Trump Taps Project 2025 Architect Russ Vought for OMB: Wants to Fire Civil Servants, Deploy Military

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman.

President-elect Donald Trump tried to distance himself during his campaign from Project 2025, the radical right-wing plan for his second term. But on Friday, he nominated a key architect of the plan, Russell Vought, to lead the Office of Management and Budget once again. Vought had led the office during Trump’s first term for a time. The Trump loyalist wrote the chapter of Project 2025 that lays out how to redefine the executive branch by firing thousands of civil servants. He’s also supported deploying the military here at home.

In a minute, we’ll be joined by the ProPublica reporter whose recent investigation of Vought is headlined “’Put Them in Trauma’: Inside a Key MAGA Leader’s Plans for a New Trump Agenda.” It’s based in part on videos ProPublica and Documented obtained of private speeches Vought gave at invitation-only annual gatherings at his pro-Trump think tank, the Center for Renewing America. This is a clip from a speech earlier this year, when Vought outlines the legal rationale for invoking the Insurrection Act, a law that empowers the president to use the military for domestic law enforcement.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: We are trying to build at the Center for Renewing America almost a shadow Office of Management and Budget. We’re trying to build a shadow Office of Legal Counsel, so that when a future president says, “What legal authorities do I need to shut down the riots?” we want to be able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community or the defense community to come in and say that’s an inappropriate use of what you’re trying to do.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Russell Vought, Trump’s nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget, key Project 2025 architect. This is an excerpt of another video ProPublica and Documented obtained. It’s from a speech last year by Vought delivered during a private gathering of the Center for Renewing America, that pro-Trump think tank. Here Vought describes his goal of defunding federal bureaucracies under a potential Trump second administration.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. We want — when they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are so — they are increasingly viewed as the villains. 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. We want to put them in trauma.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Project 2025 architect Russell Vought, speaking in a video obtained by Molly Redden, reporter at ProPublica who covers national politics and elections.

Molly, welcome to Democracy Now! Why don’t you lay out what you found, the most important takeaways from these videos that have — that you’ve now gotten a hold of, who Vought is?

MOLLY REDDEN: Vought was the director of the Office of Management and Budget at the end of Trump’s first term, and he’s returning to that position. What that office does is it sets spending priorities for the entire federal government. So, Congress writes the check, and then the OMB directs how that money is spent, either through regulations or just pipelining the money. And there’s obviously a lot of power in that.

And Vought, you know, what he talked about in these videos, in these sort of unguarded moments, is a really expansive and aggressive vision of executive power, to sort of take that money and spend it the way that Trump envisions it for, you know, a stronger executive branch, less environmental regulation, really according to sort of what they laid out in Project 2025, so really not letting Congress control the spending agenda anymore, but leaving it in the hands of a very small group of people to achieve exactly what Trump laid out on the campaign trail and what Vought and others laid out in Project 2025. So, he’s in a really powerful position, and he has a really targeted and aggressive vision of how to execute what Trump has been talking about.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, explain what the OMB does, the Office of Management and Budget, why it’s such a powerful position.

MOLLY REDDEN: It’s such a powerful position because, first of all, it oversees all of the regulations that the administration puts out. So, Congress can write a check for — you heard him in those videos talk about defunding the EPA and making sure regulators don’t have what they need. So, even if Congress appropriates money for clean water regulation, you know, scrubbing pollution from the atmosphere, Vought can — Vought and his agency can oversee how rules get technically written so that that money can dry up. That’s just one example. You know, they really get into the details of how you spend money. And that’s just so incredibly powerful, because that’s really where the rubber meets the road for any policy in any administration.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk more about how he would — why being in that position would matter when it comes to his support for deploying the military at home, on the streets of the United States.

MOLLY REDDEN: That has a little bit more to do with the work that Vought did between the two Trump administrations. So, he founded a think tank called the Center for Renewing America. And what that think tank did is, in between the two administrations, sort of in that interim, it played host to a number of people who had been in high-up positions of the Trump administration, and they incubated and drafted a lot of ideas for what a second Trump administration could do to execute its agenda more effectively.

And I think we all remember from the first Trump administration, he, the president, cycled through a lot of appointments who came from more traditional Republican institutional backgrounds. And a lot of them stood in the way, sort of acted as a bulwark against some of the more aggressive and, you know, history-defined things that Trump wanted to do. Deploying the military against protesters during the summer of 2020 George Floyd protests is a really good example of this.

And so, you know, that’s over in the second Trump administration, right? You can see from his appointments, whether they’re people who have defended his agenda really aggressively on Fox News or people like Russ Vought, who have been thinking for four years about how to build a legal framework and staff an administration that will do whatever Trump wants, that they are really focused on making sure that they have an administration that is loyal to Trump, rather than, you know, focused on what existing law says you can do.

So, at the Center for Renewing America, one of the things that Vought spoke about in those videos, they are preparing legal doctrines, basically, that will rationalize Trump’s domestic deployment of the military. Another thing that Vought has been a really big proponent of is, your viewers might be familiar with, Schedule F, which is basically a way to reclassify government civil servants so that they’re all political appointees and easier to fire if they don’t comply with what the administration wants them to do.

AMY GOODMAN: Molly, I wanted to go back to August, when we reported on an undercover video that showed Russell Vought bragging about his ties to Trump, even as Trump was trying to distance himself from Project 2025. It shows Vought meeting at a five-star Washington, D.C., hotel with two men who he thought were relatives of a wealthy conservative donor. He was actually talking to two undercover reporters with the Center for Climate Reporting, an independent British news outlet. They were secretly recording him. This is part of the video accompanying their investigation called “Undercover in Project 2025: The secretive ‘second phase’ and the radical policies set for rollout on day one.”

NARRATOR: We want to meet the man writing the game plan for Trump’s second administration. Vought believes that in his first term Trump’s agenda was frustrated by what he calls the “deep state.” So Vought is planning a radical centralization of government power under the president, firing civil servants and ending the independence of agencies like the FBI and DOJ.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies. And we are working doggedly on that, whether it’s destroying their — an agency’s notion of independence, that they’re independent from the president.

NARRATOR: Vought has also been preparing documents based on fringe legal theories, arguing the president has the power to use the military against protesters.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: You know, George Floyd obviously was not about race. It was about destabilizing the Trump administration.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: Right.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: We put out, for instance, a 50-page paper designed for lawyers to know that the president has, you know, the ability both along the border and elsewhere to maintain law and order with the military. And that’s something that, you know, it’s going to be important for him to remember and his lawyers to affirm. But we’ve given them the case for that.

NARRATOR: With loyalists installed in key government agencies and armed with his playbook, Vought believes a radical Christian nationalist agenda can be realized under a second Trump presidency. For example, on abortion.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: So, I think the president has actually come up with a strategy that works, so long as you are giving people like me in the government the ability to block funding for Planned Parenthood, block funding for fetal tissue research. So, what I’ve told people is, he had the most pro-life record ever. I’ve never seen him take — to stand in the way of a pro-life initiative that actually was real politically and with momentum.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was a report from a British climate justice group that went and spoke to him. He thought he was talking to — that’s Russell Vought — wealthy conservative donors. They videoed him as he spoke. But if you can comment, from your research, on the implications of what he said, right down to blocking the federal funding for Planned Parenthood, which runs hundreds of clinics all over the country for women’s healthcare?

MOLLY REDDEN: I think what you can see in that video and in some of our reporting is that a lot of what Trump said on the campaign trail to distance himself from things that were really unpopular, like Project 2025 and its vision for really concentrating an extremely aggressive amount of power in the executive branch, like new restrictions on abortion, on reproductive rights, on Planned Parenthood — I think what that shows is that a lot of that, those were political movements. Those were political maneuvers meant to reassure voters who, you know, really felt uneasy with voting for Trump, given that that’s what his allies talked about his plans to do.

And so, I think, you know, now that Trump has unified control of Congress in the Republicans and is feeling really good about — you know, he’s described himself as having a mandate — you’re probably going to see a lot of what he denied he was going to do on the campaign trail — you’re probably going to see that come to pass, at least some of it. I think Vought’s appointment is a really good piece of evidence for that. Vought, as you described it, he was a key architect of Project 2025. A lot of the folks who worked at his think tank, the Center for Renewing America, were really instrumental in putting the plan together. He wrote a really key chapter about executive power and how to transform the presidency into the most powerful it’s ever been. And so, I think Project 2025 is going to be right at home in the White House.

AMY GOODMAN: And where does the first act that President Trump is pushing as he becomes president again, and that is the mass deportation of immigrants and using the military to put them in camps and detention centers and send them home — how does Vought and what he’s been describing facilitate that?

MOLLY REDDEN: So, what you heard him talk about was, again, helping come up with some of the legal rationalizations so that that can happen very quickly, so that they can try to do that very quickly and without a meaningful challenge.

You know, he also — he talked about, in some of the videos we obtained, talked about trying to set the national conversation and make it a lot more extreme around migration. You know, he and some other folks who worked for his think tank — people might remember Ken Cuccinelli, a top DHS executive — or, a top DHS official from the first Trump administration — they really kind of had like a private roadshow in 2022, trying to convince a lot of Southern border governors to embrace this really, you know, out-there, at the time, legal theory that —

AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds.

MOLLY REDDEN: — migration at the southern border really constituted an invasion. So he really set the tone for that, too.

AMY GOODMAN: And Marjorie Taylor Greene is now going to head a subcommittee on government efficiency, and she says they will go after states and cities, cut off their funding, if they make themselves sanctuary. Molly Redden, I want to thank you for being with us, ProPublica reporter. We’ll link to your investigation. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.