Reuters Trump Picks Project 2025 Architect Russell Vought to Oversee Budget Office

President-elect Donald Trump has selected Russell Vought to run the Office of Management and Budget, the largest office within the executive branch. The decision brings one of the architects of the controversial Project 2025 governing plan by the Heritage Foundation deep into the heart of the White House, in a position that has enormous influence over Trump’s spending and policy priorities.

Vought led the OMB in the final two years of the first Trump administration, functioning as an acting director for more than a year before being confirmed in July 2020. After leaving the White House at the end of Trump’s first term, Vought founded the Center for Renewing America, a nonprofit organization that describes itself as the “tip of the America First spear.”

In a statement late Friday, Trump described Vought as “an aggressive cost cutter and deregulator who will help us implement our America First Agenda across all Agencies.” He said “Russ knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end Weaponized Government, and he will help us return Self Governance to the People,” adding that the incoming OMB chief “will restore fiscal sanity to our Nation.”

A MAGA intellectual: Vought has become one of the leaders on policy within Trump’s “Make American Great Again” movement. His main focuses are shrinking government and slashing spending, and he is expected to play a central role in the Trump administration’s self-declared war on the federal bureaucracy.

In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Vought said that he intends to move aggressively. “There certainly is going to be mass layoffs and firings, particularly at some of the agencies that we don’t even think should exist,” he said.

Previously, Vought made it clear that he views many federal employees as something like enemies who have abetted a “Marxist takeover” of the country. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said, per Government Executive. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.”

One project Vought is expected to be involved with is the effort to reclassify thousands of federal employees as political appointees, removing their civil service protections. The so-called Schedule F initiative was attempted at the end of the first Trump administration but ran into legal challenges and eventually ran out of time. Back then, Vought said the Schedule F rule change would allow him to designate up to 88% of the employees at OMB as political appointees, clearing the way for mass firings.

Project 2025 returns: Vought reportedly worked closely with the Heritage Foundation, where he once served as vice president of Heritage Action for America, the group's lobbying arm, to help create Project 2025, a 900-page blueprint for a potential second Trump administration.

More than 100 former Trump administration officials contributed to the Project 2025 effort, but Trump distanced himself from the hard-right plan for governance after Democrats began using some of its more extreme policy prescriptions in attack ads. Following his electoral victory, though, Trump has embraced some of the key Project 2025 contributors, including Vought at OMB, the incoming “border czar” Tom Homan, immigration hardliner Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff, and John Ratcliffe, Trump's pick to lead the CIA.