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center for renewing america
Progressives Slam 'Extremist' Plans of Project 2025 Architect Tapped for Key Trump Post
Russell Vought, Trump's pick to head the White House Office of Management and Budget, was questioned by members of the Senate Homeland Security Committee during a Wednesday confirmation hearing.
Jan 15, 2025
As a U.S. Senate committee held a confirmation hearing for Russell Vought—Republican President-elect Donald Trump's pick to head the White House Office of Management and Budget—progressive critics underscored what they called the extremism of the controversial nominee, who played a key role in crafting a proposed initiative to expand executive power and purge the federal civil service.
Vought—who was questioned Wednesday by members of the Senate Homeland Security Committee—served as both acting director and director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) during Trump's first term. He currently leads the think tank Center for Renewing America, whose motto is "For God. For Country. For Community."
The defender of Christian nationalism recently co-authored the policy portion of Project 2025, which includes dramatic cuts to critical public programs, abolishing or gutting essential government agencies, a national abortion ban, and a litany of additional far-right wish list items. While Trump has tried to distance himself from the deeply unpopular proposal, at least 140 people who worked in his first administration—including six former Cabinet secretaries—have been involved with Project 2025.
Tapped to oversee an agency that plays a key role in managing civil servants, Vought was secretly recorded saying he wants government officials to be "traumatically affected" by his reforms "because they are increasingly viewed as the villains."
Debra Perlin, policy director at the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility in Washington, submitted written testimony to the Senate committee in which she warned that "should he be confirmed, it is abundantly clear that Mr. Vought intends to misuse his authority as director of OMB to harm civil servants, and as a result, endanger the American public."
Perlin continued:
During his tenure as OMB acting director and then director from January 2019 to January 2021, Mr. Vought was a central figure in attempting to implement Schedule F, President Trump's executive order that would have upended the merit-based civil service system by stripping employment protections away from thousands of career civil servants had President [Joe] Biden not rescinded it. Mr. Vought has called for reinstating Schedule F and was a key architect of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's sweeping—and wildly unpopular—conservative policy plan that advocates for dismantling the civil service. If Schedule F is reinstated, it would not only harm federal employees but would also cause catastrophic harm to government services, as well as causing deep economic impacts in places with significant populations of government workers including California, Texas, Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., among others.
In addition to Mr. Vought's intention to dismantle the civil service, he has pushed extreme strategies to consolidate presidential power under the banner of "radical constitutionalism." He supports the president withholding congressionally appropriated funds in violation of the Impoundment Control Act, bypassing the advice and consent of the Senate to push recess appointments, invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy the military on the American public, and abusing emergency powers. These plans to expand presidential power are even more troubling taken with Mr. Vought's stated desire to reduce the independence of federal agencies such as the Department of Justice, in part by purging agencies of career civil servants that are seen as standing in the way of the president's agenda. Mr. Vought has called for "an army of investigators" to prosecute current and former government officials who sought to hold President Trump accountable.
"These are just some of the ways Mr. Vought intends to misuse his own authority and craft plans for the president to subvert the law and, in the process, American democracy," Perlin added.
In a statement coinciding with Wednesday's hearing, Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said: "Vought has no business going back to OMB. His extreme ideological opposition to regulations that protect consumers, workers, our environment, and public health and safety will lead to more deregulatory disasters that harm all of us."
"He wants to slash funding for critical government agencies and services, interfere with agencies that are supposed to be politically independent, exclude the benefits of regulation from cost-benefit analysis, and fire vast numbers of civil service employees simply for doing their jobs," Gilbert added. "In addition, he abused his power during his last tenure at OMB to override agency experts, repeatedly endangering public health and safety. The Senate should reject this dangerous and extreme nomination."
Congressman Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), founder of the Stop Project 2025 Task Force, said Wednesday that "we don't have to guess if Russ Vought will enact the radical vision laid out in Project 2025 if he is confirmed, because he literally wrote the playbook and his record shows that he will stop at nothing to enact it."
"He is a self-avowed Christian nationalist who plans to dismantle the civil service—replacing thousands of qualified, nonpartisan federal employees such as scientists and engineers with political lackeys who will be selected to follow partisan orders above the law or the Constitution," the lawmaker continued. "He has vowed to ignore the Constitution by seizing unlawful power for Trump to unilaterally withhold or redirect funds for entire agencies or programs that Congress appropriated."
"His aggressive plan to gut checks and balances clears the way for Trump to enact his entire Project 2025 agenda to sell out the middle class, threaten personal rights and freedoms, and impose biblical morality codes on all of us," Huffman added. "We cannot take that risk and let this authoritarian architect of Project 2025 anywhere near the federal budget or the Oval Office."
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Leaked Videos Reveal Project 2025 Architect's Plan for Far-Right 'Shadow' Government
Russell Vought, who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget during Trump's first term, said he wants to inflict "trauma" on career civil servants and bulldoze opponents of the Republican nominee.
Oct 28, 2024
A former high-level Trump administration official who played a key role in crafting the far-right Project 2025 agenda said in closed-door speeches revealed Monday that he wants to traumatize career civil servants and lay the groundwork for Republican nominee Donald Trump to seize total, unfettered control of the federal government should he win the November 5 election.
In partnership with the watchdog organization Documented, ProPublica on Monday published several videos of two private speeches that Russell Vought—who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget during Trump's first term—delivered in 2023 and 2024.
During the previously unreported speeches, ProPublica and Documented observed, Vought "detailed plans to deploy the military in response to domestic unrest" and "defund the Environmental Protection Agency."
"The two speeches delivered by Vought, taken together, offer an unvarnished look at the animating ideology and political worldview of a key figure in the MAGA movement," the new reporting notes. "Echoing Trump's rhetoric, Vought implicitly endorsed the false claim of a stolen 2020 election and likened the media's debunkings of that claim to Chinese Communist propaganda."
Vought also laid out in unsettling terms his intention to leave federal employees "traumatically affected" as part of a sweeping effort to purge the government of scientists and other civil servants deemed disloyal to Trump.
"When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains," Vought said in a clip obtained by ProPublica and Documented. "We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so."
While Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, claiming he knows nothing about it and has "no idea who is behind it," at least 140 members of his first administration—including Vought—were involved in assembling the sprawling far-right agenda, which outlines plans to gut climate regulations, further roll back abortion access, slash summer food assistance programs for children, and cut taxes for the wealthy.
Vought, who heads the Center for Renewing America think tank, has dismissed Trump's effort to disavow Project 2025, telling an undercover journalist earlier this year that the Republican nominee is "very supportive of what we do."
In the 2024 speech obtained by ProPublica and Documented, Vought said that he and other Project 2025 leaders have assembled "detailed agency plans" and are "writing the actual executive orders" for Trump to sign if he defeats Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in the November 5 election.
"We are writing the actual regulations now," said Vought, "and we are sorting out the legal authorities for all of what President Trump is running on."
Specifically, ProPublica and Documented reported, Vought "laid out how his think tank is crafting the legal rationale for invoking the Insurrection Act, a law that gives the president broad power to use the military for domestic law enforcement."
Lamenting that Trump was talked out of invoking the Insurrection Act to crush mass racial justice demonstrations sparked by the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, Vought said during the 2023 speech obtained by ProPublica and Documented that his preparations for a possible second Trump administration have included constructing a "shadow" Office of Legal Counsel, the body that advises presidents on their powers.
Vought, according to ProPublica and Documented, "made clear he wants the office to help Trump steamroll the kind of internal opposition he faced in his first term."
Jesse Eisinger, a senior editor at ProPublica, described Vought's assessment of the current state of the U.S. as "apocalyptic stuff," pointing to his stated view that the country is "in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover... in which our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus, and they have aimed it at us."
Vought—who has previously said he hopes to "rehabilitate Christian nationalism"—cast Trump as a kind of savior in one of the newly revealed speeches, calling him "a man who is so uniquely positioned to serve this role."
"He has seen what it has done to him, and he has seen what they are trying to do to the country," Vought added. "That is nothing more than a gift of God."
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Christian Nationalist Insiders Are Prepping for Trump's 'Dystopian' Return
"Nationwide abortion bans, attacks on same-sex marriage, and restrictions on contraception—this is the horrifying reality being openly discussed by Team Trump and the likely architects of his second term agenda."
Feb 20, 2024
Although former President Donald Trump is not personally religious, his close ties to Christian nationalists—whom he has relied on to gather support for his presidential campaigns—could place the United States on a path to embracing numerous far-right policies, according to documents penned by a leading right-wing think tank.
Politico, which obtained the documents, reported that staffers at the Center for Renewing America (CRA) included "Christian nationalism"—the promotion of the belief that the U.S. was founded as a Christian country and should emphasize "Christian values" in its policies—on a list of priorities for a second Trump term.
CRA's president is Russell Vought, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump, who Politico reported believes his continued close ties to the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee "will elevate Christian nationalism as a focal point in a second Trump term." The two speak at least once a month, the outlet reported.
Vought has been frequently named as a potential White House chief of staff should Trump win a second term, which could position him to carry out other proposals in the CRA document, including:
- Invoking the Insurrection Act as soon as Trump takes office, allowing him to deploy the military to stop protests;
- Impounding federal funds, or refusing to spend money appropriated by Congress, as former President Richard Nixon did to block agencies from taking on projects he opposed before Congress banned the practice; and
- Creating other new ways to expand Trump's presidential power.
Politico reported on the plans to "elevate Christian nationalism" as Trump prepares to address the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) Association in Nashville on Thursday—the world's largest association of Christian broadcasters.
Along with Vought, Politico reported that former Trump administration official William Wolfe is likely to significantly influence the White House should Trump win the election. A close associate of Vought's, Wolfe served as deputy assistant secretary of defense and director of legislative affairs at the State Department under Trump.
As recently as December, Wolfe called for a Christian nationalist government in which sex education in schools would be abolished and gestational surrogacy and no-fault divorce would be banned.
Vought is also an adviser to Project 2025, led by the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation. The group aims to reshape the government by ousting federal employees who stand in the way of Trump's agenda—deploying "a wrecking ball for the administrative state," said Vought toldThe Associated Press last year.
The project goes hand-in-hand with the CRA's Christian nationalist agenda, Politico reported, with plans to repeal policies that "support LGBTQ+ rights, subsidize 'single-motherhood,' and penalize marriage... because subjective notions of 'gender identity' threaten 'Americans' fundamental liberties.'"
Supporters of Project 2025 also aim to increase surveillance of abortion and maternal mortality reporting, require the Food and Drug Administration to revoke approval of drugs used for medication abortions, and protect employers who refuse to include contraceptive coverage in insurance plans.
Former New York state Sen. Anna Kaplan, a Democrat, said the proposals of Project 2025 and the CRA show that "reproductive rights in all 50 states are on the ballot in 2024."
The Biden campaign said the new reporting laid bare "the dystopian reality if Trump is reelected: an America governed by religious extremism where Americans have fewer rights."
The proposals of Trump's allies are "straight out of The Handmaid's Tale," said Lauren Hitt, senior spokesperson for President Joe Biden's reelection campaign. "Nationwide abortion bans, attacks on same-sex marriage, and restrictions on contraception—this is the horrifying reality being openly discussed by Team Trump and the likely architects of his second term agenda."
"Every day Donald Trump openly supports an agenda of restricting Americans' freedoms, dividing our country, and attacking our rights," said Hitt. "That's what he will do as president. It's not who we are as Americans."
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