Russell Vought met with President Donald Trump on Thursday as more than just another MAGA goon ready to do the administration’s bidding, whatever it might be.
Now in his second stint as director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Vought has proven himself to be a MAGA ghoul. He is someone who delights at the prospect of traumatizing federal employees he imagines to be part of a deep state that supposedly impedes Trump’s goals.
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in a videotaped speech cited by ProPublica last October. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down…”
He added, “We want to put them in trauma.”
Thursday must have felt to Vought like something right out of his most ghoulish dreams when Trump announced they would reportedly be using the government shutdown to plan the firing of federal civil servants by the thousands—turning fears into reality where there would be no work to go to.
In announcing the meeting on Truth Social, Trump publicly embraced Vought as a primary figure in Project 2025.
During the campaign, Trump disavowed any knowledge of this detailed plan for his second term. He was apparently afraid it would alienate voters who saw it as an authoritarian scheme to consolidate power around the executive and exclude those who did not support his agenda.
“I know nothing about Project 2025,” Trump posted on Truth Social on July 5, 2024. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
Yet Vought was one of the men behind it, and had served as the OMB’s director during Trump’s first term.
But Trump was probably telling the truth when he said he had never read “Mandate for Leadership,” which details Project 2025’s plans for the second Trump term and includes a chapter by Vought titled “Executive Office of the President Of the United States.” The document is 922 pages long, exceeding anything Trump is known to have actually read.
When Trump implicitly embraced Project 2025, along with Vought, in his Truth Social post on Thursday, the president did not even pretend that the contemplated cuts were anything but political.
“I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent,” Trump wrote.
Later on Thursday, Trump posted a video with AI images of Vought not as just some MAGA ghoul but as the Grim Reaper himself. There were even nifty lyrics tailored from a Blue Öyster Cult song.
Vought lived up to the image by announcing on X that he had taken big swings with his uber-partisan fiscal scythe.
“Roughly $18 billion in New York City infrastructure projects have been put on hold to ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional DEI principles,” Vought wrote.
He added: “Specifically, the Hudson Tunnel Project and the Second Ave Subway.”
That was not all.
“$2.1 billion in Chicago infrastructure projects—specifically the Red Line Extension and the Red and Purple Modernization Project—have been put on hold to ensure funding is not flowing via race-based contracting.”
There was also this: “Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled,” he posted. “The projects are in the following states: CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, MD, MA, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OR, VT, WA.”
The moves punished Trump’s political foes while furthering his agenda and therefore extending Project 2025. Vought was widely described as the primary architect of Project 2025, but he had only been brought in to implement what had been originally conceived by a lower-level former Trump official named Paul Dans.
Back in April of 2022, Dans was tasked by the right-wing Heritage Foundation to develop a plan for the next conservative administration. He set to work at his kitchen table in Fort Mill, South Carolina, crowdsourcing with fellow conservatives to produce the “Mandate for Leadership.” He brought in Vought to develop an operational plan that was not made public.
Dans says that he left the project when his work was done, the same way an architect turns the plans over to a construction team for the actual building to begin. He is currently making a primary challenge against U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham in the 2026 election. Graham has already secured Trump’s endorsement.
In the meantime, if Trump really did have nothing to do with planning Project 2025, Dans and the Vought proved well able to anticipate what the president would want.
CNN determined that 36 of the 53 executive orders Trump issued in his first week back in office echoed Project 2025 proposals, predictably including “Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential” (drill baby, drill); “Protecting the American People Against Invasion” (by removing undocumented immigrants); and “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government “ (by investigating and holding accountable political opponents who supposedly conducted politically motivated investigations).
Nearly all of the orders were what would have been expected based on Trump’s campaign promises and were no more surprising than the result of shouting into an echo chamber.
But one executive order not in Project 2025 was “Establishing and Implementing the President’s Department of Government Efficiency.”
That came from Elon Musk, who immediately dispatched an almost uniformly arrogant bunch of impossibly young whizzes to take over databases and slash payrolls and move to shutter entire agencies with little apparent concern for the effects.
“We’re going to let DOGE break things, and we’ll pick up the pieces later,” Vought reportedly told his OMB staff.
However ghoulish Vought can be, he does not seem to be just a heedless slasher.
Project 2025 recommended cutting USAID’s budget, but Musk declared it a criminal enterprise that was not worth saving and closed it. Experts warned that the closure would result in the deaths of numerous children, but Musk moved on to seemingly more pressing matters—like turning the South Lawn of the White House into an impromptu Tesla showroom‚ with Trump playing the role of happy customer.
Eclipsed for a time by the antics of Musk and DOGE minions like “Big Balls,” the dastardly, diligent Vought worked long hours in the adjacent Executive Office building. His OMB staff is estimated to have grown from 300 to as many as 800 as he played his part in reordering the administrative state to align with Trump’s wishes.
Many of the efforts involved not just cutting, but also restaffing. And Project 2025 had assembled a database of people who had been politically vetted. Among other things, the White House purged 200 from the National Security Council and restocked it with “staff aligned to the new President’s priorities.”
In other instances, the Trump administration jibed with Project 2025’s advice just to walk away. The U.S. withdrew from the United Nations Human Rights Council, the World Health Organization and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
As proposed by Project 2025, the State Department prohibited displaying “divisive symbols such as the rainbow flag or the Black Lives Matter flag” at U.S. embassies. The administration also moved in keeping with Project 2025’s advice to “make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors.”
According to the Mandate for Leadership: “This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (‘SOGI’), diversity, equity, and inclusion, gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”
In keeping with Project 2025’s recommendations, Trump issued executive orders abolishing the Office of Domestic Climate Policy.
In further concurrence with Project 2025, Trump also imposed “relatively high tariffs” on countries that have “relatively large trade deficits with the U.S.”
He also moved to “Indefinitely curtail… refugee admissions.”
And to “strengthen relations with Saudi Arabia.”
And to “Reinstate Trump’s Migratory Bird Treaty Act (companies will not be punished for killing migratory birds).”
And to “Vacate Biden-era order protecting 30 percent of U.S. land and water by 2030.”
And to “Immediately rollback Biden’s executive orders that prioritized addressing climate change.”
And to ”Revoke rules regarding predator control and bear baiting” and “Delist the grizzly bear and gray wolf from the Endangered Species Act” and “Reinstate Trump’s limitations on the Endangered Species Act’s definition of critical habitat” and “Work with the congressional delegations and governors of Wyoming and Montana to restart coal leasing program.”
Trump also kept with a Project 2025 recommendation to “Reduce regulations on cryptocurrencies,” which continue to make him and his family richer than rich. He would thereby enjoy the massive tax cuts set forth in his Big Beautiful Bill that are offset in part by the healthcare cuts that the Democrats continue to hold unacceptable.
That standoff had led to the government shutdown that Trump and his Grim Reaper ghoul Vought are using as an opportunity to cut funding for “Democratic agencies” and infrastructure projects in Democratic cities.
“I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity,” Trump wrote in a Trump Social post on Thursday. “They are not stupid people, so maybe this is their way of wanting to, quietly and quickly, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Or something like that.
The post Opinion: A MAGA Ghoul Is Trump’s Project 2025 Grim Reaper appeared first on The Daily Beast.
