WASHINGTON (AP) — Russel Vought sounds like a general mustering troops for a battle when he talks about taming a “woke and gun-toting” federal government.
He recently described political opposition as “enemy fire overshooting the mark,” while urging allies to be “fearless at the point of attack” and calling his policy proposals “battle plans.”
As a former president Donald Trump If Vought wins a second term in November, he may have the opportunity to go on the offensive.
As chief architect of Project 2025 — the controversial conservative blueprint for overhauling the federal government — Vought is likely to be appointed to a top job in a second Trump administration. And he has drawn up a previously secret “180-Day Transition Playbook” to speed implementation of the plan and avoid a repeat of the chaotic start that plagued Trump’s first term.
Among the small group of Trump advisers with a mechanical understanding of how Washington operates, Vought advised influential conservative lawmakers on Capitol Hill, held a top post in the Trump White House and later founded his own pro-Trump think tank. Now he’s being bandied about as a candidate to become Trump’s White House chief of staff, one of the most powerful positions in the administration.
“If we don’t have courage, we’ll get out of the fight,” Vought said in June on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast. “But we believe that’s where the country needs us, and we’re not going to save the country without a little bit of confrontation.”
Conservative Blueprint for Government Change
Project 2025, led by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, is a detailed, 920-page manual for governing under the next Republican administration. A whirlwind of far-right ambitions, its proposals range from firing thousands of government workers and replacing them with Trump loyalists to rolling back the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of drugs used in abortions. Democrats have used Project 2025 for months to criticize Trump and other Republicans, telling voters it represents the former president’s true — and extreme — agenda.
Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025 in recent weeks, posting on social media that he has not seen the plan and “has no idea who is responsible for it, and, contrary to our very well-received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it.”
His campaign said Tuesday that the “demise of Project 2025 would be very welcome.” That same day, Paul Dans, the project’s executive director and a former Trump administration personnel official, resigned.
Trump’s efforts to repudiate the blueprint are complicated by his connections to many of its contributors. More than two dozen authors served in his administration, including Vought, who was director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.
Trump’s campaign did not respond to questions about which Project 2025 proposals the former president rejected or whether Vought would be offered a top government position during a new Trump term.
Vought did not respond to an interview request or to questions emailed in February to his think tank, the Center for Renewing America, which played a key role in creating Project 2025.
People who know Vought describe him as someone who is deeply committed to Trump’s cause, but not so much to the former president himself.
“A very determined warrior is how I would see Russ,” said a former Trump administration official who worked with Vought in the White House and spoke candidly on condition of anonymity. “I don’t think he thinks about whether he likes Donald Trump as a person or not. I think he likes what Donald Trump represents in terms of the political forces that he can marshal.”
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Vought was born in New York and raised in Connecticut. He described his family as blue collar. His parents were devout Christians. Vought’s father, a Marine Corps veteran, was a union electrician and his mother was a schoolteacher.
Vought’s father, nicknamed Turk, was not one for laziness or waste. Mark Maliszewski, an electrician who knew him, recalled that Turk Vought would scold his coworkers after a job if they threw away any usable material.
“He went over there and kicked the trash can,” Maliszewski said. “He said, ‘What’s this? If it was quarters or dollars in that trash can, you’d pick it up.'”
Russell Vought graduated in 1998 from Wheaton College, a Christian school in Illinois that counts famed evangelist Billy Graham among its alumni. He moved to Washington to work for Republicans who advocated austerity and small government.
“I’ve worked with a lot of different staff members and in terms of work ethic, tenacity, intellect, knowledge (and) commitment to principle, Russell was one of the most impressive people I’ve worked with,” said former GOP Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas, who hired Vought in 2003.
After honing his credentials as a budget hawk, Vought was named policy director of the House Republican Conference, the party’s main messaging platform then chaired by then-Rep. Mike Pence, who later became Indiana governor and Trump’s vice president.
Vought left Capitol Hill for a lobbying firm affiliated with the Heritage Foundation. When Trump was elected, Vought became the deputy director of OMB.
His confirmation hearing was controversial. Liberal Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont accused him of using Islamophobic language when he wrote in 2016 that Muslims “do not know God because they have rejected and been condemned by Jesus Christ, his Son.”
Vought told senators his comments were taken out of context and said he respects everyone’s right to express their religious beliefs.
The Senate confirmed him as OMB’s No. 2 by a unanimous vote. He became acting director in early 2019 after his boss, Mick Mulvaney, was named Trump’s acting chief of staff. Vought was confirmed as OMB director a year and a half later, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world.
OMB is a typically quiet office that drafts the president’s budget and reviews regulations. But with Vought at the helm, OMB has been at the center of Trump’s confrontations with Congress over federal spending and the legal limits on presidential power.
After lawmakers refused to give Trump more money for his wall on the U.S. southern border, the budget office has siphoned off billions of dollars from the Pentagon and Treasury Department budgets to pay for the wall.
Under Vought, OMB also withheld military aid to Ukraine as Trump pressured President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to investigate President Joe Biden and his son. Vought refused to comply with a congressional demand to remove him during the subsequent Democratic-led House investigation that led to Trump’s first impeachment. The investigation, Vought said, was a sham.
After Trump left the White House, Vought founded The Center for Renewing America. The organization’s mission is to be “the tip of the America First spear” and “renew the consensus that America is one nation under God.”
Vought has defended the concept of Christian nationalism, which is a fusion of American and Christian values, symbols, and identity. Christian nationalism, he wrote three years ago, “is a commitment to an institutional separation of church and state, but not the separation of Christianity from its influence on government and society.”
The only way to return America to the country the Founding Fathers envisioned is “radical constitutionalism,” Vought said on Bannon’s podcast. That means putting control of the executive branch solely in the hands of the president, not a vast federal bureaucracy.
To anticipate the fight needed to achieve this, Trump’s supporters must be “fearless, faithful and frugal in everything we do,” he said.
A statement of less independence
Vought’s center was part of a coalition of conservative organizations, organized by the Heritage Foundation, that launched Project 2025, a detailed plan for governance during the next Republican administration.
The project’s public document, “Mandate for Leadership,” examined virtually every corner of the federal government, urging reforms large and small to rein in a “gigantic” bureaucracy.
Project 2025 calls for closing the U.S. Department of Education and dismantling the Department of Homeland Security, with its various components absorbed by other federal offices. Diversity, inclusion and equity programs would be gutted. Promotions in the U.S. military to general or admiral would be scrutinized to ensure that candidates have not prioritized issues like climate change or critical race theory.
The plan also recommends reviving Trump-era personnel policies that aim to reclassify tens of thousands of federal employees as political appointees, potentially leading to mass layoffs.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history at New York University and author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,” criticized Project 2025 as “a recipe for mass chaos, abuse of power, and government dysfunction.”
The overarching theme of Project 2025 is dismantling the “administrative state,” which, according to the plan, is the mass of unelected government officials who pursue policy agendas that run counter to the president’s plans.
In his public remarks and in a chapter he wrote for Project 2025, Vought has said that no department or agency of the executive branch, including the Justice Department, should operate outside the president’s authority.
“The whole idea of independent agencies is an abomination from a Constitutional standpoint,” Vought said during a recent appearance on Fox Business Network.
Critics warn that this could leave the Justice Department and other investigative agencies vulnerable to a president who might pressure them to punish or investigate a political enemy. Trump, who has been prosecuted four times, has threatened retaliation against Biden and other perceived enemies.
Curtailing the independence of the Justice Department would be a “radically bad idea,” said Paul Coggins, former president of the National Association of Former US Attorneys.
“No president deserves to rip the Justice Department off his political enemies, or, frankly, to rip the Justice Department off his political friends,” he said.
It’s unclear what job Vought might get in a second Trump administration. He could return as OMB director, the job he held at the end of Trump’s presidency, or an even higher position.
“Russ would make a very, very good (White House) chief of staff,” Mulvaney said.
Whatever the position, Vought is expected to become one of Trump’s key field commanders in his campaign to dominate Washington. ___
Rhonda Shafner, an Associated Press researcher in New York, contributed to this report.
