Just after the November election, Tucker Carlson, the fiery rightwing media personality, hosted the man who took office as Donald Trump’s budget director last Friday on his podcast.
For more than 90 minutes, Russell Vought explained to Carlson how a second Trump administration needed to overhaul and cleanse the administrative state in America. Carlson pinned the clip at the top of his X feed.
Vought’s comments foreshadowed what has unfolded in Trump’s first weeks back in the White House: a rampage through government agencies to find budget savings and eliminate any hint of liberal policy bias, testing the limits of his presidential powers.
“Bureaucracies hate the American people,” Vought said on Carlson’s show.
“Trauma” would have to be inflicted on the civil service to stop it from being “weaponised against the country”, he added.
Vought claimed divine backing for this mission.
“God has given us a particular purpose for a particular time,” he said.
While Elon Musk, the billionaire investor, and his team at the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency”, are on the front lines of Trump’s push to slash and shake up federal agencies, Vought is arguably the commander of the operation and increasingly in the spotlight.
On Saturday, a day after becoming budget director, Vought assumed an additional role as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and immediately ordered staff to halt nearly all operations at the regulator set up in the aftermath of the global financial crisis.
“The CFPB has been a woke & weaponised agency against disfavoured industries and individuals for a long time. This must end,” he tweeted on Sunday.
Democrats have been aghast. They tried and failed to block Vought’s confirmation by the US Senate last week, viewing him as the posterchild for Trump’s crusade against many federal programmes and the origin of budget cuts they fear will be deeply damaging to America both domestically and internationally.
“If the chaos of the last two weeks is any indication of what’s to come, Russell Vought will become a massive liability for Donald Trump, for Republicans, and, worst of all, for the country,” Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, said on the floor of the upper chamber of Congress last week.
Vought is a well-known figure in Washington’s budget policy circles. Before Trump’s first ascent to the presidency in 2017, he served on Capitol Hill as a senior staffer for the Republican Study Committee, a group of hardline conservative lawmakers wedded to spending reductions.
Vought was then tapped by Trump to be budget director during his first term, and after the failed re-election bid in 2020, he launched a think-tank called the Center for Renewing America to lay the policy groundwork for a possible return to office.
At the same time, he co-authored the “Project 2025” manifesto of staunchly rightwing policies that Trump distanced himself from during the 2024 campaign against Kamala Harris, but has been reflected in some of Trump’s first actions since taking office again.
In it he wrote that the next conservative president would need “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will and self-denial to use the bureaucratic machine to send power away from Washington and back to America’s families, faith communities, local governments, and states”.
On specific issues, Vought has been a staunch critic of foreign aid, including to Ukraine, a fierce opponent of reproductive rights, and an advocate for deregulation in sectors ranging from energy to finance.
He has also openly doubted whether the Federal Reserve deserved special protections as an independent agency within the civil service.
“I am not a huge fan of the Fed,” Vought said on Carlson’s show.
“I can’t look at the Constitution . . . and see that that is a place where there deserves to be an exception for. I don’t even understand who controls the Fed. Where does their authority come from? Are they speaking directly to God?,” he asked.
But Democrats are for now focusing on the impact of Vought’s expansive views of the White House’s ability to direct, redirect, or freeze the disbursement of federal dollars, and the impact of his proposed cuts on the economy as the most immediate danger.
“He’s going to make a lot of people’s lives worse. That’s where, obviously, I think I would like people to focus their attention,” says Michael Linden, a former US budget official under Joe Biden.
Meanwhile, Vought is become more of a lightning rod. Wheaton College, a Christian university in Illinois, last week issued a call for prayer and congratulations to celebrate Vought’s confirmation to the White House, since he was an alumnus of the institution. But Wheaton was quickly forced to retract the statement because of an online backlash which it described as the “political situation surrounding the appointment”.
Still, Republicans have been cheering his return to the White House without reservation, as a dogged champion of spending discipline and the most effective official to implement Trump’s second term agenda.
“You served in Washington for years. You’re going to be challenging the status quo. You’re going to be called crazy,” John Kennedy, a Republican senator from Louisiana, quipped during his confirmation hearing last month, adding a biblical reference.
“Many people also called Noah crazy, then the rains came, and all the fact-checkers died. You have to persevere,” he added.
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