Mandate for a Sinking Ship

Vought contributed one of the twenty chapters of the Mandate for Leadership, Project 2025’s policy guidebook for the next GOP administration. If Project 2025 is a game plan for remaking the country in the Trump movement’s image, Vought’s specific contribution is a detailed set of instructions for using the powers of the presidency to seize total control of a sprawling federal bureaucracy run by career civil servants and dominated by what he calls an “imperial Congress.”

Vought’s central, seemingly paradoxical goal is to expand the size of the presidency to ultimately shrink the size of the federal government. To do so, Vought wrote, the president must “bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will” while “us[ing] the bureaucratic machine to send power away from Washington and back to America’s families, faith communities, local governments, and states,” all of which the president has the “levers” to do once in office.

“Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies,” Vought more explicitly said last year, unaware he was being filmed. “And we are working doggedly on that, whether it’s destroying their — agencies’ notion of independence, that they’re independent from the president.”

Critical to this goal is the OMB that Vought was nominated to head, which he likens to the president’s “air-traffic control system,” letting him ensure “all policy initiatives are flying in sync” and to decide “to let planes take off and, at times, ground planes that are flying off course.” As he explained in one interview, “every dollar decision goes through OMB, but every regulatory decision goes through OMB,” making it central to ensuring the president’s agenda is actually executed.

“The [OMB] director must view his job as the best, most comprehensive approximation of the President’s mind,” wrote Vought, and so “ensure that OMB has sufficient visibility into the deep caverns of agency decision-making.”

For Trump’s purposes, that means making sure power is put as much as possible in the hands of political appointees plucked from Trump’s movement, and taken out of the hands of career civil servants who act on “the wishes of the sprawling ‘good government’ management community in and outside of government.”

In Vought’s vision, that would involve taking the six massive offices within OMB that oversee separate policy areas, whether health, education, or national security, and not just displacing the “careerists” who normally run them by putting Trump loyalists in charge instead, but also dividing them into many smaller policy subareas, with a proliferation of many more loyalist appointees to run those, too.

From there, those politically appointed loyalists can make the “many granular but critical policy decisions” that would normally be left up to career officials who have developed expertise on a subject area over many years of work. Among other things, Vought suggests having political appointees “personally sign” apportionments — or the latest installments of federal funding that agencies have to request from OMB, typically as a matter of course — and use that to put restrictions on how they spend funding that would “ensure consistency with the President’s agenda.”

Vought suggests a similar overall vision for the “Management” side of OMB, which he argues has traditionally and wrongly not been made a priority. There, Trump loyalists can set policies for the federal workforce and for government contractors that will “push back against woke policies in corporate America,” get rid of supposed waste, and roll back regulations on corporate power.

That last one is a particular priority for Vought, who outlines various strategies for “reining in the regulatory state.” One is to boost funding for the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), a subagency of the OMB that is tasked by a still-on-the-books Bill Clinton executive order to review “significant” regulations, a review that, Vought writes, “often leads to fewer regulatory burdens” and so “tends to pay large dividends.”

But Vought also suggests other, non-OMB-centered strategies for the president to advance this goal, like reviving Trump’s spate of deregulatory executive orders, “maximiz[ing] the utility” of the Congressional Review Act that Clinton enacted to let Congress overturn some federal rules, or working with Congress to pass a variety of legislation. Vought specifically points to a set of Republican bills that throw as many delays and roadblocks in the way of regulators trying to check corporate actors. Like the REINS Act, which would force Congress to approve any major rule issued by agencies within seventy days before it could take effect. Or the Regulatory Accountability Act, which ties regulators in layers of red tape, including by making the cost to industry one of the factors that go into setting health standards.

There are other ideas Vought outlines — for instance, having the president reinstate “pay-as-you-go” at the administrative level, an austerity measure historically favored by neoliberal Democrats like Nancy Pelosi that mandates federal agencies make spending cuts to offset any move they make that increases spending. He also lays out a similar overall strategy for other offices within the executive branch, like the National Economic and Security Councils, to wrench control of the federal bureaucracy and bend them to Trump’s agenda.

But given how central the OMB is to that agenda succeeding, and that Vought has been nominated to lead it, it’s his plans for the OMB that are arguably most important.

The Budget From Hell

A big part of that is OMB’s central role in developing and enforcing the president’s budget.

The federal budget, Vought writes, is “a powerful mechanism for setting and enforcing public policy at federal agencies” — for example, by putting in place detailed spending plans for each agency. He suggests having the OMB, which puts together the budget proposal the president ends up sending Congress to actually write, set a “fiscal goal” for the president that would drastically rein in spending.

As it happens, the CRA, Vought’s think tank, put out its own 2023 budget proposal last year that gives us a good idea of what this would actually mean in practice. To slash government debt and balance the budget over the course of a decade, Vought’s mock budget takes the same approach tried countless times by the same Republican establishment Trump claimed to be running to defeat: by taking an industrial lawnmower to government programs working Americans depend on, while lavishing tax cuts on the rich and taxpayer dollars on the military-industrial complex.

Vought’s budget is a broad assault on workers and the poor, principally by attacking the Medicaid program, including through cuts to the program worth $2 trillion over a decade and repealing Barack Obama’s expansion of the program, which would throw eighteen million people off their health insurance. This is alongside its plan to cut hundreds of billions more dollars from Obamacare and food stamps, deny health care to veterans, impose onerous work requirements on Americans getting government help, and end the Section 8 vouchers that help low-income families get into affordable housing, as well as hobbling federal departments that are disliked by the GOP establishment — like Education, Labor, and State  — by starving them of funding.

Not everyone would feel the pain in Vought’s ideal world, though. His budget revolves around making permanent Trump’s tax cuts for the rich, which added trillions to the deficit to give an average $60,000 tax cut to households in the top 1 percent, while upping funding for the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security.

The fact that Vought’s mock budget spares the major entitlement programs of Medicare and Social Security, and that Trump has promised not to touch either program, shouldn’t put anyone at ease. Despite telling the Heritage Foundation in 2023 that conservatives “should be about the bureaucracy crushing” and that “for too long we have fought about social security and Medicare,” Vought made clear the plan was to eventually go after those programs, too, once the Trump movement had built up the political capital and the public had been softened up for it.

“We do not touch the benefits of Social Security and Medicare, not because they are not actuality unsound [sic], and they are, but because I actually want to get to the point where we someday get to reform those because the American people have come along,” Vought explained.

Bigger Than the Budget

This represents just a small part of the overall political transformation Vought has envisioned, and which he wants to aggressively use expanded presidential power to create.

CRA’s website is explicit about seeing its mission as “to renew a consensus of America as a nation under God”; more candidly, Vought told a pair of undercover reporters, “you have to rehabilitate Christian nationalism.” Vought has publicly defended the concept, and it was reportedly on a list of bullet-pointed second Trump term priorities that the think tank was working on during the election campaign.

He calls the Department of Education “the Department of Critical Race Theory [CRT],” voicing traditional Republican complaints about the teaching of history that are now reframed in terms of “wokeness” and CRT, and even suggested it should be abolished. “I do not know why we need a Department of Education,” he told a C-Span caller; “education should be [at] a local level and parents should be intimately involved.”)

Other priorities laid out in his think tank’s annual report and elsewhere include Trump’s mass deportation program and deploying the military at the border, blocking funding for Planned Parenthood, ending military aid to Ukraine, banning online pornography, and making cuts to the FBI’s intelligence and counterintelligence divisions to discourage its supposed targeting of conservatives (while giving it more money for criminal investigations).

He is also prepared for any popular outrage at these moves. It was Vought who was at the center of the headline-grabbing revelation last year that Trump is planning to potentially sicc the military on Americans, bragging behind closed doors that he had drafted the legal justifications for troops to put down protesters on US streets.

Get Out the Vought

Vought’s plan for the second Trump presidency is little different from the neoliberal program pushed for decades in Washington by Republicans and Democrats: of cutting taxes for the wealthy and eliminating regulations on corporate power, while slashing spending on government programs the rest of the country depends on. What sets it apart is the scale and ambition with which he plans to carry this out.

Given the GOP’s Senate majority, it is more than likely Vought will be confirmed as OMB director and soon set about trying to realize this vision. But even if he isn’t, it’s more than likely Vought will still be shaping Trump’s presidency from the outside.

“All of it will be designed for a theory of the case that the president, if a battle plan is out there that will do what he wants, there are people like me that have his trust that will be able to give it to him in whatever position we’re at,” he said on a hidden camera. “I could be at Center for Renewing America, but the relationships will be there.”