Reporters raise their hands to ask a question of Acting Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought during a press briefing Monday, March 11, 2019, in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour)
Forget rally rants -- this architect of Project 2025 is dismantling democracy through HR forms and executive orders
Critical Resistance -- Substack
May 20, 2025
This is the second in Critical Resistance’s new profile series. If you missed the first on Stephen Miller, you can find that here and the follow-up strategy guide here. Once you’ve read his profile, read the accompanying strategy guide, How to Break the Blueprint: A Tactical Guide to Russ Vought’s 180-Day Power Grab.
Note: Impoundment is when the executive branch refuses to spend funds Congress has already approved, essentially overriding the legislature by doing nothing.
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He doesn’t look like a threat. He doesn’t rant on cable news or pound a lectern. He simply writes the plans.
Russell T. Vought -- once Donald Trump’s budget director, now the principal architect of the 920-page Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” -- is quietly assembling what may be the most radical re-engineering of the federal government in modern U.S. history. His blueprint would sweep away civil-service protections, concentrate executive power, and embed an explicitly Christian-nationalist worldview across every department.
Unlike the populists who perform rage onstage, Vought draws no energy from applause; his weapon is procedure. As head of the Office of Management and Budget he learned that control of forms and footnotes can move billions of dollars and thousands of jobs. Now, from his Center for Renewing America war-room, he is sharpening those tools for a second Trump term.
He calls the idea “radical constitutionalism.” Critics call it soft-spoken authoritarianism.
What follows is not just a profile of one man; it is a warning about how democracy can be rewritten in the language of process -- by people who already know where every wire runs and intend to cross them.
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