WASHINGTON (AP) – Russell Vought sounds like a general mustering troops for combat when he talks about taming a “woke and armed” federal government.
He recently described political opposition as “enemy fire approaching its target,” while urging allies to be “fearless at the point of attack” and calling his policy proposals “battle plans.”
If the former president donald trump wins a second term in November, Vought may have the opportunity to go on the offensive.
Chief architect of Project 2025 — the controversial conservative plan to remake the federal government — Vought will likely be named to a senior role in a second Trump administration. And he has been drafting a so-far secret “180-Day Transition Playbook” to speed up the plan’s implementation and avoid a repeat of the chaotic start that dogged Trump’s first term.
Among the small cadre of Trump advisers who have a rote understanding of how Washington operates, Vought advised influential conservative lawmakers on Capitol Hill, held a top position in the Trump White House and later established his own pro-Trump think tank. Now, he is being mentioned as a candidate to be Trump’s White House chief of staff, one of the most powerful positions in the administration.
“If we do not have the courage, then we will turn away from the battle,” Vought said in June Former Trump Advisor Steve Bannon’s ‘War Room’ Podcast. “But our view is that this is where the country needs us and we are not going to save our country without a little confrontation.”
Conservative plan to change government
Led by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, Project 2025 is a detailed 920-page manual for governing under the next Republican administration. A whirlwind of far-right ambitions, its proposals range from impeachment thousands of civil servants and replacing them with Trump supporters to reverse the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of drugs used in abortions. Democrats have for months used Project 2025 to attack Trump and other Republicans, arguing to voters that it represents the former president’s true — and extreme — agenda.
In recent weeks, Trump has sought to distance himself from Project 2025. He posted on social media that he had not seen the plan and “has no idea who is in charge and, contrary to our very well-received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it.”
His campaign said Tuesday that the “end of Project 2025 would be very welcome”. That same day, Paul Dans, the project’s executive director and former Trump administration staff official, resigned.
Trump’s attempts to reject the project are complicated by the connections he has with many of his collaborators. More than two dozen authors served in his administration, including Vought, who was director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.
The Trump campaign did not respond to questions about which Project 2025 proposals the former president opposes or whether Vought would be offered a high-level government job in a new Trump term.
Vought did not respond to an interview request or questions first emailed in February to his think tank, the Center for Renewing Americawho played a key role in the creation of Project 2025.
Those who know Vought have described him as fiercely dedicated to Trump’s cause, if not to the former president himself.
“I would see Russ as a very determined warrior,” said a former Trump administration official who worked with Vought at the White House and requested anonymity to speak candidly about him. “I don’t think he thinks about whether or not he likes Donald Trump as a person. I think he likes what Donald Trump represents in terms of the political forces he can control.”
Washington Fountain
Born in New York and raised in Connecticut, Vought described his family as blue-collar. His parents were devout Christians. Vought’s father, a Marine Corps veteran, was a union electrician and his mother was a teacher.
Vought’s father, nicknamed Turk, did not tolerate idleness or waste. Mark Maliszewski, an electrician who knew him, recalled that after a job, Turk Vought would scold his coworkers if they threw away still-usable material.
“He would go over there and kick the trash can,” Maliszewski said. “He said, ‘What is this? If they were coins or dollars in that trash can, you’d be collecting them.’”
Russell Vought graduated in 1998 from Wheaton College, a Christian school in Illinois that counts famous evangelist Billy Graham among its alumni. He moved to Washington to work for Republicans who advocated fiscal austerity and small government.
“I worked with many different employees and as far as work ethic, tenacity, intellect, knowledge (and) commitment to principle, Russell was one of the most impressive people I worked with,” said former Republican Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas, which hired Vought in 2003.
After honing his credentials as a fiscal hawk, Vought was named policy director of the House Republican Conference, the party’s main messaging platform, chaired at the time by then-Rep. Mike Pence, who served as governor of Indiana and vice president under Trump.
Vought left the Capitol for a lobbying organization linked to the Heritage Foundation. When Trump was elected, Vought became deputy director of OMB.
His confirmation hearing was controversial. Liberal Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders accused him of using Islamophobic language when he wrote in 2016 that Muslims “do not know God because they rejected Jesus Christ, his Son, and are condemned.”
Vought told senators that his comments were taken out of context and said he respected every person’s right to express their religious beliefs.
The Senate confirmed him as OMB’s No. 2 by a single vote. He became interim director in early 2019 after his boss, Mick Mulvaney, was named Trump’s acting chief of staff. Vought was confirmed as OMB director a year and a half later, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world.
The OMB is a typically sedate office that crafts the president’s budget and reviews regulations. But with Vought at the helm, OMB has been at the center of clashes between Trump and Congress over federal spending and the legal limits on presidential power.
After lawmakers refused to give Trump more money for his southern border wall, the budget office diverted billions of dollars from the Pentagon and Treasury Department budgets to pay for it.
Under Vought, OMB also withheld military aid to Ukraine as Trump pressured President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to investigate President Joe Biden and your son. Vought refused to comply with a congressional demand to depose him during the subsequent Democratic-led House investigation that led to Trump’s first impeachment. The investigation, Vought said, was a sham.
After Trump’s departure from the White House, Vought formed the Center for Renewing America. The organization’s mission is to be “the tip of the America First spear” and “to renew the consensus that America is one nation under God.”
Vought defended the concept of Christian nationalism, which is a fusion of American and Christian values, symbols, and identity. Christian nationalism, he wrote three years ago, “is a commitment to an institutional separation of church and state, but not to the separation of Christianity from its influence in government and society.”
The only way to return America to the country the Founding Fathers envisioned is “radical constitutionalism,” Vought said on Bannon’s podcast. This means ensuring that control of executive power rests exclusively with the president, and not with a vast federal bureaucracy.
Anticipating the struggles to achieve this, Trump supporters need to be “fearless, faithful and frugal in everything we do,” he said.
A declaration of less independence
The Vought center was part of a coalition of conservative organizations, organized by the Heritage Foundation, that launched Project 2025 and created a detailed plan for governing in the next Republican administration.
The public document of the project, “Mandate for Leadership,” examined nearly every corner of the federal government and called for reforms large and small to rein in a “giant” bureaucracy.
Project 2025 calls for the closure of the US Department of Education and the dismantling of the Department of Homeland Security, with its various parts absorbed into other federal offices. Diversity, inclusion and equity programs would be destroyed. Promotions in the U.S. military to general or admiral would be put under a microscope to ensure candidates did not prioritize issues such as climate change or critical race theory.
The plan also recommends reviving a Trump-era personnel policy that seeks to reclassify tens of thousands of federal workers. as political appointees, which could allow mass layoffs.
Ruth Ben-GhiatNew York University history professor and author of “Strong Men: Mussolini to the Present” criticized Project 2025 as “a recipe for mass chaos, abuses of power and government dysfunction.”
The overarching theme of Project 2025 is to strip away the “administrative state.” This, according to the project, is the mass of unelected government officials who pursue political agendas at odds with the president’s plans.
In his public comments and in a chapter he wrote on Project 2025, Vought said that no executive branch department or agency, including the Justice Department, should operate outside the president’s authority.
“The whole notion of independent agencies is anathema from the standpoint of the Constitution,” Vought said during a recent appearance on the Fox Business Network.
Critics warn this could leave the Justice Department and other investigative agencies vulnerable to a president who might pressure them to punish or investigate a political enemy. Trump, who faced four separate lawsuits, threatened retaliation against Biden and other alleged enemies.
Diminishing the independence of the Justice Department would be a “radically bad idea,” said Paul Coggins, former president of the National Association of Former U.S. Attorneys.
“No president deserves to turn on the Justice Department against his political enemies or, frankly, alienate the Justice Department from his political friends,” he said.
It’s unclear what role Vought might get in a second Trump administration. He could return as OMB director, a position he held at the end of Trump’s presidency, or to an even higher position.
“Russ would make a very, very good (White House) chief of staff,” Mulvaney said.
Whatever the position, Vought is expected to be one of Trump’s top field commanders in his campaign to dominate Washington. ___
Associated Press researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report.
