Project 2025 calls for the U.S. Education Department to be shuttered, and the Homeland Security Department dismantled, with its various parts absorbed by other federal offices. Diversity, inclusion and equity programs would be gutted. Promotions in the U.S. military to general or admiral would go under a microscope to ensure candidates haven’t prioritized issues like climate change or critical race theory.
The blueprint also recommends reviving a Trump-era personnel policy that seeks to reclassify tens of thousands of federal workers as political appointees, which could enable mass dismissals.
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Trump’s attempts to [distance himself from] the blueprint are complicated by the connections he has with many of its contributors. More than two dozen authors served in his administration, including Vought, who was director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.
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Those who know Vought described him as fiercely dedicated to Trump’s cause, if not to the former president himself.
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After honing his credentials as a fiscal hawk, Vought was named policy director of the House Republican Conference, the party’s primary messaging platform chaired at the time by then-Rep. Mike Pence, who went on to serve as Indiana governor and Trump’s vice president.
Vought left Capitol Hill for a lobbying organization attached to the Heritage Foundation. When Trump was elected, Vought became OMB’s deputy director.
His confirmation hearing was contentious. Liberal Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders accused him of using Islamophobic language when he wrote in 2016 that Muslims “do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ his Son, and they stand condemned.”
Vought told senators his remarks were taken out of context and said he respected the right of every person to express their religious beliefs.
The Senate confirmed him to be OMB’s No. 2 by a single vote.
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OMB is a typically sedate office that builds the president’s budget and reviews regulations. But with Vought at the helm, OMB was at the center of showdowns between Trump and Congress over federal spending and the legal bounds of presidential power.
After lawmakers refused to give Trump more money for his southern U.S. border wall, the budget office siphoned billions of dollars from the Pentagon and Treasury Department budgets to pay for it.
Under Vought, OMB also withheld military aid to Ukraine as Trump pressured President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to investigate President Joe Biden and his son. Vought refused to comply with a congressional demand to depose him during the subsequent Democrat-led House investigation that led to Trump’s first impeachment.
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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.”
The only way to return America to the country the Founding Fathers envisioned is “radical constitutionalism,” Vought said on Bannon’s podcast. That means ensuring control of the executive branch rests solely with the president, not a vast federal bureaucracy.
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It is not clear what job Vought might get in a second Trump administration. He could return as OMB director, the job he held at the end of Trump’s presidency, or an even higher-ranking post.
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Whatever the position, Vought is expected to be one of Trump’s top field commanders in his campaign to dominate Washington.
APNews
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