One of President Donald Trump’s most powerful yet little-known officials faces a threat from inside his own office, an analyst warned.
Catherine Rampell argued in a Thursday analysis in The Bulwark that Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought’s own subordinates may turn on him once Democrats take over Congress and threaten them with subpoenas and criminal penalties.
Vought ran the budget office in Trump’s first term, then spent the next four years building a pro-Trump think tank and writing a key chapter of Project 2025. Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA), who is set to chair the House Budget Committee, has called him “the most dangerous man in America that most Americans have never heard of.”
“He’s just really, really good at turning Trump into a king,” Rampell wrote. “So far, under Vought’s direction in the second term, the president has illegally frozen, canceled, or terminated hundreds of billions of dollars meant for Head Start, FEMA, libraries, after-school care, medical research, AIDS prevention, the Smithsonian, infrastructure grants in states that didn’t vote for Trump, refugee assistance programs, and dozens of other purposes.”
She also pointed to a maneuver known as a pocket rescission, in which the White House asks Congress to cancel already approved funding so late in the fiscal year that the money expires before lawmakers can act. Vought has pulled it off twice with a Republican Congress going along.
Georgetown law professor David A. Super told Rampell that unlike other Cabinet figures, “Russ Vought is actually pretty good at his job.”
Once Democrats hold the majority, Rampell argued, they can write spending bills that leave Trump no room to pick favorites, subpoena records of how the budget office skirted the law, and zero out Vought’s salary or staff budget. Super doubted impeachment was likely, given how many other officials are already in line.
Boyle also has a bill that would attach criminal penalties to illegal impoundment, which Rampell suggested Democrats could force into a budget deal. That, Rampell argued, is where Vought becomes vulnerable to his own staff.
Vought could always ask Trump for a pardon, she wrote, but the lawyers who sign off on the freezes and the officials who carry them out may feel far less protected and far less willing to keep breaking the law for him.
“The guy with the shredder can’t be everywhere at once,” Rampell wrote, arguing lawmakers only need to identify which of Vought’s subordinates would rather cooperate than take the fall.
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