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The Shadow President
From the wholesale gutting of federal agencies to the ongoing government shutdown, Russell Vought has drawn the road map for Trumps second term. Vought has consolidated power to an extent that insiders say they feel like he is the commander in chief.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 Trumps 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, Voughts predecessor, told me, If youre 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 Trumps first term, Vought (whose name is pronounced vote) did more than perhaps anyone else to turn the presidents demands and personal grievances into government action. In 2019, after Congress refused to fund Trumps 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 Ukraines 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 wasnt a showboat, and he was committed to doing what the president wanted to do.
https://www.propublica.org/article/russ-vought-trump-shadow-president-omb
Vought may be the most deliberately evil asshole in this administration. "Christian" nationalist, of course.
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The Shadow President (Original Post)
Zorro
Saturday
OP
J_William_Ryan
(3,081 posts)1. Russell Vought
Trumps Martin Bormann