Trump Shakes Up Budget Office with Key Project 2025 Architect Russell Vought – What’s Next?

Russell Vought is a key architect of Project 2025, and President-elect Donald Trump said Friday that he is appointing him to head the Office of Management and Budget. Vought is a close ally who has advocated for strong presidential powers to tackle the vast federal bureaucracy. The 48-year-old Vought held the same position for a portion of Trump’s first term until founding the Center for Renewing America, an advocacy organization that supports Trump’s policies, after Trump lost the 2020 election.

“Russ will assist us in restoring self-government to the people and is fully capable of destroying the Deep State and ending weaponized government. In a prepared statement, Trump declared, “We will bring our country’s finances back into balance and unleash the American people to new heights of prosperity and ingenuity.”

Acting Director Russell Vought of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) talks at a press conference on March 11, 2019, at the White House in Washington, DC. The Office of Management and Budget coordinates with federal agencies and departments, creates the president’s yearly budgets, and carries out the president’s executive branch priorities. Vought, whose appointment needs Senate approval, authored the executive power chapter in Project 2025, the contentious policy plan that Trump attempted to disassociate himself from during the 2024 campaign and was developed by the conservative Heritage Foundation.

In this piece, Vought criticizes federal regulatory organizations that are not governed by the White House. “A conservative president has a significant obstacle in the form of the existential necessity to make forceful use of the huge. The selection of Vought comes as Trump has tapped wealthy tech entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a new initiative dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency to find ways to dismantle the federal bureaucracy and slash government spending.

Musk and Ramaswamy have laid out a plan for Trump to cite presidential authority to eliminate “thousands of regulations” and a massive reduction in the federal workforce in his next administration. Any such undertaking would almost certainly faces challenges in the courts. Trump announced the Vought pick on a whirlwind night of rapid-fire nominations that also included Scott Bessent as Treasury secretary; Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, R-Ore., as Labor secretary; Russ Vought as director of Office and Budget Management; Scott Turner as secretary of Department of Housing and Urban Development; Marty Makary as Food and Drug Administration commissioner; Dave Weldon director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and Janette Nesheiwat as U.S. Surgeon General.