Trump Is Letting Russell Vought Go Wild

Vought's Project 2025 “unitary executive” theory has us headed toward a constitutional cliff

U.S. President Donald Trump's nominee for Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought testifies during the Senate Banking Committee nomination hearing. Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images.

Last summer, The Heritage Foundation made a splash with their Project 2025 “presidential transition project,” a 920-page blueprint for what to expect from a second Donald Trump term should he win in November.

Trump and his aides swiftly distanced themselves from the document after it went viral and sparked significant backlash. But it was clear to many that those denials were hollow, considering former Trump administration officials and core policy advisors were among its authors and architects.

Notable among them was Russell Vought, who had served as Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) during Trump’s first term. Vought served as policy director of the Republican National Committee platform committee during the 2024 cycle and authored the section of Project 2025 titled:

“Executive Office Of The President Of The United States.”

This chapter lays out a core philosophy of Vought’s, and of the conservative movement broadly, about the importance of expanding the executive branch’s power over the federal government. It’s one that we are currently seeing Trump put into action on a daily basis.

Now, more than a month into Trump’s second term—and 16 days into Vought’s second stint as Trump’s OMB Director—some 36 percent of Project 2025 has already been implemented. With Trump aggressively pursuing Vought’s autocratic vision of the executive, it’s worth taking a deeper look at the author of this theory of expanded executive power.

In today’s piece, I’ll dig into Vought’s Project 2025 blueprint for an expanded executive and take a look at how this transformation of the power of the president was previewed by a 2022 essay he wrote laying out this vision. I’ll also examine other aspects of Vought’s personal philosophy, which make him a clear model for not just Trump’s takeover of the federal government, but of his takeover and transformation of the Republican Party.

The Christian Nationalist By Donald Trump’s Side

According to The Washington Post, Russell Vought arrived in Washington D.C. during the end of the Clinton administration, worked for fiscal conservative hawks Sen. Phil Gramm and Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas, and ultimately served as executive director of the conservative House Republican Study Committee, where he advocated for smaller government and cuts to the nation’s entitlement programs.

Amid the Tea Party revolution of 2010, Vought moved over the Heritage Foundation where he threw bombs at Republican members of Congress to keep them in line on fiscal issues. But his time at the Office of Management and Budget from 2019-2021 during the first Trump administration was marked more by loyalty to Trump than any fiscal ideological purity.

Per The Post:

When Congress blocked additional funding for Trump’s border wall, the budget office in early 2020 redirected billions of dollars from the Pentagon to what became one of the most expensive federal infrastructure projects in U.S. history. And it was Vought’s office that held up military aid to Ukraine as Trump pressed the government to dig up dirt on Joe Biden, prompting the president’s first impeachment.

As former Mike Pence aide Tim Chapman put it,

“There’s a marriage of convenience between Russ and Trump. Russ has been pursuing an ideological agenda for a long time and views Trump’s second term as the best way to achieve it, while Trump needs people in his second term who are loyal and committed and adept at using the tools of the federal government.”

This unholy alliance echoed a trend that began during Trump’s first term and has only grown since: Trump’s massive support among evangelical Christians, particularly Christian nationalists who advocate for the leveraging of government power to advance a biblical worldview.

According to The Economist’s profile of Vought, which dubs him “Trump’s holy warrior,”

His faith remains at the core of his life and politics. Mr. Vought calls himself a Christian nationalist. In 2021 he founded the Center for Renewing America, an organization whose mission is to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God.”

Vought launched the Center for Renewing America on January 20, 2021, the day Joe Biden was inaugurated. The group’s website, besides being peppered with allusions to Christianity, such as “God, country, and community are at the heart of this agenda,” it’s also a veritable clearing house for Trump 2.0 policy proposals and catchphrases.

These include calling for the abolition of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. They also include a defense of the impoundment of federal funds, which Trump tried to implement with his freeze of federal grants and aid, essentially “impounding” funds already appropriated by Congress. There’s even a whole section labeled “Woke and Weaponized.”

It’s like a concentrated version of Donald Trump in website form.

And there’s a very good reason for that, as Vought told British journalists who posed as donors in an undercover video exposé last year.

As CNN reported:

Vought said his group, the Center for Renewing America, was secretly drafting hundreds of executive orders, regulations, and memos that would lay the groundwork for rapid action on Trump’s plans if he wins, describing his work as creating “shadow” agencies. He claimed that Trump has “blessed” his organization and “he’s very supportive of what we do.”

Vought elaborated:

“We’ve got about 350 different documents that are regulations and things of that nature that are, we’re planning for the next administration,” he said.

The work of drafting policies is happening months ahead of the election in part because “President Trump will want to spend literally zero amount of time thinking or contemplating what a transition will look like,” Vought said. “It’s not how he thinks.”

Vought’s guiding principle, he said, was simple: What would Donald do?

In short, Vought is not just an architect of Project 2025, he is not just the Director of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, he is the prime author of the last 36 days.

It is no accident, of course, that someone with his views about the role of Christianity in government would serve in such an influential role in the Trump administration. Trump’s rise has paralleled the rising influence of Christian nationalism as a driving force in the Republican Party (as we have seen with the ascension of Christian nationalist Mike Johnson to third in line to the presidency).

And sure enough, as Vought revealed to the undercover reporters, he does not hide his ultimate goal.

Per CNN:

In the conservative movement, “we’ve been too focused on religious liberty, which we all support, but we’ve lacked the ability to argue we are a Christian nation,” Vought argued – an idea he’s also talked about publicly. “Our laws are built on the Judeo-Christian worldview value system.”

“I want to make sure that we can say we are a Christian nation,” Vought added later. “And my viewpoint is mostly that I would probably be Christian nation-ism. That’s pretty close to Christian nationalism because I also believe in nationalism.”

Vought has not tried to hide his radical views in favor of the complete abolition of abortion and the prohibition of pornography.

He has openly called on Congress to outlaw medication abortion, for example.

And in fact, Vought has crammed this view in among his Project 2025 policy proposals:

Vought proposes in his Project 2025 chapter a new special assistant to the president to ensure “implementation of policies related to the promotion of life and family.” To Vought, that means curbing abortion — and boosting the birthrate. “The families of the West are not having enough babies for their societies to endure,” he wrote in a Center for Renewing America policy paper.

Vought is well aware, however, that these views are more extreme than even Trump has signaled comfort with. But Vought plays the long game. He understands that before his radical policy wishlist items can be attended to, phase one of his Project 2025 fever dream to remake the presidency as a unitary executive and end the “deep state” must succeed first.

It’s that phase that we are currently living through in real time each day.

Russell Vought’s Philosophy Of The Unitary Executive

If anyone is surprised by Donald Trump’s aggressive first-month moves, they shouldn’t be. His attempt to reclaim Congress’s constitutionally mandated power of the purse for himself and to decimate the federal workforce was all right there in black and white for all to see, thanks in large part to Russell Vought’s own writings.

In the opening paragraph of his Project 2025 chapter titled “Executive Office of the President of the United States,” Vought lays out the premise for what we are seeing play out in Trump 2.0:

In its opening words, Article II of the U.S. Constitution makes it abundantly clear that “[t]he executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” That enormous power is not vested in departments or agencies, in staff or administrative bodies, in nongovernmental organizations or other equities and interests close to the government. The President must set and enforce a plan for the executive branch. Sadly, however, a President today assumes office to find a sprawling federal bureaucracy that all too often is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences—or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly “woke” faction of the country.

But Project 2025 was hardly the first time Vought publicly laid out the case for a federal government ruled by an all-powerful executive. In his 2022 essay titled “Renewing American Purpose,” Vought starkly breaks down his theory of the executive branch. His views fly in the face of the constitutional separation of powers, urging the right to adopt what he calls “radical constitutionalism” to correct for what he views as an unconstitutional takeover of the government by the left.

The conservative movement has little concern, of course, for such basic constitutional principles as separation of powers or separation of church and state. Trump is outright dismissive of birthright citizenship and constantly suggests running for a third term despite clear language to the contrary in the Constitution.

From Vought’s perspective, such devotion to basic constitutional principles has been rendered moot since, in his telling, “the left” has undertaken what he describes as “a slow-moving revolution for over a hundred years.” Vought concludes that, as a result, “the Constitution we live under is not the one that our Founders gave us.”

As Vought puts it,

“We are in a post constitutional moment in our country.”

And if that’s truly the case, then why follow it? goes the logic. Or, as with constitutional originalism, follow it selectively to achieve the outcome you want.

Vought expresses contempt for the left’s reading of the Constitution as a “living document” that evolves with the times. Instead, he adopts the same “originalist” theory of the Constitution championed by radical Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

In recent years, the “originalist” theory has been used by Justice Alito to justify overturning decades-long precedent such as Roe v Wade. Justice Alito stated in his Dobbs decision that “procuring an abortion is not a fundamental constitutional right because such a right has no basis in the Constitution’s text or in our Nation’s history.” Somehow the same “originalism” led the Trump majority on the Court to expand the Second Amendment to include personal ownership of modern-day weapons, even though at the time of the Constitution’s drafting only single-shot muskets existed.

Vought praises originalism in his essay, calling on right-wingers to

throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last two hundred years and to study carefully the words of the Constitution and how the Founders would have responded in modern situations to the encroachments of other branches.

But he does carve out a major loophole for judicial originalists:

Originalism should not just be interpreting the words in their original meaning. It should be to understand the logic of the original Constitution and how these authorities should be used unencumbered by the scar tissue resulting from decades of bad cases and bad statesmen.

Translation: Originalist logic, as we get to define it.

From Vought’s perspective, any twisting of the Constitution is justified because the left twisted it first. It put too much power in the unelected administrative state, for example, which Vought claims is “increasingly arrayed against the American people.”

He decries the fact that

The Left in the U.S. doesn’t want an energetic president with the power to bend the executive branch to the will of the American people.

Vought concludes with a clear expression of the basic premise of Project 2025 and what has become the central driving force of Trumpism:

But the long, difficult road ahead of returning to our beloved Constitution starts with being honest with ourselves. It starts by recognizing that we are living in a post-Constitutional time.

In his paranoid and dystopian view of 2025 America, each and every institution of the government is arrayed against the American people. It’s precisely how the so-called “law and order party” can now view institutions such as the FBI with such suspicion and disdain.

As I wrote last week, such framing is also how Trump and his fellow Republicans can position themselves as the “forever opposition party”— the brave warriors against a government that they themselves now control.

Republicans don’t see the cognitive dissonance inherent in this view. This was hilariously on display during Homeland Security Director Kristi Noem’s recent appearance on CNN, during which Noem declared:

“Well, we can’t trust the government anymore.”

To which host Dana Bash bluntly reminded her:

“You are the government.”

But how long does the Trump administration think it can continue to rail against the government as though it’s still run by Joe Biden and his shadowy “deep state”?

No wonder Trump and Vought are working at lightning speed. They want to seize full control before people understand their illegal unconstitutional power grab for what it is.

The Guy Behind The Guy Behind The Guy

Vought isn’t the only Trump retread currently driving the chaos we’ve seen out of this administration the past 36 days. Standing firmly behind Vought at OMB is his general counsel Mark Paoletta.

Paoletta served with Vought in Trump’s first OMB and has his own history of advocating for a stronger executive, particularly when it comes to the impoundment of funds.

Take for instance an essay Paoletta penned for The Federalist just last year, which is bluntly titled

The next POTUS Should Reclaim The Constitutional Spending Power Congress Stole

In it, Paoletta echoes Vought’s stated view that the so-called presidential impoundment power, or the power to override or block spending approved by Congress, should be revived.

As Vought’s Center for Renewing America, where Paoletta is a senior fellow, puts it:

The Constitution vests the entirety of executive power in the President. The impoundment power is a longstanding part of this grant of executive power. It is also a necessary part of the President’s obligation to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, and of his Commander in Chief and foreign affairs authority. Impoundment enables the President to respond to emergencies, faithfully execute the laws, and ensure good government and reasonable implementation of federal programs.³ For nearly 200 years, the President’s impoundment authority was undisputed.

This leaves out the fact that Nixon in fact tried to impound billions in funds that Congress had earmarked for clean water projects but Nixon didn’t want to see spent. The Supreme Court, in the case of Train v. City of New York, unanimously ruled against his right to withhold congressionally appropriated funds.

After President Nixon left office in disgrace, Congress passed a law prohibiting impoundment as part of post-Watergate reforms, a law that Vought and Paoletta view as an unconstitutional impediment to presidential power. Trump parroted this view in a 2023 campaign video.

Paoletta’s essay tries to frame the presidential impoundment of congressionally allocated funds as a perfectly reasonable means to rein in wasteful spending, as he writes in the final paragraph of his essay:

Should President Trump be reelected this fall, consistent with every president from Washington to the ICA’s enactment, he should immediately use his constitutional authority to impound funds based on efficiency and targeted constitutionally based policy grounds. Such actions will help bring some sanity to the mindless spending that has increased our debt to unsustainable levels and check funding programs that don’t work. Challenging the Impoundment Control Act is a worthy battle in the larger war to reestablish constitutional executive powers that Congress has usurped over the past several decades.

But as we well know from recent experience, in practice it is hardly so benign or well-intentioned.

As Jay Kuo wrote after the OMB attempted a mass impoundment last month:

Shock and fear rippled across federal, state and local governments yesterday, as well as through the nonprofit, education and research communities, after a two-page memo issued from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) purporting to pause disbursement of all federal financial assistance effective Tuesday, January 28, 2025 at 5 p.m.

While direct payments to individuals and Social Security and Medicare are expressly excluded, other large programs such as Medicaid, which is paid out indirectly via the states, could be swept in. In the words of the memo, this freeze affects “all Federal financial assistance” provided by the government, “including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.” Notably, the words “but not limited to” are doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and what the OMB means by the last three categories is unclear.

The move represented Trump’s attempt to put Vought’s and Paoletta’s theory into practice.

Now Trump is putting mass impoundment to the test by freezing and withholding all federal grants and financial assistance. If upheld, this will have devastating downstream effects on local and state governments as well as disrupt ongoing research, relief efforts and all manner of work by nonprofits. If taken to an extreme, it would deal a significant blow to the economy as money that individuals, communities, organizations and governments rely on suddenly dries up, causing widespread furloughs and a pull-back in consumer and organizational spending nationwide.

The response was swift, as Democratic Attorneys General around the country sued to block the move and multiple courts imposed temporary restraining orders to restore the disbursement of any funds that had been blocked. Of course, the Trump administration has appealed those orders and, as with pretty much every other radical illegal move they’ve made since Trump took office last month, they hope and expect it will be adjudicated by the Supreme Court.

But this is one case in which Vought’s vision of the Constitution may not jibe with that of conservative “originalist” jurists in the end.

According to NPR:

William Rehnquist, for example, was clear on his read of the Constitution. Before he was appointed a Supreme Court justice by Nixon — and before he was promoted to chief justice by President Ronald Reagan — Rehnquist served as an assistant attorney general in the Nixon administration. In that position, Rehnquist wrote an Office of Legal Counsel memo in 1969 in which he said the "existence of such a broad power" — that is, a presidential impoundment power — "is supported by neither reason nor precedent." He continued, "It is in our view extremely difficult to formulate a constitutional theory to justify a refusal by the President to comply with a congressional directive to spend."

And what about Trump’s very own SCOTUS appointee Brett Kavanaugh? Things could get awkward:

Kavanaugh, whom Trump appointed to the Supreme Court, expressed a similar sentiment. In a 2013 opinion, when he was serving on a federal appellate court, Kavanaugh wrote, "the President does not have unilateral authority to refuse to spend."

As we noted in an earlier piece, even

Justice Clarence Thomas recently wrote an 7-2 opinion upholding the creation of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau where he began with a simple reminder that “Our Constitution gives Congress control over the public fisc” so long as the funds were appropriated correctly.

The problem for Trump is that, as David Super, a professor of law and economics at Georgetown Law, told NPR, it all comes down to that pesky little phrase in the Constitution, that the President:

"shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed."

And, as Super plainly states:

"So if Congress has provided a million dollars for an activity, the president isn't faithfully executing that law if he fails to spend it."

But as we have seen, one never knows with this Supreme Court, which has sided with Trump and the conservative movement over precedent and over any sane “originalist” reading of the Constitution time and time again. They’ve even given Trump immunity, so what does “faithfully executing the law” even mean anymore?

We all know the radicals on the Court are perfectly capable of twisting the Constitution into knots to achieve a desired result. The question is, will they go so far as to ratify Vought’s extreme, autocratic vision of an all-powerful executive and lay the groundwork for a much more disturbing Phase 2 of Trump’s second term?

Or will they walk us back from the constitutional cliff and agree with the unanimous Court of 50 years ago, which held that the power over the purse belongs to Congress and Congress alone?

We may have an answer soon on this most fateful of all questions for our Republic.