How a little known fixer seizes control of the US government

Most Americans have not heard of him. But the name Russell Vought is already whispered with a mixture of alarm and fear about Washington’s power corridors.

Vought, a right -wing radical called “Trump’s Thomas Cromwell,” aims to demolish his master’s enemies in US Civil ServiceWin the cultural wars, and place even greater force in hand on the chief boss.

Vought’s Rise has been unobstructed by a democratic party in disarray and a Republican Congress in Thrall to the 47th President. On Thursday night, he was confirmed as Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) despite a last ditch attempt from Democrats to Stenmakke the appointment in the Senate, warning that Vought was Trump’s “most dangerous nominees.”

It will allow him to start seriously with plans, he predicts in speaking to the right-wing think tanks before Trump entered the White House-not at least by rejecting Officials There is in the way of the president’s orders. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said in 2023.

Elon Musk, Trump’s effectiveness Tsar, reportedly pressed to get the most important OMB job and recognized in him someone with his stomach for the fight to strike the federal government’s 2.2 million strong civil service.

OMB will be as unknown to many people as Vought himself. But don’t let it fool you with regard to its central role in the US federal government.

Political insiders describe this office as “the central nervous system” in the executive branch.

It plans the president’s budget, promotes his political priorities and oversees the regulation of all state agencies-as Trump believes, houses the “deep state” of leftist, recurring officials who want to undermine his populist agenda.

“OMB’s power to oversee the federal budget sweeps,” says Thomas Gift, a director of the UCL Center on American politics. “As a director, Vought will have tremendous authority to impose the president’s agenda from above and down.”

Patricia Crouse, a public policy expert at the University of New Haven, agrees: “Giving Vought the Keys to OMB essentially gives Trump total control over the budget and regulatory processes. Vought, if confirmed will be the key to pushing Trump’s agenda through. “

Vought, a bearded and spectacular 47-year-old, who looks older than his years, worked for the Conservative Heritage Foundation Think Tank before serving as Deputy Director of OMB in 2018, and as director of 2020 in Trump’s first period. Trump repeatedly praised vought for performing an “incredible” and “fantastic” job.

Vought later wrote a chapter in the 900-page project 2025 policy document published by the Heritage Foundation in 2023 as a plan for another Trump period. In the document, Vought Omb described as the “President’s Air Traffic Management System,” which he said should be “involved in all aspects of the white house policy process”, which became “powerful enough to override the implementation agencies’ bureaucracy”.

Now all the signs are pointing out that Vought was “Trump’s Thomas Cromwell, behind the scenes Fixer, enabling his master’s goal,” according to Donald Moynihan, professor of public politics at the University of Michigan.

In the eyes of Trump, the US government agencies are from the FBI and CIA to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Monasteries, the officials staffed them are the Monks to be sent.

As an indication of his political point of view, Vought declared that America under Joe Biden was “in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover”. It was Vought, who is believed to have devised the first 180-day plan for radical executive orders and surprising messages that we now see Trump firing daily.

Vought was an important mover behind “Plan F”, a controversial order introduced at the end of Trump’s first period, which would have made it easier to remove officials who obey him. It reappeared on January 20 as a executive order called timetable policy/career.

“What is becoming more and more clear is that Trump’s threat of cleaning what he is feeling” Deep State “is not just rhetoric,” says Prof -Gave. “However, the only way Trump can achieve this goal is with loyal foot soldiers like Russell Vought.”

Vought has spoke in public About his ambition to remove politically non-compatible officials in any way possible.

“When they wake up in the morning, we wish they do not want to go to work because they are increasingly seen as villains,” he said in a speech in 2023 in the Center for Renewing America, a think tank he had founded two years earlier.

“We want their financing to be closed so that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cannot make all the rules against our energy sector … We will put them in trauma.”

Writing for The american mind, A journal published by the Conservative Think Tank The Claremont Institute in 2022, Vought said the Biden administration was “increasingly array against the American people. It is both woken and weapons. The national security state, with bodies such as the FBI, NSA and the CIA, is in line against the American people ”.

On February 5, the CIA became the first major national security agency to offer buyouts for its entire workforce. The CIA staff have been told that if they finish their jobs, they will receive about eight months of salary and benefits.

In addition to taking an EACS to the official administration, Vought also favors large cuts for welfare, science and environmental expenses, but not defense.

Some on the Republican right have hailed Vought’s desire to empty public spending. Senator Rand Paul, the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said, “We need someone with the strength of character like Mr Won to put his foot down, put the hammer down and say enough is enough.”

Vought also aims to concentrate more power in the president’s hands. He is vocally against the “introductory” law that was introduced to limit the president’s ability to sifle money away from congressional -approved expenses. In January, the Vought Senate Committee told his nomination that he considers the law as a constitutional boundary of the president’s power.

The IMPROUNDMENT ACT from 1974 was adopted in response to the then President Richard Nixon, who derived funds that Capitol Hill had already earmarked for specific purposes. It seems that another controversial Republican President with Vought’s help may be recovering these powers.

To tackle sin, or what Vought considers as immoral, also appears prominent in his political design. The slogan from his Center for Renewing America is “For God. By country. For society. “

In contrast to Tudor Éminence Pigs Cromwell, Vought is planning not to reduce the prominent role of the church, but to increase it.

“He really thinks, even more than the president, that federal workers constitute a ‘deep state’ that is not only against the president, but actively trying to undermine what he sees as American ideals, such as God, faith and traditional gender/family relationships, ”Says Todd Belt, professor of political science at George Washington University. In Vought, the belt adds, Trump wants “not only a loyalist but a zealot who is eager to shrink and redesign the federal government”.

Vought, who has two daughters with her ex -wife, Mary Vought, is determined to turn diversity, justice and inclusion (DEI). In a strange language he has decorated the “transient wastewater that is pumped into our schools and institutions”.

According to Vought, they were protests and riots that followed the police’s killing of George Floyd in May 2020, ”obviously not about race. It was about destabilizing the Trump administration ”.

Trump has clearly seen the political opportunity in the agenda prosecuted by Vought. After all, it is not only the right one in the United States that believes that “wokeness” has become too widespread and gone too far.

The political strategist James Carville is among the leading Democrats who have warned that excessive political correctness has harmed his party’s notions of recent elections. “What went wrong is just stupid wisdom … I mean this ‘defund policy’ lunacy … Take Abraham Lincoln’s name from schools,” he said in the bite’s time in office.

Vought is a constitutional originalist. He believes the United States should comply with the charter when it was originally written 237 years ago. In this he has the support of other right -wing figures, including the controversial Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Despite his call for compliance with the US Constitution, as it was written in 1787, Vought seems to have some time, but for Thomas Jefferson’s view that the United States was and should remain a completely secular nation. In one Newsweek Article In 2021, he suggested that America be seen as “a Christian nation where our rights and duties are understood to come from God, and where our primary responsibility as citizens is to build and maintain strength, prosperity and health in our own country” . While he accepts the “institutional separation between church and state”, it does not mean “the separation of Christianity from its influence on the government and society”.

Trump’s Thomas Cromwell has now been confirmed as Washington’s most powerful fixer, regardless. The fear of Trump’s opponents over what’s coming next was summarized by Chuck Schumer, the Senate’s Democratic leader, in a speech during Thursday evening’s debate. “Confirmation of the most radical nominee who has the most extreme agenda to the most important agency in Washington,” he said was a “triple main disaster for hard -working Americans.”

The only thing a politically polarized United States seems to agree on, except that Vought’s plans are really radical is that he has every chance to see them come to execution.

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