Russ Vought is on track to return to a little-known but powerful position in the incoming administration at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) after President-elect Donald Trump nominated him on Nov. 22.
The OMB’s director is crucial to ensuring that each executive agency is coordinated behind the president’s economic and political goals, playing a role in finances and regulations enacted by executive agencies.
Vought is soon to reprise the role, in which he served during Trump’s first administration after Mick Mulvaney, his predecessor, was named Trump’s chief of staff.
In his announcement of the endorsement in a post on Truth Social, Trump wrote that Vought “is an aggressive cost cutter and deregulator who will help us implement our America First Agenda across all Agencies.”
Trump said that Vought would “dismantle the Deep State and end weaponized government.”
Vought wrote a chapter of Project 2025—the Heritage Foundation’s vision for successful conservative administrations—and he’s been clear about his hopes for the incoming administration, including reducing bureaucracy and returning substantial powers to the state.
While implementing his ideas could represent a political earthquake for Washington, they align broadly with decades of conservative proposals and complaints: cutting spending and regulations, reducing the power of the bureaucracy, and returning power to states and local communities.
During his first tenure at the OMB, Vought emphasized cuts to spending and regulations.
Vought has often expressed skepticism toward how expansive these regulations have become.
“We’re doing everything we can to get the government out of the American people’s life,“ Vought said during a July 2019 appearance on EpochTV’s ”American Thought Leaders.”
Vought will soon again be responsible for drafting the president’s budget proposals to Congress, as well as ensuring that these align with Trump’s policy priorities. He’ll also be able to veto new regulations through the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a subdivision of the OMB.
In his entry for Project 2025, Vought made clear that he sees it as a priority to strengthen the influence of the president while weakening the influence of the unelected bureaucrats who serve in the executive branch.
These bureaucrats, Vought says, are contrary to the intention of the Founders and the Constitution, which says that executive power “shall be vested in a President of the United States.”
But today, Vought wrote, the president “assumes office to find a sprawling federal bureaucracy that all too often is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences.” He then said the worst case of this is when the bureaucracy aligns with a radical or progressive faction in the country.
The power of bureaucrats has long been a complaint—and a target—for Republicans.
During his first term, Trump made an effort to counter the bureaucracy’s power with Executive Order 13957, which created exceptions in federal employment standards to allow employees with jobs of a “policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character” to be fired more easily.
However, the executive order came just weeks before the 2020 election, and was quickly rescinded by President Joe Biden when he took office.
Vought has been a strong advocate of the proposal, and Trump could quickly reimplement it alongside other rescinded executive orders soon into his second term.
In the long run, Vought says he plans to use the substantial powers of the OMB and related agencies aggressively to increase the power of the president himself while weakening federal power more broadly.
While Vought encouraged returning power to the president as an individual, he also proposed that the goal should be an ultimately weaker executive branch.
“The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power—including power currently held by the executive branch—to the American people,” Vought wrote.
Vought emphasizes a federalist approach to policy, where state and local governments will take precedence over the federal government.
“Success ... will require a rare combination of boldness and self-denial: boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will and self-denial to use the bureaucratic machine to send power away from Washington and back to America’s families, faith communities, local governments, and states,” Vought said.
—Joseph Lord
BOOKMARKS
Florida’s Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo issued a new guidance on Nov. 22 advising against the long-standing practice of adding fluoride to the public drinking water supply, The Epoch Times’ TJ Muscaro reported. It comes after Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick to head up the Department of Health and Human Services, said that the administration would advise against drinking water fluoridation on day one.
Multiple Democratic and Republican senators on Nov. 24 signaled that they will grill Trump’s choices to lead the Intelligence Community and the Pentagon, The Epoch Times’ Jack Phillips reported. They include Pete Hegseth, the veteran and Fox News host nominated by Trump to lead the Department of Defense, and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democrat who switched to the GOP prior to the election.
Trump’s choice for his national security advisor, Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), said that he wants the incoming administration to bring the Russia–Ukraine war to a “responsible end,” The Epoch Times’ Jack Phillips reported. That aligns with Trump’s long-standing calls for a swift end to the conflict.
Native Americans, a historically Democrat-faithful voting bloc, shifted toward Republicans in 2024, The Epoch Times’ Allan Stein reported. Many members of the Navajo Nation said they were moved by issues like food and fuel prices to back Trump, though it’s unclear how the final margins broke down among the group.
Education policies in areas like universal school choice, critical race theory, transgender ideology, student college debt relief, and higher education accreditation could shift substantially under Trump, The Epoch Times’ Aaron Gifford reported. Trump has also expressed interest in ending the Department of Education, though this would require a tough legislative fight in Congress.
