Confirmed as Director of the Office of Management and Budget in 2025, these are the individuals shaping the decisions that undermine democracy.
Summary: In a move that belies his campaign trail disavowals, President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Russell Vought, one of the masterminds of Project 2025’s sweeping vision of Christian Nationalist governance, as his nominee for Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). OMB, which Vought worked for in the prior Trump administration and led in 2020, is the largest executive branch office and is responsible for creating its annual budget. The nomination represents a stark departure from Trump’s earlier claims of ignorance about Project 2025, signaling an overt embrace of its authoritarian framework, which includes plans for military deployment against domestic unrest and unprecedented executive control. Vought’s transformation from a traditional fiscal conservative a driving force behind Project 2025 reflects a broader shift in far-right politics, moving from limited-government ideals to advocacy for using state power to advance Christian Nationalist goals and founding his own organization, the “Woke and Weaponized” Center for Renewing America, a Project 2025 sponsor.
Through his roles as Republican platform committee policy director and a Project 2025 leader, Vought aims to reshape American governance around “Judeo-Christian worldview value systems,” recently telling disgraced former Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the concept of independent agencies should be eliminated and that the president must “take control of the executive branch.”
In His Own Words:
“It is a commitment to an institutional separation between church and state, but not the separation of Christianity from its influence on government and society.”
— Newsweek essay, 2021.
“We are living in a post-Constitutional time.”
— A 2022 essay by Russell Vought in The American Mind, a publication of Project 2025 supporter the Claremont Foundation.
“I’m proud to work with @William_E_Wolfe on scoping out a sound Christian Nationalism.”
— Twitter/X post, January 2023. William Wolf claims Democrats worship “demon gods” Moloch and Baphomet.
“The decision to defend the rule of law necessitates the separation of families.”
— American Moment conference speech on immigration, September 2023.
“We’re not going to save our country without a little confrontation.”
— On Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, June 2024.
“I want to make sure that we can say, ‘We’re a Christian nation.’ And my viewpoint is mostly that I would probably be ‘Christian nationism.’ That’s pretty close to Christian nationalism because I also believe in nationalism.”
— To undercover reporters from the Centre for Climate Reporting, August 2024.
“At the national level, we will intricately manage that momentum. You know, ‘What is the specific bill that we want? What’s the regulation?’ At the state level, we will zoom in where [it’s] strategic.”
— Ibid.
“Our first year, our biggest priority was critical race theory… we were the ones that got politicians comfortable with talking about it from a race standpoint.”
— Ibid.
“President Trump will want to spend literally zero amount of time thinking or contemplating what a transition will look like. It’s not how he thinks. We create battle plans and then we start to implement them ourselves.”
— Ibid.
“He’s [Trump] been at our organization [Project 2025], he’s raised money for our organization, he’s blessed it.”
— Ibid.
“The Director must view his job as the best, most comprehensive approximation of the President’s mind… [OMB] is a President’s air-traffic control system.”
— Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, page 45.
“We have to solve the woke and the weaponized bureaucracy and have the president take control of the executive branch… the whole notion of an independent agency should be thrown out.”
— Interview with Tucker Carlson, November 2024.
“Western civilization does not work without the underpinnings of a Judeo-Christian worldview. That is the bedrock for all of our laws.”
— Russell Vought in a video posted by his Center for Renewing America in April 2024.
An Architect for Authoritarianism
Russell Vought never wanted to hide his key role in Project 2025, as if he knew all along that Donald Trump would put Project 2025’s highly controversial blueprint into action despite campaign promises to the contrary. “There is no think tank, no policy organization, no battle plan creator other than us for the world view that I think Donald Trump has,” Russell Vought told undercover reporters in a Washington D.C. hotel suite in July 2024. Now, as Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the man behind those secretly recorded words stands poised to implement his vision. The meeting, orchestrated by activists posing as potential donors from a wealthy New Mexico family, revealed Vought’s confidence that Project 2025’s “350 different documents” of regulations and plans would be “plugged right in” to a second Trump term — despite the former president’s public attempts to distance himself from the authoritarian playbook.
Vought’s path to becoming the intellectual architect of Trump’s second term reflects broader shifts within American conservatism. With Vought’s leading role in the push to adopt Project 2025’s policies, including stealthily drafting a secret “180-Day Transition Playbook” to guide Trump from day one, he has emerged as a leading voice advocating the remake of government to advance Christian Nationalism.
The Making of a Movement Conservative
Vought’s conservative credentials run deep. Starting as a staffer for Senator Phil Gramm (R-Texas) and then-Representative Mike Pence (R-Ind.), he built his reputation as a fiscal purist at the House Republican Study Committee and the Heritage Foundation’s political arm, Heritage Action for America, where he was vice president. Vought’s early career reflected a synthesis of conservatism and free-market fundamentalism that defined trickle-down Reaganomics. But at that time, slashing government programs and lowering taxes for the rich was an ideal, not an action he was in a position to enact.
But it was during his tenure as Trump’s OMB director, empowered by Trump’s reckless policies, that Vought began pushing institutional boundaries. When Congress refused to fund the border wall, his office redirected billions from Pentagon accounts. During Trump’s first impeachment, he defended freezing Ukraine aid — actions the Government Accountability Office later concluded violated federal law, though Vought disputed this finding.
Project 2025: From Shadow Plan to Official Policy
In the secretly recorded meeting, Vought spoke openly about the behind-the-scenes work and Project 2025’s plans to block funding for Planned Parenthood, cut down on government agencies’ autonomy, and work to “rehabilitate Christian Nationalism.” The scope of these preparations extends far beyond traditional policy proposals and budget oversight. In Project 2025’s materials, Vought argues that “The Director must view his job as the best, most comprehensive approximation of the President’s mind,” positioning OMB to be “involved in all aspects of the White House policy process” and become “powerful enough to override implementing agencies’ bureaucracies.”
Vought interviewed by Tucker Carlson, November 18, 2024.
Expanding Executive Power
In recent appearances, Vought has been increasingly explicit about his plans. On Tucker Carlson’s show, he declared: “We have to solve the woke in the weaponized bureaucracy and have the president take control of the executive branch… The president has to move executively as fast and as aggressively as possible with a radical constitutional perspective to be able to dismantle that bureaucracy in their power centers.”
This vision includes challenging post-Watergate norms about agency independence. Vought believes there is no law dictating that there are independent agencies within the federal government, arguing that the longstanding norm of Justice Department independence should be “thrown out” and that all civil servants work for Trump, to whom their undivided loyalty must lie. Those who refuse to pledge allegiance to Trump will be fired.
The Christian Nationalist Framework
Through his Center for Renewing America, established the day of Biden’s inauguration, Vought promotes what he terms “radical constitutionalism,” while advocating for explicit Christian influence in governance. In a 2022 Newsweek essay entitled “Is There Anything Actually Wrong With ‘Christian Nationalism?’” He argued for “an institutional separation between church and state, but not the separation of Christianity from its influence on government and society.”
This Christian Nationalist framework shapes his approach across policy domains. At a 2023 American Moment conference, he defended the Trump administration’s family separation policy as necessary to “defend the rule of law” and advocated for what he calls a “Christian immigration ethic,” which apparently has nothing to do with keeping families whole.
The Project 2025 Network
The gap between Trump’s public stance and private actions is telling. While Trump claimed in July he had “nothing to do” with Project 2025, Vought told the undercover reporters that Trump had visited and raised money for Project 2025, “blessed it” and been “very supportive of what we do.” The appointment of at least six Project 2025 contributors to key administration roles appears to confirm Vought’s private assertions.
These appointments include Project 2025 co-authors Tom Homan as border czar and Brendan Carr to head the Federal Communications Commission, and Project 2025 contributors John Ratcliffe to lead the CIA and Pete Hoekstra as ambassador to Canada. Some appointments, like Homan’s, don’t require Senate confirmation, allowing immediate implementation of Project 2025’s agenda. Homan recently announced plans to cut federal funding to states that don’t cooperate with mass deportation efforts, stating he could guarantee Trump would implement such measures.
Challenges and Contradictions
- The 922-page Project 2025 blueprint includes drastic proposals for everything from illegalizing pornography, to rejecting any gender identity beyond biological sex, and eliminating the U.S. Department of Education.
- Despite growing public backlash against these more extreme elements, Vought, who authored chapter 2, entitled “Executive Office of the President of the United States,” described himself to the undercover reporters as someone who “has the president’s trust.”
- During his OMB tenure under Trump, the national debt increased by $1 trillion in his first year and $4 trillion in his second, though much of this stemmed from bipartisan COVID-19 response spending that Trump approved over fiscal hawks’ objections.
The Road Ahead
If confirmed, Vought’s immediate priorities are expected to include working with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy on government efficiency initiatives and implementing plans to replace tens of thousands of federal workers with political appointees. His influence extends to Congress, where he recently orchestrated House Republican resistance to the 2023 debt ceiling deal.
For Vought, such institutional changes appear central to what he sees as an existential mission. In his Project 2025 chapter, he wrote that “America cannot be saved unless the current grip of woke and weaponized government is broken. That is the central and immediate threat facing the country — the one that all our statesmen must rise tall to vanquish. The battle cannot wait.”
With hundreds of prepared regulations still closely held and a clear mandate from Trump to “dismantle the Deep State,” Vought’s confirmation would signal the implementation of Project 2025’s vision for transforming federal power through expanded executive authority, Christian Nationalist principles, and aggressive bureaucratic reform.
“We’re not going to save our country without a little confrontation,” he presciently declared on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast in June. That confrontation — whether through institutional reform, cultural warfare, or both — will define American governance for years to come.
