By Bradley Devlin, The Daily Signal | November 25, 2024
The Office of Management and Budget is a less well-known entity within the executive branch, but few are as critical for ensuring the implementation of the president’s agenda. President-elect Donald Trump has once again placed that awesome responsibility in Russ Vought’s hands.
The previous Trump OMB director will return to the White House, where he says there is “unfinished business on behalf of the American people.”
Trump released a statement announcing Vought’s nomination as OMB director on Friday evening. “I am very pleased to nominate Russell Thurlow Vought, from the Great State of Virginia, as the Director of the United States Office of Management and Budget. He did an excellent job serving in this role in my First Term – We cut four Regulations for every new Regulation, and it was a Great Success! Russ graduated with a B.A. from Wheaton College, and received his J.D. from the Washington University School of Law,” Trump’s statement read.
“Russ has spent many years working in Public Policy in Washington, D.C., and is an aggressive cost cutter and deregulator who will help us implement our America First Agenda across all Agencies. Russ knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end Weaponized Government, and he will help us return Self Governance to the People. We will restore fiscal sanity to our Nation, and unleash the American People to new levels of Prosperity and Ingenuity. I look forward to working with you again, Russ. Congratulations. Together, we will Make America Great Again!”
OMB is not just the president’s budget division. While OMB oversees the structure and execution of the budget, it also has oversight powers over federal agencies and federal regulations to ensure the commands of the president, bestowed executive powers by the American people, are being followed.
In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Vought explained how OMB can use those powers to kill the deep state—a death by a thousand cuts.
“OMB is the nerve center of the federal government, particularly the executive branch,” Vought told Carlson. “Office of Management and Budget has the ability to turn off the spending that’s going on at the agencies. It has all the regulations coming through it to assess whether it’s good, or bad, or too expensive, or could be done a different way, or ‘What does the president think?’”
In short, “presidents use OMB to tame the bureaucracy,” Vought said.
“It is the President’s most important tool for dealing with the bureaucracy, the administrative state,” he reiterated. “And you know, the nice thing about President Trump is he knows that, and he knows how to use it effectively.”
Vought was previously atop the OMB, first in an acting capacity and then confirmed by the Senate, for the second half of Trump’s first term. His foremost achievement as OMB director was helping lay the groundwork for Trump’s most important campaign promise; namely, the construction of a wall along the southern border.
While Trump issued an executive order instructing the federal government to build the wall his first week in office, actually getting the government to fund and construct it—whether because of Congress, the courts, or rogue bureaucrats—proved difficult. Trump, in consultation with Vought and others, used the transfer authority (provided by Congress in appropriations) and assumed emergency powers to construct hundreds of miles of border wall.
“We at OMB gave him a plan to be able to go and fund the wall through money that was in the Department of Defense, and to use that because Congress wouldn’t give him the ordinary money at the Department of Homeland Security,” Vought told Carlson of the fight over the wall.
In Vought, Trump has found a rare talent with the ability to articulate a vision to return government to the people with the technical knowledge to implement it.
“The left has innovated over 100 years to create this fourth branch of an administrative state—you and I might call it the regime—this administrative state that is totally unaccountable to the president,” Vought said in his interview with Carlson. “The Left stopped talking about constitutional amendments because they innovated to this new fourth branch, which is totally different than anything the Founders would have ever understood.”
“[When] Republicans that take office,” Vought continued, “you find that it’s incredibly difficult to wield power to get them to deal with all of that muscle memory, to get them to do what you want.”
What’s needed, Vought added, is “a president kind of steps in and says, ‘I am fully aware of where I sit in the Constitution. I am fully aware of the tools at my disposal, and I’m going to use them on behalf of the American people, because I just won a massive agenda-setting election, and I’m going to go do what I said I would do.’”
As Trump and Vought prepared to depart the White House in 2021, Vought told the president of his intention to start the Center for Renewing America, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that sought to keep Trump’s policy vision alive in the nation’s capital. Trump was supportive of Vought’s endeavor, and the pair remained in close contact while Trump was out of power.
Vought’s fingerprints have been all over Republican politics and the conservative movement for the past four years. He wrote the Project 2025 chapter on how to reform the Executive Office of the President of the United States. In the media, he was an outspoken proponent for “draining the swamp” by making the federal agencies once again accountable to the president and the American people. And, over the summer, Vought lead the Republican National Convention’s policy platform committee.
Now, his fingerprints will be all over bringing the bureaucracy to heel.
Bradley Devlin is politics editor for The Daily Signal.
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