A Culture of Spending Cuts

You can see the embryo of what is currently unfolding decades earlier during the George Bush years, when Vought was a Hill staffer working on budget policy. Vought was born in Trumbull, Connecticut, the youngest of seven children of an electrician and a teacher. He would later credit the political strategy he’s devised for Trump to this working-class background.

“I’m the son of union workers, and so I process everything politically from the diner,” he has said.

Rather than starting out by going after big-ticket items that working Americans had paid into for decades like Social Security, Vought explained, the first targets ought to be the things funded by the US government that seem most divorced from their day-to-day concerns, like “the Bob Dylan statute in Mozambique or the LGBT activist in Senegal.” That way, “you build a culture of spending cuts,” so that eventually “you will get to a point where you can actually deal with these big immovable spending [sic],” meaning cuts to Medicare and Social Security.

But Vought had to work his way up to this epiphany. After graduating in 1998 with a history and political science degree from the evangelical Christian school of Wheaton College, Vought got a job in Washington as a budget staffer for Texas senator Phil Gramm, a deficit hawk and champion of deregulation. Working for Gramm, a master of Senate procedure, was “a seminal experience” for Vought.

Gramm — of whom one fellow lawmaker once said “you could wipe out the social programs entirely, and that would be just fine with Phil” — was arguably best known for two things. One happened long before Vought came on the scene, when in 1985 Gramm authored a deficit reduction bill that relied entirely on severe spending cuts to plug the hole left by Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts, including to entitlements. The other came eight months into Vought’s time in his office, when Clinton signed into law the Wall Street deregulation Gramm had authored, which nine years later helped produce the 2008 financial crash. (Vought wasn’t involved in writing the legislation).

“He said, ‘If you do budget, you do everything,’” Vought later recalled about Gramm. “And so I really took that to the heart.”

For Vought, “everything” meant one thing above all: taking apart the modern system of US government created by the New Deal as a response to the economic crises of the twentieth century, a goal he spent the next twelve years trying to realize by shaping budget policy for members of Congress as radical as he was.

“I always loved working for conservatives,” Vought later said. “I never worked for folks that were willing to compromise on their principles. . . . [Their] policies were really aimed at protecting freedom and limiting the size and scope of the federal government.”

Vought put it more explicitly in his chapter of the Project 2025 policy guidebook. The goal is to “reduce [the federal government’s] size and scope back to something resembling the original constitutional intent,” aimed at “dismantling” the modern administrative state that has empowered workers to organize for better pay and working conditions and led to the disappearance of chemicals that once riddled Americans with cancers, among other things.

Vought was simply ideologically hostile to such progress. Years later, he would approvingly quote a criticism of the GOP establishment from Federalist cofounder Ben Domenech, who charged that it “dislikes bad government, and it seeks to replace it with good government, not realizing that either way ends up slowly but surely with big government” — forgetting that “big government is always, always, bad government.”

Vought eventually landed in the office of another Texas deficit hawk, Representative Jeb Hensarling, who had also served as an aide to Gramm and considered him his mentor. Vought’s major achievement there was producing Hensarling’s Family Budget Protection Act (FBPA), which took drastic measures to attack government outlays, including caps on entitlement spending, a commission rooting out waste and fraud whose recommendations Congress would vote up or down, and a provision that made all safety net programs that Americans didn’t pay into automatically face possible elimination.

You don’t have to strain to see echoes of current Trump policy in some of these proposals.

The FBPA never became law, but Vought’s placement in Hensarling’s office gave him more opportunities to push his budget-cutting philosophy on the national stage. When Hensarling became chairman of the Budget Task Force at the Republican Study Committee (RSC) in 2004, he brought his young policy director along.

Originally formed in 1973 to arrest what conservatives disdained as the GOP’s pro-government drift since the New Deal, the RSC had seen its influence drastically expand by the time Vought came on board, having grown to include more than ninety, then soon more than one hundred, members of Congress.

“Its job is to push Leadership as far to the right as is possible and flat out oppose it when necessary,” Vought later explained.

With Vought as its budget policy director, the RSC agitated for a budgetary vision that looks eerily familiar today. There was 2005’s “Operation Offset,” where the RSC and Hensarling in particular tried to condition Hurricane Katrina aid on harsh spending cuts to more than one hundred different federal programs. The targets included everything from retirement benefits for federal workers, high-speed rail, and foreign aid (including anti-AIDS programs and USAID) to the federal bureaucracy, Medicare and Medicaid, and whole swaths of the federal government like the CDC, NASA, and the Education and Treasury Departments.

Vought’s fingerprints were all over the RSC’s alternative balanced budget the following year, modeled on the GOP’s famously austere 1995 budget written by another future Trump rival, John Kasich. Now 150 programs would be on the chopping block, containing many of the same targets, including hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid and severe cuts to the Departments of Education, Energy, and Commerce. They were “so restructured that the case could be made that under this budget those agencies would be, for practical purposes, abolished,” Heritage Foundation cofounder Paul Weyrich gushed at the time.

The RSC backed other measures in its war on spending. One was a line-item veto, which would let the president effectively edit out whatever parts of spending bills he didn’t like. Another was a standalone “sunset” bill that mirrored Vought’s FBPA, where every year a commission would recommend abolishing whole agencies and programs, which Congress would have to vote up and down as a package after no more than ten hours’ debate.

Under Vought, the RSC’s proposals had another thing in common: even as they cut social programs to the bone, they maintained the same, gargantuan level of military spending or even increased it — and most importantly, they kept Bush’s deficit-exploding tax cuts for the rich in place. By 2008, when Hensarling had ascended to RSC chair and made Vought its executive director, the group’s stimulus package that year was focused entirely on business tax breaks, including lowering the top corporate tax rate ten points.

One suspected that the aim wasn’t really scaling back federal programs in order to attack the deficit but using the deficit to eliminate federal programs. In fact, Vought has recently said as much.

“The most important thing is to go after this deep administrative state, is to defund it,” he said in an interview last year. “This is not about whether we can afford it or not, which we can’t. I would rather burn this money in a parking lot than have it go for the types of things it is going for.”

With Vought setting the agenda for Trump’s second term — first from outside government, now from inside of it — versions of many of these ideas are now official policy. Trump has already mused about conditioning disaster aid. His main legislative aim is to extend his tax cut for the rich while drastically cutting a panoply of programs, including Medicaid. He has already begun defunding the Education Department and downsizing many of the same agencies and departments the RSC once put in its crosshairs. His across-the-board pause on federal grants effectively halted entitlement programs, including Medicaid, before public outrage triggered a walk back.

Vought to a Hundred

As the subprime mortgage crisis that the deregulatory spree of Phil Gramm, his former boss, had helped enable spread through the financial system in 2008, Vought got a promotion.

The GOP’s 2006 midterm wipeout had made its most rightward flank, the RSC, its largest cohort, allowing the group’s former chief Mike Pence to win election to chair of the House Republican Conference, the third-highest ranking GOP leadership post. Pence would no longer be agitating for change from one corner of the Republican caucus but setting the agenda for the entire party — and he brought Vought on board to be the conference’s policy director.

“[Vought’s] expertise in areas such as the federal budget, appropriations, entitlements, and legislative procedure have been invaluable in promoting conservative solutions” to the nation’s ills, Pence later said.

Vought’s tenure saw Pence and the Republican Conference oppose Barack Obama’s stimulus and suggest returning some of the money, call for an across-the-board spending freeze instead, and put forward a budget alternative that was the usual package of tax cuts for high earners and entitlement “reforms” familiar to Vought’s proposals, with the only novel addition being language railing against bailouts.

“But I got to the point where if you’re going to have lasting change, you got to have an outside game,” Vought later recalled. “You could spend your whole career encouraging members to vote a certain way from the inside. But I wanted to go and share what I knew, what I learned, and tell the grassroots.”

So in summer 2010, Vought left Congress to become political director for Heritage Action for America, the newly founded lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation, the oligarch-funded think tank that for decades had served as the brain trust for incoming Republican administrations. The career change, and Vought’s own writings at the time, betrayed an impatience and a growing radicalism.

“Unfortunately, we are past the point of incrementalism,” he wrote in one December 2011 post. “We don’t have the time to fiddle at the edges. We need elected officials free of calcified political assumptions of what is possible that reveal only their own level of accommodation with the liberal welfare state.”

In blog post after blog post, Vought his vision of how to, as he put it, “bring the nation back from the brink.” It was a worldview that mirrored that of the Left he disdained and its own frustrations with a neoliberal Democratic Party: the GOP was insufficiently radical on, and had insufficiently bold solutions to, the country’s biggest problems (in his view, excessive spending and size of government); bipartisanship was a sin that usually produced bad policy; the Right had to wage war against GOP “moderates” and leadership, who were too willing to compromise and betrayed the activist base while paying lip service to their goals; and it had to pick big, public battles and resort to extreme measures to educate the public and break the political stasis.

Vought approvingly singled out this passage from Pence’s farewell letter upon leaving Congress: “While we should always seek areas of genuine common ground with the opposition, we must avoid the temptation to embrace agreement for agreement’s sake,” he wrote. “We must never compromise on our commitment to end this era of runaway federal spending, borrowing, bailouts, deficits and debt.”

Heritage Action reflected Vought’s anti-government ideology. “Our country stands at a precipice. The size and scope of the federal government is growing at unprecedented rates,” its homepage warned, as it vowed to do battle with “big-government special interests.” As Vought explained at the time, his job was “keeping all members accountable,” whether rank-and-file Republicans or GOP leadership, as it pursued this mission.

Vought helped put together Heritage Action’s Sentinel program, which took advantage of the Tea Party era’s upswing of conservative grassroots energy by providing activists with training, guidance, and talking points to pressure lawmakers. But it wasn’t just activists: from 2010 to Vought’s exit in January 2017, Heritage Action ran targeted advertising campaigns, as well as employed a group of lobbyists on Capitol Hill on whom it spent roughly $2 million, all financed by donors whose identities stayed a secret.

The scope of that lobbying was vast: dozens upon dozens of separate bills and policy issues each quarter that were often continuations of fights Vought was involved in at the RSC. Many aimed to make good on Heritage Action’s promise to “rein in spending” (a balanced budget constitutional amendment, opposing lifting the debt ceiling, imposing spending caps), “roll back government” (pushing “zero-based regulation” that makes deregulation the default, defeating and then repealing Obama’s Wall Street reform, eliminating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau), and “restore responsibility to Washington” (ending emergency unemployment benefits during the recession, cutting Medicare and Medicaid, re-upping Bush’s privatization of Social Security).

It also meant lowering taxes — by lobbying to extend Bush’s tax cuts for the rich, put in place a flat tax, or rolling back the estate tax — and playing a leading role, as Vought and Heritage Action did, in fights over killing the Export-Import Bank and using possible government shutdowns to extract harsh spending cuts. But arguably its central goal during Vought’s tenure was repealing Obamacare, which saw the organization and Vought lead a yearslong lobbying blitz paired with a grassroots campaign to that end.

On his blog, Vought argued for these policies while calling out GOP officials for being squishy on spending, lauding those Republicans he saw as truly advancing the cause, defining the “true” conservative positions on issues before Congress, and directing activists to pressure GOP officials to vote one way or another. With one foot in the proverbial diner, he tailored his anti-spending rhetoric for the post-2008 era: keeping the postal service solvent in the face of a politically engineered fiscal crunch was a “postal bailout,” while a bill at least nominally about infrastructure investment was a “highway bailout.”

Nothing but the full loaf would do for Vought. Obama’s Bowles-Simpson deficit-reduction plan — a major betrayal of Democratic voters that would have cut Social Security — was unacceptable, “a massive tax hike that will keep the federal government at a size and scope that is historically high for this country.” He excoriated Republican leadership for putting “their pre-cooked, poll-tested ‘jobs’ agenda” — the idea of using public investment to stimulate the economy and put Americans back to work, in other words — ahead of finding “ways to limit government.” He mocked their “Keynesian logic” of creating jobs in a recession by investing in highway construction, imploring House conservatives: “Please don’t be complicit in growing government.”

Was there a risk that making government sit on its hands in a crisis or even ripping away safety net programs might prove unpopular? Not in Vought’s worldview. He vehemently pushed back on the idea that Republican wipeouts in 2006 and 2008 were thanks to the party’s anti-government agenda and that it should instead deliver for the middle-class. These losses, he said, were simply evidence the GOP hadn’t been zealous enough at taking a hatchet to government and so demoralized activists and lost independent voters, who he claimed were against “Republican big government” — even after Bush’s RSC-backed attempt to partially privatize Social Security had been deeply unpopular, and Republicans had been in better standing when expanding entitlements in his first term.

All the Pieces in Place

All of this begs the question of how Vought came to hold such a powerful, central position within Trumpworld. After all, he was a loyal staffer, booster, and self-described “friend” of Mike Pence, Trump’s estranged former running mate whom the president famously thought deserved the death threats he got from his supporters, who consider him a traitor.

Trump, meanwhile, rose to power by taking positions diametrically opposed to Vought’s politics, whether on cooperation with Russia (with Vought opposing an arms control deal he charged “projects untold weakness”), passing massive infrastructure investment (“it may be the difference between Chinese communism and Soviet communism, but it’s still communism,” Vought once wrote about the idea), or a host of other “big government” positions anathema to Vought. Vought’s pre-2017 X/Twitter feed is devoid of references to Trump but chock full of praise for his establishment foes like Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Rick Perry, whom Vought endorsed for president in 2012.

What the two men had in common was a sense they were battling the establishment, even if they differed on what exactly that establishment was. For Trump, it was Republican never-Trumpers and saboteurs, and the unholy alliance of the media, Democrats, and national security agencies that teamed up to destroy him; for Vought, it was the modern federal bureaucracy, the liberal welfare state it oversaw, and the Democrats and what he called the “casually conservative,” “Just Happy to Be Here” Republicans with whom bureaucrats collaborated to prop it up. But these views were not irreconcilable.

For his part, Trump — who was once a “very pro-choice” registered Democrat before becoming the most anti-abortion Republican president in history — has always been ideologically flexible. After his 2016 victory, his campaign’s economic populism melted into yet another establishment GOP-led push to repeal Obamacare and cut taxes for the rich, as Trump looked for a win and delegated his presidency to whoever was around and willing to get him one. Trump’s unique ability to draw and grow significant working-class support in spite of this has made him a useful vehicle for a swarm of different players and interests with their own agendas.

That includes Vought, about whom one former Trump official told the Associated Press last year: “I don’t think he thinks about whether or not he likes Donald Trump as a person. I think he likes what Donald Trump represents in terms of the political forces he’s able to harness.”

Vought has comported his older edition of conservatism to its new form under Trump. His think tank, the Center for Renewing America (CRA), where he helped plot out the president’s second term, has made ideas that it’s hard to imagine Vought backing in the past — like Trump’s more dovish views on Russia and his hostility to the FBI — central to its program. At the same time, it’s maintained Vought’s social conservatism and lifelong mission to roll back the modern American state.

He has also retailored his rhetoric to this new Trump era. These days, Vought tends to talk a lot more about “the deep state,” the Washington “cartel,” and the “woke and weaponized bureaucracy” to justify the same draconian cuts as when he was fighting what he used to call “big government.” Conservatives are no longer “dealing with the 1970s liberalism” and big government of Reagan’s time, he argues, but a “more hard-edged” one “that makes every decision on the basis of climate change extremism and on the basis of woke militancy, where you’re effectively trying to divide the country into oppressors and the oppressed.”

“This was something that was an assignment Donald Trump gave me,” Vought explained in 2022 about how his think tank was founded. “He said, ‘I want to get rid of CRT [Critical Race Theory] within the federal government.’ And we wanted to make sure there was an organization to do that once he was out of office.”

But the CRA didn’t just take aim at “critical race theory.” It took a deliberately broad understanding of it and other Trump bugbears — diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; wokeness; “cultural Marxism” — to envelop the same targets Vought has been going after since he was a Congressional staffer.

Vought’s 2023 mock budget released under the CRA’s auspices was yet another tax cut for the rich on the back of trillions in pitiless cuts to Medicaid and countless other programs, all while the think tank put out videos of Vought complaining about Joe Biden’s “woke and weaponized spending” and attacking the “woke and weaponized Medicaid program.” Vought has successfully squared the circle.

“D.C. is controlled by a cartel,” he has said. “That’s what Donald Trump came to Washington to change. And he had great success, but the cartel remains, and it will remain. It will remain, passing $1.7 trillion omnibus bills that no one reads until the cartel is broken.”

The methods for doing so have arguably changed more than the rhetoric. If Vought was already done with incrementalism last decade, then today, with only “two years and one chance” left to roll things back, the steps he’s willing to take go way beyond debt ceiling brinkmanship.

As he explained in a 2022 speech, the Left has tipped the country into a “post-constitutional time,” where a sprawling regulatory state the Founders hadn’t envisioned has too much power. The Right need “to become radical constitutionalists” who will “throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed” over the decades to fight the “titanic struggle between the branches horizontally and between the states and the federal government vertically.”

As part of this “titanic struggle,” the powers Vought once sought now take a more radical form. Where the RSC once proposed passing a presidential line-item veto into law, Vought now pushes the radical “impoundment” theory that the president can simply refuse to carry out whatever spending Congress authorizes that he doesn’t like. Where he once wrote budgets eviscerating scores of programs and federal jobs if they passed, Vought now writes memos unilaterally halting all federal spending by the executive branch. Where he once crafted legislation creating a commission to recommend cuts for Congress to vote on, those cuts are now illegally made with no input from Congress by a billionaire donor’s private agency that answers only to the White House.

As Vought outlined in the Project 2025 playbook, the overarching aim is to create a presidency powerful enough to single-handedly take apart the federal government. Determined to see this through, he has been laying the groundwork for extreme measures against any opposition. Vought has called the modern Democratic Party “increasingly evil,” likening it to the rise of another “great evident public evil,” the Nazis.

He sees his budget cutting as a way to cut off “the funds that are funding the Left, funding our enemies.” And if public outrage at his plans spills out into the streets, he has legal theories in place to justify its violent repression by the military. The fact that Vought’s plans involve keeping in place the most repressive arms of government and putting loyalists in charge of them will no doubt help with this.

These plans have fortuitously coincided with the rise of a number of influential figures on the Right whose worldviews and interests overlap just enough with Vought’s: Curtis Yarvin, who believes American democracy should be replaced by a CEO-monarchy; the tech entrepreneurs who listen to him and other corporate leaders who don’t, united by their desire for lower taxes and deregulation; former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who says he’s “comrades in arms” with Vought and has long called for the “deconstruction” of the administrative state; Elon Musk, who wants to slash trillions in supposed waste and fraud to make government more efficient. Common to all of them is a desire to roll back or even outright demolish the government’s ability to protect Americans from corporate greed and economic insecurity.

And of course, there’s Donald Trump, who perfectly fits Vought’s call for “throw[ing] off the precedents and legal paradigms” to wage his “titanic struggle”: a politician who will transgress norms like no other, take radical steps, and, fueled by revenge, go to war with institutions the way Vought needs for his vision to succeed. Or as he put it last year, a president who is

the only person in history that is so uniquely positioned to return us to self-government by ending the woke and weaponized deep state. No one has ever seen it from his vantage point and is so uniquely prepared on a grand historical basis to do it.

FUBAR, ASAP

Trump is often said to have remade the Republican Party in his image and bent it to his will, which to a large extent is true. But Trump himself has also been remade, his priorities and legacy reshaped in the image of Vought’s long-standing agenda — the same one, ironically, that was once advanced by Trump’s establishment rivals a decade ago.

That agenda has little to do with why voters put Trump in the White House. This past November, Trump won voters earning both less than $50,000 and $50,000–100,000 and overwhelmingly won those who said the economy and inflation were their top priorities. A majority of Americans want him to focus on these two issues in his first hundred days and an even bigger majority don’t believe he actually is. Sure enough, once in office, Trump has sidelined the topic of still-rising prices while making Vought’s anti-government crusade his priority.

Trump’s second term will put to the test Vought’s faith that what voters really want is a radically smaller government and less spending, and there is little reason to think he will be proven right. But it may not matter. Vought’s plan has been to use Trump’s presidency to do as much damage as possible to the machinery of the state in a short window of time, crippling it to the point that it ceases to properly function and can’t be easily put back together — or justifies further dismantling.

So far, he’s on track to do it.