How Russell Vought Broke the U.S. Government

0:00Here we are. Somebody tweeted the other day, it's their sixth shutdown of their life as a journalist covering Washington. And I thought, my God, I've been here for all of these shutdowns, too, going back to the Newt Gingrich shutdown. But that's when people found it shocking. Now, I don't even know how shocking anybody is. It's kind of like an annual dance, practically. I mean, it seems almost meaningless. Yeah, there's sort of like— And the whole only question is, okay, how long is this one going to last for? Right, except for, of course, the poor people who aren't getting their paycheck. I have to say, flying back into Washington hours after the shutdown started, I thought, well, it's not optimal to have those air traffic controllers at work without getting paid.

0:43Yeah, they're working essentially for the love of the game right now. Yeah, well, not to mention for all of us. I hope they have a lot of love for all of us. I mean, there is a difference, though, this year. And we can talk about this a little bit. But one of the differences is that they're not just talking about furloughing these workers. They're talking about laying them on forever. That's a huge difference. Which has never happened, by the way. Never, never. This is a war on the government, not just an interregnum. Good point. That's what this show's about.

1:14Welcome to The Political Scene from The New Yorker, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Jane Mayer, and I'm joined by my colleagues Susan Glasser and Evan Osnos. Hi, Susan. Hey there. Great to be with you. Hi, Evan. Great to see you guys. We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. 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 to put them in trauma. That is Russell Vogt, a name most Americans had never heard of before this week. But he's been central to the Trump world for years.

1:59He is Trump's budget chief, directing the White House Office of Management and Budget. He's a longtime fiscal hawk, Christian nationalist, and co-author of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025. If you want to understand the choices and tactics coming out of this White House, you really need to understand what's happening inside Russell Vogt's mind. And this week, his influence has been impossible to ignore. On Thursday, Trump announced he'd speak with Vogt about which so-called Democrat agencies should be cut during the shutdown. Vogt's fingerprints are all over the strategic decisions that brought us here, and he appears to be guiding what's next.

2:50So who is Russell Vogt? How did he become such a powerful force in shaping policy in the second Trump administration? And what is his vision for America? So, Susan, before we dive into Russ Vogt's rise to power and, in particular, his role in the shutdown, let's step back a bit. What kind of figure is Russ Vogt in Washington? Well, you know, I'm so glad we're taking on this subject today because the shutdown, I think, is one of those stories that makes perfect sense somehow here in Washington in our convoluted politics, but actually makes no sense if you step back. And, you know, Vogt is one of the reasons why we keep having these serial crises, because he is part of a cadre of, you know, very ideological, hardcore Republican Christian nationalists who have figured out how to push the levers of power in Washington over the last decade or so in ways that was never envisioned before.

3:50And I think the key point for people to understand here is that it's not six months into Russ Vot's tenure atop the Trump administration, but he was a key advisor in Donald Trump's first term. And it's those experiences in the first term that are shaping, I think, the very aggressive effort to expand executive power coming out of the White House. So for me, it's Russ Vogt's experience at Trump's side in Trump 1.0 that's really shaping this second term. And one of the things he learned relevant to shutdown politics is he learned that Congress can be rolled. What's happened in the sort of erosion of our checks and balances is that Congress no longer really plays the role and vision for it.

4:33And these shutdown fights are a way of sort of calling Congress's bluff. And that's what you're hearing from Donald Trump. Just the other day, you mentioned on Thursday, Trump said he'd meet with Vought to decide the fate of agencies. Of course, that's not really how it's supposed to work, that the president sits down with one of his staffers and decides whether to axe a whole agency that's been created by Congress. But in this day and age, you have people like Vought advising Trump essentially that he has unlimited executive powers. Back in 2019, they had a shutdown fight. Vought was Trump's budget director then, just like he is now.

5:08Donald Trump demanded billions of dollars to build that wall. Remember the wall on the southern border? Congress said no. And actually, after the longest shutdown in U.S. history, they had to back down. Donald Trump backed down without winning. But it wasn't actually the loss people portrayed. Literally hours later, after that, he just said at Votes Advice, I'm going to declare an emergency at the southern border and take my money anyways from the Pentagon budget and other places. And he did that. And for me, that's this like aha moment that vote and Trump had. And it shapes everything. Now everything is an emergency.

5:46And Donald Trump claims unlimited powers as a result of that moment. I mean, maybe we should bring people up to date with just what he's been doing in this most recent moment, which is in a way torquing up the shutdown and exploiting it to do things that actually have not been tried before. He's doing things right, Evan, as cutting off funds,$18 billion or so from New York that was already earmarked and already approved by Congress. It's not related to the government shutdown. He's using the crisis that he's created to claw back money that Congress has already appropriated to New York. And in addition to that,$8 billion that was appropriated for clean energy, correct?

6:28Right. I think – and before we talk about that, which I think by now most people have picked up some of this from the news, let's actually describe for a second where he fits into the ecology of Washington. Every once in a while, there is a person who comes along who is a kind of – not just a policy entrepreneur, but somebody who sees gaps, sees loopholes or vulnerabilities in the very nature of how the state is arranged and exploits those. So you had Newt Gingrich, for instance, in the 1990s who figured out that there were ways that you could change politics fundamentally. Then you go and you had the neocons.

7:07We now know of people in a way that we didn't know before. People like Richard Perle. Remember these names that at the time were in a way they felt like second tier figures but were in fact the designers, the architects of a whole generation of how to use American power. In the neocons case, it was about how to use it overseas. In the Christian nationalists or nationalist conservatives case, it's about how to use power at home. And the key insight, as Susan was suggesting a moment ago, is that Russ Vogt figured out that when you are the executive branch, you can take steps. You can do things that are fait accompli.

7:47You can put facts on the ground that are much faster than the legal system can respond and certainly much faster than an opposing party in a minority position can respond. So as a result, what's really important to know about this guy is we all know and the kind of meme out in the culture is that the Trump administration has all of these guys who don't really know what they're doing in their jobs. People like Pete Hagseth, who stands up there, as we saw just in the last few days, and sort of cosplays around the stage pretending to be somebody who actually has the respect of those generals. Russ Vogt is a different person.

8:25He knows exactly what he's doing. He has spent years training himself to exploit these wormholes in the state and is now using it in a way that is really transforming the power of the president. Just to the point about spending years, I don't know if you guys saw the comment the other day by Mike Lee, the conservative senator from Utah. He said basically Russ Vogt has been dreaming since puberty of making these cuts. And specifically, Jane, talking about taking advantage in the way that you pointed out. We've had many shutdowns before. Newt Gingrich, Evan, one of the contributions, I put that in scare quotes, that Gingrich made was really to inaugurate this modern era of shutdown politics.

9:09But one of the things that vote has done here, you know, sort of take us to a whole different level of shutdown politics is to seize the shutdown to basically make further transformations in government that aren't a part of the shutdown. Now, there's dubious questions of legality involved here. Yes, that's to put it mildly. And maybe if he does succeed in firing thousands of workers, which he and Trump have threatened to do, we'll see that these projects in New York that Jane alluded to, not only is he seizing on the pretext, going after basically blue states and huge amounts of money that benefit all Americans, red or blue.

9:47He's talking about axing subway project in New York City, Hudson River tunnels urgently needed. But this really gets me. I don't know if you guys notice this. His pretext for doing that, that he stated in his social media post announcing these cuts was because the Hudson River tunnels might have been unconstitutionally influenced by DEI. So can you is there such a thing as a woke tunnel? It's basically a flex. It's basically everyone can see it's a pretext. It's a threat to the leaders of Congress, the Democratic leaders, that is. It's a threat to Schumer from New York and Jeffries from New York.

10:27And it's kind of a way of saying kind of nice subway you got there. It'd be a shame if something happened to it. Too bad because we're going to cut off the funding. I mean, but the thing about this is, yes, it does violate the Constitution, which designates Congress as the body that is supposed to appropriate the funds and has in this case. But the thing is, he knows that there's not going to be action that stops him. That's what he's figured out. That's the key point. And if there is, it'll be so late that everything will be busted by then. And to your point, Evan, I think the idea of him being as kind of a Washington character, he's so prototypical in that he's got tortoiseshell glasses and a trimmed beard.

11:11This is not a superhero with a cape. In Washington, how do you have superpowers? You learn how to use the budget. And that's what this man has done. And he learned it from his mentor, who was Phil Graham, a senator from Texas, Republican budget hawk, who said the budget is everything. And that was decades ago as to what Susan's saying and Mike Lee saying he's been salivating to do this since he was, you know, an adolescent. This is a long, long gestating plan that we're now seeing unfolding. It may have been frustrated in Trump 1. Now he's got the running room. But this is something they've been going at for a very, very long time.

11:51And to your point about sort of years in the making, I think this gets at something that I'm constantly on the lookout for, which is what is actually the difference between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0? And part of it actually just is the four years of experience of those surrounding Donald Trump and figuring out what works and what the system will bear. And especially because they have with Trump a very radical partner who's willing to take, you know, pretty destabilizing actions. You know, Trump is willing to go places that people like vote want to take them. And remember, so they figured out this emergency declaration thing in Trump 1.0 and that shutdown that I mentioned.

12:33Another thing that they figured out is basically Congress won't stand up for itself if we take money that they've appropriated for one purpose and use it for another. One of the things that Vote has written about, has spoken about, has talked about is not only the very vast powers he ascribes to the executive, but the idea that I don't care that Congress has passed these laws or appropriated this money. I basically think it's unconstitutional, the post-Watergate Act passed by Congress in 1974 that says, you know, you can't just impound money. If you're the president, you have to have a process behind it.

13:12He just says, yeah, I don't think we should follow that rule. And this is really at the heart of why it is you've seen Donald Trump in the second term do what he didn't do in the first term, which is just go after the federal government en masse. Yeah, I think, you know, people out there know about Project 2025, right? They know that Russ Vogt was the architect in a sense of this. It's worth actually just drilling down for a second, though, on a really key detail. in Section 1 of Project 2025, which is called Taking the Reins of Government. Vogt outlined this process in which it was a theory of the case that the executive office of the president should be heeded above all.

13:56As he wrote here, it is the president's agenda that should matter to the departments and agencies that operate under his constitutional authority. That right there is actually a very kind of subtle, bland way of making a giant claim, which is that the Congress's power to appropriate and to designate where money is obligated is, by this reading, less important. And this is where we get into something really significant, is that he has, in effect, come up with this idea that it was, in fact, the conservative establishment that was part of the problem because they were too timid in his view. They were not going far enough to dismantle independent agencies, to incapacitate them.

14:40So he was very publicly critical of people who we think of as, you know, fundamentalist conservatives like the originalist judges or the Federalist Society. He was the one who was saying they are in fact perpetrating and propping up this fiction that Congress has any ability to contain the powers of the president. And so in a way, you know, this is what we recognize from if you've studied any revolutionary movement, any kind of movement that is an ideologically driven phenomenon, there will always be people who find their lane, the way to operationalize their ambition by becoming what's known in China as being redder than red.

15:19It happens to work in the conservative context, too. He figured out that the way you win is by being redder than red. And ultra-partisanship is really the key to understanding both vote and Trump. They found a way to turn everything into a partisan fight this summer. And I found this fascinating. Actually, he said at another event this summer, and we played that shocking quote of him saying he wanted federal employees to feel the trauma. He said he took after Congress and he said, it's too bipartisan, this appropriations process. They want everything to be Republican. And so when they put out to bring it back to the present day and the shutdown, boom, let's attack New York.

16:00Boom, here's a list of Democratic-dominated states that are going to have their climate projects cut. But just this morning before we began taping, they put out more things that they were going to cut. Where are they doing it? In Chicago, Democratic-run Chicago. They want to take everything in this country that benefits Americans, whatever their political party, but they want to turn it into everything being about red America versus blue America. You look at his think tank, the Center for Renewing America. There is a memo there that is about how to weaponize the Justice Department. They're unabashed about it.

16:37They want to break the norms that we've had since Watergate about not using the government in corrupt ways that put them into the hands of the president so that he can help his friends and punish his enemies. I mean, in many ways, I think if you go back and you look at the origins of this, it's not just Russell Vogt. There's a group of conservative thinkers and legal thinkers that rejected Watergate. Meaning what when you say rejected? They felt that Nixon was unfairly brought down. It sounds crazy, but if you go look carefully at the Claremont Institute's writings, you will see that there are people there, scholars there.

17:20It's kind of the brain center for Trumpism who think Nixon was wronged. The presidency was too weakened. We need a strong man in this country. It's very sort of Carl Schmidian thinking about how the checks and balances are yesterday. And so you actually have Russell Vogt having written in 2022 an essay about how we are in what he calls a post-constitutional moment. What does that mean, Jane? It means the Constitution with all of its checks and balances, it's too quaint. It weakens the strongman too much. We need an Orban in this country is what it means if you read carefully. And the sort of the paper trail is there connected to Russ Vogt and a handful of other people who put a lot of their plans together in these think tanks that were funded and running during the years that Biden was in the White House.

18:15They were planning and plotting their next step. You know, it makes you nostalgic for the years when Republican legal thinking was dominated by originalism because – Or limited government. Remember that idea? In the original formulation of not only the Constitution, but how American government worked, it was Congress that was the dominant branch. That's the thing that I find so remarkable about this sort of takeover by the sort of strong executives here. Basically, they have views of the presidency as sort of kingly institution. And for the rest of us, that's the part that rings the most off. We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, more on Votes Rise to Power and how his Christian nationalism shapes his politics.

19:05The political scene will be back in just a moment.

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20:29So, Evan, Russ Vogt calls himself a Christian nationalist. What does he mean? Well, what's interesting, if you think about it, just stylistically, by the way, how curious it is that a Christian nationalist would be very close to Donald Trump, who is a profoundly unbiblical person. And, you know, there is a way in which Vogt kind of, you know, according to people who are really around them a lot. He's just statistically odd next to Trump. And yet, Trump understands fundamentally the value that he has to the operation. I mean, Vogt is, interestingly, when you look at how he was raised, I mean, he grew up in Trumbull, Connecticut, in a kind of generally fairly prosperous area from a huge family, many kids.

21:12His dad was an electrician. His mom was a teacher. Religion was a part of his life from a very young age. He talks about the idea that he sort of took God into his life at the age of four. And, you know, let's remind ourselves what we're talking about, this frame of being redder than red. It's like he took what was the old-fashioned Ralph Reed form of Christian conservatism and has amped it up. And so what does a Christian nationalist mean? In a sense, it means the fusion of the affairs of American civic life with the fundamental ideas of Christian and mostly white Protestant life. And in his view, this is something that is in fact part of the design of the United States, that this goes back to the original.

21:56I mean, this is where they're sort of taking the originalism idea of how the courts have been re-engineered to look at the literal language of the Constitution. And he's applying that in a sense to the Old Testament. I mean, he quotes from Deuteronomy. He sort of imagines these are operational documents for how to imagined government in the year 2025. So what does this mean in practice? So take, for example, deportation and immigration. There's a moment caught on a hidden camera, a journalist undercover, and he said, if we're going to have legal immigration, can we get people that actually believe in Christianity?

22:32He said, in an ideal world, I think we could save the country in the sense of the largest deportation in history. That's how you end up in a situation where you have ice out on the streets in all the ways that we now know and see every day. It's coming from this deeply seated conception that the future of the country is fundamentally at risk because it is unchristianizing the nation. And that's where the ferocity, what would seem to, I think, a lot of people, a sort of immunity to sympathy to people who are vulnerable. Where does it come from? It comes from the fact that he believes he is in this messianic struggle to protect the nation.

23:16And there's another form of messianism that he has, which is an almost religious fervor of anti-governmentism. And that comes from, Jane mentioned his sort of apprenticeship, if you will, in a very important figure who, you know, isn't talked about as much these days, But Phil Graham, a Republican, actually famous party switcher back in the day, Democrat to Republican, really dominant figure in the 1980s in Washington. And the religion that he preached was the religion that government is bad. He was the co-author of a proposed balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, right? And I think it's this fusion of this belief about Christian nationalism and this idea of who is really an American, right?

24:00But then it's fused with the idea that government itself is somehow anti-American. And I think that's why we're having this conversation now during the shutdown, because, you know, what is the shutdown about? It's about the nature of what role does the federal government play in America? And historically, Democrats have been the ones who've been very resistant to shutdowns because they believe government is the American people. It's providing services for the American people. It's what helps to make the country work. It's the air traffic controllers. It's the government economists who help the economy run by showing us how it really works.

24:34It's the public health. It's the, you know, and on and on you can go there. And Republicans have had this ideology over decades. Phil Graham being a great example of how four, five decades ago this project first took shape and took flight. And now you have vote and this vessel of Donald Trump basically fulfilling this decades-old project. That's such a great point about a vessel. Like this is actually ties these two themes together, which is how does somebody who is so religious like vote kind of break bread? And the answer is that they have come to believe that Trump is an artifact of God's plan.

25:13And that is how they explain all the inconsistency. And I think actually if you drill down even more, there's almost a kind of a coming together of a mindset in a way between Trump and somebody like Russell Vogt, which is they're brought together in their mutual sense of being disrespected and resenting the establishment. You've got Trump from the outer boroughs who's always feeling looked down upon. And you've got Russell Vogt, an evangelical Christian. They always feel that the rest of the world doesn't respect their worldview. And if you look at what Russell Vogt says about his upbringing in Trumbull, Connecticut, there's some kind of deep wound there.

25:53I don't feel like it's been fully explained. But he talks about how his parents worked so hard and they could have been so much more if not for the government taking so much out of them. What is he talking about? His father was a union electrician. His mother was a public school teacher who then went and started a Christian school. He has some kind of deep resentment against the government. And then it surfaces again where we started this podcast today. When you hear him talking about putting public servants into trauma, that's like violent rhetoric. It's visceral. There's an anger there that I don't feel is fully explained.

26:33But Trump obviously has this great anger also at the establishment. And the two kind of movements have come together maybe in this. Well, and Jane, to your point, that's an excellent point because remember, Trump is also, these are the kinds of people he collects around him. You know, people who have a grievance, people who are attracted in some way to the darkness of his message, American carnage here, destruction. Trump, you know, he's the mirror for other people's souls in many ways. And if you look at those around him, right, you will find that as a common theme. And so I think it's really important also that they have taken the battles and the battle scars of that first term.