Friends,
Every empire has its architects. In this vein, I urge you to read Andy Kroll’s extraordinary investigative report in ProPublica co-published with The New Yorker titled “The Shadow President,” to grasp the blueprint currently driving the dismantling of our democracy.
Russell Vought isn’t just a budget man. He’s another so-called Christian who wields faith as a weapon while dismantling the very institutions meant to serve the public good. With echoes of Steve Bannon's strategy of "muzzle velocity,"the overzealous architect of a shock-and-awe campaign to hollow out the federal state, Vought has consolidated unmatched power within the Office of Management and Budget—engineering mass firings, freezing funds, and paralyzing entire agencies to advance an authoritarian vision of executive supremacy. This is governance by harm: deliberate chaos, funding clawbacks, and a calculated indifference to human suffering—from refugees and educators to scientists and the elderly.
As Kroll reveals, Vought’s hand also guides Project 2025, the sweeping plan devised by the far right to concentrate power in the presidency, purge the civil service, and impose a Christian nationalist order on public life. His approach amounts to policy as punishment—a campaign that treats human consequences as collateral damage in an ideological crusade. If Trump is the showman, Vought is the strategist—the man with the map, the machinery, and the will to use both.
— Angela Valenzuela
The Shadow President From the wholesale gutting of federal agencies to the ongoing government shutdown, Russell Vought has drawn the road map for Trump’s second term. Vought has consolidated power to an extent that insiders say they feel like “he is the commander in chief.” by Andy Kroll Oct. 17, 2025, 6 a.m. EDT
On the afternoon of Feb. 12, Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, summoned a small group of career staffers to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for a meeting about foreign aid. A storm had dumped nearly 6 inches of snow on Washington, D.C. The rest of the federal government was running on a two-hour delay, but Vought had offered his team no such reprieve. As they filed into a second-floor conference room decorated with photos of past OMB directors, Vought took his seat at the center of a worn wooden table and laid his briefing materials out before him.
Vought, a bookish technocrat with an encyclopedic knowledge of the inner workings of the U.S. government, cuts an unusual figure in Trump’s inner circle of Fox News hosts and right-wing influencers. He speaks in a flat, nasally monotone and, with his tortoiseshell glasses, standard-issue blue suits and corona of close-cropped hair, most resembles what he claims to despise: a federal bureaucrat. The Office of Management and Budget, like Vought himself, is little known outside the Beltway and poorly understood even among political insiders. What it lacks in cachet, however, it makes up for in the vast influence it wields across the government. Samuel Bagenstos, an OMB general counsel during the Biden administration, told me, “Every goddam thing in the executive branch goes through OMB.”
The OMB reviews all significant regulations proposed by individual agencies. It vets executive orders before the president signs them. It issues workforce policies for more than 2 million federal employees. Most notably, every penny appropriated by Congress is dispensed by the OMB, making the agency a potential choke point in a federal bureaucracy that currently spends about $7 trillion a year. Shalanda Young, Vought’s predecessor, told me, “If you’re OK with your name not being in the spotlight and just getting stuff done,” then directing the OMB “can be one of the most powerful jobs in D.C.”
During Donald Trump’s first term, Vought (whose name is pronounced “vote”) did more than perhaps anyone else to turn the president’s demands and personal grievances into government action. In 2019, after Congress refused to fund Trump’s border wall, Vought, then the acting director of the OMB, redirected billions of dollars in Department of Defense money to build it. Later that year, after the Trump White House pressured Ukraine’s government to investigate Joe Biden, who was running for president, Vought froze $214 million in security assistance for Ukraine. “The president loved Russ because he could count on him,” Mark Paoletta, who has served as the OMB general counsel in both Trump administrations, said at a conservative policy summit in 2022, according to a recording I obtained. “He wasn’t a showboat, and he was committed to doing what the president wanted to do.”
After the pro-Trump riots at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, many Republicans, including top administration officials, disavowed the president. Vought remained loyal. He echoed Trump’s baseless claims about election fraud and publicly defended people who were arrested for their participation in the melee. During the Biden years, Vought labored to translate the lessons of Trump’s tumultuous first term into a more effective second presidency. He chaired the transition portion of Project 2025, a joint effort by a coalition of conservative groups to develop a road map for the next Republican administration, helping to draft some 350 executive orders, regulations and other plans to more fully empower the president. “Despite his best thinking and the aggressive things they tried in Trump One, nothing really stuck,” a former OMB branch chief who served under Vought during the first Trump administration told me. “Most administrations don’t get a four-year pause or have the chance to think about ‘Why isn’t this working?’” The former branch chief added, “Now he gets to come back and steamroll everyone.”
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| “The President loved Russ because he could count on him,” said OMB general counsel Mark Paoletta of Vought, seen at the microphone in the White House in 2019. Evan Vucci/AP Images |
