Huh? What? What is that?
It's a way- And where does it get its authority? They get their authority. They have essentially taken authority. They have no legitimate authority. They have no legitimate authority in the Constitution. But they are part of this fourth branch that I still believe reports in large measure to congressional leadership. and in the K Street interest, right?
You have very powerful interests that direct them to keep going in the direction that they want them to go. It's why these bills are written in such a way that they are anything, you could read anything into them, right? When Nancy Pelosi says, we're gonna find out what the bill says, She wasn't actually being inaccurate. That's their strategy.
They pass bills and then they let the experts fill them in. But over the phone, they put massive pressure on them to go along with their directions and their ends. lo and behold, you get conservatives, Republicans that take office, and then you find that it's incredibly difficult to wield power to get them to deal with all of that muscle memory to get them to do what you want.
And so you got to have statutory authority that a president kind of steps in and says, I am fully aware of where I sit in the Constitution. I am fully aware of the tools at my disposal, and I'm going to use them on behalf of the American people because I just won a massive agenda-setting election, and I'm going to go do what I said I would do. That's democracy, correct? That is democracy.
That is not oligarchy. And when they say we're going to preserve democracy, we know that they have been meaning all they want to do is preserve their kind of amorphous oligarchy administrative deep state.
Mm-hmm.
They ignore the president. And officials ignore the president. And I think one of the things you'll see in this next Trump term is policy officials, his political appointees, that are not looking to get out of what he has clearly told them to do. So let's assume that issue is solved.
so for instance my staff uh is was part of what we call the policy process right where you would go and you defend the and you would articulate what you're trying to accomplish and we had put the hold on the the ukraine funding and my guy goes to the the all of these meetings and he's like literally the only one in the room that wants to do what the president has asked him to do everyone's kind of just ganging up on him
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