Days into the 2025 shutdown that introduced the federal authorities to a halt, President Donald Trump reposted an AI-generated music video set to the tune of Blue Öyster Cult’s “(Don’t Concern) The Reaper.” Trump performs the cowbell. Vice President J.D. Vance mans the drums. Trump’s funds director, Russell Vought, wields the scythe. “Russ Vought is the reaper,” goes one lyric.
For many of Vought’s practically three a long time in Washington, D.C., he operated largely behind the scenes. He spent a dozen years as a congressional staffer earlier than going to Heritage Motion, the advocacy arm of the Heritage Basis, the influential conservative assume tank. In 2017, he returned to authorities, bringing his exhaustive information of the budgetary course of to the primary Trump administration and changing into one of many president’s most loyal functionaries.
Over the previous decade, this unassuming funds wonk and self-proclaimed Christian nationalist has quietly injected his concepts into the bloodstream of American politics. He was one of many chief architects of the Heritage Basis’s Challenge 2025 and mentioned he spent a lot of 2024 drafting the chief orders, laws and different plans to make use of in a second Trump presidency. Since returning because the director of the White Home Workplace of Administration and Finances in January, he has led the president’s effort to dismantle giant swaths of the federal authorities.
ProPublica reporter Andy Kroll spent nearly a yr chronicling Vought’s rise from the mailroom of the U.S. Senate to his perch as one of many two or three most influential gamers within the present administration behind solely Trump and, arguably, Stephen Miller, the president’s deputy chief of employees. In his second time period because the president’s funds guru, Vought has tried to make good on his want to place federal employees “in trauma.”
This video is predicated on scores of interviews, hundreds of pages of emails obtained by means of data requests and dozens of hours of movies and recordings of personal briefings given by Vought, most of which haven’t been beforehand reported.
Vought declined to be interviewed for this story. His spokesperson at OMB wouldn’t touch upon the file in response to an in depth checklist of questions.
The portrait that emerges from Kroll’s reporting is that of a person who’s equal components authorities technocrat, political operator and zealous iconoclast. Kroll reveals how the seeds of Trump’s presidency in 2025 had been planted early in Vought’s profession, whereas uncovering how a lot Vought has formed the trajectory of the Trump-era Republican Get together from behind the scenes. He additionally raises questions of what’s to come back as Vought leverages his encyclopedic information of the federal authorities’s interior workings to attain his objective of remaking the chief department. As Vought instructed his supporters in a 2024 speech, “God put us right here for such a time as this.”
Kirsten Berg contributed analysis.
