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President Donald Trump’s second administration is full of highly qualified candidates for “top villain.” But there’s a central White House figure who continues to evade his fair share of scrutiny: Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought. Vought, an alum of Trump 1.0 and key architect of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led manifesto for Trump 2.0, is accurately referred to as the “shadow president.” He prefigured the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and has effectively shepherded it before, during, and after Elon Musk’s departure. Vought is the connective tissue linking different elements of the MAGA coalition (e.g., billionaires seeking to eradicate legal constraints on profiteering, bigots propagandizing against various scapegoats, Christian nationalists, and other anti-democratic reactionaries) into a machine for advancing the interests of a small minority of oligarchs.

Despite being the nerve center of Trump 2.0, Vought continues to fly under the radar. This is shameful but not surprising; even though the OMB director bears so much responsibility for so much avoidable pain, the ostensible opposition party mentions him far too infrequently. Most of the domestic carnage of the second Trump administration is inseparable from Vought-led attacks on the non-military federal workforce (there are 278,000 fewer civil servants now than there were at the start of Trump’s second term) and his unlawful moves to freeze hundreds of billions of dollars in socially beneficial funding appropriated by Congress. The basic formula repeated by Musk’s DOGE and Vought’s OMB goes like this: 1) identify spending that doesn’t align with right-wing priorities; 2) baselessly claim that such outlays are, by definition, riddled with “waste, fraud, and abuse”; and 3) unilaterally defund those programs.

Vought’s position at OMB gives him extraordinary power over the federal money spigot; he abuses this power to impose his misanthropic vision with no regard for the popular will. The nakedly authoritarian nature of Vought’s budgetary moves is especially clear when he engages in what historian Colin Gordon calls “vindictive federalism” — that is, coercively withholding money from Democratic-led cities and states, often under the guise of “reviewing” funding. These are blatant attempts to strong-arm jurisdictions that aren’t fully cooperating with Trump’s revanchist agenda.

Although Vought will likely never be as well known as a billionaire megalomaniac like Musk, he should be at least a household name à la White House adviser Stephen Miller or Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. That he’s not reflects a major failure by congressional Democrats to consistently and effectively communicate to the public how the Vought is orchestrating the Trump regime’s assault on the common good.

Democrats are failing to foreground Vought as the nucleus of Trumpian chaos

Official e-newsletters — emails that most, but not all, members of Congress send to subscribers — provide some of the best evidence we have of who and what federal lawmakers are talking about and how often. “Who cares about emails?” one might instinctively ask. In addition to exemplifying the broader communications strategies of individual lawmakers and the parties to which they belong, congressional e-newsletters can reveal insightful trends. Comparing mentions of Musk and Vought, for instance, clarifies how badly the Democratic Party is failing to foreground Vought as the progenitor and executor of Trump’s inhumane agenda.

According to data the Revolving Door Project obtained from DCinbox, Democrats sent 478 unique emails mentioning Musk from January 27 to March 31, 2025 —........

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