Trump’s ruthless budgetary puppet master

The U.S. federal government shutdown continues with no end in sight. It’s a disaster for countless American residents and businesses that rely on public programs and services. However, the Trump administration is seizing it as another chance to dismantle the federal bureaucracy. And behind the scenes, a relatively unknown figure is pulling the strings.

Last February, U.S. President Donald Trump appointed Russell Vought, head of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. Nestled within the executive branch of government, the office is small and obscure. It also wields enormous influence.

The office’s purpose is to help presidents achieve their policy, budget, management and regulatory goals. It also evaluates the performance of all U.S. federal agencies. Plus, the office functions as a federal human resources directorate.

It’s becoming unclear whether Vought — a hardcore MAGA intellectual — is serving the president, or if it’s the other way around.

Vought has been a Republican operative in Washington dating back to the late 1990s. Yet what he’s most known for is co-authoring the conservative manifesto, Project 2025. Published in April 2023 by the Heritage Foundation think tank, the 900-page tome prescribes how to rapidly reorient America toward white Christian nationalism.

Among the many extreme ideas championed by Vought is what’s known as the “unitary executive theory.” In essence, placing absolute control of the U.S. government solely within the office of the president.

The initiative became politically toxic midway through Trump’s re-election campaign. “I have nothing to do with Project 2025,” Trump posted in July 2024. “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying, and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”

Not anymore. Since Trump re-entered the White House, Project 2025 has been unfolding in real-time.

Professional civil servants have been purged from government, replaced by partisan sycophants. Top military generals deemed insufficiently loyal to the president have been fired. Diversity acknowledgments and references to climate change are being scrubbed from federal policies. Foreign-born residents are being deported or seeing their protected statuses revoked. The National Guard is being utilized as the president’s personal army.

Then there is abolishing of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Researchers calculate this alone may cause an additional 14 million deaths worldwide by 2030. And all for fiscal savings that amount to less than a rounding error in the federal budget overall.

The State Department’s Global Engagement Center has been shuttered, too. The Biden administration created the office to disrupt and debunk foreign disinformation campaigns. Yet it became a lightning rod for MAGA conspiracy theorists falsely claiming it promoted censorship of conservative views. Authoritarian propagandists are now even more free to fill information vacuums worldwide with anti-democratic fictions.

“Thinking about Project 2025 as simply a laundry list of management tweaks and policy proposals is a mistake,” political journalist David A. Graham wrote back in April. The authors, including Vought, “set out to turbo-charge the Trump administration and reshape the executive branch, but their ambitions are much bigger. Their goal is to transform American society in their image.”

Amid the shutdown, Trump is harnessing Vought as a “a kind of budgetary angel of death, ready to take a scythe to government programs near and dear to Democrats,” wrote the BBC earlier this month.

Indeed, “Nobody in D.C. has a better grip on the numbers and management process of the federal government than Russ Vought,” says Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and so-called godfather of the modern America First movement.

Although some GOP lawmakers are wary about Vought’s influence, they are concerned his populist crusades could harm their constituents and damage their re-election chances.

“This is the risk of shutting down the government and handing the keys to Russ Vought,” Republican Senate majority leader John Thune told Politico shortly after the suspension went into effect. “We don’t control what he’s going to do.”

Vought’s office has already frozen tens of billions of dollars in federal grants for infrastructure and green energy projects in Democrat-controlled districts. And government watchdog websites have gone dark after the office withheld funding from 15 inspector generals. This is just the beginning.

Viewed one way, the office under Vought is capably executing what Elon Musk’s feckless Department of Government Efficiency could not. But it also highlights something else.

Donald Trump demonstrably lacks either an ideological or moral compass. Instead, the president simply seeks power, fame, flattery and self-enrichment. The danger of his second term may thus rest more with those using Trump as a vehicle to advance their own radical agendas.

Kyle Volpi Hiebert is a Montreal-based political risk analyst and former deputy editor of the Africa Conflict Monitor.