Description
Reporter Andy Kroll got his hands on secret tapes of a low-profile bureaucrat named Russell Vought. Turns out, as director of the Office of Management and Budget, he’s been quietly reshaping the federal government and commanding many of the second Trump administration’s biggest moves.
Transcript
Editor’s Note: “Paper Trail” is produced as an audio series. If you are able, we encourage you to listen to the series. This transcript has been lightly edited for style.
Jessica Lussenhop: We’re almost halfway through President Donald Trump’s second term, and no matter where you stand on the president, it’s clear that round 2 has been very, very different than the first.
Andy Kroll: You don’t have to think hard to remember how chaotic and soap-opera-like the first Trump administration was.
Lussenhop: This is my colleague Andy Kroll. He reports on the federal government.
Kroll: Just every single day, some new, crazy new thing was happening, and it seemed like nothing really was getting done out of the White House. Compare that to the last 18 months of Trump 2.0, it’s night and day. There is a plan.
Lussenhop: In more ways than I can keep track of, the federal government has changed dramatically. The White House has ignored Congress, carried out its agenda both at home and around the world without much regard for the norms of checks and balances. Agencies like USAID have been dismantled. Others like ICE have grown explosively. And Andy says at the center of it all is one man.
NEWS ARCHIVAL, President Donald Trump: America is respected. …
Lussenhop: No, actually, not that one.
NEWS ARCHIVAL, Elon Musk: This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy!
Lussenhop: Uh, not him either.
NEWS ARCHIVAL, Pete Hegseth: The War Department is going to fight decisively.
Lussenhop: Nope.
Kroll: If you wanna understand the difference between Trump 1 and Trump 2 and why this time feels so different and so much more consequential, I think you’ve gotta look toward this guy, Russ Vought.
Lussenhop: I’m sorry, Russ who?
Kroll: Russ Vought. By staying under the radar, by not getting out in front of the president, he has more influence. It’s part of his superpower, for lack of a better way to put it.
Lussenhop: Vought — that’s V-O-U-G-H-T — he’d worked for the Office of Management and Budget during Trump’s first term. Not exactly high profile. But a lot of the things we do know about him, we know because of Andy.
Kroll: I’ve been directly reporting on him since the summer of 2024, when we got this first really juicy tip about him.
Lussenhop: The summer of 2024 was the ramp-up to the November presidential election, pitting Kamala Harris against Trump. A contact of Andy’s reached out to him and said, hey:
Kroll: We have some videos of speeches given by Russ Vought. He’s speaking to his allies, his friends, at a closed-door gala kind of event. Hasn’t been reported on. You know, you should take a look and tell us what you think.
Lussenhop: Were these speeches that were ever supposed to land in the hands of a reporter like you?
Kroll: Never.
Lussenhop: At first glance, Vought was pretty unassuming.
ARCHIVAL TAPE, 2024 Russell Vought speech: When we started this organization people were very kind to us. …
Kroll: He’s balding, tortoiseshell glasses, chinos, he looks like a high school history professor, frankly. You look at him, you do not think architect of a president’s all-encompassing plan to change the shape of the American government and the course of American history. You just don’t. But then you listen to what he says.
ARCHIVAL TAPE, 2024 Vought speech: The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country.
Kroll: And you go: “Whoa. OK. This is, this is for real.”
ARCHIVAL TAPE, 2023 Vought speech: How can we possibly be in the midst of tyranny? That’s the question of this morning.
Kroll: He believes the American government is no longer a democracy, that it has been quietly taken over by these unelected bureaucrats.
ARCHIVAL TAPE, 2024 Vought speech: A new regime, if you will, that pays only lip service to the Constitution.
Kroll: The so-called deep state: They run the show, and that what we need is a president who is a, quote-unquote, “radical constitutionalist” to come in and put things right.
ARCHIVAL TAPE, 2024 Vought speech: And guess what? We have in Donald Trump a man who is so uniquely positioned to serve this role. …
Kroll: But then you hear him say:
ARCHIVAL TAPE, 2023 Vought speech: We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. We want— when they wake up in the morning, we want them to not wanna go to work.
Kroll: This particular comment hit me like a bag of bricks. We need to run the government in such a way that we’re gonna traumatize the people who work for it. They’re gonna be so beaten down, demoralized, that they won’t wanna get out of bed in the morning and go to work. He believes himself to be on this mission, this righteous cause.
ARCHIVAL TAPE, 2024 Vought speech: To dismantle and deconstruct and defund this post-constitutional regime.
Kroll: I mean at the time, I thought, this is someone who is not only much more important than I thought, but someone who is going to be an absolutely critical player in a second Trump administration if Trump were to get reelected. And of course, that is exactly what’s happened.
Lussenhop: As soon as Trump was elected — he brought Russ Vought back into the administration — to the Office of Management and Budget. Maybe that sounds like a straightforward accounting job, but that’s not the way Vought sees it. He treats it like the true seat of power. If you control the flow of money, you can effectively control the budget. If you control the budget, that’s everything.
Andy has spent the last two years following how Russ Vought operates, and how he’s reshaping the federal government in ways that will last long beyond this presidency. He’s been combing through private speeches nobody outside Vought’s circle was supposed to hear, some of which we’re going to play for the first time.
Vought’s official title is director of the Office of Management and Budget. But Andy says there’s an easier way to think about him: the shadow president.
I’m Jessica Lussenhop, and this is “Paper Trail.”
Kroll: In the movie version of the Russ Vought story that I have casted and directed and played in my mind more times than I’d care to admit, there is one moment that sets us on the course that we find ourselves on right now.
NEWS ARCHIVAL, NJ Spotlight: Chaos on Capitol Hill tonight, thousands of pro-Trump protesters clashed with police, halting the joint session to certify the electoral college vote won by Joe Biden …
Kroll: It’s January of 2021. The January 6th insurrection has just happened. People who had been loyal to the president, who were working in his own White House at the time, head for the exits.
NEWS ARCHIVAL, Fox News: Some breaking news, and I want to get your take on it. This is the first Cabinet member-level resignation. Secretary of Transportation …
Kroll: Elaine Chao, wife of Senate leader Mitch McConnell.
NEWS ARCHIVAL, NewsNation: Education Secretary …
Kroll: Betsy DeVos, who had been there the whole first term until that point, says, I’m outta here.
NEWS ARCHIVAL, NewsNation: She is now the ninth member of the administration to leave her post.
NEWS ARCHIVAL, ABC News: Lindsey Graham, who’s been perhaps the most stalwart supporter of the president … His golfing buddy. Golf whisperer … taking to the Senate floor.
Lindsey Graham: Today … all I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.
Kroll: Trump’s stock could not be lower. He’s been left for dead. And what does Russ Vought do? He pays a visit to Trump in the Oval Office. He tells Trump, I’m with you. I support you. We are gonna get through this. And I’m gonna work day and night to get you back here in the White House in four years.
Lussenhop: In the buddy comedy version of this movie, I’m really touched. Like they really had each other’s back.
Kroll: The, the Will Ferrell-John C. Reilly version. That’s right.
Lussenhop: This dynamic duo of Russ Vought and Donald J. Trump, it’s a pretty unlikely pairing.
Kroll: Russ Vought could not be more different from the commander in chief, from Donald Trump.
Lussenhop: For starters, Russ Vought grew up as an evangelical Christian.
Kroll: He comes from very modest means. There was this tragedy when he was very young where a half-sister was killed in a car accident. This death seems to spark a religious awakening for his family. They become devout Christians.
ARCHIVAL TAPE, 2023 Vought: Let’s talk about this. I’m a Christian. I am a nationalist. And so we have a — we were meant to be a Christian nation.
Lussenhop: On the tapes Andy got his hands on, Vought talks about this.
ARCHIVAL TAPE, 2023 Vought: Now, that doesn’t mean we’re gonna take it to crazy places.
Lussenhop: About how his religion influences his politics.
ARCHIVAL TAPE, 2023 Vought: Like, when was the last time you had a politician, even a conservative politician, be able to appeal to the revealed truth that we have in the Bible? It never happens because we have bought into this privatized notion of faith that’s totally inaccurate.
Kroll: By the time Trump comes along, as best I can tell, Vought was wary of Trump for all of the reasons that a evangelical Christian conservative might be: the divorces, the lurid tabloid headlines.
Lussenhop: The pussy grabbing and whatnot.
Kroll: Exactly.
Lussenhop: Vought’s pull to Trump comes from the fact that he, like Trump, was a misfit in the traditional Republican Party. Which Vought realized when he spent his early career working for Republicans in Congress.
Kroll: As Vought climbs the ranks within the Republican Party. I’m talking like Tea Party era, Obama presidency, he, by his own description, is feeling more and more disillusioned with his own allies, with his fellow Republicans. They claim to be the party of small government, the party of Dickey Flatt.
Lussenhop: Dickey Flatt — a reference I was not aware of. Came from a mentor of Russ Vought’s: the Republican Senator Phil Gramm out of Texas.
ARCHIVAL TAPE, C-Span: Give a great welcome to the man Phil Gramm has made famous the world over, Dickey Flatt, from Mexia, Texas.
Dickey Flatt: Howdy.
Crowd: Howdy.
Dickey Flatt: I bring you greetings from the city of Mexia, Texas.
Kroll: Dickey Flatt was a businessman, a printer, Gramm had met on his travels through his home state of Texas.
ARCHIVAL TAPE, C-Span, Phil Gramm: He works hard for a living … and whether you see him at the PTA or the Boy Scouts or the Presbyterian Church, try as he may, he never quite gets that blue ink off the end of his fingers.
Kroll: Gramm said everything that he voted on, every program he considered, had to undergo the Dickey Flatt test.
ARCHIVAL TAPE, C-Span, Gramm: And then I’m gonna think about the millions of Dickey Flatts in this country, and I’m going to ask a simple question: Will the benefits to be derived by spending money on this program be worth taking the money away from Dickey Flatt to pay for it? And let me tell you something, there are not a hell of a lot of programs that’ll stand up to that test.
Kroll: Dickey Flatt became the face of business people, regular folk who were constantly feeling the federal government reach into their pockets and take out their hard-earned money to fund programs that didn’t work or were wasteful or whatever.
Lussenhop: Russ Vought was a Dickey Flatt-style Republican. But as he worked on Capitol Hill in the early 2000s, he thought the party had drifted way too far from its roots.
Kroll: Republican leaders: They claim to be the party of small government, and yet time and again, Republicans sign off on these mega spending bills. And they betray their own people. Vought increasingly on Capitol Hill just finds himself fighting with his own party, and it gets so bad that he leaves Capitol Hill in 2010, goes to this new offshoot of the Heritage Foundation, the big conservative think tank, working to defeat Republicans that they have deemed insufficiently conservative and to replace them with Tea Party-style, much more uncompromising, unyielding conservative candidates. What Vought comes to realize is that Trump is a vehicle. He is someone who, unlike other Republicans, wants to make dramatic change and represented the proverbial bull in a china shop.
Lussenhop: That’s why Russ Vought took a job in Trump’s bureaucracy the first time around.
Kroll: He installs himself in the Office of Management and Budget. The wonky budget plumbing of the whole federal government.
Lussenhop: Congress has the power of the purse: Members of the House and Senate set the budget. But it’s the job of the Office of Management and Budget to distribute the money that Congress allocates. The OMB writes the checks.
Kroll: Somehow, it got left out of “Schoolhouse Rock!” But it is essentially the central command board controlling the flow of money that Congress approves and how that money gets to the agencies where the stuff actually happens.
Lussenhop: Vought’s hope was he could stop the stuff from actually happening … by just refusing to write the checks. Even though he didn’t technically legally have the power to do that. Maybe he could shrink agencies — the so-called deep state — and cut government spending on stuff that he didn’t see as passing the Dickey Flatt test. Like, in Trump’s first administration, Vought had USAID — the Agency for International Development — in his crosshairs. He was also eyeballing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, originally proposed by Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Kroll: But time and again, he keeps running into obstacles. The agencies that he’s going after, even though they’re run by Trump appointees, don’t wanna be cut in half. The lawyers say, “You know, you can’t just cancel programs or pause this funding. You can’t do these things that you’re trying to do.” And so he spends the first three years really frustrated.
Lussenhop: But what he was doing in those years was quietly experimenting with ways he could help the president get around roadblocks for his agenda: roadblocks like Congress.
Kroll: One really seminal moment is in 2019.
Lussenhop: Congress had authorized money to aid security efforts in Ukraine.
Kroll: Trump essentially tells the Ukrainian leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, you know, we’re gonna hold back these hundreds of millions of dollars in security money that we’ve said we’d give you in your war with Russia until you investigate the Bidens.
Kroll: The actual act of holding back that money, freezing money that Congress has already approved and should just head off to its destination, that happens under Vought’s watch at the Office of Management and Budget.
Lussenhop: He just doesn’t sign the check.
Kroll: Yeah.
Lussenhop: Everybody around you must be kind of screaming at you …
Kroll: Oh yeah.
Lussenhop: Send the money, and he just was like, mm, no.
Kroll: The experts at OMB, the people whose job it is to make sure that the different parts of the government function as they should, are freaking out. They’re like, you can’t do this. Uh, it’s actually illegal. It is the first time that Vought is really pushed into the spotlight. Impeachment inquiry is started. Uh, investigations are opened.
NEWS ARCHIVAL, CNN: The government accountability office says that the Trump administration broke the law by withholding that U.S. security aid to Ukraine.
Kroll: This maneuver to freeze money that Congress has approved is ultimately deemed illegal, but Vought believes the president should have the power to do that.
Lussenhop: Vought believes the president should have the power, not just to freeze money that Congress has approved, but also to redirect money they approved for one thing and spend it on something else entirely.
Kroll: The other really key battle that plays out. Remember, Trump 1.0, “Build the wall, build the wall. We’re gonna get Mexico to pay for it,” all of that sort of stuff. Trump wants billions of dollars to fund new border wall construction. Congress is like, uh, I don’t think you need that much money to do whatever it is you’re doing at the border. Even some Republicans are skeptical. What Vought ends up doing is coming up with some creative legal tinkering, declaring a national emergency at the border, to unlock, in his view, the ability for the White House to say, “Well, actually, maybe we don’t need Congress. We’re just gonna take some money from the Defense Department, and we’re gonna shift it to this border wall construction because it’s a national emergency.” Vought is rewarded for his work and his loyalty by finally getting picked to be the full-fledged director of the Office of Management and Budget. And when he is sworn in, Trump comes up to him and says this really interesting thing.
Vought: He says, “Russ, we gotta get another, another term. We’ve finally figured out how to do this.”
Kroll: You can understand why Vought feels such a sense of unfinished business when that first term is over.
Lussenhop: In the tapes, Vought talks about what came next in pretty epic terms.
Kroll: He invokes the Bible.
ARCHIVAL TAPE, 2024 Vought speech: In preparing for this talk, I spent a good bit of time this week in Esther.
Kroll: Specifically, the Book of Esther.
ARCHIVAL TAPE, 2024 Vought speech: Do you remember that story? Yes. God raised Esther, a Jew, up from nowhere to be the queen of Persia. While she is queen … an official … convinces the king to annihilate all the Jews in the empire.
ARCHIVAL TAPE, 2024 Vought speech: When Esther’s adopted father … asks her to beg the king to reconsider. She does what any one of us would have done with the complexities of that situation. She pauses.
Lussenhop: Russ Vought makes a big deal out of that PAUSE in the biblical story. He draws parallels to the pause in Trump’s story.
Kroll: It’s a strange thing, this four-year pause between the Trump terms. For Vought it is this really valuable period to regroup. He sets up shop in this kind of janky office where his ties are, like, hung up in the bathroom, and there’s a pigeon in the wall or the ceiling.
ARCHIVAL TAPE, 2023 Vought speech: We don’t invest in our offices, shall we say. We are fearless, we are faithful, and we will always be frugal, but we do need to scale. Next slide.
Kroll: And spends the next four years putting the building blocks in place to ensure that if Trump got reelected, the chaos and the division, the dysfunction, the ineptitude of the first Trump administration would not be repeated the second time around.
Lussenhop: And it’s in this pause when Vought creates his plans for a second term.
ARCHIVAL TAPE, 2023 Vought speech: I wake up in the morning, and I’m trying to save the country.
Kroll: Vought lays out this vision for a president and a White House that exerts a huge amount of control over the entirety of the government that you know a lot of constitutional scholars, frankly a lot of conservatives as well as liberals, Democrats, etc., find problematic because Vought is saying the president is the unitary executive, and thus everything in the executive branch should operate at his direction.
ARCHIVAL TAPE, 2024 Vought speech: The energy and the posture of the political capital of the administration should be to move quickly to do all they can executively, not wait on Congress for new authorities.
Kroll: The Justice Department should act at the whim of the president, the so-called independent agencies like the EPA should be much more closely attached to the agenda of the president. Anything that the president disagrees with, doesn’t align with his agenda, should be rooted out. And then the other thing he does is he oversees a bunch of work to give Donald Trump if he were to win in 2024, all of the practical, day-to-day tools to actually put this agenda into motion.
ARCHIVAL TAPE, 2024 Vought speech: The majority of my time right now is being spent chairing the transition portion of the Project 2025.
Kroll: The Project 2025 blueprint guide, you know, people will remember got a ton of attention.
ARCHIVAL TAPE, 2024 Democratic National Convention: And this. This is Project 2025.
Kroll: People were waving it around on stage at the Democratic National Convention.
NEWS ARCHIVAL, Wall Street Journal: Project 2025 would roll back our fundamental freedoms … usher in the most conservative executive branch in modern American history … undermine our democracy, and gut checks and balances.
Lussenhop: It wasn’t just Democrats who pushed back on this … Republicans distanced themselves from it too.
Kroll: It became, honestly, an albatross around Donald Trump’s neck because it was so unpopular.
ARCHIVAL TAPE, presidential debate: I have nothing to do, as you know, and as she knows better than anyone, I have nothing to do with Project 2025.
Lussenhop: But Russ Vought was behind it.
Kroll: He writes arguably the most important chapter.
ARCHIVAL TAPE, 2024 Vought speech: We have detailed agency plans. We are writing the actual executive orders. We are writing the actual regulations now, and we are sorting out the legal authorities for all of what President Trump is, is running on.
Lussenhop: Sounds like doing like, doing the like boring bureaucratic work to make a lot of very unboring things happen quickly.
Kroll: Yeah. Exa-exactly.
ARCHIVAL TAPE, 2023 Vought speech: We are trying to build almost a shadow Office of Management and Budget. We’re trying to build a shadow office of le-legal counsel.
Kroll: Remember, in Trump 1, there were lawyers in the White House counsel’s office pushing back on some of the more extreme things Trump wanted to do.
ARCHIVAL TAPE, 2024 Vought speech: I don’t want President Trump having to lose a moment of time having fights in the Oval Office about whether something is legal or doable or moral.
Kroll: Vought is saying those kinds of arguments, policy disputes or frankly, moral debates about whether we should even do this or not: We’re having all of that now in the year before this election so that we’re not having them when we’re there. So that when we’re there, we’re gonna move on it.
Lussenhop: That’s after the break.
Lussenhop: At the start of Trump’s second presidency, a larger-than-life figure in the new administration dominated the news cycle: Elon Musk with a chainsaw.
NEWS ARCHIVAL, Musk: Chainsaw!
Lussenhop: The Department of Government Efficiency was going to root out waste, fraud and abuse in government agencies.
NEWS ARCHIVAL, Trump: Waste, fraud and abuse. Other than that we’re leaving it.
Lussenhop: At the same time, the words “diversity” and “women” and “Native American” were being wiped from government websites. In the background of all the in-your-face change was Russ Vought.
ARCHIVAL TAPE, 2023 Vought speech: Next slide. We have to be able to defund agencies that are the cause of the time that we are in.
Lussenhop: In the pause between presidencies, Vought had made a plan for this moment. But he knew that Congress and the courts weren’t going to be his only obstacles to the big project of defunding. He was going to have to convince the public.
ARCHIVAL TAPE, 2023 Vought speech: And that is why we are focusing so much on woke and weaponized.
Kroll: I heard him talk about how they very intentionally came up with this phrase, “woke and weaponized.”
ARCHIVAL TAPE, 2023 Vought speech: How do we make spending an issue that people care about? Woke and weaponized spending, endless wars. Go ahead, next slide.
Kroll: And Vought says, “When you hear the words ‘woke and weaponized’ come out of an elected official’s mouth, you can know that that came from us.”
NEWS ARCHIVAL, John Barrasso: People feel we have an administration that is woke and weaponized against them.
NEWS ARCHIVAL, Matt Gaetz: This woke and weaponized government has to be defanged.
NEWS ARCHIVAL, Lauren Boebert: Crooked Joe’s DOJ is woke and weaponized.
NEWS ARCHIVAL, Barrasso: Woke and weaponized bureaucrats at the Department of Labor.
NEWS ARCHIVAL, Josh Brecheen: That Russ Vought has put out going after a woke and weaponized government, a government that is prioritizing the wrong things.
Kroll: Vought accused the Veteran Affairs Department of being captured by woke-ism. You know, infrastructure projects like the big Gateway project in the Northeast somehow had gotten infiltrated by DEI. It is one of the main tools in Vought’s tool kit is to slap it with the label of woke, and thus the Trump administration needed to freeze it or cancel it or stop it or, and cut it out.
ARCHIVAL TAPE, 2023 Vought speech: We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. We want— when they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work. Because they are so — they, they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We wanna put them in trauma.
Kroll: “We want to put them in trauma,” is the direct quote, and I remember talking to one of these very workers who said, “Yeah, I’m, you know, I’m, I’m feeling pretty traumatized right now.” Like, if you’re Russ Vought, you’ve probably mission accomplished, at least on this piece.
Lussenhop: In the two years since Trump’s second election, Russ Vought has shrunk the quote-unquote deep state that he thinks has been antidemocratic and tyrannical. And he’s done all of this radical remaking of our government simply by … firing as many people as possible and not signing the checks.
Kroll: He has been using his powers to go to Congress and say, politely, “Hey, I know you signed a law that said that these billions of dollars should fund foreign aid and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but actually, I want you to Control + Z that and get rid of it.”
Lussenhop: The end of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been a death knell for NPR and PBS stations around the country, especially in rural areas. Those cuts to foreign aid — my ProPublica colleagues reported they created a hunger crisis abroad.
Kroll: Money for, like, clean energy subsidies, Head Start, PEPFAR, the AIDS prevention program that George W. Bush put into place, money for the Department of Transportation, money for the Department of Education. Like, across the board, he is just aggressively turning off faucets everywhere he can, even though it’s not really clear that you can legally do that.
Lussenhop: And he’s also reportedly deployed the other tactic he learned in Trump’s first term — when he tried to get border wall funding — taking money Congress intended for one thing and using it for something else.
Kroll: It’s been reported that Vought has taken money, in one, in one instance meant for the Secret Service, and redirected it to help finance the new East Wing ballroom that the president is really fired up about. I mean he keeps doing things. He keeps popping up in this part of the government or that part of the government.
ARCHIVAL TAPE, 2023 Vought speech: But if you just said on these issues, are these all of the issues that’s needed to save the country? I would say emphatically no. There are a ton of issues that I think are first order issues.
Lussenhop: There is still plenty on Vought’s agenda.
ARCHIVAL TAPE, 2023 Vought speech: Low birth rate.
Lussenhop: He’s a fierce opponent of abortion rights.
ARCHIVAL TAPE, 2023 Vought speech: Civilian control of the military.
Lussenhop: He’s laid out plans to use armed forces to quell any domestic “riots.”
ARCHIVAL TAPE, 2023 Vought speech: Central bank. We need a Fed expert, but we need a Fed expert that wants to end the Fed.
Lussenhop: Vought has led some of the White House’s attacks on the Federal Reserve.
ARCHIVAL TAPE, 2023 Vought speech: Artificial intelligence.
Lussenhop: And the White House is putting Al at the center of its science and tech agenda.
ARCHIVAL TAPE, 2023 Vought speech: Next slide.
Lussenhop: Vought’s next move, it seems, is a huge one. He is poised to expand the way the president can control the government not just at the federal level — but at the local level. The federal government gives out more than a trillion dollars to states, counties, cities and tribal governments every year.
This is money for roads and water treatment facilities and disaster response and health initiatives and schools. And the government historically has tried to do this in a theoretically nonpartisan way, by having experts review the applications.
Kroll: What Vought has proposed is to take that system, to, to, to rip out the plumbing of it and put something new in. A system overwhelmingly run by political appointees, by people who are loyal to the administration, giving more power to the federal government to take back the money, to cut off grants, to cut off these recipients if they are seen as out of line with what the White House wants them to do. You know, one expert on this stuff, described this as a plan to create this massive patronage system, where it’s all about political loyalties and relationships as opposed to the merits, as opposed to the science, as opposed to the tangible benefits to the people.
Lussenhop: When you think about all this reporting you’ve done and you, and you’re so, like, well-schooled on all his beliefs and his plans, do you have a sense of, like, a big end goal?
Kroll: I think based on everything that Vought has said I’d have to think that there is a longer-term goal to get some kind of ruling at the Supreme Court or rulings plural at the Supreme Court that reorient how the American system of government works that the commander in chief should be able to tell the DOJ what to do, tell the IRS what to do, tell the Fed what to do, and that is not how our government is conceived right now.
Lussenhop: In other words, to erode our famous system of checks and balances of power, and to concentrate it in the hands of a single person. Break and reshape things so fundamentally that, even if a Democratic president comes to power, it will take a generation to undo what Vought and Trump have done. And it seems like his ambition isn’t just to change policy: It might be to change the way Americans think about ourselves.
Kroll: Trump has put Vought in charge of implementing all of these kind of cultural-focused executive orders and initiatives. And, you know, the one that really stands out to me is this top to bottom review of the Smithsonian museums. I mean, these government institutions that tell the story of our country. Trump signs this executive order saying, we’ve got to return to a pro-American and pro-sanity version of American history. And Vought is at the forefront of that effort to change the version of American history and American culture that people see in these, in these institutions that we care so much about.
Lussenhop: It’s quite a magic trick to do all of that … through the Office of Management and Budget.
ARCHIVAL TAPE, 2023 Vought speech: We’re, we’re past the “Shark Tank” stage, OK? We are having an impact today, and we can have more impact today.
Kroll: He’s still as busy as ever trying to rewrite one of the fundamental jobs of what the United States government does. He is deconstructing the government, He’s thinking for the long term.
ARCHIVAL TAPE, 2024 Vought speech: You know how the story ends. … Esther is not naive. She knew the risks. She knew her very life was at stake, but she acted anyway. If I perish, I perish. If they crush me with legal bills, they crush me with legal bills. If the FBI shows up at my door, it shows up at my door. If I end up in jail, I end up in jail. If I’m slandered, I’m slandered. If I’m ostracized, I’m ostracized, but I will do my duty, and then God can take care of the results.
Julia Longoria: This episode was produced by me, Julia Longoria, and edited by Katherine Wells. Fact-checking by Darya Marchenkova. Sound design and mixing by David Herman. Music by Julian Sartorius, Filippo Ansaldi and Simone Sims Longo, with additional music by Epidemic Sound. Our team also includes Sabby Robinson, Gabrielle Berbey and Emma Talkoff.
