Russell Vought Is Boring (And Evil)

Written By Leeja Miller

Sources:

Transcript:

Welcome to Why, America? I’m Leeja Miller. We need to talk about Russell Vought, but holy hell every time I’ve considered making a video about him I’m resistant to the idea because this guy is just so fucking boring. But I think that’s what makes him so insidious, because he can hide behind this boring government operative veneer while also being incredibly fucking radical and evil, all while existing right in front of our faces and he’s just such a fucking snoozefest it’s easy to ignore him. But, just as I did in Wednesday’s video, it’s important to look these fucking goons in the face because Trump is the show pony but they’re running the show, and Russell Vought is one of the most influential people pulling the strings of the Trump administration right now, and he’s doing it in a way that’s so fucking boring that he can almost get away with it.

That being said, a lot of coverage has focused on Russell Vought over the last week because of his role in the government shut down, which has thrust him a bit more into the limelight. But, again, coverage of him is often overlooked, boring, or overly deferential because he doesn’t have the character of a deranged far right radical Christian nationalist that we’re used to. But please make no mistake, this man has declared war on “wokeness” and on the “left” and the ideas he espouses, in a most boring fashion and often out of the limelight, are incredibly radical and have no place in a pluralist democracy like the United States. Which is why he is dead-set on reshaping the US in that image, because his radical ideals do not actually work unless the US constitution is completely reinterpreted. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Who is Russell Vought? Russ is 49–a rough-looking 49, which is to be expected when your insides are rotted through I suppose. He grew up in Connecticut, one of 7 children in a devout Christian household with an electrician and marine corps vet father and a school teacher mom. He got his bachelors from Wheaton College, an evangelical institution in Illinois and his law degree from George Washington University in DC. And by all accounts this guy is truly deeply lost in the sauce of Christianity–he currently attends a baptist church, regularly quotes the bible, and refuses to swear. Fuckin snoozefest, amiright? Anyway, after college he worked for Senator Phil Gramm of Texas while also attending law school. Upon getting his JD, Vought went on to work for Republicans in the House, helping to direct budget policy during, according to the New York Times, “the rise of the Tea Party movement, when populist demand for smaller government propelled a wave of hard-line conservatives into Washington.” But of course anyone who has any familiarity with the Tea Party movement knows that it wasn’t about small government. This wasn’t some Reaganite deregulatory movement, it was a direct backlash to the election of Barack HUSSEIN Obama, and the attack on good clean traditional Christian values that many perceived in the wake of, god forbid, a black man taking the White House and the gays being allowed to wed. No one of that era or now the MAGA movement is actually interested in a smaller government, they are interested in a government that serves their white Christian nationalist world-view. If the entire administrative state did that, they would be fine with the whole thing. But unfortunately for them some of the bureaucrats running the administrative state have basic critical thinking skills and are therefore not MAGA die hards hell-bent on politicizing and undermining the work of their agencies. So they have to go. And so make no mistake a lot of the sanitization of Russell Vought, because he’s so fucking boring, is claiming that he’s just interested in small government. Meanwhile he’s foaming at the mouth to concentrate as much power as possible in Trump’s hands so… make it make sense, ya know?

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Anyway yadda yadda yadda boring little guy, works on the budget for the house republicans, after which he took a role as Vice President of Heritage Action for America, the lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation, architects of Project 2025, but don’t worry he also wrote a whole chapter of the Project 2025 playbook, which we’ll get into. Then in 2018 he took on the role of Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget for the first Trump Administration. He flew largely under the radar in his role at the time, until he took the helm of the Office of Management and Budget as acting director during the 35-day government shut down during Trump’s first term, and in 2020 he was nominated as the director of the office of management and budget in the waning days of the first Trump administration. He was behind the drafting of the executive order that would have re-qualified large swaths of the federal work force so that the President could fire them at will, something Biden later undid. He was also behind Trump’s decision to use the freeze of aid to Ukraine as a means to force Zelenskyy to investigate Biden, which, if you’ll recall, led to Trump’s impeachment. Back then, Vought defied a subpoena from Congress to testify about his role in the scandal.

After Trump lost the 2020 election, Vought scuttled back to the bog from whence he came and founded the right wing think tank Center for Renewing America to further his research into the best ways to completely subvert the constitution and the functioning of Democracy. Again, his think tank’s publications from that time indicate not a simple lil nerd interested in shrinking the government but instead a far right zealot interested in dismantling what he considers to be the woke leftist takeover of the federal government through the administrative state in favor of a lil king who can impose a Christian nationalist ideology from the top down throughout the country.

For example, his think tank the Center for Renewing America published a 2023 budget proposal titled “A Commitment to End Woke and Weaponized Government.” It is over 100 pages long and, once again, deeply fucking boring. But even just reading his intro to the budget indicates where his intentions lie. In it, he bemoans the independence of the Federal Reserve, claiming that the fed’s independence shields it from “government by the people.” This is a common lamentation from MAGA, that in shielding certain agencies from direct political meddling by the president, those agencies then become less answerable to “the people” the idea being that the president is the best representative of the voice of the people. This is of course why Russ had to create a whole ass think tank to do the mental gymnastics it takes to try to convince people that this is real, because it has long been established and understood, since the founding, that it is Congress, especially the House of Representatives, that best represents the will of the people, that is best positioned to enable the robust debate necessary in a democracy. You know, Congress, the entity that created the Federal Reserve as an independent body to begin with. Congress, the entity explicitly given the power to set the budget as one of its major checks against Presidential authority. But despite this, the argument MAGA acolytes always fall back on is that independence from the president means that an agency is no longer answerable to the people. It’s a blatant misrepresentation of how our government functions and you should not fall for it. What makes the government no longer answerable to the people is our abysmal record of money infecting politics, which allows the rich and powerful to have ultimate say over what laws get passed and who wins elections. BUT I DIGRESS.

Vought’s intro in this 2023 budget proposal further laments that the COVID pandemic quote “made it painfully obvious that a small scientific elite could shut down the economy, keep people from running their businesses, mandate an experimental drug be jabbed into another’s body to participate in society, and denigrate health treatments that could have saved millions.” I’m assuming he means ivermectin, the horse medication, or perhaps he means bleach injections, who’s to say. To him, it is clear that the government has been quote “weaponized against the people it is meant to serve.” Indeed, he says, “the national security apparatus itself is arrayed against that half of the country not willing to bend the knee to the people, institutions, and elite worldview that make up the current governing regime.” Sorry so man with the law degree who’s spent most of his life rubbing elbows with some of the most powerful people in Washington DC is lamenting the elites right right right. Truly the intro alone to this budget hits all the major MAGA talking points–Critical race theory, wokism, leftist universities, coercion by the state to support said wokism, even exportation of the woke ideology by funding gay pride events and LGBT activists in other countries under the guise of foreign aid!!!! He laments quote “Why should billions be spent on Section 8 vouchers that spread crime and disfunction into safe neighborhoods as part of “affordable housing” activism hostile towards single-family homes? This Budget is an effort to separate the spending the nation desperately needs (a massive Navy, a completed border wall, infrastructure, etc.) from spending that is not just simply unaffordable but ruining communities and funding organizations that hate the country.” Quote “In short, America cannot be saved unless the current grip of woke and weaponized government is broken. That is the central and immediate threat facing the country—the one that all our statesmen must rise tall to vanquish. The battle cannot wait. However, this woke and weaponized regime requires the resources of taxpayers to flourish and can be starved in order to dismantle it. Of course, these spending cuts will result in significant savings for the taxpayers. Thus, the main priority of this first Budget from the Center for Renewing America is to consciously and indelibly link the efforts of getting our nation’s finances in order with removing the scourge of woke and weaponized bureaucracy aimed at the American people.”

This is I think a very helpful paragraph for understanding Vought’s central animating mission: use the budget to enact the MAGA worldview.

Oh but then he ends his intro with one final, little aside, one little disclaimer, which lays bare that he is not simply a policy wonk who just wants simple, smaller government. Quote “This first Budget does not attempt to offer solutions to some of the most pressing long-term problems facing the country that should preoccupy conservative policymakers in the near future. For instance, the families of the West are not having enough babies for their societies to endure. Raising a family in America with only one parent working outside the home is often unaffordable, and public policy often incentivizes that trend. Much can be learned and adopted from a country like Hungary that has arrested such decline.”

Ok so just so we’re clear, Russ Vought, devote christian who often quotes the bible, indeed his intro opens with a bible quote, uses terms like “threat, battle, and vanquish” to describe his policies, words of war, laments declining birthrates in “families of the West” which I can only assume he means white European families, given that he laments the left’s “open borders” policies as well, wants to protect single family homes from the scourge of section 8 housing. Ok like this is not a man who simply wants to shrink the government, this is a man with a very radical, specific, MAGA-aligned worldview who has literally said he wants to TRAUMATIZE federal workers [insert clip] and believes that the best way to enforce his white christian nationalist worldview is by weaponizing the national budget to force his policies through.

One of the major ways he is intent on doing this is through a radical legal theory he is a die hard proponent of, the presidential impoundment powers. Presidential impoundment is the idea that even if Congress, who once again were explicitly and very clearly in the constitution given the power of the purse strings in order to check the authority of the president, even if Congress, through its constitutionally given power, appropriates money for a specific purpose, it is ultimately the call of the President whether he will actually move forward with spending that money. Basically, Trump doesn’t have to listen to Congress and can spend money as he wants or not spend money at all, against the will of Congress, the largest representative body of the people. Because again this isn’t really about the will of the people this is about power and about concentrating that power in the hands of one executive and his many unelected advisors so as to force through a very specific worldview, one that I’ll note is deeply deeply unpopular with the vast majority of the American people. This is not about democracy, this is not about the “republic” this is not about constitutional originalism, going back to the founding, doing what the founders would have done, as Vought claims, this is about power and control and forcing through a specific ideology because Vought and others do not want to live in a world where people who aren’t White Christians have any power, where the wealth that this country generates might be distributed more equally among the people yes even the poors and the brown ones. It is a worldview that ranks peoples’ worth based on money, education, religion, and skin color and then hides behind the guise of just wanting to protect the will of the “silent majority.” It’s so fucking evil and twisted and its being orchestrated in part by this fucking nerd who’s so boring it’s hard to pay attention to him. He even LOOKS boring like if a ham sandwich was a person it would be Russel Vought. But then you bite into it and surprise the meat is rancid because there are no more food inspectors and then you die of e coli. This man is foul. Rotted.

So we’ve kinda lost the plot of the timeline of this goon’s life but that was from the proposed budget he produced from his think tank, Center for Renewing America, and then he took that and largely regurgitated it into his section of the Project 2025 playbook titled “Executive Office of the President of the United States.” Please open your copy of the Mandate for Leadership and turn to page 43. His section is, once again, you guessed it, really fucking boring. But it’s an important read if you can bare it because it lays out the roadmap and largely mirrors what we’ve already seen in the first 10 months of Trump’s second administration. What’s most stark to me here is that in the same breath Vought laments the lack of representation of the will of the people in the administrative state, he then advocates for the power given to agencies, you know the ones created by and answerable to Congress, the will of the people, that power should instead be concentrated in the hands of the executive, who should then have his will implemented by entities like the Office of Management and Budget or the National Security Council, a trove of unelected officials, many of whom do not have to go through a Congressional confirmation process, who are solely devoted to the will and policy agenda of the president instead of guided by, you know, science or ethics or unbiased facts. This is, once again, not an effort meant to remove the “woke left” from the government and instill a less biased more fair government. It is an effort meant to remove experts and people who have dedicated their lives to the specialization needed to run such a huge country and instead impose the will of a weird little radical minority of non-expert sycophants who don’t know what they’re doing because they’re just hired yes-men. At no point is more power flowing to the people in Vought’s policies. It is flowing up in a different arguably worse direction, and any tax cuts we have seen, the money Vought promises will return to American’s pockets and the power promised back to the states and local institutions, it’s all flowing up. Tax cuts for the rich. The executive repeatedly attacking states that do not align with its worldview. This is not power for the people. Russell Vought has a specific white christian nationalist worldview that aligns with the MAGA movement and he is intent on shoving it down all our throats by any means necessary and then trying to sell it to us as freedom. This is the work of a twisted person, this man is a fucking snake.

And this government shutdown is his perfect opportunity to move quickly to impose some of the worst of his quote unquote “budget proposals.” He’s already moved to cut over $18 billion dollars in infrastructure projects in “liberal” cities like New York and Chicago, claiming that illegal racial hiring practices were happening, and he cancelled $8 billion dollars in clean energy projects across numerous states. This shutdown, because no money is flowing anywhere and budgetary restrictions are in more of a legal gray area, means Vought may be able to make major funding cuts and fire more federal workers than he would have been able to otherwise. It will of course all be subject to litigation as Democrats and federal unions have promised to sue–which, reminder, every lawsuit that happens because of legal overstepping by the Trump regime is more taxpayer money wasted, just so we’re clear about the waste fraud and abuse that’s really happening–but as I’ve said repeatedly the lawsuits are just temporary respite because if they make their way up to the Supreme Court the court seems ready to do whatever it takes to support to the Trump regime. And just today, Russ announced that they are ready to move forward with massive layoffs, with no clear indication of what exactly that means because it turns out once again he doesn’t care about Americans having power or transparency, he cares about his own power and ability to do what he wants with the apparatus of the government.

There is, however, a chance that any overstepping by Vought during this politically fragile time could backfire for Republicans in Congress, because it will be on their heads if their president moves to make deeply unpopular cuts to the government while the people are already suffering due to the government shut down. It will feel like salt in the wound like the government is already at a stand still what do you mean you’re cutting it further and firing more people have we not suffered enough. The answer is no, because to sociopaths like Vought, mass suffering doesn’t factor into the equation of his attempt to impose his worldview. It would all be worth it if we could just dismantle the government and concentrate power in one executive who will impose Christian nationalism on everyone.

This does beg the question: what is his plan if he concentrates all the power in the executive and then the people elect a Democrat or, even worse, a progressive to the white house in the future? Could this all not be wielded in the opposite direction some day in the not too distant future? It seems as though in Vought’s ultimate fantasy scenario, the administrative bodies would be so withered away by that point that the damage would be irreversible. On top of that, he asserted in his confirmation hearing that the 2020 election was rigged, and his think tank has a whole section on “election integrity” pushing against voting by mail and in favor of meddling with the US census. We’ve discussed the arguments that conservatives are pushing in favor of fucking with the US census to erase immigrant populations by excluding them from census records, which has the dual effect of making them easier to erase in actuality, because no one is tracking them, as well as creating massive shifts in population numbers in numerous, mostly liberal states, effectively increasing power and representation among conservative states. That, combined with the regime’s role in promoting gerrymandering and dismantling the voting rights act, which is a topic that deserves its own video, will work to undermine our elections and solidify artificial conservative majorities that may make it impossible to elect a Democrat in the future. A recent study found that these activities taken in combination could allow Republicans to redistrict 27 total seats in their favor, which would quote “clear the path for a one-party system where power serves the powerful and silences the people.” Stay tuned to future episodes for a deep dive on the Supreme Court’s case this term that is seeking to dismantle section 2 of the Voting Rights act, which would be disastrous. And keep your eyes on Russell Vought, even though he’s deeply and incredibly boring, because it is that bean pusher exterior that makes his evil work that much more insidious.

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