Russ Vought careened into the escalating government shutdown fight this week, threatening mass layoffs of federal workers if Democrats don’t capitulate to President Donald Trump and fellow Republicans.
For those who know the White House budget director’s long history in Washington, it was only a matter of time.
“You could have anticipated what was coming,” Bill Hoagland, a former longtime top Senate GOP budget aide, said in an interview. “He is clever. But he has a clear intent here, which I think is to strangle the beast. And he knows how to play the game.”
With the layoffs threat Wednesday, Vought has cast himself as a main character in the shutdown standoff ahead of the Tuesday midnight funding deadline. It’s a role he is no doubt comfortable playing, having navigated dozens of spending fights as a congressional aide, think-tank operative and Trump official.
Now Vought, 49, is well positioned to further execute his long-held views on government spending if federal cash stops cold, after months of groundwork undermining bipartisan funding negotiations and upending the federal bureaucracy.
His ideological allies are already excited by what Vought might have in store at the Office of Management and Budget if the government does in fact shut down at midnight Sept. 30.
Paul Winfree, who served as Trump’s director of budget policy during his first term, called Vought’s threat a “brilliant” move.
During the last shutdown under Trump, which ended in early 2019, Vought served in an understudy role. Administration officials at the time sought to play down the impact on most Americans, Winfree noted.
“This time, Russ is putting the pain on the bureaucracy,” he said.
Democrats, meanwhile, are stewing and eager to make Vought a bogeyman of the partisan fight after sparring with him for years.
Soon after POLITICO published the OMB memo Wednesday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called him a “malignant political hack.”
“We will not be intimidated by your threat to engage in mass firings,” Jeffries wrote on social media. “Get lost.”
Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, who has long criticized the OMB chief as the House’s top Democratic appropriator, said in a statement Thursday that the layoffs threat was “Russ Vought’s trademark chaos.”
An OMB spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment about Vought’s approach to the potential shutdown. But what is clear from Vought’s history and his own statements is that he sees a method to the madness.
Speaking on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast last week, he called the shutdown deadline “a very critical juncture” and said that Republicans have Democrats “in a very good position, where they should be with us to fund the government.”
The OMB director’s latest move fits neatly into the playbook he articulated during vetting earlier this year for Senate confirmation, after helping write the Heritage Foundation’s controversial “Project 2025” recommendations during Trump’s campaign for a second presidency.
Put simply, he thinks Congress can set a ceiling for agency funding but a president can spend less.
One first-term Trump administration official said no one familiar with the administration’s strategy was surprised by Vought’s memo to agencies this week. Shutdowns “create a natural inflection point between essential and nonessential,” said the person, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about White House thinking.
“If the government can function with only essential employees and not inflict pain on the American people … then why would we not want that?” the former official added. “It proves the point the administration has been making from the campaign all the way to day one: That there is bloat and excess within the government.”
In the roughly 45 years Congress has been letting federal funding lapse amid partisan standoffs, OMB directors have frequently used their power to either lessen the impact of a government shutdown or maximize it, depending how the White House wanted to sway the negotiations.
Vought is now taking those powers to a new level. Threatening to terminate federal jobs during a funding lapse goes far beyond the usual discretion of a budget chief to determine “essential” and “nonessential” work during government shutdowns, further demonstrating how a motivated ideologue can torpedo norms in Congress as well as the executive branch by testing the limits of a typically bureaucratic and process-focused role.
Not every Trump ally understands the calculus, however. Another official who served in the first Trump administration, also granted anonymity to speak frankly about Vought’s moves, said it could be “just a really heavy-handed way of spooking Democrats.”
There is no obvious advantage to firing large swaths of federal workers during a government shutdown, besides applying pressure on Democrats, because the White House has already been executing those “reduction-in-force” layoffs, the former official said. And after the administration fired federal workers under the Department of Government Efficiency initiative earlier this year, the Trump administration has since rescinded many of those terminations.
“Most people I’ve talked to just assume it’s a scare tactic,” the person said. “Everyone was like: Well, why are they hiring all of these DOGE fires back, and then suddenly want to do another RIF? Why do you need a shutdown to do a RIF?”
Democrats so far are showing no sign of retreat. Rep. Glenn Ivey, who represents droves of federal workers in suburban Maryland, said in an interview Thursday that Vought is “clearly the bad cop” in the government shutdown standoff.
“We figured that out a long time ago, and also the fact that he’s not paying attention to following the law or the Constitution,” Ivey said. “So I think for Democrats on the Hill, we understand we’ve got to fight back. And this is the time to do it.”
Over the past eight months, Vought has been far bolder in testing the bounds of his role as budget director than he was during his initial stint leading the budget office during Trump’s first presidency, when OMB withheld aid to Ukraine in 2019, contributing to the president’s first impeachment.
He has since openly questioned the constitutionality of the federal law requiring presidents to get congressional approval before canceling federal cash — asserting that funding for programs Trump considers “woke and weaponized” can’t be spent in a way that’s consistent with the president’s agenda. Last month, he orchestrated a legally dubious move to unilaterally cancel billions of dollars in approved spending without the consent of lawmakers.
Over the summer, Vought told reporters he wants government funding negotiations on Capitol Hill to be “less bipartisan,” infuriating lawmakers of both parties who have long led those delicate talks.
“He becomes enemy No. 1 on the Democrat side,” Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.), a senior appropriator, said in an interview this month.
“If you’re a Democrat — even just like a mainstream Democrat — your predisposition might be to help negotiate with Republicans on a funding mechanism,” Womack said. “Why would you do that if you know that whatever you negotiate is going to be subject to the knife pulled out by Russ Vought? That’s a challenge for us.”
Meredith Lee Hill, Nicholas Wu and Sophia Cai contributed to this report.
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