Russell Vought – from the 2025 project to the executor of the closure of Trump

Donald Trump had a warning to the Democrats.

Soon, he will decide “Democratic agencies” that he would cut and if these reductions would be temporary or permanent.

He said that the government’s closure, which started on Tuesday, offered him an “unprecedented opportunity”.

“I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, that of renown of the 2025 project,” he published Thursday morning on his social website.

Vought, director of the White House management and budget office, may not be a familiar name.

But Project 2025, a conservative plan for governance mainly brought together by former Trump officials like Vought when the Republicans were out of power, presented in good place during the presidential campaign last year.

The 900-page political document contained proposals for spectacular reductions in the size of the federal government, the extended presidential authority, the application of rigorous immigration, a ban on national abortion and other elements of an ultra-conservative social program.

He was frequently presented by the Democratic candidate for the presidential election Kamala Harris, as a “dangerous plan” of Trump for the future if he should win.

At the time, seeking to reassure undecided voters, Trump attempted to distance himself from the political document.

“I know nothing about the 2025 project,” wrote Trump in July 2024. “I do not agree with some of the things they say and some of the things they say are absolutely ridiculous and abyssal.”

Now, however, Trump uses the conservative plan as a threat to bring Democrats to accept his budgetary requests. And he holds Vought, who is the author of a chapter on the use of executive power, as a kind of budgetary angel of death, ready to take a false of close and dear government programs to the Democrats.

In the event that this particular metaphor was not clear, Trump Thursday evening shared a parody clip generated by Ai-Ai on Truth Social with Vought described like the Grim Reaper, which was modified by the words of Blue Oyster Cult Don’t Fear the Reaper.

In Capitol Hill, the Republican leaders echoed the characterization of Trump de Vought as the heavy white house.

“We are not controlling what he will do,” said the head of the majority of the Republican Senate John Thune. “This is the risk of closing the government and putting the keys to Russ Vought.”

Senator Mike Lee from Utah told Fox News that Vought had “prepared for this moment since puberty”.

This can be a little exaggerated, but Vought, who cut his teeth as a member of the congress for the hawks of the republican budget and helped manage the Lobbying branch of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative reflection group, has a richness of experience to dig the subtleties of the federal budget.

He spent a year as deputy director of the White House budget office during Trump’s first mandate, rising to being his director in 2019. Unlike many of those who served with Trump during these first four years, Vought remained in power – and was quickly reinstalled at the head of the Budget Budget when Trump returned this year.

“Many of those who have not returned represent a former way of thinking,” said Richard Stern, director of heritage economic policy who, like Vought, began his career in the budgetary circles of the Conservative Congress. “Russ was ahead of his time in the first mandate and just in time now.”

Although Vought is not the type to avoid controversial declarations – he said once he aspired to be “the person who crushes the deep state” – he did not look exactly the part of a republican bogeyman.

Balding and with glasses, with a graying beard, Vought’s public statements generally have the measured cadence of a beans or a teacher. He does not have the rhetoric of narrow eyes and amplified rhetorics of Stephen Miller, another longtime adviser from Trump who supervises the immigration policy of the White House.

Make no mistake, however, Vought has become an influential player in this White House, having transformed the management and budget office – generally mentioned by its acronym OMB – into a main engine behind Trump’s push to reduce public spending and its workforce.

Earlier in the year, he worked in close collaboration with Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Effectiveness of the Government, or “DOGE”, while they opened a burnt path through the federal government, closing several agencies and reducing whole services. And he continued the efforts after the departure of Musk and Doge greatly abandoned the sight of the public.

“The OMB is an intrinsically powerful position, but it has almost never been exercised as such,” said Stern. “Its inhabitants have tended to maintain itself and allow the bureaucracy to grow slowly. It is as influential as the person who exercises this chair wants to do it.”

Now Trump has threatened to unleash himself at a time when, due to the legal limbo created by the government’s closure, their cuts could be deeper and more sustainable than those instituted earlier this year by Doge.

The former president of the Newt Gingrich Chamber, a veteran of the big closing fights of the 1990s, told NPR that Vought and his team were preparing exactly for this kind of circumstances when they were in the political desert during the Biden years.

“They all knew that a government closure was possible,” he said. “I think they had decided very early that you will only get the scale of change they want if you are very hard and very determined and every opportunity you get, you take advantage of it.”

The opportunity that this closure presents for budget cuts like Vought is that, without funding approved by the congress, the government operates in a legal gray area with fewer budgetary restrictions.

The White House can, in theory, reduce funding and staff more deeply than it could be earlier in the year, when expenses were governed by basic credit amounts. And although permanent layoffs should still respect a 60 -day notice, Vought could start this clock to check each time and Trump, so choose.

Vought has already announced that major infrastructure projects in New York and Chicago are pending, citing the need to examine potentially illegal racial hiring practices – an examination which, according to him, cannot take place when closing. He also canceled nearly $ 8 billion in clean energy projects in 16 states, who all supported Harris, Trump’s opponent, in last year’s presidential race.

Federal Democrats and unions have promised to fight these court discounts and said Trump was largely empty threats to try to put them on the abandonment of the fight.

Many economists have stressed that the White House discounts have been accompanied by other ball policies with deficit, which could undermine their attacks on Democrats to be the party of tax irresponsibility.

“Republicans increase spending in other areas and reduce taxes at the same time,” said Brett House, economics teacher at Columbia University School of Business. “The idea that they are devoted to budgetary prudence is not confirmed by their actions.”

Some Congress Republicans have expressed their concern that the apparent joy with which Trump boasts cuts commanded by Voughts could turn public opinion against them if the closure extends.

The Republicans have warned the disastrous consequences of closure on government services – part of a concerted effort to portray Democrats like those to blame. Doing it while celebrating new ways whose administration reduces programs could derail these efforts.

“Russ is less politically in line than the president,” said Southern Dakota senator Kevin Cramer, a member of the “Doge Caucus”, said News Semaor website.

“We, as Republicans, have never had as many moral highlands on a government financing bill in our lives … I do not see why we waste it, which, I think, is the risk of being aggressive with the executive power at the moment.”

Thom Tills, a Northern Caroline senator who chose not to present himself to re -election next year, warns that administration officials “must be very cautious” in the way they present new cuts.

The layoffs and programs cut by DOGE were largely unpopular, according to public-operations, causing drag on the president’s approval notes. A resumption of this could be perilous.

According to Stern, however, the White House and Vought can see the long -term advantages that are also worth short -term challenges.

“For Russ, for me, for anyone who is in the budgetary space, this country goes bankrupt,” he said. “Whatever the political risks of trying to do the right thing, we must do it. If we do nothing, this country will implose.”