Our breakfast with Trump budget mastermind Russ Vought
I asked Russ Vought a deceptfully simple question during this week’s instructor breakfast: “Are you now effectively the Doge chef?”
The director of the Budget of the White House has been bristled by the suggestion that, in his desire to reduce the size of the government, he became the new Elon Musk, the multi-minillionaire who led the Ministry of Efficiency of the Government at the start of Trump 2.0.
“No, I am not,” said Mr. Vought. “I am the chief of two agencies.”
Why we wrote this
As people, Elon Musk and Russ Vought could hardly be more different. But they share a determination to reduce the government. And m r. Vought’s power to do so, as director of the Trump administration budget, is enormous.
“Only two?” I have half joking, referring to the practice of the Trump administration to give senior officials several jobs. In addition to the budget director, Mr. Vought is also the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Office.
“This is all. It was always a false news that I was appointed leader of Doge according to a strange title,” he said, referring to an article by the Wall Street Journal of May anticipated by the departure of Mr. Musk from the administration.
However, in a key way, Mr. Vought resumes where Mr. Musk stopped, working to bring the congress to recover money for agencies targeted by Doge. The first “racissance” package, $ 9 billion in funding for public broadcasting and foreign aid was adopted on Friday.
During our breakfast Thursday, Mr. Vought said that more attractions are “likely to come soon”, but refused to provide details. The article by my colleague Cameron Joseph on breakfast highlighted this point.
More striking, perhaps, was his contrast in the style of that of Mr. Musk. Doge King is a biggest than life character who has arrived in Washington without any government experience. Mr. Vought is a reserved government official imbued with Washington Ways, including years on Capitol Hill and a leading role in the 2025 project, the conservative plan for President Donald Trump’s second mandate. In the first mandate, Mr. Vought was director of the deputy budget before moving on to a director.
In short, he is anti-MUSC. But their objective is the same: to reduce the government, eliminate bureaucracy and reduce costs. “It was not actually Musk holding a chainsaw,” said a senior government official in Politico recently. “Musk was a chainsaw in the hands of Russ Vought.”
During our breakfast, Mr. Vought did not hesitate to express himself with journalists on the cuts of government programs, often stressing what he described as a “fundamentally awakened bureaucracy” at work. The National Institutes of Health? He has shook a list of projects he deemed reprehensible, including $ 5.1 million to “improve the diversity of researchers at the Northwestern University” and “$ 699,000 to study cannabis consumption among individuals of the various sex of sexual minorities”.
So far, some 51,000 federal employees have been dismissed, but budget deficits remain high. Mr. Vought suggests that he is just beginning.
But it was his comments on breakfast on the congress, including the budgetary process, which attracted the most attention to Capitol Hill, in particular its disdainful approach to bipartite. He refused to engage in the finance levels accepted in the next Bipartite financing bill.
“Who ran and won the agenda of a process of bipartite credits? Literally person,” said Vought.
Members quickly learned of his comments. GOP senator, Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, said that Mr. Vought “disrespect” the government’s financing process. The Senate Democrat, Chuck Schumer, called him “a very serious danger” for democracy, and said he should be dismissed.
To be honest, I was most caught when Mr. Vought said he had “amused” in his work. He had noted the privilege of returning to a work he had done before and how he was able to “hit the ground”. But I had to ask: what did he mean for pleasure? Work is work, I say. “What’s not fun?” He replied.
I remembered that Mr. Vought is known to read budgetary documents during his free time, even on weekends. In my note to him after breakfast, I thanked him for coming and, yes, told him that I had fun – what I did.
