Project 2025 Architect Ready to Shock Washington If Trump Wins

AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File President Donald Trump listens as Acting Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought speaks during an event on “guidance transparency and federal law enforcement” in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2019, in Washington.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Russell Vought sounds like a general mobilizing troops for battle when he talks about taming an “woke and armed” federal government.

He recently described the political opposition as “hostile fire directed at a target” while calling on allies to be “fearless at the point of attack” and called his policy proposals “battle plans.”

If former President Donald Trump wins a second term in November, Vought could get a chance to go on the offensive.

The chief architect of Project 2025 — the controversial conservative plan to overhaul the federal government — Vought is likely to be appointed to a senior position in a second Trump administration. And he is developing a previously secret “180-day transition playbook” to speed up implementation of the plan and avoid a repeat of the chaotic start that dogged Trump’s first term.

Among a small group of Trump advisers with a mechanical understanding of how Washington works, Vought has advised influential conservative lawmakers on Capitol Hill, held a senior position in the Trump White House and later founded his own pro-Trump think tank. Now he is being touted as a candidate for Trump’s White House chief of staff, one of the most powerful jobs in the government.

“If we don’t have the courage, we’ll walk away from the fight,” Vought told former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast in June. “But our view is that the country needs us there, and we’re not going to save our country without some confrontation.”

Conservative

change plan

government

Led by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 is a detailed, 920-page playbook for governing under the next Republican administration. A storm of far-right ambitions, its proposals range from removing thousands of public officials and replacing them with Trump supporters to revoking Food and Drug Administration approvals for abortion drugs. Democrats have been using Project 2025 for months to attack Trump and other Republicans, convincing voters that it represents the former president’s real — and extreme — agenda.

Trump has sought to distance himself from Project 2025 in recent weeks. He wrote on social media that he had not seen the plan and “has no idea who is responsible for it, and unlike our very well-received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it.”

His campaign said Tuesday that “the demise of Project 2025 would be very welcome.” That same day, Paul Dans, the project’s executive director and a former Trump administration staff official, resigned.

Trump’s attempts to kill the bill are complicated by his ties to many of its co-authors. More than two dozen of its authors served in his administration, including Vought, who was director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.

The Trump campaign did not respond to questions about which Project 2025 proposals the former president opposes or whether Vought would be offered a senior government position in Trump’s next term.

Vought did not respond to an interview request or to questions emailed in February to its Center for Renewing America think tank, which played a key role in creating Project 2025.

Those who know Vought describe him as incredibly devoted to the Trump cause, though not to the president himself.

“A very determined fighter, that’s how I would see Russ,” said a former Trump administration official who worked with Vought in the White House and asked not to be identified so he could speak candidly about him. “I don’t think he thinks about whether he likes Donald Trump as a person. I think he likes what Donald Trump represents in terms of the political power he’s able to leverage.”

Washington

initiate

Born in New York and raised in Connecticut, Vought described his family as working class. His parents were devout Christians. Vought’s father, a Marine Corps veteran, was a union electrician, and his mother was a teacher.

Vought’s father, known as Turk, had no tolerance for idleness or waste. Mark Maliszewski, an electrician who knew him, recalled that after work, Turk Vought would scold his coworkers if they threw away still usable materials.

“He would come over and kick the trash can,” Maliszewski said. “He said, ‘What’s this? If there were quarters or dollars in that trash can, you would have picked them up.’”

Russell Vought graduated in 1998 from Wheaton College, a Christian school in Illinois that includes famed evangelist Billy Graham. He moved to Washington to work for Republicans who advocated fiscal austerity and small government.

“I’ve worked with a lot of different employees, and in terms of work ethic, tenacity, intelligence, knowledge (and) commitment to principle, Russell was one of the most impressive people I’ve worked with,” said former GOP Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas, who hired Vought in 2003.

After honing his credentials as a fiscal hawk, Vought was named policy director for the House Republican Conference, the party’s main communications platform, chaired by then-Rep. Mike Pence, who went on to serve as governor of Indiana and Trump’s vice president.

Vought left Capitol Hill to run a lobbying organization affiliated with the Heritage Foundation. When Trump was elected, Vought became deputy director of OMB.

His confirmation hearing was controversial. Liberal Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders accused him of using Islamophobic language when he wrote in 2016 that Muslims “do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ, his Son, and are damned.”

Vought told senators that his comments were taken out of context and emphasized that he respects everyone’s right to express their religious beliefs.

The Senate confirmed him as OMB’s No. 2 by one vote. He became acting director in early 2019 after his boss, Mick Mulvaney, was named acting chief of staff to Trump. Vought was confirmed as OMB director a year and a half later, as the COVID-19 pandemic gripped the world.

OMB is typically a quiet office that creates the president’s budget and reviews regulations. But with Vought at the helm, OMB has been at the center of clashes between Trump and Congress over federal spending and the legal limits of presidential power.

After lawmakers refused to give Trump more money to build a wall on the southern border, the budget office took billions of dollars from the Pentagon and Treasury Department budgets to fund construction.

Under Vought, OMB also withheld military aid to Ukraine as Trump pressured President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate President Joe Biden and his son. Vought refused to comply with Congress’s demand to remove him from power during the subsequent Democratic-led House investigation that led to Trump’s first impeachment. According to Vought, the investigation was a farce.

After Trump left the White House, Vought founded The Center for Renewing America. Its mission is to be “the tip of the spear of America First” and “renew the consensus that America is a nation under God.”

Vought has championed the concept of Christian nationalism, which is a fusion of American and Christian values, symbols, and identity. Christian nationalism, he wrote three years ago, “is a commitment to the institutional separation of church and state, but not to the separation of Christianity from its influence on government and society.”

The only way to return America to the country the Founding Fathers envisioned is through “radical constitutionalism,” Vought said on Bannon’s podcast. That means control of the executive branch rests solely with the president, not a vast federal bureaucracy.

Anticipating struggles to achieve that goal, Trump supporters must be “brave, faithful and frugal in everything they do,” he said.

Declaration of Minor Independence

Vought was part of a coalition of conservative organizations led by the Heritage Foundation that launched Project 2025, a detailed blueprint for governing under the next Republican administration.

The project’s publicly available document, titled “A Mandate for Leadership,” examined nearly every corner of the federal government and called for reforms, large and small, to rein in the “giant” bureaucracy.

Project 2025 would shut down the U.S. Department of Education and dismantle the Department of Homeland Security, with various parts of it being absorbed into other federal bureaus. Diversity, inclusion, and equity programs would be destroyed. Promotions to general or admiral in the U.S. military would be scrutinized to make sure candidates don’t prioritize issues like climate change or critical race theory.

The bill also would restore a Trump-era personnel policy that seeks to reclassify tens of thousands of federal workers as political appointees, potentially enabling mass layoffs.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history at New York University and author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,” criticized Project 2025 as “a recipe for mass chaos, abuse of power, and government dysfunction.”

The overarching theme of Project 2025 is the dismantling of the “administrative state.” According to the plan, this is a mass of unelected government officials who pursue political agendas at odds with the president’s plans.

In his public statements and in his chapter on Project 2025, Vought has stated that no executive branch department or agency, including the Department of Justice, should operate beyond the President’s authority.

“The whole idea of independent agencies is unconstitutional,” Vought said during a recent appearance on Fox Business Network.

Critics warn that could leave the Justice Department and other investigative agencies vulnerable to a president who could pressure them to punish or investigate a political foe. Trump, who faces four separate trials, has threatened retaliation against Biden and other perceived foes.

As Paul Coggins, former president of the National Association of Former U.S. Attorneys, said, limiting the independence of the Justice Department would be a “radically bad idea.”

“No president deserves to have to pit the Justice Department against his political enemies or, frankly, have to pull the Justice Department away from his political friends,” he said.

It’s unclear what job Vought might get in a second Trump administration. He could return as OMB director, a position he held toward the end of Trump’s presidency, or an even higher position.

“Russ would make a really, really good White House chief of staff,” Mulvaney said.

Regardless of the position he takes, Vought is expected to be one of Trump’s most important field commanders in his campaign to dominate Washington.

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