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Days after the 2025 shutdown that shut down the federal government, President Donald Trump reposted an AI-generated music video to the song “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper” by Blue Oyster Cult. Trump plays the cowbell. Vice President JD Vance will be on drums. Russell Vought, President Trump’s budget director, wields a scythe. There’s a lyric that goes, “Las Vought is the Grim Reaper.”
Mr. Vaught worked behind the scenes for much of his nearly 30 years in Washington, D.C. He spent more than a dozen years on Congressional staff before moving to Heritage Action, the advocacy arm of the Heritage Foundation, an influential conservative think tank. He returned to government in 2017, bringing extensive knowledge of the budget process to the first Trump administration and becoming one of the president’s most loyal employees.
For the past decade, this modest budget fanatic and self-proclaimed Christian nationalist has quietly injected his ideas into the bloodstream of American politics. He is one of the lead architects of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which he said spent much of 2024 drafting executive orders, regulations and other plans for use in President Trump’s second term. Since returning as director of the White House Office of Management and Budget in January, he has led the president’s efforts to broadly dismantle the federal government.
ProPublica’s Andy Kroll spent nearly a year chronicling Vought’s rise from the Senate mailroom to one of the two or three most powerful people in the current administration, behind Trump and perhaps his chief of staff, Stephen Miller. In his second term as president’s budget director, Vought has sought to fulfill his desire to “traumatize” federal employees.
The video is based on numerous interviews, thousands of pages of emails obtained through records requests, and dozens of hours of video and personal accounts from Vought, much of which has never been reported before.
Mr. Vought declined to be interviewed for this article. His spokesperson at OMB did not comment on the record in response to a detailed list of questions.
The picture that emerges from Kroll’s reporting is that of a man who is at once a government technocrat, a political operator, and an avid iconoclast. Kroll reveals how the seeds for Trump’s 2025 presidency were planted early in Vought’s career and reveals how much behind the scenes Vought has shaped the trajectory of the Trump-era Republican Party. He also questions what will happen next as Vought leverages his encyclopedic knowledge of the inner workings of the federal government to achieve his goal of rebuilding the executive branch. As Vought told supporters in his 2024 speech, “God put us here for times like these.”
Kirsten Berg contributed to the research.
