Russell Vought is the tool of a dangerous elite

He wields his budget hammer not in service to the people or the Constitution, but for the billionaire class.

Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought at a Sept. 29 news conference. (C-SPAN)

By Sheldon Whitehouse

In ordinary times, Americans go about their daily lives without much worry about who is running the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), a powerful, low-profile agency tasked with executing the federal budget.

These are not ordinary times.

President Donald Trump’s OMB director is Russell Vought. You might have seen Vought in one of Trump’s crazed AI videos, portrayed as the government’s grim reaper, gleefully wielding a scythe in the Trump shutdown. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said of Vought’s plans to use the shutdown to fire more federal workers, this is what Vought has been “dreaming about—and meticulously preparing for—[…] since puberty.” Not a normal guy.

On Friday, Vought began implementing his plan to fire those furloughed federal workers, beginning with about 4,100 people, including about 600 at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and 1,400 at Treasury.

Vought is an extremist; a tool of creepy billionaires in the corporate takeover of the U.S. government; and he seems to get unhealthy pleasure from depriving Americans of the government services their tax dollars are supposed to fund.

Let’s start with a little history on Vought’s lawlessness. Vought served at OMB during the first Trump administration. Back then, he violated the Impoundment Control Act—the law requiring the executive branch to spend the funds Congress appropriates—by withholding (“impounding”) hundreds of millions of dollars in aid from the heroic Ukrainian soldiers fighting back against Russia’s “little green men” invasion. That “dirt-for-dollars” scandal was at the center of Trump’s first impeachment.

Now in Trump’s second term, Vought wields OMB as a hammer to break the power of Congress and create executive supremacy. Before Vought’s confirmation this year, he said, “If I am confirmed as OMB Director, I will follow the advice of OMB General Counsel, and ultimately the President” on the Impoundment Control Act. He did not say he would follow the law established by Congress. He did not say he would follow court decisions. Just his legal counsel and his lawbreaking president.

So, let’s look at who Vought’s legal counsel is. Remember when billionaire Harlan Crow commissioned a now-infamous painting? That painting is basically a panorama of the Supreme Court’s corruption: the billionaire who funded it (Crow), the justice who secretly accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in billionaire gifts (Justice Clarence Thomas), the guy who implemented the scheme and travels with justices on billionaire-funded trips (Leonard Leo), and a sidekick who defends the justices from any criticism of their “Billionaire Gifts Program.” The sidekick in the billionaire court-capture panorama is Mark Paoletta, now Vought’s legal counsel. Paoletta has said the Impoundment Control Act is a stupid law, and tweeted at Vought: “Impound, baby, impound.”

Like Paoletta, Vought is a creature of the far-right, billionaire dark-money operation that captured the Supreme Court. Before he went to OMB the first time, he was vice president at Heritage Action, a billionaire-funded dark-money group advocating for things that dark-money billionaires want. He’s mostly still working for them, just at taxpayer expense now.

After Trump lost in 2020, Vought set up an outfit called the Center for Renewing America—another billionaire-funded, dark-money front advocating for things dark-money billionaires want. “Senior fellows” at his center included Paoletta and Kash Patel, the guy now busy turning the FBI into a political weapon for Trump.

At the Center for Renewing America, Vought was a key author of Project 2025, the dark-money-funded playbook to loot the American government for billionaires and big polluters. Yes, the one Trump pretended not to know about. Now Vought is at OMB implementing that plan. In the Trump regime, you see Project 2025 playing out again and again. Take, for one example, the administration’s dirty work to kneecap clean energy for the big fossil fuel companies that prop up Republican campaigns and gave Trump hundreds of millions. Look at how Vought decapitated the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency that had returned over $21 billion to Americans cheated by giant companies, created by Congress specifically to protect consumers after the 2008 financial crisis.

Vought’s Project 2025 scheme is to destroy all independent government agencies. Agencies like the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission require independence from direct executive branch political control to serve the public. These agencies shield Americans from corporate exploitation, protect consumers and ensure a functioning economy. Vought has said, “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them.” Seizing the independent agencies of government lets him put them under the political control of the big corporate donors who paid to put the regime in power and makes Trump the gatekeeper of political control.

Billionaire stoogery aside, Vought is a bit strange. He said about the men and women who work in the federal government: “We want them to be traumatically affected. 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.” Your postman, a villain; the meat inspector who makes your steak safe at the USDA, a villain; the scientists who do brain cancer research, villains—according to Vought. Not normal.

Vought wants to replace government experts with toadies who can’t or won’t stand up to big corporations and polluters. He has begun mass firings of the civil servants who keep this country running—and threatened worse. Now, he’s saying that federal workers furloughed through no fault of their own aren’t guaranteed back pay after the government shutdown, despite a law that clearly says they are. Intimidation of the federal workforce, to make it compliant to political pressure from big corporate powers, is his goal. To actuate that political pressure, the big corporate powers will have to go to Trump, and Trump can then demand corrupt tribute for himself and his family. It’s a racket in the making.

Like a clever commissar for a dictator, or the plotting vizier of a sultan, Vought is a dangerous figure. This is not a guy who respects the law and the Constitution. This guy is the tool of a very small, very creepy, right-wing billionaire elite. Vought belongs to the looters and polluters, and he is manipulating our government for their benefit, setting us up for ever worse corruption.

Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat, represents Rhode Island in the U.S. Senate.

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