🚨 Trump’s Power Grab: Russell Vought’s Secret Plan to Dismantle the Government
Russell Vought is executing a radical plan. Call your Senators to block the vote.
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UPDATE:
- The White House budget office on Wednesday rescinded the memo freezing all non-individual federal grants. This post has been updated with a new call to action - let’s take this momentum and tank Vought’s nomination.
-The White House has clariffied the Executive Orders signed by Trump directing agencies to stop funding things like DEI programs and things related to domestic energy production.
-The memo was a wide scale freeze that went into immediate effect, it was creating chaos and uncertainty for grantees who got virtually no warning. It was an immediate affront to the impoundment act. The White House Press secretary is attempting to spin the need to recind the memo to make Trump look good, the administration was forced to recind it because of significant public pressure and litigation. The EO’s and lots of other harmful Trump Administration policies remain in effect.
CALL TO ACTION:
Call your Senators about the vote to confirm Russell Vought as OMB director. The Budget committee vote is scheduled for Thursday, January 30 - then it moves to the floor.
Find your Senators by clicking here. Save their phone numbers in your phone.
SCRIPT:
Hi my name is [NAME] and I am a constituent. I’m calling to urge the Senator to vote NO on Russell Vought’s nomination.
Vought supported the unconstitutional funding freeze and should not be director of OMB.
Thank you
WHAT IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW:
On Monday, Trump issued a memo imposing a sweeping pause on federal funding to start on Tuesday at 5pm. Chaos ensued as everyone tried to figure out what funds were going to be frozen. The memo would effect programs that fund schools, housing and healthcare. Medicaid websites were shut down despite the White House saying the program was not intended to be impacted.
On Tuesday, a judge temporarily blocked this order in response to litigation brought by the Democrat-aligned legal advocacy group Democracy Forward. The block is in place until Feb. 3, next Monday.
Democrats in the Senate are blocking the nomination of Russell Vought to be OMB director in response.
Karoline Leavitt, told the press corps that Vought “told me to tell all of you that the line to his office is open for other federal agencies” to call and make their case why their monies shouldn’t be frozen.
Vought does not currently work for the Federal Government.
On Wednesday due to intense public pressure and ongoing litigation the White House recinded the order.
WHAT WOULD HAVE BEEN BE IMPACTED:
People were still trying to figure out what the scope of this order will be, and the White House did not providing sufficient clarity.
People’s understanding was that it would have included things like: foreign aid, medical and scientific research grants, discretionary education spending like after school programs, anything related to the inflation reduction act.
It did not include: medicare, individual grants like SNAP, social security, federal loans, pell grants, IDEA grants, HBCU, small business and grants to farmers.
Unclear: medicaid, head start, free school breakfasts, army contracting, rental assistance. For many of these programs, online portals stopped working.
Democracy Forward was collecting information on organizations affected here.
WHY IS TRUMP DOING THIS:
Since 2018, Steve Bannon has been very public about his flood the zone strategy to overwhelm Democrats and defeat media opposition. This makes it hard for Democrats to settle on a core message strategy. It exhausts the opposition base, and distracts from the administration’s core work of dismantling and privatizing the administrative state.
Trump is creating unease and instability in the government that will give his loyalists more power.
Along with all of the orders and actions related to government employees, this is a way to punish anyone or any program who disobeys the cultural hegemony Trump seeks to institute.
This is giving more power to the unelected bureaucrats, many of whom are connected to broligarchs, to pick and choose what programs to fund.
And lastly, this past week has clearly been intended to stun the opposition into silence. But remember, this is a long game and Trump can be defeated at the ballot box and through democracy. But that is up to us.
WHAT CAN BE DONE:
Democrats in the Senate should do everything possible to block Vought’s nomination and they should be very very loud about it and clear WHY they are doing it. Supporting this unconstitutional power grab is disqualifying.
Volume and authenticity are key in today’s messaging war, not consultant-tested tweets or canned answers. More is more is more is more.
Legal organizations are doing strong and swift work, they litigated to block this funding freeze which was an unconstitutional violation of Article II and the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. That path to stop it was a combination of messaging and litigation.
Let’s go into more detail.
In the opening weeks of his second presidency, Donald Trump has launched an unprecedented assault on the administrative state. His team has had four years to dissect the constraints that held him back during his first term and to enact a strategy that aims to barrel through them like a monster truck escaping a bank robbery.
Last week we saw a cavalcade of executive orders and actions on the culture war issues that animated the core of the MAGA base like immigration, gender identity and DEI.
The five Cabinet appointees that Trump chose to ram through on week one were specifically chosen to be able to oversee his top directives: Defense, Homeland Security, Secretary of State, CIA & Treasury
The speed and scope of Trump’s actions mirror what Naomi Klein termed the "shock doctrine," a deliberate strategy of overwhelming the public with such a volume of changes that they become impossible to process or effectively resist, allowing Trump and his allies to push deregulation and privatization. This approach proves particularly effective in our current "post-truth" environment, where traditional sources of authority have been undermined.
Trump’s Executive Order strategy capitalizes on this reality. He is issuing Executive Orders that are unconstitutional, but still standing law until otherwise adjudicated, tests of executive power and political propaganda all at once.
In addition to the functional effects, Trump’s orders and actions are all more broadly shifting the Overton Window.
The concept of the Overton Window is named after Joseph P. Overton, who observed that at any given time, only a narrow range of political ideas are considered politically viable. The window's boundaries are determined by public opinion, not by politicians themselves.
Politicians and public figures often try to subtly expand or shift the Overton window to make their preferred policies seem more mainstream. By repeatedly discussing certain ideas, they can gradually move public perception and make previously radical concepts seem more moderate.
Think of it like a spectrum of social and political beliefs. The window can shift over time - what was once considered unthinkable can become acceptable, and vice versa. For example, ideas like women's suffrage or marriage equality were once outside the Overton window but gradually moved inside as societal attitudes changed. Marriage equality is a great example because while that public perception was changing, ongoing litigation made its way to the Supreme Court who issued a ruling that reflected those changing norms. Narrative shift and what is constitutional go hand in hand.
The letter about the funding freeze was sent out by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The OMB is a White House Agency that is in charge of developing and executing the federal budget and reviewing all regulations (among other things). Russell Vought is Trump’s nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) - a position he held in the first Trump Administration.
Russell Vought is intent on completely reshaping American government and democracy. It’s Vought who will be implementing Project 2025 in the White House and using OMB to do that.
Unlike some of Trump’s vastly under qualified nominees Vought is terrifyingly overqualified and is incredibly skilled at accomplishing his goals. Vought sees the Office of Management and Budget as the "nerve center" of the federal government, where he will have the ability to control spending and regulations regardless of Congressional decisions. This concentration of power in the executive branch raises serious constitutional concerns.
Who is Russel Vought? Let’s go through the deep experience he’s had at the top of Republican politics:
Worked at Heritage Action, the lobbying arm of The Heritage Foundation.
Was Executive Director and budget director of the Republican Study Committee
Was Policy Director for the House Republican Conference
During the first Trump term he first served as Deputy Director of OMB and then became Director
Then he started an organization called the Center for Renewing America focused on culture war issues like critical race theory, and he started American Restoration Action to "renew a consensus of America as a nation under God".
He’s been called one of the architects of Project 2025 and literally wrote the chapter on the “Executive Office of the President” therein.
During his confirmation hearing weeks ago, Vought teased the current funding freeze, saying he believes the impoundment law could be unconstitutional and that presidents can withhold spending.
Vought's vision includes drastic measures such as reclassifying tens of thousands of merit-based civil servants as political appointees, potentially using military force against protesters, and defunding agencies like the EPA.
Vought's deep understanding of federal bureaucracy and his experience at OMB make him particularly effective at turning ambitious policy ideas into concrete action. This expertise is what makes his role in Project 2025 matter. While serving as Trump's budget director, Vought gained intense knowledge of how federal agencies operate and where the levers of power lie. He applied that insider knowledge to craft his section ofProject 2025, the Trump admin blueprint to reshape the federal government.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University history professor and author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,” has explained that Project 2025 is “a recipe for mass chaos, abuses of power, and dysfunction in government.”
Through his Center for Renewing America, Vought has been quietly preparing hundreds of executive orders, regulations, and policy directives that could be implemented immediately in a second Trump term. The project goes far beyond typical policy proposals, detailing specific administrative and legal strategies for bypassing potential congressional or judicial opposition.
Vought knows how to operate within Washington.
Among the small cadre of Trump advisers who has a mechanic’s understanding of how Washington operates, Vought has advised influential conservative lawmakers on Capitol Hill, held a top post in the Trump White House and later established his own pro-Trump think tank.
Following Trump’s exit from the White House, Vought formed The Center for Renewing America. The organization’s mission is to be “the tip of the America First spear” and “to renew a consensus that America is a nation under God.”
Vought has defended the concept of Christian nationalism, which is a fusion of American and Christian values, symbols and identity. Christian nationalism, he wrote three years ago, “is a commitment to an institutional separation between church and state, but not the separation of Christianity from its influence on government and society.”
In July 2023, Vought sat down for what he thought was a donor meeting in a luxury Washington DC hotel suite. Instead, he was speaking with undercover journalists from a British nonprofit who secretly recorded the entire conversation.
Vought revealed that while Trump has publicly distanced himself from Project 2025, this was merely what Vought called "graduate-level politics." Behind the scenes, Vought claimed Trump had "blessed" the work of his organization, the Center for Renewing America.
The recording revealed that Vought's team was quietly preparing hundreds of documents, including executive orders and regulations, for a second Trump term. These plans included proposals for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, which Vought suggested would help move the country away from multiculturalism. He also discussed shifting from religious freedom protections toward what he termed "Christian nation-ism," and outlined plans to restrict pornography through indirect legal measures. Notably, Vought expressed views about using military forces for domestic law enforcement, suggesting the president has broad authority in this area.
In 2021, Vought wrote an article for The Federalist where he outlined his desire to not merely go after policy victories, but to topple “the tide of progressive liberalism” and “help restore an old consensus in America.” The left, he wrote in 2022 in a conservative intellectual magazine, has perverted the proper constitutional order. Like the broligarchs, he wishes to re-institute what he views as the proper hierarchy in American society.
He says the solution is for conservatives “to become radical constitutionalists.” To disregard all current legal paradigms and developments and return to the original constitution - whatever that means. “These authorities should be used unencumbered by the scar tissue resulting from decades of bad cases and bad statesmen.” Unencumbered by things like civil rights.
Vought is a mastermind. He is an architect. In an administration stacked with many newbs who could be stymied by the intricacies of bureaucracy, he is a highly experienced, highly capable ideologue set on remaking not only the government but also America itself.
Call your Senators and tell them to vote no on Russell Vought.
Thanks Emily for the specific action items along with the information!
Thank you from a federal worker! We are tired and demoralized.