Trump taps key Project 2025 architect Russ Vought to head budget office

By Gram Slattery and Tim Reid

(Reuters) – U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Russ Vought, a key architect of “Project 2025,” the controversial conservative plan to overhaul the government, to be director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, a powerful agency that helps decide the president’s policy priorities and how to pay for them.

Vought, who was OMB chief during Trump’s 2017-2021 term, would play a major role in setting budget priorities and implementing Trump’s campaign promise to roll back government regulations.

Since Trump left office, Vought has been deeply involved in Project 2025, a series of detailed policy proposals for Trump’s second term drawn up by hundreds of high-profile conservatives. 

Among other measures, Project 2025 calls for a broad expansion in presidential power by boosting the number of political appointees and increasing the president’s authority over the Justice Department. The project also proposes enforcing laws that make it illegal to mail abortion pills over state lines, criminalizing pornography and eliminating the Department of Education.

The project’s authors, Vought included, have also advocated for the reclassification of parts of the federal workforce that would give Trump the authority to fire tens of thousands of government employees.

During his election campaign, Trump repeatedly denied he had any links to Project 2025, even though many of its authors were former officials from his first administration. With Vought’s selection, the president-elect has now tapped several former aides with Project 2025 links for key administration roles.

DAY ONE PROPOSALS

During the election campaign, Trump’s Democratic opponents made a concerted effort to raise public awareness of Project 2025 among voters, warning it was a blueprint for a hard-right political shift they said would occur under Trump.

Their effort succeeded in making Americans widely aware of the project’s existence, and opinion polls showed voters broadly disapproved of the effort.

The Trump campaign expressed increasing annoyance with the project, repeatedly emphasizing that its proposals were separate from the campaign’s official policy platform.

Vought wrote a chapter for Project 2025 centered on the management of the president’s executive office. While many of the suggestions he laid out are highly technical, they are for the most part aimed at expanding the president’s authorities and lessening the power of career civil servants.

“After months of lies to the American people, Donald Trump is taking off the mask: He’s plotting a Project 2025 Cabinet to enact his dangerous vision starting on day one,” said Alex Floyd, a spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee.

Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said Trump never had anything to do with Project 2025, and that all his cabinet nominees and appointments were “whole-heartedly committed to President Trump’s agenda, not the agenda of outside groups.”

Vought has helped craft several executive orders that could be implemented on Day One of Trump’s term, according to two people involved in the project. They include an order instituting Schedule F, which would re-categorize thousands of civil servants to enable Trump to fire them should he want to, said those people, who requested anonymity to discuss the project’s internal deliberations.

Trump’s other nominees with Project 2025 ties include Brendan Carr, who wrote the project’s chapter on the Federal Communications Commission. Carr is now set to lead that agency.

Carr has criticized the FCC (BME:)’s decision not to finalize nearly $900 million in broadband subsidies for Elon Musk’s SpaceX satellite internet unit Starlink, as well as the Commerce Department’s $42 billion broadband infrastructure program and President Joe Biden’s spectrum policy.

Other Project 2025 contributors who have been named by Trump as officials in his new administration are Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar,” John Ratcliffe, his incoming CIA director and Pete Hoekstra, Trump’s choice for ambassador to Canada.

Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s incoming deputy chiefs of staff, founded a conservative legal and advocacy group known as America First Legal, which contributed to the project.

At OMB, Vought will work with X CEO Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to carry out Trump’s campaign pledge to slash government spending and regulations.

Musk and Ramaswamy have been tapped by Trump to co-lead a newly created Department of Government Efficiency, an entity Trump has indicated will operate outside the confines of government.