Days into the 2025 shutdown that brought the federal government to a halt, President Donald Trump reposted an AI-generated music video set to the tune of Blue Öyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper.” Trump plays the cowbell. Vice President J.D. Vance mans the drums. Trump’s budget director, Russell Vought, wields the scythe. “Russ Vought is the reaper,” goes one lyric.
For most of Vought’s nearly three decades in Washington, D.C., he operated largely behind the scenes. He spent a dozen years as a congressional staffer before going to Heritage Action, the advocacy arm of the Heritage Foundation, the influential conservative think tank. In 2017, he returned to government, bringing his exhaustive knowledge of the budgetary process to the first Trump administration and becoming one of the president’s most loyal functionaries.
Over the past decade, this unassuming budget wonk and self-proclaimed Christian nationalist has quietly injected his ideas into the bloodstream of American politics. He was one of the chief architects of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and said he spent much of 2024 drafting the executive orders, regulations and other plans to use in a second Trump presidency. Since returning as the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget in January, he has led the president’s effort to dismantle large swaths of the federal government.
ProPublica reporter Andy Kroll spent almost a year chronicling Vought’s rise from the mailroom of the U.S. Senate to his perch as one of the two or three most influential players in the current administration behind only Trump and, arguably, Stephen Miller, the president’s deputy chief of staff. In his second term as the president’s budget guru, Vought has tried to make good on his desire to put federal workers “in trauma.”
This video is based on scores of interviews, thousands of pages of emails obtained through records requests and dozens of hours of videos and recordings of private briefings given by Vought, most of which have not been previously reported.
Vought declined to be interviewed for this story. His spokesperson at OMB would not comment on the record in response to a detailed list of questions.
The portrait that emerges from Kroll’s reporting is that of a man who is equal parts government technocrat, political operator and zealous iconoclast. Kroll reveals how the seeds of Trump’s presidency in 2025 were planted early in Vought’s career, while uncovering how much Vought has shaped the trajectory of the Trump-era Republican Party from behind the scenes. He also raises questions of what’s to come as Vought leverages his encyclopedic knowledge of the federal government’s inner workings to achieve his goal of remaking the executive branch. As Vought told his supporters in a 2024 speech, “God put us here for such a time as this.”
Kirsten Berg contributed research.
