Russell Vought is the architect and legal scholar behind the Trump administration’s attempt to reshape the federal government. Simon Rabinovitch, US economics editor for the Economist, explains how he got all that power. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members President Trump's Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, at his Senate confirmation hearing last month. Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What controversial statements were made during confirmation hearings?
During confirmation hearings, Democratic senators pushed President Trump's more controversial cabinet picks on things they'd allegedly said.
Did you say Lyme disease is a highly likely militarily engineered bioweapon?
I probably did say that. On things they'd allegedly done.
Chapter 2: Why did Democrats stage a protest against Russell Vought?
Another time, a CBA staffer stated that you passed out in the back of a party bus. Is that true or false? Anonymous smears.
But for one nominee, Russell Vogt, Democrats took the step of staging a 30-hour protest calling him... Donald Trump's most dangerous nominee. Before he was easily confirmed by the Republican majority Senate. The low-key Mr. Vogt now leads the low-key Office of Management and Budget. And while he's short on razzle-dazzle, he's been very, very, very effective so far.
What Russ wants, coming up on Today Explained.
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Chapter 3: What influence does Russell Vought have in the Trump administration?
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You're listening to Today Explains. Is it Today Explain or Today Explains? Explained. Explained.
My name is Simon Rabinovich, and I'm the U.S. economics editor with The Economist.
So there are a lot of outsized personalities in Donald Trump's second administration, starting with Donald Trump. We also have Elon Musk, RFK, Tulsi Gabbard, just a lot of character. Why do you think Russell vote is worth understanding?
Well, Russ Vogt, he's not outsized in terms of his personality, but I think he is outsized in terms of his influence. He was there in the first Trump administration. He's a returnee, obviously, in the second. And he really is the architect of a lot of the chaos and disruption that we've seen in the last few weeks. It's his idea.
to dramatically shrink the civil service, to bend it to President Trump's will, to reshape the way that the presidency operates to make it that much more powerful. So in many respects, he really is sort of the power behind the throne.
OK, so when we say Elon Musk is the power behind the throne, he's the one dismantling the civil service. That's not exactly right.
It's not exactly right. Elon Musk obviously has a great deal of influence, a great deal of power. But I think you can almost view Elon Musk and Doge, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, as Russ votes shock troops. They, you know, they both agree that they want to reduce the size of the federal government to cut federal spending.
You know, Musk is kind of hyperactive in moving every which way, every direction. But ultimately, kind of the general, the person who's really leading this is Russ Vogt. And he's the general. He's also the scholar because what they're doing will be challenged in courts. It will be challenged in Congress.
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of Vought's Christian nationalism?
He talks about kind of quote-unquote the storm clouds being upon us.
And we've got to take measure and be ready to put ourselves in uncomfortable, difficult spots and trust that duty is ours, results are God's.
So it's a really, really important motivational force for him.
I've wondered about his speech. He's also quite mean. He can be quite mean. He talked about wanting to traumatize civil servants, make them realize that nobody likes them.
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.
Some of this language, I mean, if we were five years old, we would say that's not very nice. Now that we're older, we would say, you know, don't talk about traumatizing people. It's unnecessary.
Yeah, and it's a really weird contrast because if you meet him... You know, I've had a long conversation with him and he has this very kind of scholarly demeanor. He's, you know, always very buttoned up and, you know, very nicely trimmed beard. And he's soft spoken. But then when you actually listen to what he's saying, it's really quite radical. And I think...
I think it's something that he... This is really just a reflection of the strength of his convictions. This is stuff that he truly, deeply believes in. And more than that, I think that the manner in which he speaks is something that helps to inspire people who work with him. And he does have... kind of a devoted group of small allies who kind of share his vision. He's not transactional.
He might say he's not corruptible. This is just stuff that he really wants to do.
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Chapter 5: How did Russell Vought's background shape his political views?
This is something that he's quite passionate about. But yet all of these anti-abortion politicians in the Republican Party who failed to do anything, but it was Trump who ultimately was the one who, you know, through his Supreme Court appointments, was able to kill Roe versus Wade.
He had the most pro-life record ever. I've never seen him take it to stand in the way of a pro-life initiative that actually was real.
And so Vote, I think, sees Trump as just a critical ally, as somebody who's, you know, even if he doesn't agree with him on a day-to-day basis or on many issues, the grand vision is something where he sees alignment.
For four years, the Trump vehicle had more or less stalled. The president lost the 2020 election and was cast out into Florida. What was Russ Vogt doing then?
So the first thing to say is that at the very end of Trump 1.0, I think the Trump team began to realize this Russ vote guy has some ideas that are actually very, very powerful and might be electorally useful.
So in his last year, when he was running the Office of Management and Budget, he was the one who wrote a memo saying that the federal government should stop all training in quote-unquote critical race theory. That obviously became a very powerful trope for Trump in his more recent election campaign. And he was also the one who was the architect of Schedule F, the idea...
that you could basically remove all career protections for civil servants. So the Trump team already had the sense that that vote was powerful. He leaves the administration. Trump is out of office. Vote forms this organization, Center for Renewing America, and basically begins to create the legal blueprint for a lot of the actions that we've seen in the last couple of weeks.
So ideas for ways to give the president much more power over spending, which is known as impoundment power, basically the idea that Congress can approve spending, but the president has the ability not to actually execute that spending.
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Chapter 6: What role did Russell Vought play in Trump’s first administration?
The president ran on the notion that the Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional. I agree with that.
And then also, you know, thinking about ways to get Schedule F back into power, thinking about ways to shrink the civil service. So basically beginning to create this blueprint for what Trump would do in his current administration. And one way as well in which Vote was very much involved in thinking through Trump 2.0 was that he was one of the driving forces behind Project 2025.
Donald Trump had nothing to do with Project 2025. He thought it was ridiculous and abysmal.
They are extreme. I mean, they're seriously extreme. Exactly, exactly. Trump denied on the campaign trail that Project 2025 had anything to do with his administration, his future administration. I don't know anything about it.
I don't want to know anything about it.
But of course, as we've seen in power, he's appointed many of the people who were involved in drafting Project 2025. And, you know, first and foremost is Russ Vogt.
Coming up, what is Project 2025? JK, JK, JK. You remember what it is. But now it's not just an idea. It is government policy. Simon returns after the break to identify all the places where we see the ideas made real.
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Chapter 7: What strategies did Vought implement after leaving the administration?
Well, I think first and foremost, you know, what Russ Vogt is doing with the OMB, you know, is very much in line with what his blueprint was. He wrote a chapter in Project 2025 about basically how to use the executive office of the president. And he was, you know, totally transparent with his intentions.
A president today assumes office to find a sprawling federal bureaucracy that all too often is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences. Or worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly woke, faction of the country.
And so he viewed the idea of strengthening the White House as a way of basically returning power to the American people. And so he laid out a blueprint of how he would use the OMB, how he'd use the agencies under the OMB, including the Office of Personnel Management, to basically shake up the civil service, to traumatize it, to shrink it.
and then to push through, you know, very, very robust ideas. So, you know, we've talked a bit about how he'd like a full-on ban on abortion. That's not something he can do, but he can do things in terms of trying to restrict immigration.
Chapter 8: What does the future hold for Vought's political influence?
And he has a view that immigration should be dramatically circumscribed, that ideally, in his view, America should primarily be favoring immigrants from Christian nations or Christian immigrants. Not only does the Bible support
national sovereignty and borders, but the Bible also has profound principles for thoughtful, limited immigration and emphasizing assimilation.
These are things that, you know, obviously it's not just vote himself. People like Stephen Miller are integral to doing this. But, you know, this is what he talked about in Project 2025. I think you can go back and look at Project 2025 and see that, you know, much of what it was doing
was, you might say, one, writing out a blueprint, but two, also kind of channeling the ideology of the Trump world. And so therefore giving us a fairly clear idea of what President Trump was actually going to do.
I haven't read it. I don't want to read it purposely. I'm not going to read it.
Now, much of what the Trump administration is doing is better described as trying to do because it is running into fierce opposition from the courts. We have the elected vice president, J.D. Vance, saying, intimating, I guess might be a better way of putting it, that the president ultimately has more power than the courts.
Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power.
What is Russell Vogt's plan to deal with that, to deal with all these lawsuits? I'm assuming he's thought this through?
He's certainly no dummy. So he knows that what he's doing does amount to radical reform, radical change, and therefore that there will be all kinds of opposition. It's not going to be a smooth road. And so, you know, he's anticipated that.
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