Democrats Shouldn’t Let Russell Vought Fly Under the Radar

This post is a part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. 

President Donald Trump’s second administration is full of highly qualified candidates for “top villain.” But there’s a central White House figure who continues to evade his fair share of scrutiny: Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought. Vought, an alum of Trump 1.0 and key architect of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led manifesto for Trump 2.0, is accurately referred to as the “shadow president.” He prefigured the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and has effectively shepherded it before, during, and after Elon Musk’s departure. Vought is the connective tissue linking different elements of the MAGA coalition (e.g., billionaires seeking to eradicate legal constraints on profiteering, bigots propagandizing against various scapegoats, Christian nationalists, and other anti-democratic reactionaries) into a machine for advancing the interests of a small minority of oligarchs.

Despite being the nerve center of Trump 2.0, Vought continues to fly under the radar. This is shameful but not surprising; even though the OMB director bears so much responsibility for so much avoidable pain, the ostensible opposition party mentions him far too infrequently. Most of the domestic carnage of the second Trump administration is inseparable from Vought-led attacks on the non-military federal workforce (there are 278,000 fewer civil servants now than there were at the start of Trump’s second term) and his unlawful moves to freeze hundreds of billions of dollars in socially beneficial funding appropriated by Congress. The basic formula repeated by Musk’s DOGE and Vought’s OMB goes like this: 1) identify spending that doesn’t align with right-wing priorities; 2) baselessly claim that such outlays are, by definition, riddled with “waste, fraud, and abuse”; and 3) unilaterally defund those programs.

Vought’s position at OMB gives him extraordinary power over the federal money spigot; he abuses this power to impose his misanthropic vision with no regard for the popular will. The nakedly authoritarian nature of Vought’s budgetary moves is especially clear when he engages in what historian Colin Gordon calls “vindictive federalism” — that is, coercively withholding money from Democratic-led cities and states, often under the guise of “reviewing” funding. These are blatant attempts to strong-arm jurisdictions that aren’t fully cooperating with Trump’s revanchist agenda.

Although Vought will likely never be as well known as a billionaire megalomaniac like Musk, he should be at least a household name à la White House adviser Stephen Miller or Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. That he’s not reflects a major failure by congressional Democrats to consistently and effectively communicate to the public how the Vought is orchestrating the Trump regime’s assault on the common good.

Democrats are failing to foreground Vought as the nucleus of Trumpian chaos

Official e-newsletters — emails that most, but not all, members of Congress send to subscribers — provide some of the best evidence we have of who and what federal lawmakers are talking about and how often. “Who cares about emails?” one might instinctively ask. In addition to exemplifying the broader communications strategies of individual lawmakers and the parties to which they belong, congressional e-newsletters can reveal insightful trends. Comparing mentions of Musk and Vought, for instance, clarifies how badly the Democratic Party is failing to foreground Vought as the progenitor and executor of Trump’s inhumane agenda.

According to data the Revolving Door Project obtained from DCinbox, Democrats sent 478 unique emails mentioning Musk from January 27 to March 31, 2025 — including 91 sent during the week of January 31 to February 7, the zenith of Musk’s D.C. rampage when DOGE infiltrated the Treasury Department and shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development. In comparison, Democrats mentioned Vought in just 28 emails between October 1 and November 12, 2025, even as the OMB director used the government shutdown to intensify his longstanding efforts to gut federal agencies and block the disbursement of congressionally appropriated funds. 

Things haven’t improved over time; Democrats alluded to Vought in only a half-dozen emails during the entire month of April 2026, even though he (finally!) testified before the House and Senate budget committees on the 15 and 16, respectively. During the hearings, Democrats asked questions that visibly frustrated Vought in the moment, but they failed to capitalize in the hours, days, and weeks afterward. Videos of some of Vought’s most damning answers and non-answers, compiled by my colleague KJ Boyle, show that Democrats had more than enough fodder to turn the hearing into a full-blown spectacle. Their refusal to repeatedly broadcast Vought’s most odious statements in as many venues as possible was a missed opportunity.

In all, Democratic lawmakers mentioned Vought in just 78 e-newsletters sent between January 20, 2025 and April 30, 2026. Musk, by contrast, was invoked in 858 emails during the same period — 11 times more often.

Given Musk’s ubiquitous social media presence (he infamously bought Twitter and transformed it into a pro-fascist bullhorn) and outlandish antics, including brandishing a literal chainsaw during his February 2025 debut at the Conservative Political Action Conference, he has never lacked for attention (or criticism). Vought, however, is strategically reclusive. Thus, he remains largely unknown to broad swaths of the population. This means that Democratic members of Congress must go to far greater lengths to convey to the public how destructive Vought has been and how dangerous he is.

A daily drumbeat of critical emails is the bare minimum that the Democratic Party could be doing to help make Vought a deeply unpopular, Musk-like symbol of everything wrong with the right’s ongoing attacks on democracy and government capacity. And yet, even that low bar is not being met.

Based on my analysis of DCinbox data, 162 House Democrats (roughly three-quarters of the caucus) mentioned Musk in e-newsletters sent during the first 15 months of Trump’s second term. Only 36 of them (less than one-fifth) brought up Vought. Among the 47 senators who caucus with Democrats, 18 of them (about two-fifths) emailed their constituents about Musk. Only nine said something about Vought.

Figures 2 through 5 contain more details about which congressional Democrats have and have not been informing people about Musk and/or Vought via email. As a handful of lawmakers demonstrate, it’s possible to talk about Musk’s reign of terror and Vought’s. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (MD) invoked Musk 10 times (tied for second-most among members of the Senate Democratic Caucus) and brought up Vought four times (the most among party members in the upper chamber). 

Again, e-newsletter patterns can be indicative of a lawmaker’s broader communications strategy. If they’re emailing their constituents about something, they’re likely talking about it elsewhere. For his part, Van Hollen hasn’t limited his Musk- and Vought-related criticisms to electronic formats. Last month, to take one recent example, the senator publicly denounced Vought’s OMB for impeding the allocation of already-approved funding to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) lab. “It’s time for Vought to follow the law and release the funds as Congress intended for the public services that NOAA provides, which are vital to our economy,” Van Hollen told The Hill in a statement.

Vought released those NOAA funds a few days later, on April 16. That happened to be the same day he baselessly asserted to the Senate Budget Committee that “we have not impounded anything.” Committee member Jeff Merkley (OR), second among Senate Democrats with three Vought-related emails, told Talking Points Memo after the hearing that the Trump White House has “absolutely impounded” funds, so Vought “just lied to America.” “If we want to save our democracy,” Merkley added, “we have to save ourselves from the strategy that Mr. Vought implemented.”

How Democrats can coalesce around anti-Voughtism

The data above are meant to illustrate Vought’s relative invisibility. By now, everyone in the United States should be familiar with “the devil on Trump’s shoulder,” as James Goodwin of the Center for Progressive Reform calls Vought. They’re not, however, so popular education aimed at exposing the mortal impacts of Voughtism needs to become a priority for federal Democratic lawmakers, who should be doing everything in their power to organize effective opposition to Trump 2.0.

To be clear, the answer is not simply more Vought-focused constituent emails, though an uptick in anti-Vought emails from congressional Democrats would be a step in the right direction. Political scientist Lindsey Cormack has argued that the “Republican-style messaging campaign” — i.e., sustained and high-volume deployment of critical e-newsletters — that Democrats ran against then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem showed “how a minority party can use official communications to isolate a Cabinet official until they become a liability even to their own President.” But on its own, that’s far from an adequate strategy.

In campaign speeches, remarks from the House floor, and on social media, Democratic lawmakers can connect the dots between the OMB director’s actions and their constituents’ preventable suffering; they should relentlessly explain to people how Vought is implicated in making their lives worse.

The Republican Party is skilled at identifying and popularizing certain victims, who come to symbolize arguments for particular courses of action. For example, the GOP used Laken Riley’s tragic murder as pretext to drum up xenophobia and pass namesake legislation that has eliminated due process for immigrants (58 congressional Democrats helped them). It’s grotesque that Republicans, with some bipartisan consent, exploited an individual’s plight (against the wishes of her father) to turbocharge racist stereotyping and expand the carceral state. Yet Democrats could easily take advantage of this approach to advance progressive causes that actually benefit the greater good.

There’s no shortage of people whose lives have been upended by Vought-led efforts to concentrate federal spending authority in the executive branch and selectively sabotage government capacity (e.g., supporting more resources for militarization but not occupational safety, environmental protection, and social welfare). Vought’s cuts have already caused deleterious consequences: missed cancer treatments; rampant financial predation; foregone medical breakthroughs; blocked nutrition assistance; lapsed child care and Medicaid funding; stalled infrastructure projects; degraded weather forecasting and lower-quality warnings; less investment in disaster mitigation; and diminished disaster responses and recoveries.

Some adverse outcomes haven’t yet materialized, but Vought is increasing their likelihood. He’s putting people at heightened risk of foodborne illnesses, drug overdoses, workplace injuries, train derailments, airplane crashes, viral epidemics, and extreme weather calamities. The people who have already been negatively affected by the OMB director can be fairly described as “Vought victims.” They may soon be joined by more people when additional foretold catastrophes happen. What’s stopping Democrats from finding and talking with those people?

Because they represent geographically limited areas, House Democrats are especially well-positioned to identify specific Vought victims living in their districts. They could conduct surveys and host town halls to collect local data, which can be aggregated into user-friendly storybanks. Since Vought-caused destruction isn’t limited to blue districts, Democrats would be smart to venture into neighboring red jurisdictions to document harms, which might help them win back disaffected voters while shaming Republican lawmakers.

From there, it should be possible to recruit ordinary people who are willing to talk about how Vought’s policies harmed their lives. Senate Democrats might elevate the most compelling examples from their states, and they could also assemble statewide and nationwide data to ensure that an individual’s suffering is properly contextualized as part of a broader phenomenon affecting millions of people. State delegations could collaborate to build interactive visualizations that quantify Vought’s destructiveness and supplement statistics with personal narratives.

The aforementioned information could form the basis for an incessant stream of congressional letters demanding that Vought answer hard-hitting questions. And if those answers don’t arrive by the deadline or they are unsatisfactory? That’s another newsmaking opportunity. Host a press conference to expose OMB’s intransigence. Doing this work now is crucial. If Democrats take back one or both chambers in the midterms, they can haul Vought in front of a different subcommittee every week to make him publicly justify his cruelty. After each hearing, hold rallies where clips of Vought’s answers are played, interspersed with commentary from his victims. Write op-eds and talk to news anchors and podcasters, perhaps even alongside affected constituents. Ensure that all of this material is adapted for and then mass-distributed on every social media channel.

All of the oversight activities described above can be used to support the nascent “Impeach Vought” campaign, a federal worker-led effort that my organization, the Revolving Door Project, has endorsed. Of course, impeaching Vought now is highly unlikely. It would require Democrats to vote in unison and flip multiple Republicans — a long shot given the GOP’s authoritarian turn. Convicting Vought with 66 Senate votes is even less likely. But that’s not the point. Because motions to impeach are privileged, any House member can call up such a resolution and the speaker must promptly schedule a time to consider it. 

This would give House Democrats an opportunity to outline the case against Vought in a public forum — and force House Republicans to go on record in support of the OMB’s onslaught against the public good. The purpose of such maneuvers is to shed as much light as possible on Vought’s power grab and make lawmakers pick a side: the people or the man who is single-handedly eviscerating Congress’ power of the purse with devastating effects. 

By connecting the proliferation of hunger, disease, and other daily struggles to Vought’s depraved actions, today’s Democrats have a chance to do something similar to what New Deal Democrats did amid the Great Depression: discredit Republicans’ anti-government hostility and market fundamentalist orthodoxy for multiple generations. There’s no better time to start than the present. The monumental task of de-Trumpification will require halting and reversing all the damage set in motion by Vought.