by DAFYDD TOWNLEY
While Elon Musk has clearly been a major influence on the Trump administration, the less well known, but arguably more influential, power behind the presidency is Russell (usually Russ) Vought. Vought is the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) – the nerve centre of the administration’s sweeping changes.
Vought is also rumoured to be about to take over running the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) from Musk.
Unlike Musk, Vought acts mostly outside the media spotlight. He is fully committed to a radical overhaul of the way the US presidency works – and his deep religious convictions have led him to believe there should be more Christianity embedded in government and public life.
He has vowed to “be the person that crushes the deep state”, and was part of the first Trump administration, where he held the position of OMB deputy director – and, briefly, director.
Vought worked with Trump in his first term on executive order 13957, which aimed to reclassify thousands of policy jobs within the federal government. This was designed to allow the White House to quickly change who was employed in these roles.
This was subsequently revoked by the Biden administration. But Trump issued a similar executive order 14171 in January, which will implement quicker hiring and firing procedures. The Office of Personnel Management estimates that this could affect 50,000 federal roles.
In an interview with conservative commentator and podcaster Tucker Carlson, Vought said that this was necessary for the White House to “retain control” of the agencies under its command. Without it, he claimed, ideological “opponents” within the agencies had the power to diminish the efficiency of White House initiatives. And his role as head of the OMB, he argued, was “to tame the bureaucracy, the administrative state”.
During the Biden presidency, Vought was one of the main authors – credited as the key architect – of the Heritage Foundation’s influential Project 2025, widely seen as the blueprint for Trump’s second term of office. The 900-page document, whose full title is Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, was a major talking point during last year’s presidential election campaign.
The Conversation for more