Politics
State of the Union: The Project 2025 coauthor served as OMB director during Trump’s first term.
President-elect Donald Trump is expected to pick Russell Vought to run the Office of Management and Budget. Vought is notable as having served as OMB director during the final two years of Trump’s first term and thereafter as an author of the “Executive Office of the President” chapter of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.
Vought served throughout the first Trump administration, first as the OMB’s deputy director under Mick Mulvaney, and then as director when Mulvaney was made chief of staff.
The OMB director is responsible for for developing the budget of the executive branch and also is responsible for executing the agenda of the President and the cabinet across the various Federal departments
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The news of the likely selection came a day after Vought was interviewed on Tucker Carlson’s program on X. “[OMB] is the President’s most important tool in dealing with the bureaucracy—the administrative state,” Vought told Carlson. “The nice thing about President Trump is he knows that and knows how to use it effectively.”
Vought cited the OMB’s ability to cut off funding as an important tool even in executing on the agenda of the President on foreign policy, telling Carlson:
Think about Ukraine, and the president [Trump] in that first term wanted to cut off funding for Ukraine. Why? Because it’s a corrupt country and we didn’t know how it was going to be spent. It’s totally normal policy process to go through that the people lost their minds about, but the bureaucracy was literally just ignoring it. And quite frankly his political appointees, like John Bolton, were ignoring him as well. And what we then did at OMB was I had been personally told, ‘look, you know I want the money cut off until we can figure out where it’s going.’ And we got the money [cut] off.
