"On the afternoon of February 12th, Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, summoned a small group of career staffers to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for a meeting about foreign aid. A storm had dumped nearly six inches of snow on Washington, D.C. The rest of the federal government was running on a two-hour delay, but Vought had offered his team no such reprieve."
"Vought, a bookish technocrat with an encyclopedic knowledge of the inner workings of the U.S. government, cuts an unusual figure in Trump's inner circle of Fox News hosts and right-wing influencers. He speaks in a flat, nasally monotone and, with his tortoiseshell glasses, standard-issue blue suits, and corona of close-cropped hair, most resembles what he claims to despise: a federal bureaucrat."
Russell Vought, as director of the Office of Management and Budget, leverages O.M.B.'s sweeping responsibilities to influence regulations, executive orders, budgets, and workforce policy across the executive branch. O.M.B. reviews significant agency rules, vets presidential actions, and issues personnel policies affecting over two million federal employees while controlling disbursement of congressional appropriations. Vought combines detailed institutional knowledge with alignment to Trump-era priorities to pursue staffing changes, budgetary cuts, and regulatory interventions that weaken agencies and test legal limits. Career officials and legal experts express concern that aggressive O.M.B. use could erode norms, impair program delivery, and invite judicial challenges.
Read at The New Yorker
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