Russell Vought and the junktanks behind Trump's coup

Russell Vought may be the most dangerous appointment to be confirmed in Trump's government. He is Heritage Foundation alumnus and the junktanks around him are crucial to watch.

In assessing which Trump appointment is more dangerous, Russell Vought freshly confirmed to helm the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is a contender for the worst. Vought wrote one of the chapters from Project 2025 (an “authoritarian incubator”), but his other revelations expand on the threat.

As director of the OMB, Vought has “total control over the budget and regulatory processes.” The role’s “power to oversee and manage the federal budget is sweeping.” It enables him to implement Project 2025’s steps from the top down. The Founders gave the “power of the purse” to Congress to operate as a check on the executive. It was meant to protect America against a monarchy. In 1974, the Impoundment Act reinforced this separation: Vought has declared war on it.

Vought runs the Center for Renewing America (CRA), with extreme Christian Nationalist William Wolfe. They met when he worked alongside Wolfe at the Atlas Network’s Heritage Action: the Tea Party lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation. Heritage was “the country’s leading bastion of conservative policy,” but its Mandate for Leadership that has driven Republican governments’ agenda since Ronald Reagan’s first presidency is adulterating its “business Republican” programs. It now blends theocracy with its ultra-free market positions. This iteration of the Mandate is Project 2025. Despite Trump feigning distance between himself and the Project during his campaign, Trump’s team is “drawing directly” on it for “nearly all” of its actions.

CRA is one of “roughly two dozen” junktanks spawned after “insurgent” Senator Jim DeMint was driven out of the presidency of Heritage, taking many Heritage staff with him to his new Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) umbrella body. The structure was intended to “insure mission alignment” for officials committed to Trump after his 2020 defeat. The CPI supercharged its impact with over $25 million dollars donated by one Texas software developer alone, making it the “nerve center” of the MAGA (Trump) movement. The CPI is the “gathering site” for the far right Republican “Freedom Caucus.” (The eye-glazing quality of these junktanks’ names and initialisms is intentional.)

Racist and bigoted efforts pervade Jim DeMint’s cluster of junktanks at CPI. Stephen Miller, ugly white supremacist, has been named Trump’s White House Deputy Chief of Staff and runs his America First Legal outfit under the CPI umbrella. The same donors that support the more dignified policy bodies also use their “dark money ATM” to support hate groups.

DeMint is a member of the theocratic Council for National Policy (CNP).

One of the major donors of Vought’s junktank is Tim Dunn, a fracking billionaire and Christian Nationalist pastor. Not surprisingly, the CRA recommends bringing down the price of gas by unleashing the fossil fuel sector. This kind of donor-purchased policy propaganda is the purpose of the Heritage Foundation and all its affiliated and spawned junktanks.

Project 2025 is a deeply climate denialist plan for governing.

Last time he was director of Trump’s White House Office of Management and Budget, Vought “drafted and published Trump’s executive order” against diversity training as part of the culture war “idiot ball” of Critical Race Theory (CRT). That “moral” panic was a strategy devised and promoted by Christopher Rufo, another Atlas Network operative. The timing might be coincidence but one of the first executive orders to be released after Vought’s confirmation was “Eradicating anti-Christian bias.” Like the dogwhistle campaigns against CRT and DEI, allegations of anti-Christian bias are largely a “relatively socially acceptable way to signal White allyship without explicitly referencing race.”

Vought contemplates eliminating the Department of Education. As Yale Philosopher Jason Stanley has illustrated in Erasing History: how fascists rewrite the past to control the future, fascistic projects see education as a critical field to conquer. Republicans aim to destroy the public school system to enable a simplified and mythologised national narrative. Lacking understanding of the nature of the American project, not least its deeply flawed past, and the people and groups who resisted oppression, youth are intended by these politicians and their donors to be made into a docile mass for their “strongman” leaders and corporate interests. (Some of Atlas’s Australian junktanks are echoing this campaign here.)

Church and charter schools will also not teach “woke” or “blasphemous” topics, climate science amongst them.

In the undercover investigation, Vought and his research director Micah Meadowcroft were approached through the religio-ethnonationalist National Conservative (NatCon) conference where JD Vance was soft-launched ahead of his elevation to the presidential ticket. DeMint and Vought are signatories to the NatCon Statement. Standard for NatCon ideologues, Vought has a record of Islamophobic commentary.

They boast in the covert video that the secretive second phase of Project 2025 was “supervised largely by Russ.” That second phase was a “comprehensive, concrete transition plan for every federal agency.” Vought expressed confidence that providing Stephen Miller or Bob Lighthizer were in, he could hand the full implementation of Project 2025 to Trump’s team until he was in the system. It would not be in writing however, to prevent media coverage and FOI requests.

Vought begins his Project 2025 chapter with the assertion of the (Unitary) Executive Power of the President. The Brennan Center refers to Unitary Executive theory as a “dangerous vision” that proposes a “giant leap for authoritarianism.”

Vought’s goals are autocratic. He, and insurrectionist CRA operative Jeffrey Clark, intend to make the Justice Department subject to Trump. The junktank boasts a 50-page paper advising the legal strategy for using the Insurrection Act to deploy the military on the border, but also to crush protest on American streets. The confirmation of Peter Hegseth as Secretary of Defense grants Vought a supportive partner.

The CRA argues that the FBI is both “weaponised” and “partisan” and must be “broken up.” Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee to lead the FBI, is one of CRA’s personnel. The CRA, in contradiction, also wishes to use the FBI against its enemies. This is another Patel-supported policy. One of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s first acts was to implement a “Weaponization Working Group” to root out actors unsupportive of President Trump.

Vought is supported by the “hyper-populist, racially-inflected nationalism” led by Steve Bannon, who has worked with and promoted the CRA. He is also the “glue” between Republicans and the neofeudal tech-fascists represented by Elon Musk. Musk is confident that Vought shares his sledgehammer intent for government.

Vought has said that, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. … When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. … We want to put them in trauma.”

The budget freeze that caused chaos in Trump’s first fortnight was Vought’s plan and, although not yet confirmed, he recommended that department heads contacted him to argue their case.

The withdrawal from the World Health Organisation and withdrawal of funding has been a CRA project. Alongside the destruction of USAID, this is in accord with the eugenics that pervades the movements.

His junktank prepares “primers” for strategists to destroy enemies. One of the safest ways to end a pregnancy is by medication. The CRA provides strategies to prevent the distribution of these pills. Vought also plans to defund Planned Parenthood, the primary provider of reproductive healthcare in large swathes of America. Project 2025 plans to “maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family.”

Russell Vought intends to remake America according to his vision of a Christian Nation: the Atlas Network that fostered his career boasts that it is strengthening the “worldwide freedom movement.” Instead it has ultimately, perhaps accidentally, worked in cooperation with autocrats turning the January 6th insurgency into a US coup.