If federal employees feel traumatized at the moment, Russell Vought, the new head of the Management and Budget Office (OMB), probably has something to do with that.
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” said Vought in a video revealed by Propublica and the research group documented in October. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them not want to go to work, because they are more and more considered the bad guys. We want their funding to be closed … We want to put them in trauma. »»
Vought’s words, delivered during an event organized by his thinkank, Center for Renewing America, were striking. They had reflected a point of view, for a long time by Vought, that the government should be put in the heel by a powerful executive branch.
Now, the head of the management and budget office – the powerful agency of the executive branch which oversees federal agencies and administers the budget – Vought is positioned to help Donald Trump to do exactly this.
It will be the second time of Vought in the position: he spent six months to direct the OMB at the end of the president’s first mandate, trying without success to trigger a policy of the employment status of workers in the agency for dismiss them more easily.
Since then, he has worked with his thinkank and the Heritage Foundation to trace a course for a second term Trump.
Already, Trump’s most shocked executive actions reflect Vought’s vision for a reduced and demoralized public service. When the acting director of the CMOB published a memo note to ask the federal agencies to freeze all the grant funds, which stopped the flow of financing to programs like Head Start, meals on wheels and others Services supported by the federal government for poor and low -income Americans, he was vauhe the press secretary of Who Trump, Karoline Leavitt, said that she was consulted.
Leavitt told the press that she had already spoken “with the director of the OMB this morning, and he told me to tell everyone that the line of his office is open to other agencies of the federal government at all levels ”.
Radical constitutionalism
Vought said he embraces an ideology of “radical constitutionalism” and, in an essay in 2022, urged the right wing to “reject the previous ones and the legal paradigms that have wrongly developed in the past two hundred years ». , Vought helped describe a vision of a president engaged in an active struggle with the other branches of the government.
In this power struggle, Vought wrote in his chapter of the 2025 project, the president would be called “to an aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch”. At the heart of the executive power, Vought wrote, was the management and budget office.
“The OMB cannot play its role on behalf of the president effectively if it is not intimately involved in all aspects of the White House political process and lack of knowledge of what agencies do,” he He writes.
Vought’s thinkank has recommended policies such as the appeal of the insurgency law to suppress demonstrations and stop immigration to the southern border and abolish the law on the control of pounds, a law that limits The president’s ability to temporarily block the flow of funds from the congress.
The work of the center for the renewal of America adapts perfectly to the ideology of other extreme personalities in the Trump administration such as Pete Hegseth, who wrote that he believed that factional political violence in the United States is inevitable and describes American politics as a fight against evil. Likewise, the Vought group claims that the left in the United States is an “existential” threat to the country.
“The threat of radical philosophies, anchored in Marxism, such as the critical theory of the race, is vast, real and more and more existential”, reads a line of text in a section of the website entitled Woke and Armed.
Vought has also openly adopted Christian nationalism, the political movement which seeks to infuse Christianity in public life and the government.
Before the confirmation hearing of the Hegseth Senate, the Democrats of the Budget Committee urged their republican counterparts to delay confirmation of the advancement of Vought, noting its apparent link with the frost on the financing of federal subsidies and chaos that ‘He had sown. Vought, wrote Washington’s state senator, Patty Murray, vice-president of the Senate budget committee, “feels enchanted to challenge the Congress, the Constitution and the Act on the Control of Retory”.
When the Republicans argued, the Democrats of the Budget Committee boycotted the vote to advance his appointment to a vote in the Senate, then held a night marathon session pronouncing speeches recording their opposition to the candidate the day before the vote.
Vought said that Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin at 10:30 p.m. openly called the president to challenge the congress and take control of federal funding decisions that are constitutionally acquired in the legislative power “.
Many have also taken the role of Vought in the development of the 2025 project to discredit the candidate.
“Russell Vought is an extremist who will betray the families of workers, betray your family, and there is simply no other way to say it,” said Nevada senator Jacky Rosen on Thursday morning. “After all, he was the main architect behind the 2025 project.”
But if the Trump campaign sought to be distant from the proposal of the unpopular heritage foundation, this separation was a Mirage campaign season.
“God be congratulated,” wrote Vought on Twitter / X, after being confirmed by a narrow and online vote of the Senate on Thursday evening.
“Recognizing the President and the American Senate. Incredibly grateful for all the many who prayed to me. NOW. Let’s go. Go.”
