by Andy Kroll

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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.”

At the meeting in February, according to people familiar with the events, Vought’s directive was simple: slash foreign assistance to the greatest extent possible. The U.S. government shouldn’t support overseas anti-malaria initiatives, he argued, because buying mosquito nets doesn’t make Americans safer or more prosperous. He questioned why the U.S. funded an international vaccine alliance, given the anti-vaccine views of Trump’s nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The conversation turned to the United States Institute of Peace, a government-­funded nonprofit created under Ronald Reagan, which worked to prevent conflicts overseas; Vought asked what options existed to eliminate it. When he was told that the USIP was funded by Congress and legally independent, he replied, “We’ll see what we can do.” (A few days later, Trump signed an executive order that directed the OMB to dismantle the organization.)

The OMB staffers had tried to anticipate Vought’s desired outcome for more than $7 billion that the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development spent each year on humanitarian assistance, ­including disaster relief and support for refugees and conflict victims. During the campaign, Trump had vowed to defund agencies that give money to people “who have no respect for us at all,” and Project 2025 had accused USAID of pursuing a “divisive political and cultural agenda.” The staffers proposed a cut of 50%.

Vought was unsatisfied. What would be the consequences, he asked, of a much larger reduction? A career official answered: Less humanitarian aid would mean more people would die. “You could say that about any of these cuts,” Vought replied. A person familiar with the ­meeting described his reaction as “blasé.” Vought reiterated that he wanted spending on foreign aid to be as close to zero as possible, on the fastest timeline possible. Several analysts left the meeting rattled. Word of what had happened spread quickly among the OMB staff. ­Another person familiar with the meeting later told me, “It was the day that broke me.”

What Vought has done in the nine months since Trump took office goes much further than slashing foreign aid. Relying on an expansive theory of presidential power and a willingness to test the rule of law, he has frozen vast sums of federal spending, terminated tens of thousands of federal workers and, in a few cases, brought entire agencies to a standstill. In early October, after Senate Democrats refused to vote for a budget resolution without additional health care protections, effectively shutting down the government, Vought became the face of the White House’s response. On the second day of the closure, Trump shared an AI-generated video that depicted his budget director — who, by then, had threatened mass firings across the federal workforce and paused or canceled $26 billion in funding for infrastructure and clean-­energy projects in blue states — as the Grim Reaper of Washington, D.C. “We work for the president of the United States,” a senior agency official who regularly deals with the OMB told me. But right now “it feels like we work for Russ Vought. He has centralized decision-­making power to an extent that he is the commander in chief.”

At the start of Trump’s second term, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which promised to slash spending and root out waste, dominated the headlines. A gaggle of tech bros, with little government experience, appeared to be marching into federal buildings and, with the president’s blessing, purging people and programs seen as “woke” or anti-Trump. The sight of Musk swinging a chainsaw onstage at a conservative conference captured the pell-mell approach, not to mention the brutality, of the billionaire’s plan to bring the federal government to heel.

But, according to court records, interviews and other accounts from people close to Vought, DOGE’s efforts were guided, more than was previously known, by the OMB director. Musk bragged about “feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” but the details of the agency’s downsizing were ironed out by Vought’s office. When DOGE took aim at obscure quasi-government nonprofits, such as the United States Institute of Peace, OMB veterans saw Vought’s influence at work. “I can’t imagine that the DOGE team knew to target all these little parts of the government without Russ pointing them there,” the former OMB branch chief told me. Vought also orchestrated DOGE’s hostile takeover of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, crippling a regulator that Republicans had hoped to shutter during Trump’s first term. “DOGE is underneath the OMB,” Michelle Martin, an official with Citizens for Renewing America, a grassroots group founded by Vought, said in May, according to a video of her remarks. “Honestly, a lot of what Elon began pinpointing ... was at the direction of Russ.”

Vought, who declined to be interviewed for this story, voiced concerns about some of DOGE’s tactics — canceling budget items that the OMB had wanted to keep, for instance — but he mostly saw the department as a useful battering ram. An administration official who has worked with Vought and Musk told me that DOGE showed Vought it was possible to ignore legal challenges and take dramatic action. “He has the benefit of Elon softening everyone up,” the official told me. “Elon terrified the shit out of people. He broke the status quo.”

Vought is a stated opponent of the status quo. One of the few prominent conservatives to embrace the label of “Christian nationalist,” he once told an audience that “the phrasing is too accurate to run away from the term. ... I’m a Christian. I am a nationalist. We were meant to be a Christian nation.” American democracy, he has said, has been hijacked by rogue judges who make law from the bench and by a permanent class of government bureaucrats who want to advance “woke” policies designed to divide Americans and silence political opponents. “The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country, in which our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus,” Vought said in 2024, during a conference hosted by the Center for Renewing America, a nonprofit think tank that he also founded. “And they have aimed it at us.”

The central struggle of our time, he says, pits the defenders of this “post-­constitutional” order — what he calls the “cartel” or the “regime,” which in his telling includes Democrats and Republicans — against a group of “radical constitutionalists” fighting to destroy the deep state and return power to the presidency and, ultimately, the people. Vought counts himself as a member of the latter group, which, in his view, also includes right-wing stalwarts such as the political strategist Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said in a private speech in 2023. “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.”

The ultimate radical constitutionalist, Vought says, is Donald Trump. In Vought’s view, Trump, the subject of four indictments during his time out of office, is a singular figure in the history of the American republic, a once persecuted leader who returns to power to defeat the deep state. “We have in Donald Trump a man who is so uniquely positioned to serve this role, a man whose own interests perfectly align with the interests of the country,” Vought said in his 2024 speech. “He has seen what it has done to him, and he has seen what they are trying to do to the country. That is nothing more than a gift of God.” As Bannon put it, sitting onstage with Vought at a closed-door conference in 2023, Trump is “a very imperfect instrument, right? But he’s an instrument of the Lord.”........

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