A look at Russell Vought’s influence and his push to reshape the government

Geoff Bennett:

As the government shutdown enters its third full week, the Trump administration is freezing billions of dollars in infrastructure funding across the country.

Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought announced on social media today that his office is halting more than $11 billion in projects nationwide, many of them in Democratic-led cities.

As our Liz Landers reports, it's the latest in a series of controversial moves by Vought, who has used the shutdown to advance the president's political agenda and oversee mass layoffs of federal workers.

Liz Landers:

The chief of the White House budget office is rarely in the spotlight, but Russ Vought, who leads the Office of Management and Budget, has become a key figure in the government shutdown and even the star of a meme video shared by the president on social media.

Donald Trump, President of the United States: They call him Darth Vader, but he's actually a very nice person.

Liz Landers:

Vought has been a key power broker during the shutdown, using his X account to announce the government will freeze projects in blue states and sharing veiled threats to fire federal workers.

Russell Vought, Director, Office of Management and Budget: If there's no funding for these programs, then what would you have us do?

Yes, I called for trauma within the bureaucracies. Bureaucracies hate the American people.

Liz Landers:

How influential has he been in this shutdown, from what you have seen?

Damon Linker, University of Pennsylvania: I think very influential. Any time you see a story about funding being halted, he's the one at the head of that chain of command making those calls.

Liz Landers:

Damon Linker teaches political science at the University of Pennsylvania. He compares Vought to an air traffic controller.

Damon Linker:

He knows where the money is coming from, where it's supposed to be going, who the key players in the administration and in the government are to ensure that the money gets to where it's supposed to be. And it also means he knows exactly where to go if he wants to stop money, to claw it back.

Liz Landers:

During Mr. Trump's first term, he initially served as deputy director of the OMB. In 2019, he defied congressional subpoenas, refusing to testify in House Democrats' impeachment inquiry. Vought then led OMB for the final two years of Trump's first term…

Russell Vought:

We have many, many programs that are wasteful and inefficient that we can no longer afford.

Liz Landers:

… and, at the president's direction, called on federal agencies to stop racial sensitivity trainings, referring to them as divisive anti-American propaganda.

Many of Vought and Trump's policy priorities were easily reversed by the Biden administration, fueling frustrations and plans for more permanent changes. Vought launched the Center for Renewing America, a conservative think tank aimed at confronting what they call the woke and weaponized agenda of the ruling class.

It provided research and policy ammunition to lawmakers and Vought an organizing vehicle for four years to workshop policies that could be swiftly enacted in a future conservative presidency and be harder to undo. Vought penned an essay during this time describing the country as in a post-constitutional moment.

Russell Vought:

We did a lot of things in the first term. We had a ton of paradigm shifts. But one of the things we did not do was reductions in force. And we honestly learned about it in our years of exile.

Liz Landers:

The Center for Renewing America features religious underpinnings, a guiding principle for Vought and his world view. Their Web site describes their mission to — quote — "renew a consensus of America as a nation under God with unique interests worthy of defending."

Vought embraces what he's called Christian nationism.

Russell Vought:

We need to be a country that is for God. We need to be for country and for community, in the sense that we want to really reflect on the fact that we are a nation that's built on a Judeo-Christian world view.

Liz Landers:

Vought wrote a key chapter of the conservative policy proposal Project 2025 that advocated for centralizing government power to the White House, giving political appointees more authority and slashing government jobs and spending.

Damon Linker:

It very clearly lays out exactly what he planned to do if he ended up back in that office. And so far he's been following it pretty much to a T. And, if anything, I have been surprised only by the aggressiveness with which he's done it.

Liz Landers:

After Trump's win, Vought was back in a position to enact those changes, appointed to lead the OMB again.

Vought's view, Linker says, gives Trump more power to shape government staffing…

Damon Linker:

Everyone who works under him — this is tens of thousands of employees — are his employees. He can hire them and fire them at will. He can tell them not to do something or to do something and they must obey under threat of losing their jobs.

Liz Landers:

… and would allow the executive branch to wield more power to enact their political agenda, including overstepping Congress on government spending and advocating for the administration to not follow court rulings they view as overreaching.

Damon Linker:

Russ Vought believes that, in very crucial areas of the federal government, the president is in effect superior to the other branches.

Liz Landers:

After being installed as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he halted most of the agency's work. Vought was also the architect of the administration's rescissions package to Congress, cutting billions in foreign aid and defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

His moves have earned praise from the president.

Donald Trump:

He's become very popular recently because he can trim the budget to a level that you couldn't do any other way.

Liz Landers:

Vought has used the shutdown to further push the president's agenda, freezing funding to so-called Democratic projects, including green energy efforts in more than a dozen states, and halting funding for infrastructure projects in New York and Chicago.

Donald Trump:

We will be cutting some very popular Democrat programs that aren't popular with Republicans, frankly, because that's the way it works. They wanted to do this, so we will give them a little taste of their own medicine.

Damon Linker:

If you didn't vote for him, you are his enemy, and he will hurt you when and where he can, and Vought is perfectly content to help him enact that vision of governance.

Liz Landers:

Vought has also enabled government agencies to fire more than 4,000 workers in recent days, including thousands at the Department of Health and Human Services and the Treasury Department.

And according to a memo obtained by "PBS News Hour," Vought had charged the lead counsel at OMB to explore the possibility of not paying furloughed federal workers back pay, an idea that even Speaker Mike Johnson batted down.

Damon Linker:

You would expect Congress to rise up in opposition to this and say, you are usurping legislative powers, Mr. President. You cannot do this. It's in the Constitution.

But this Congress is in the hands of a Republican Party that will not defy Trump.

Liz Landers:

As the shutdown continues into another week, the administration has warned more layoffs could come soon and that OMB's cuts will continue.

For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Liz Landers.