18/10/2025
As we await the Trump Bump
In early 2021, on one of the final days of Donald Trump’s first term, Russell Vought visited him in the Oval Office. Both men felt a sense of unfinished business, Vought would later recall. Only a few months earlier, when Vought was sworn in as the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget—an obscure but vastly influential agency—Trump had told him that, after three and a half years as President, he had finally got the hang of the job. “Russ, we’ve got to get another term,” Trump said. “We finally figured out how to do this.”
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. “Most Administrations don’t get a four-year pause or have the chance to think about ‘Why isn’t this working?’ ” a former O.M.B. branch chief said. “Now he gets to come back and steamroll everyone.”
In Vought’s vision for the U.S. government, an all-powerful executive branch would be able to fire workers, cancel programs, shutter agencies, and undo regulations that govern air and water quality, financial markets, workplace protections, and civil rights. The D.O.J., meanwhile, would shed its historical independence and operate at the direction of the White House. In the nine months since Trump took office again, Vought has worked to enact that vision. He has frozen vast sums of federal spending, terminated tens of thousands of federal workers, slashed foreign aid, and, in a few cases, brought entire agencies to a standstill. “We work for the President of the United States,” an official who regularly deals with the O.M.B. said. 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.” Andy Kroll reports on Vought’s mission to lay waste to the federal bureaucracy: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/f7DwK5
