RUSSELL VOUGHT

MSNBC - On Wednesday, Russell Vought, President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to run the Office of Management and Budget, appeared before a panel of senators. When the gavel fell to end the hearing a few hours later, the most positive thing one could say about Vought’s performance was that he showed up for it at all.....

GOP senators eagerly embraced a man who would prefer to see them made obsolete.

While the OMB is little known outside of wonky Washington circles, the agency touches on every facet of the government. It clears spending plans and sets the administration’s funding priorities; it signs off on every regulation that agencies put forward; it oversees the hiring and firing process for civil servants and political appointees alike. In the chapter he wrote of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, Vought argued that the OMB’s influence makes it an ideal nerve center for a hyperaggressive executive branch. Over 26 pages, he laid out his view of how the OMB can function to shape the federal bureaucracy to whatever ends he sees fit, including the replacement of nonpartisan career officials with political lackeys...

 After the first Trump administration ended in 2021, Vought founded the Center for Renewing America, a pro-Trump think tank that has advocated massive cuts to spending that would leave the social safety net shredded and millions of Americans left to fend for themselves...

Vought has made the true depths of his ideologies known: a philosophy that sees the presidency as unfettered by the other branches of government. Though Vought already served as OMB director for part of Trump’s first term, his return to the agency would see an entirely different approach to its power. And with his knowledge of how the levers of power operate in Washington, he’s taken a major role in preparing the incoming administration to greatly tighten its chokehold on the rest of government.