The pursuit of idiosyncratic grievances and obsession with exerting unconstrained power have been the hallmarks of President Trump’s second term so far. But it was only last week, during a pair of congressional hearings, that the American public received its first real introduction to the obscure administration official largely responsible for translating Trump’s worst impulses into action: Russell Vought.
Officially, Vought is the Director of the White House Office of Management Budget (OMB), which is an enormously powerful position even in a normal administration. But his role in supervising much of the administration’s day-to-day decisions and actions was further augmented when he became de facto head of DOGE — the legally dubious operation to infiltrate the federal government and dismantle it from within — following Elon Musk’s acrimonious departure.
Vought’s influence over Trump’s second term began well before the inauguration. Most notably, he was a chief architect of Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation-led manifesto for razing constitutional checks and balances and building an authoritarian presidency in their place.
His influence is such that Vought has even been referred to as Trump’s “shadow president.”
Remarkably, it’s been nearly a year since Vought last appeared before Congress (yet another indicator of how congressional Republicans have all but abdicated their constitutional oversight responsibilities). He was finally coaxed from the shadows to defend the president’s proposed budget before the House and Senate Budget Committees.
The outrageous proposals contained in the budget — including extreme cuts to essential programs for struggling families and communities, along with unprecedented increases in military funding to support the illegal war in Iran — received significant attention, of course. But the hearings also provided a crucial opportunity for lawmakers to finally demand answers about Trump’s illegal, corrupt, and callous actions from the person most qualified to provide them.
What emerged over the course of two days of intense questioning from the Democratic committee members was a picture of Vought essentially functioning as a sommelier of authoritarianism, expertly curating available presidential powers and administrative tools (or inventing new ones) that might pair best with Trump’s grievance du jour or otherwise delight his dictatorial palate.
To satisfy Trump’s contempt for the poor, Vought has already leveraged various instrumentalities of the state to conduct a full-scale war against those clinging to the economy’s lowest rungs. Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA), for instance, highlighted research projecting that 15 million Americans have lost their healthcare due to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that Vought helped shepherd. Vought’s only defense was to lie, asserting that all of those individuals were either illegal immigrants or somehow engaging in fraud. The reality, as the victims of this policy will attest, is that their only “crime” was to be poor.
Similarly, Vought sought to defend the administration’s proposal to eliminate LIHEAP — a decades-old program that provides financial assistance to low-income households to pay for energy bills — by again claiming that it is rife with fraud. Yet, when Rep. Morgan McGarvey (D-KY) pressed him on whether those of his Louisville constituents who depend on LIHEAP were committing fraud, Vought could only demur.
The administration’s campaign of cruelty also extends to people from countries that Trump once derided as “shitholes.” After citing a report finding that the administration’s shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development could result in the preventable death of 4.5 million children, Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ) asked Vought how he would defend that action to the children’s mothers.
Another major focus of the hearing was Vought’s role as a lead conductor in Trump’s revenge tour. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) asked Vought how he would grade his efforts to put the career civil service in “trauma” — a reference to a controversial speech Vought gave years ago in which he laid out his plans to attack government workers if Trump was reelected. To this day, the president blames these workers for allegedly obstructing his policy agenda during his first term.
Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA) also criticized the administration for denying Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster response grants to states that did not vote for Trump in the 2024 presidential elections. Historically, such grants have been fairly uniform across both red and blue states. During Trump’s second term, red states have been more than three times more likely to receive such funding than their blue state counterparts.
That Vought has served this administration as a leading agent of cruelty and revenge is particularly notable given his professed devotion to Christianity. McGarvey made this point well by contrasting his own Christian beliefs — quoting at length from the Book of Matthew, in which Jesus closely identifies with the plight of the poor — with the actions Vought has carried out on behalf of President Trump over the last 15 months.
If only someone espousing such commitment to compassion and mercy was sitting on Trump’s other shoulder.
