Russell Vought, Maga’s shutdown ‘bulldog’

Illustration by Andy Bunday

Ten days ago Donald Trump shared an AI-generated video portraying Vought (pronounced Vote) as the grim reaper, accompanied by a soundtrack of Blue Oyster Cult’s (Don’t Fear) The Reaper. Although presented as a sophomoric joke, it carried a serious and threatening message.

Vought, 49, is director of the White House office of management and budget, a position that doesn’t usually attract much attention. However, all eyes are on him because, with Congress having failed to agree government funding, he has come out swinging a metaphorical scythe.

Rather than placing government workers on furlough, the practice in previous shutdowns, Vought is seeking to sack large numbers and further reduce the reach and capability of federal agencies, which both he and Trump view as a liberal bureaucratic conspiracy.

“Russ knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end weaponised government,” Trump wrote when nominating Vought.

Vought is also responsible for a $25bn freeze in funding for infrastructure in Democratic-voting states. His reason for closing down a subway project in New York City was that it might have been unconstitutionally influenced by DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] policies, which led to suggestions he had invented a whole new engineering concept of “woke tunnels”.

If the Trump administration is stacked with poseurs and yes men, Vought is the inconspicuous exception. While his profile may not match that of Peter Hegseth or RFK Jnr, by contrast he knows what he’s doing.

“He is very, very smart,” says Newt Gingrich, a former Republican speaker of the house who organised several government shutdowns in the 1990s. “He’s very calm and he is very determined.”

Vought served as budget director in the first Trump government and the experience of seeing policies moderated by the democratic process was a frustration to which he gave much strategic consideration, particularly after Trump lost the 2020 election.

“He took the years in the wilderness to think through what he had learned and to lay out a very aggressive plan for shrinking government once we were back in power,” says Gingrich.

That plan was contained within a 900-page document entitled Project 2025, a wish-list and how-to policy blueprint produced by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing thinktank. It sought a radical reduction in government, the expansion of presidential authority and a nationwide abortion ban among other initiatives with an ultra-conservative bent. It was so extreme that even Trump described some of its contents as “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal” before he regained office.

Paul Dans, another veteran from Trump’s first administration, was the director of Project 2025. “Russ was initially reluctant to be part of the coalition,” says Dans. “He wanted assurance that it wasn’t going to be chock full of neocons and that we were actually going to go after people for their feckless governance.” Vought, he says, “put together the 180-day marching plan” designed to ensure that a “flood the zone” agenda was enacted from day one of Trump’s presidency.

“I believe upwards of 80% of what the administration has done in the second term is reflective of the work of Project 2025,” says Dans. “Every time that president Trump rolls out a new policy, I feel like a Project 2025 angel gets its wings.”

But Vought had a competitor earlier this year whose work overshadowed and often undermined his own: Elon Musk and his department of government efficiency (Doge). According to a recent New York Times report, Vought was outraged by the chaos that Doge created, and withering in his assessment of its results.

Careful not to challenge the wealthiest man in the world, who was also for a while Trump’s golden boy, he had to wait until Musk fell out with the president to implement his own no less destructive but more premeditated assault on government.

Vought is the youngest of seven children from a blue-collar religious family in Trumbull, Connecticut. His humble beginnings and behind-the-scenes rise to become Trump’s enforcer has something of the quality of his fellow Protestant evangelist Thomas Cromwell’s ascendancy in the court of Henry VIII: the wily master of administrative procedure doing the bidding of a mercurial egotistical leader.

After graduating from the evangelical Christian Wheaton College, he cut his political teeth in Washington working as an assistant to Texas senator Phil Gramm, a zealot in the cause of small government. By night Vought attended law school, developing a reputation as a tireless worker. He then became a full-time DC policy wonk, running both the Republican study committee, one of the most influential conservative organisations in the capital, and the lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation.

In Trump’s first administration, he was one of the officials who defied Congress and froze military spending on Ukraine, which eventually led to the president’s impeachment. Two years ago he and his wife were divorced. They have two daughters. Observing the budget director’s swift response to the shutdown, Mike Lee, a Utah senator, told Fox News that Vought had been “preparing for this moment since puberty”.

Some Republicans are concerned that Vought’s actions will backfire electorally, enabling Democrats who blocked Trump’s budget to appear measured by comparison with a ruthless Republican administration.

Vought is not easily swayed by such sentiments. Moreover, he is dedicated to delivering yet more power to the executive as he seeks to challenge the Impoundment Control Act brought in to limit Richard Nixon’s presidential power. His loyalty to Trump has confounded some observers who struggle to reconcile Vought’s trenchant Christianity – he quotes the Bible and never uses profane language – with Trump’s chequered history of beauty queens and porn stars. Dans is not among them.

“I believe president Trump has a deep spirituality,” he says. “Russ has spoken about this. People in public life are no longer afraid to speak of their faith. Obviously we have a government that is non-sectarian but that doesn’t mean it isn’t based on Judeo-Christian precepts”

Vought wrote a blog 10 years ago stating that Muslims were “condemned” because they didn’t accept Jesus Christ as God. Since then the list of the condemned has grown. Government employees and Democratic state officials will be praying that Vought – not to mention his boss – reacquaints himself with the Christian moral virtue of mercy.

Russell Vought

Born Trumbull, Connecticut

Alma mater Wheaton College, Illinois

Work Head of office of management and budget

Age 49

Family Divorced, two daughters