In a New Yorker article co-published with ProPublica, reporter Andy Kroll describes Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, as a "shadow president" with oversized influence. “I don't think you can take in the full sweep of what this administration has done in less than a year and not come away with thinking that chaos is a goal, and certainly an outcome that serves Vought and his team’s larger agenda of putting cracks in the federal government, shaking the stability of this typically rock-solid steady institution that is the federal bureaucracy,” Kroll says. Follow Fresh Air on instagram @nprfreshair, and subscribe to our weekly newsletter for gems from the Fresh Air archive, staff recommendations, and a peek behind the scenes. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. Russell Vogt has been called the shadow president, including by my guest, journalist Andy Kroll. Vogt is the director of the Office of Management and Budget.
Not the sexiest sounding title, but he's the architect behind the Trump administration's dismantling of federal agencies, slashing foreign aid, pausing or canceling over $400 billion for infrastructure and clean energy projects in blue states, ending the Justice Department's independence from the president, stuffing so many budget cuts in the so-called one big beautiful bill, and expanding the power of the president.
He was also one of the people behind Project 2025, which was intended to be a blueprint for a second Trump term, and that's what it's become. Vogt describes himself as a radical constitutionalist. Andy Kroll has been investigating how Vogt has been using his power and what his goals are.
Kroll covers the Justice Department and judiciary system for ProPublica, where he's written extensively about vote. Kroll has an article in The New Yorker in collaboration with ProPublica titled Donald Trump's Deep State Wrecking Ball. Kroll is also the journalist who first got access to and published the video of votes saying this back in 2023.
We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. 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 EPA 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.
Okay, and there's one more Russell Vogt clip I want to play for you that will give you more of a sense of Vogt's goals and strategy. When he was on the Tucker Carlson show on November 18, 2024, just 13 days after Trump was reelected, Carlson asked Vogt about his priorities. This was on top of Vogt's list.
So my belief for anyone who wants to listen is that you you have to the president has to move executively as fast and as aggressively as possible with a radical constitutional perspective to be able to dismantle that bureaucracy in their power centers. And I think there are a couple of ways to do it. Number one is going after the whole notion of independence. There are no independent agencies.
Congress may have viewed them as such, SEC or the FCC, CFPB, the whole alphabet soup. But that is not something that the Constitution understands. So there may be different strategies with each one of them about how you dismantle them.
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