President-elect Donald Trump is expected to name Russ Vought, a lead architect of the controversial Project 2025, as his choice to head the Office of Management and Budget, multiple outlets reported Wednesday.
A formal announcement has not yet been made.
Vought served in the same position for the last two years of Trump’s first administration, after having been the office’s deputy director.
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A contributor to Project 2025 who wrote a chapter titled “Executive Office of the President,” Vought has spoken in favor of aggressive proposals to fire federal workers by reclassifying them and stripping them of civil service protections.
Vought also claimed that we are in a “post-Constitutional time.”
“We need to be radical in discarding or rethinking the legal paradigms that have confined our ability to return to the original Constitution,” Vought argued in a 2022 essay, per The Washington Post. “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.”
Vought has criticized “woke and weaponized” federal spending. He is expected to be advised by someone who shares that view, Elon Musk, who is co-running the “Department of Government Efficiency”—which is not a department at all but will likely still play a key role in federal oversight under a second Trump Administration.
Trump’s OMB pick has also spoken passionately about his belief that there are no “independent” agencies—and that Trump should quickly move to end the long-held practice that some federal departments and agencies operate without direction from the president.
“My belief, for anyone who wants to listen, is that the President has to move executively as fast and as aggressively as possible, with a radical constitutional perspective, to be able to dismantle that bureaucracy and their power centers,” Vought told podcast host Tucker Carlson this week. “And I think there are a couple of ways to do it—No. 1 is going after the whole notion of independence. There are no independent agencies. Congress may have viewed them as such—SEC, or the FCC, CFPB, the whole alphabet soup—but that is not something that the Constitution understands.“
