Amid shutdown, Trump’s budget director aims for sweeping federal job cuts

WASHINGTON— It’s been four months since President Trump’s bureaucratic man of destruction, Elon Musk, fled Washington in a flurry of accusations and chaos.

But the Trump administration’s fight to dismantle most of the federal government has never ended. Only under the new administration: Less colorful but more methodical is Russell Vought, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget director.

Vought has become the background architect of Trump’s aggressive strategy; slashing the federal workforce, freezing billions of dollars in congressionally approved spending in actions that critics often call illegal.

Now Vought has proposed using the current government shutdown as an opportunity to permanently lay off thousands of bureaucrats rather than temporarily furlough them. He suggested that if anyone returns to work, the government doesn’t need to reimburse them, contrary to the law Trump signed in 2019.

These threats may turn out to be mere pressure tactics as Trump tries to persuade Democrats to accept spending cuts to Medicaid, Obamacare and other programs.

But the closure war is the current phase of a much larger war. Vought’s long-term goals, he says, are to “bend or break the bureaucracy to presidential will” and “dismantle the structure of the administrative state.”

Only half of the work is done.

“I would estimate that Vought has implemented maybe 10% or 15% of its program,” said Donald F. Kettl, former dean of the University of Maryland school of public policy. “The rest could be as much as 90 percent. If this were a baseball game, we’d be in the top of the second inning.”

Vought along the way (pronounced “oy”) It ruthlessly weakened Congress’s ability to control the use of federal funds and greatly expanded the president’s power.

“He carried out the most serious attack on the separation of powers in American history,” said Elaine Kamarck, a federal administration expert at the Brookings Institution.

He did this primarily by using OMB, the White House office that oversees spending, to control the day-to-day budgets of federal agencies, deliberately keeping Congress in the dark in the process.

“If Congress gives us very broad authority, then we will use that authority aggressively,” Vought said last month.

Federal judges ruled some of the administration’s actions were illegal but allowed others to stand. Vought’s proposal to use the shutdown to fire thousands of bureaucrats has not been tested in court.

Vought honed his aggressive approach over two decades as a conservative budget expert, culminating in his appointment as director of OMB during Trump’s first term.

In 2019, he expanded the limits of presidential power by helping Trump get around a congressional ban on border wall funding by declaring an emergency and transferring military funds. He froze congressionally mandated aid to Ukraine, the action that led to Trump’s first impeachment.

Even so, Vought complained that he was unnecessarily restrained by Trump’s wary first-term aides.

“Lawyers come in and say, ‘This isn’t legal. You can’t do this,'” he said in 2023. “I don’t want President Trump to have to waste even a second of time in the Oval Office fighting over whether something is legal or not.”

Vought is a proponent of the “unitary executive” theory, which holds that the president should have unrestricted control over every branch of the executive branch, including independent agencies such as the Federal Reserve.

When Congress designated money for federal programs, he argued: “This is a ceiling. This is not a floor. This is not the idea that you have to spend every dollar.”

Most legal experts disagree; A 1974 law prohibits the president from unilaterally withholding money appropriated by Congress.

Vought had told conservative activists in 2023 that Trump would deliberately seek to commit violence if he returned to power. “trauma” about federal employees.

“We want bureaucrats to be affected in a traumatic way,” he said. “We want them to wake up in the morning and not want to go to work.”

Vought appeared to be in Musk’s shadow when Trump returned to OMB for his second term. But when the flamboyant Tesla chief executive became enraged, the OMB director went to work to make DOGE’s work the basis for permanent changes.

It expanded many of DOGE’s funding cuts, effectively freezing them by slowing OMB approval of payments.

He helped persuade congressional Republicans to rescind $9 billion in previously approved foreign aid and public broadcasting support; this process was known as “cancellation”.

To cancel the additional $4.9 billion, he revived a rarely used gambling method called “pocket cancellation,” which freezes funds until they mature.

Along the way, he quietly stopped briefing Congress on spending, leaving lawmakers in the dark about whether programs were being canceled.

DOGE and OMB eliminated jobs so quickly that the federal government stopped publishing a running tally of federal employees. (Any number would only be approximate; some layoffs have ended up in court, and thousands of employees who opted for voluntary retirement are technically still on the payroll.)

The result has been a significant erosion of Congress’ “purse power,” which has historically involved not only approving money but also monitoring how it is spent.

Even some Republican members of Congress were outraged. “They want a blank check … and I don’t think that’s appropriate,” former Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said.

But GOP majorities in both the House and Senate let Vought have its way, happy to cut spending by any means necessary. Even McConnell voted to approve the $9 billion repeal request.

Vought’s newest innovation, layoffs amid the shutdown, would be another major step toward reducing Congress’ role.

“The result will be a dramatic and sudden change in the separation of powers,” Kettl said. “The Trump team could unilaterally end the programs without the hassle of going to Congress.”

Kettl and other academics warned that some of the consequences could be disastrous. Kamarck calls these “ticking time bombs”.

“One or more of these decisions will blow up in Trump’s face,” he said.

“FEMA won’t be able to respond to the next hurricane. The National Weather Service won’t have the forecasters it needs to analyze data from weather balloons.”

He noted that even before the government shutdown, the FAA was grappling with an air traffic controller shortage. This week, the FAA slowed departures at several airports, including air traffic control centers in Atlanta, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth, in response to growing shortages.

Theoretically, a future Congress could undo many of Vought’s actions, especially if Democrats win control of the House of Representatives or, less likely, the Senate.

But scientists say it will take much longer to rebuild radically diminished institutions than to eliminate them.

“A lot of this will be hard to reverse once Democrats come back into fashion,” Kamarck said.

Actually, this is part of Vought’s plan.

“We want to make sure that the bureaucracy can’t reconstitute itself in subsequent administrations,” he said in April on a podcast with conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was killed on Sept. 10.

He told reporters in July that he was pleased with the progress he had made.

“We’re having fun,” he said.