Meet Russ Vought, Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Oh, He's Nuts.
The OMB director who wants to put federal workers "in trauma" isn't hiding his theocratic agenda—he's boasting about it. Meet the true believer with his hands on America's purse strings.
There’s something chilling about a man who speaks of putting federal workers “in trauma” with the beatific smile of someone describing a church potluck. Meet Russell Vought, 49, Trump’s newly reanointed Director of the Office of Management and Budget, a position that sounds bureaucratically soporific but is, in Vought’s capable hands, the equivalent of handing Torquemada the keys to the Treasury.
Vought isn’t your garden-variety Washington operative—those slick-haired mercenaries who’d peddle tax policy for the Heritage Foundation one day and pivot to cannabis lobbying the next if the retainer was right. No, Vought is that far more dangerous specimen: the true believer. He’s a man who accepted Jesus as his savior at age four (one imagines him in footie pajamas, already drafting position papers on original sin) and has spent the subsequent 45 years on a mission to ensure that America returns to what he imagines was its prelapsarian Christian nationalist glory.
The son of a Marine Corps veteran electrician and an elementary school teacher from Trumbull, Connecticut, Vought has somehow managed to cloak working-class credentials around an ideology that would make Marie Antoinette blush. He wants to gut Medicaid, eviscerate the Affordable Care Act, and slash social programs with the fervor of an Old Testament prophet smiting the wicked—all while positioning himself as a champion of “regular Americans.” It’s a neat trick, rather like someone proposing to help you lose weight by cutting off your legs.
Vought’s trajectory reads like a case study in how American evangelical institutions function as finishing schools for theocratic ambition. Wheaton College in Illinois—Billy Graham’s alma mater, naturally—gave him his undergraduate polish in 1998. Then came George Washington University Law School, because every crusader needs to know which constitutional loopholes to exploit. By the time he landed on Capitol Hill as a legislative assistant to Senator Phil Gramm, he’d already perfected the art of wrapping radical fiscal conservatism in the flag and the cross.
Former Representative Jeb Hensarling, who hired Vought in 2003, gushed about his “work ethic, tenacity, intellect.” What Hensarling perhaps didn’t anticipate was that Vought would apply all that impressive tenacity toward the goal of essentially making the federal government so dysfunctional that Americans would beg for it to be dismantled. Vought rose through the Republican policy apparatus with methodical precision—policy director for the House Republican Conference under Mike Pence, executive director of the Republican Study Committee, seven years at Heritage Action. By the time Trump came calling in 2017, Vought had spent two decades in the conservative trenches, and he was ready.
When Trump tapped Vought as Deputy OMB Director in 2017, the Senate confirmation hearing provided an early glimpse of the man’s worldview. Bernie Sanders had the temerity to question Vought about his written statement that “Muslims do not simply have a deficient theology. They do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ his Son, and they stand condemned.”
Vought and his defenders howled about religious persecution, clutching their pearls over the Constitutional prohibition on religious tests for office. But here’s the thing: no one was questioning his right to believe whatever theological nonsense he fancied. The question was whether someone who believes 1.8 billion people are “condemned” should be making decisions about their federal funding. The vote was 50-49, with Mike Pence breaking the tie. Welcome to Washington, where your contempt for religious pluralism is a feature, not a bug.
By July 2020, he was confirmed as full OMB director—just in time to play a supporting role in Trump’s first impeachment drama. When Congress subpoenaed him to testify about the Ukraine aid freeze, Vought simply declined to show up. Constitutional crisis? More like an inconvenient scheduling conflict. His tenure was marked by banning federal diversity training and a general contempt for the career civil servants who actually know how to make government function.
Here’s where it gets fascinating. Most defeated administration officials slink off to corporate sinecures. Vought saw Trump’s loss as divine redirection. He’s said that after Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020, “God had other plans.” He founded the Center for Renewing America, a name inspired by the New Testament’s Letter to the Romans—”Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.” Vought appears to have read it as a mandate to reshape the federal government in his own image.
The Center became the intellectual nerve center for everything frightening about a second Trump term. Its mission? To “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God”—with Vought’s very particular God in mind. Not the God of the Sermon on the Mount with all that tedious talk about the poor and the meek. More the God of vengeance who’d presumably approve of putting bureaucrats “in trauma.”
In June 2021, the advocacy arm released a guide to “combatting critical race theory”. Never mind that most parents couldn’t define critical race theory if their lives depended on it—that was rather the point. CRT could mean anything that made white suburban parents uncomfortable: discussions of slavery’s legacy, acknowledgment of systemic racism, Black authors on reading lists.
And then there’s Project 2025, that 920-page manifesto that reads like a how-to manual for authoritarian takeover with a Christian gloss. Vought was the lead architect, the maestro conducting this symphony of democratic destruction. The project proposes reclassifying tens of thousands of merit-based civil servants as political appointees—the infamous Schedule F—so they can be fired and replaced with Trump loyalists. Civil service protections, built up over a century? Vought sees them as inconvenient obstacles.
In what must be considered an Oscar-worthy performance of villainy, Vought sat down in August 2024 with what he thought were potential donors. They were actually undercover journalists from the Centre for Climate Reporting, and Vought sang like a canary dosed with sodium pentothal.
“I want to make sure that we can say, ‘We’re a Christian nation,’” he told them. “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”. The word salad is almost endearing—like watching someone try to rebrand fascism as “freedom patriotism.” He wanted to “rehabilitate Christian nationalism,” as if pluralistic democracy just needed better PR.
More damningly, Vought revealed the cynical machinery behind the conservative movement’s culture war. He explained that much of their work is “structured around the exploitation of immediate culture-war issues in order to mask the larger, long-term goals of the party, citing the creation of a right-wing panic around critical race theory and a migrant invasion as examples”. “Our first year, our biggest priority was critical race theory. Then the invasion was our strategy for [the] second year.”
It’s governance as three-card monte: keep them focused on drag queen story hours while you dismantle the regulatory state, gut social programs, and consolidate authoritarian power.
When Trump nominated Vought for a second tour in November 2024, Democrats understood exactly what was coming. During confirmation hearings, Vought refused to commit to spending money appropriated by Congress. The Senate Budget Committee approved his nomination in an 11–0 vote, with all 9 Democrats and 1 Independent boycotting due to the federal spending freeze. The Senate confirmed him 53-47 on February 6, 2025, straight party-line. Every single Republican senator looked at this man and said, “Yes, this is fine.”
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas swore him in. Of course it was Clarence Thomas.
Within weeks, Vought announced billions in frozen funding, targeting Democratic states. He canceled $8 billion in energy projects and promised to cancel $18 billion in infrastructure funding to New York City, targeting the home state of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries. The Department of Transportation mentioned Schumer and Jeffries by name, as if federal infrastructure should be conducted like a mob protection racket.
The current government shutdown has given Vought exactly the crisis Republican Senator Mike Lee said he’s been “dreaming about this moment, preparing for this moment since puberty”. Trump crowed about meeting with “Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame” to determine which “Democrat Agencies” to eliminate.
Career OMB employees began resigning before Vought’s confirmation. Vought stated that he wanted to put the federal workforce “in trauma” and not go to work “because they are increasingly viewed as the villains”. Federal workers who’ve dedicated careers to public service are now the enemy, obstacles to be removed.
In speeches, Vought has promised to use the OMB to defund government programs and agencies that don’t align with Trump, who is “God’s gift” to America and was elected to restore the nation’s Christian calling “as a nation under God”. Trump—the thrice-married, porn-star-paying, grab-them-by-the-pussy Trump—as God’s anointed instrument. The cognitive dissonance would be funny if it weren’t so terrifying.
During a “Theology of American Statecraft” speech, he laid out the “Christian Case for Immigration Restriction,” arguing for family separation, mass deportation, and curtailing legal immigration—because nothing says “What Would Jesus Do?” quite like ripping children from their parents at the border.
In October 2024, ProPublica reported on speeches where Vought’s proposals included plans to reshape government by using military force against protesters if deemed necessary. Military force against protesters. Against American citizens exercising their First Amendment rights.
On June 25, 2025, Vought told a Senate committee that PEPFAR, the global anti-AIDS initiative, had spent $9.3 million funding abortions and “gender analysis” in Russia, a claim which The New York Times found to be false. The truth is fungible when you’re doing God’s work. PEPFAR, responsible for saving millions of lives in Africa, has to be destroyed because it might be connected to reproductive healthcare in ways that offend Vought’s sensibilities.
Vought divorced his wife Mary Grace in 2023; they have two daughters. His estimated net worth of $10 million insulates him from the consequences of his own policies. When Medicaid gets slashed, Vought’s daughters won’t be affected. There’s something Dickensian about it: the true believer who would slash programs for the poor while accumulating wealth, the family-values warrior whose own marriage couldn’t survive his political ambitions.
What makes Vought particularly dangerous isn’t just his ideology—Washington is lousy with ideologues. It’s the absolutist certainty combined with actual power to implement his vision. He’s doing all of this in plain sight, explaining his plans in speeches, writing them down in manifestos, boasting to supposed donors. The undercover recordings didn’t reveal hidden agenda—they revealed his public statements and private beliefs are identical.
And still he was confirmed 53-47. They knew about Project 2025. They knew about his Christian nationalism. They knew about his contempt for civil servants and his plans to traumatize federal workers. They knew all of it, and they confirmed him anyway.
Vought represents something genuinely new in American politics, or perhaps something very old that we’d convinced ourselves we’d outgrown: the fusion of theocratic ambition with authoritarian methodology, all wrapped in the flag and carrying a very large cross. Previous generations of religious conservatives at least paid lip service to democratic norms. Vought and his ilk have moved past that quaint notion. They don’t want to persuade. They want to dominate.
The Office of Management and Budget in Vought’s hands becomes a weapon. Every budget is a moral document, every funding decision a chance to reward friends and punish enemies. It’s government as holy war, policy as theology, and democracy as an obstacle to be overcome.
Russell Vought is 49 years old. He could be in position to inflict his vision on America for decades to come. Unlike Trump, who’s a chaos agent with the attention span of a gnat, Vought is relatively young, methodical, and deeply committed to a long-term project. He’s not governing for headlines. He’s building what he sees as the kingdom of God on earth, one budget cut at a time.
He spent four years planning for this moment, building his network, drafting his documents, preparing his army of loyalists. He read the room correctly. He understood that the old guardrails were gone, that the Republican Party had been so thoroughly transformed that someone like him could not only be nominated but confirmed by every single Republican senator.
And now he’s got his hands on the levers of power. The rest of us are left to watch as Vought pursues his divine mission, one frozen appropriation at a time, one traumatized federal worker at a time, one democratic norm violated at a time. It’s not a coup in the traditional sense—there are no tanks in the streets. It’s something more insidious: the slow-motion transformation of American government from a democratic republic into something else entirely, something that wears the trappings of democracy while hollowing out its substance.
Welcome to Russell Vought’s America. The rest of us are just living in it.
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