President-elect Donald Trump‘s selection of Russell Vought as the incoming administration’s budget chief illustrates Trump’s “total” commitment to curbing government spending and eliminating waste, according to allies.
Trump nominated Vought to serve as director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, the same post he held for the latter part of Trump’s first year in office, dubbing him an “aggressive cost cutter and deregulator.”
“Russ knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end Weaponized Government, and he will help us return Self Governance to the People,” Trump wrote when announcing Vought’s selection. “We will restore fiscal sanity to our Nation, and unleash the American People to new levels of Prosperity and Ingenuity.”
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At OMB, Trump world figures say, Vought will serve as Trump’s “right-hand man” inside the White House when it comes to trimming the federal government’s topline budget while still pursuing costly policies like a national deportation agenda.
“Russ might end up being the most consequential member of President Trump’s Cabinet,” one former Trump administration official told the Washington Examiner. “He knows his way around the White House, and he’s going to be instrumental when it comes to rolling back government overreach and getting the deficit back under control.”
“Slash and burn. That’s the mandate,” a second former Trump official added when asked what Vought’s focus during a second Trump stint would be.
A Trump campaign staffer additionally told the Washington Examiner that curbing government spending will have Vought’s “total” attention.
Vought was one of more than 100 former Trump administration officials to have a hand in crafting the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a controversial purported agenda for Trump’s second term in office that caused the president-elect some trouble on the campaign trail.
Vought authored Project 2025’s chapter on the Executive Office of the president, where he argued that the federal bureaucracy “all too often is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences — or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction of the country.”
Trump repeatedly distanced himself from Project 2025 during the lead-up to Election Day, and Trump transition team co-chairman Howard Lutnick claimed that no one associated with the initiative would land an administration job.
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“I have no idea who is behind it,” Trump said of Project 2025 on social media over the summer. “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
During the first Trump term, Vought consistently produced budget requests that cut virtually all non-defense spending and was a key component of Trump’s attempts to open career government policy staffers to at-will terminations. President Joe Biden eventually rescinded Trump’s aforementioned Schedule F order after being sworn into office in January of 2021.
And since Trump left office, Vought has also argued that Trump should resuscitate a little-known legal theory, impoundment, as a means of circumventing budgetary restrictions set by Congress. The practice has been effectively illegal since the Nixon administration, yet Trump allies want to test the limits.
“I believe the loss of impoundment authority — which 200 years of presidents enjoyed — was the original sin in eliminating the ability from a branch … to control spending,” he said during an interview with Fox Business earlier this year. “We’re going to need that back.”
Trump himself also alluded to impoundment, which sees a president simply refusing to spend funds previously appropriated by Congress as a means of pursuing their own policy goals, on the campaign trail.
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OMB and Vought are expected to work closely with the newly instituted Department of Government Efficiency, and co-chairmen Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, but legal scholars do say that the Trump team runs the risk of lawsuits if they make good on plans to unilaterally fire large swathes of government workers.
“To the extent that you could try to implement it unilaterally, you would need some kind of authority to impound — to just not do what Congress has said you’re supposed to do,” said Bowdoin College professor Andrew Rudalevige, who specifically studies the powers of the presidency. “It’ll lead pretty directly to constitutional conflict, but that, I think, is the only way that you could impose unilaterally presidential wishes in this area.”
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Trump advisers believe that the Supreme Court would side with the administration on an impoundment decision, a view shared by South Texas College of Law professor Josh Blackman.
“The most relevant data point is that Chief Justice John Roberts worked in the Reagan White House,” he told NPR. “I think he’d be very sympathetic to the arguments that were so influential in his earlier career, so I think Trump might actually have a shot at this one.”
