Russell Vought’s Silent, Pernicious Plans for the Administrative State
Photo Credit: The White House
During 2025, selected writers for the Davis Political Review will contribute to a special series under the unified theme Grave New World. This collection will examine key figures in the second Trump administration’s cabinet and explore their potential impact.
At the beginning of the 2nd Trump administration, the president announced that Russel Vought, the previous director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) during the 1st administration, would resume his post.
His appointment was one that perhaps didn’t garner as much attention as more controversial ones like Tulsi Gabbard for the role of Director of National Intelligence, Pete Hegseth’s brief, sunsetting tenure as Secretary of Defense, and the attempted nomination of Florida ex-congressman Matt Gaetz as Attorney General after a congressional report was released earlier this year concluding that Gaetz likely committed, among other acts, statutory rape and illicit drug consumption.
But who is Russel Vought, exactly? Vought was born as the youngest of six children in a religiously conservative family. Vought went on to attend Wheaton College, a private, evangelical university in suburban Chicago, graduating in 1998. After graduating from Wheaton College with his Bachelor’s, he went on to obtain his law degree from the George Washington University Law School. Vought has been a fairly quiet person for most of his career, having served mostly as policy directors and legislative assistants for various offices on Capitol Hill, and left to join Heritage Action, a sister organization to the infamous Heritage Foundation, which we’ll get into later.
This time around, it seems as though Vought has even more power than before. Previously, Vought was solely assigned with managing the OMB and it’s duty of evaluating the performance of federal agencies, as well as administering the federal budget. As of late, Vought has also assumed the position of the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a federal agency spearheaded by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and established in 2011 under the Obama administration, tasked with protecting the basic rights and liberties of the American consumer. In the few months since he assumed both roles, we have seen massive layoffs targeted directly at federal employees, totalling at over 130,000 firings as of May 2025, with another 150,000 planned layoffs.
And who is facing the biggest cuts? It’s agencies that are doing their part to ensure that companies don’t scam and extort working families like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission. Agencies that ensure that the food and necessities that everyday Americans need aren’t contaminated like the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). But perhaps most notorious of all, we have seen the near complete decimation of the United States Agency for International Development, also known as USAID.
Late last year, investigative news outlet ProPublica obtained video of Russell Vought speaking at a conference of a pro-Trump think tank, where he told the audience that he wanted “the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.”
The cuts to USAID have been particularly disastrous, with the main office in Washington, D.C. having to close down in response to sudden budget cuts back in February. Programs that USAID financed abroad are now entirely gone, leaving millions of people abroad to suffer and as a result, millions will die without the help of USAID.
Make no mistake, these budget cuts firings aren’t being done out of any legitimate concerns over “waste, fraud, and abuse”. They’re a part of Russel Vought’s plan to completely slice and dice the American government and sell it for parts to the billionaire class. This was the whole plan. And Russell Vought has not been shy at all to make this known, as we’ve seen.
Recently, the Wall Street Journal reported that Russell Vought had been named the new director of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an initiative set up and chaired by MAGA sycophants Elon Musk and for a hot second, far-right Republican donor, billionaire, and failed 2024 Republican candidate for president, Vivek Ramaswamy. It should be noted that DOGE is not an actual governmental department created by an act of congress.
It should be incumbent upon us to realize that Russell Vought’s secretive, borderline evil plans will leave us weaker as a nation. When the elites finally get their grubby, depraved hands on what little is left of our already weak and fragile welfare state, we’ll be left in an even worse position than before. Investors will become hesitant to pour money into our economy, tourism will shoot down, investment, research and development projects being canceled will lead to American universities being forced to dismiss thousands of graduate students, faculty, and other staff, and raise tuition even further. The rest of the world will be even more distrustful of us than they already are. And if given the chance
The American people are waking up to reality, standing up, and fighting back against the repressive oligarchy that has inserted itself into every crevice of our administrative state and society. Over the past few weeks, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-V.T.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) have embarked on a tour dubbed the “Fight Oligarchy” tour, holding rallies across the country in congressional districts held by Republicans, including a nearby rally in Folsom last month (that I unfortunately couldn’t get into, because I kid you not, the line was three miles long) with thousands on attendance. I’ll admit, it’s become progressively harder to hold out hope for the future of our nation, but this is one of those things that gives me just that.
Will that energy turn into substantive political action and electoral results? We may never know. That all depends on you, the person reading this, to stand up and fight back.