Today, Explained - Mr. Project 2025

Episode Date: February 18, 2025

Russell Vought is the architect and legal scholar behind the Trump administration’s attempt to reshape the federal government. Simon Rabinovitch, US economics editor for the Economist, explains how he got all that power. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members President Trump's Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, at his Senate confirmation hearing last month. Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

During confirmation hearings, Democratic senators pushed President Trump's more controversial cabinet picks on things they'd allegedly said. Did you say Lyme disease is a highly likely militarily engineered bio weapon? I probably did say that. On things they'd allegedly done. Another time a CBA staffer stated that you passed out in the back of a party bus. Is that true or false? — Anonymous smears. — But for one nominee, Russell Vought, Democrats took the step of staging a 30-hour protest,

calling him... — Donald Trump's most dangerous nominee. —...before he was easily confirmed by the Republican majority Senate. The low-key Mr. Vought now leads the low-key Office of Management and Budget, and while he's short on razzle-dazzle, he's been very, very, very effective so far. What Russ wants coming up on Today Explained. Support for this show comes from Indeed. Indeed-sponsored jobs can help you stand out and hire fast.

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about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash Vox Business. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring? Indeed is all you need. You're listening to Today Explains. Is it Today Explain or Today Explains? Explain-da.

Explain-da. My name is Simon Rabinovich and I'm the US economics editor with The Economist. So there are a lot of outsized personalities in Donald Trump's second administration, starting with Donald Trump. We also have Elon Musk, RFK, Tulsi Gabbard, just a lot of character. Why do you think Russell Vogt is worth understanding? Well, Russ Vogt, he's not outsized in terms of his personality, but I think he is outsized in terms of his influence.

He was there in the first Trump administration. He's a returnee, obviously, in the second. And he really is the architect of a lot of the chaos and disruption that we've seen in the last few weeks. It's his idea to dramatically shrink the civil service, to bend it to President Trump's will, to reshape the way that the presidency operates to make it that much more powerful. So in many respects, he really is sort of the power behind the throne. Okay, so when we say Elon Musk is the power behind the throne, he's the one dismantling

the civil service. That's not exactly right. It's not exactly right. Elon Musk obviously has a great deal of influence, a great deal of power. But I think you can almost view Elon Musk and Doge, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, as Russ Vogt's shock troops. They both agree that they want to reduce the size of the federal government to cut federal spending. You know, Musk is kind of hyperactive in moving every which way, every direction, but ultimately kind of the general, the person who's really leading this is Roosevelt.

And he's the general, he's also the scholar, because what they're doing will be challenged in courts, it will be challenged in Congress. But to the extent that there is a legal justification, this is something that Roosevelt is working on and has been working on for years leading up to the moment that we now face today. What's his lore? Where does he come from? So, Roosevelt has something of a blue collar background you could say. He had a big family, youngest of seven children.

Growing up as the son of an electrician and a school teacher, I saw firsthand the sacrifices my parents made to balance their budget and save for the future. They are a reminder of the burden government spending can place on everyday Americans. He himself has talked about having a very strong Christian upbringing. He went to college at an evangelical Christian school. All this matters because part of the way that he views his role in government is not just trying to change the way the presidency operates, but also trying to infuse Christian nationalism, his kind of self-defined ideology.

Nationalism is not just patriotic love for one's country, but a commitment to prioritize the needs and interests of one's own country over others, not unlike how a parent prioritizes their family over others, or a pastor who prioritizes their church over other. You know, he spent many, many years as a staffer for Republicans in Washington DC and so kind of worked his way up the totem pole, if you will. And then he was, you know, a key player in Trump 1.0 and he's one of the few returnees in Trump 2.0. And I think also what's notable is that not only has he returned to the administration, he's back in the very role that he was in at the end of Trump's first term.

He's the director of the Office of Management and Budget. It's one of these agencies that not many people have heard of, but it actually wields a great degree of power and even more power in Russ Vogt's hands. When Russ Vogt says his politics are Christian nationalist, what does that mean? Well, the way that he describes it is that he wants to basically bring Christianity into all aspects of society, especially government. So we talk about being a nation that's for God. That's a consensus that we want to renew in this country that we have religious liberty, but it cannot come from this notion that a

country isn't understanding the reality that it has to obey God and there is only one true God and that is Jesus Christ our Lord. And I think it's important because it doesn't just give him sort of a guidepost in terms of what he's doing, his views on abortion, which he wants to have a total ban on. It also kind of brings a certain righteousness of conviction to the way that he approaches his work, a belief that in some cases the ends justify the means. It's one of the reasons why in Trump's first administration, no

matter what President Trump did, Russ' vote stood beside him. He thought that he was a key ally for kind of propelling his vision. And you can just listen to the way that he talks, you can read the way that he writes, and it's sort of inflected with these righteous tones. He talks about kind of quote unquote, the storm clouds being upon us. And we've got to take measure and be ready to put ourselves in uncomfortable, difficult spots, and trust that duty is ours, results are God's. So it's, you know, it's a really, really important motivational force for him. are gods. So it's, you know, it's a really, really important motivational force for him.

I've wondered about his speech. He's also quite mean. He can be quite mean. He talked about wanting to traumatize civil servants, make them realize that nobody liked them. 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. Some of this language, I mean, if we were five years old, we would say that's not very

nice. Now that we're older, we would say, you know, don't talk about traumatizing people. It's unnecessary. Yeah. And it's a really weird contrast because if you meet him, you know, I've had a long conversation with him and he has this very kind of scholarly demeanor, he's always very buttoned up and very nicely trimmed beard, and he's soft spoken. But then when you actually listen to what he's saying, it's really quite radical. And I think it's something that he, this is really just a reflection of the strength of his convictions.

This is stuff that he truly deeply believes in. And more than that, I think that the manner in which he speaks is something that helps to inspire people who work with him. And he does have kind of a devoted group of small allies who kind of share his vision. He's not transactional. You might say he's not corruptible. This is just stuff that he really wants to do. Donald Trump famously throughout his life has engaged in a lot of behaviour that is

not particularly Christian. How did these two men get together? How does he end up with Donald Trump in the first administration? So Roosevelt has an interesting transition over time from, you know, when he was a young Republican staffer, he was very much focused on kind of bread and butter fiscal conservatism. But then over the years, he got into more of a, you know, a MAGA style way of looking at government and ideology. And he was somebody who got involved in the Trump transition team.

As you'll remember, there wasn't an incredibly deep bench of people back in 2017. And so he was appointed to the OMB. He was a deputy director. Eventually in the final year, he became director of OMB. And I think the thing for VOTE is that he sees Trump as a vehicle for pushing forward his ideas. So he talks about the fact that, you know, for example, abortion, this is something that he's quite passionate about. But yet

all of these anti-abortion politicians in the Republican Party who failed to do anything, but it was Trump who ultimately was the one who, you know, through his Supreme Court appointments was able to kill Roe versus Wade. He had the most pro-life record ever. I've never seen him take it to stand in the way of a pro-life initiative that actually was real. And so, Vought, I think, sees Trump as just a critical ally, as somebody who's, you know, even if he doesn't agree with him on a day-to-day basis or on many issues, the grand vision is something where he sees alignment.

For four years, the Trump vehicle had more or less stalled. The president lost the 2020 election and was cast out into Florida. What was Roosevelt doing then? So the first thing to say is that at the very end of Trump 1.0, I think the Trump team began to realize this Roosevelt guy has some ideas that are actually very, very powerful and might be electorally useful. So in his last year when he was running the Office of Management and Budget, he was the one who wrote a memo saying that the federal government should stop all training in quote

unquote critical race theory. That obviously became a very powerful trope for Trump in his more recent election campaign. And he was also the one who was the architect of Schedule F, the idea that you could basically remove all career protections for civil servants. So the Trump team already had the sense that that vote was powerful. He leaves the administration, Trump is out of office, vote forms this organization, Center for Renewing America, and basically begins to create the legal blueprint for a lot of the actions that we've seen in the last couple of weeks. So ideas for ways to give the president much more power over spending, which is known as impoundment power. Basically, the idea that Congress can improve spending, but the president

has the ability not to actually execute that spending. The president ran on the notion that the impoundment control act is unconstitutional. I agree with that. And then also, you know, thinking about ways to get schedule F back into power, thinking about ways to shrink the civil service. So basically beginning to create this blueprint for what Trump would do in his current administration. And one way as well in which vote was very much involved in thinking through Trump 2.0 was that he was one of the driving forces behind Project 2025. – Donald Trump had nothing to do with Project 2025. He thought it was ridiculous and abysmal. – They are extreme. I mean, they're seriously extreme.

Exactly. Exactly. Trump denied on the campaign trail that he, that Project 2025 had anything to do with his administration, his future administration. I don't know anything about it. I don't want to know anything about it. But of course, as we've seen in power, he's appointed many of the people who were involved in drafting Project 2025. And, you know, first and foremost is Russ Vogt. Coming up, what is Project 2025? JK, JK, JK, you remember what it is. But now it's not just an idea, it is government policy. Simon returns after the break to identify all the places

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Seemint Mobile for details. Support for this show comes from Indeed. You just realized your business needed to hire somebody yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy. Just use Indeed. With Indeed sponsored jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for relevant candidates, and you're able to reach the people you want faster. And it makes a huge difference. According to Indeed data worldwide, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed have 45% more applications than non-sponsored jobs. Plus, with Indeed Sponsored Jobs, there are no monthly subscriptions, no long-term contracts,

and you only pay for results. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed, and listeners to this show will get a $100 sponsored job credit to get your job's more visibility at indeed.com slash vox ca. Just go to indeed.com slash vox ca right now and support this show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed dot com slash vox ca. Today Explained is back with Simon Rabinovich. Simon, you write that we are seeing Project 2025 become U.S. policy, where are we seeing it? Well, I think first and foremost, you know, what Roosevelt is doing with the OMB, you

know, is very much in line with what his blueprint was. He wrote a chapter in Project 2025 about basically how to use the executive office of the president and he was, you know, totally transparent with his intentions. A president today assumes office to find a sprawling federal bureaucracy that all too often is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences. Or worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly woke, faction of the country. So he viewed the idea of strengthening the White House as a way of basically returning

power to the American people. And so he laid out a blueprint of how he would use the OMB, how he'd use the agencies under the OMB, including the Office of Personnel Management, to basically shake up the civil service, to traumatize it, to shrink it, and then to push through very, very robust ideas. So we've talked a bit about how he'd like a full-on ban on abortion. That's not something he can do, but he can do things in terms of trying to restrict immigration. And he has a view that immigration should be dramatically circumscribed, that ideally, in his view, America should primarily be favoring immigrants from Christian nations or Christian

immigrants. Not only does the Bible support national sovereignty and borders, but the Bible also has profound principles for thoughtful, limited immigration and emphasizing assimilation. These are things that, you know, obviously it's not just Vought himself, people like Stephen Miller are integral to doing this, but, you know, this is what he talked about in Project 2025. I think you can go back and look at Project 2025 and see that, you know, much of what it was doing was, you might say, one, writing out a blueprint,

but two, also kind of channeling the ideology of the Trump world. And so they're therefore giving us a fairly clear idea of what President Trump was actually going to do. I haven't read it. I don't want to read it purposely. I'm not going to read it. Now, much of what the Trump administration is doing is better described as trying to do because it is running into fierce opposition from the courts. We have the elected vice president, JD Vance, saying, intimating, I guess might be a better way of putting it, that the president ultimately has more power than the courts. Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power.

What is Russell Voigt's plan to deal with that, to deal with all these lawsuits? I'm assuming he's thought this through? He's certainly no dummy. So he knows that what he's doing does amount to radical reform, radical change, and therefore that there will be all kinds of opposition. It's not going to be a smooth road. And so, you know, he's anticipated that that what they've done, the executive orders trying to revive presidential power of empowerment, all of that will end up in the courts and probably ultimately will end up at the Supreme Court. And so it's not that he's afraid that the courts are going to block his agenda.

I think rather he wants the courts to ultimately be the jurisdiction that determines whether or not his interpretation of the law is the correct one. And if he succeeds when these cases work their way up to a Supreme Court argument, if he succeeds then he will have fundamentally redrawn the bounds of presidential power and brought America back to kind of a late 19th century version of the way that the White House could operate. The loss of impoundment authority, which 200 years of presidents enjoyed, was the original sin in eliminating the ability from a branch on branch to control spending. And we're going to

need to bring that back. In a way, all of these lawsuits aren't necessarily a bad thing. All of these lawsuits might be driving toward what RussVote wants. That's right. Driving towards the kind of the fundamental confrontation to the judgment day, if you will. Now, of course, there still is concern and some of what JD Vance has said has animated those concerns that, you know, will the Trump administration abide by court rulings that don't go in their favour. But I think as far as Roosevelt is concerned, you know, he has the confidence, the optimism

that the courts will ultimately side with them. And I think legal scholars who've looked at empowerment power, for example, you know, it's not clear exactly how the courts will rule. There's many people who think that what they're trying to do is unconstitutional, is illegal, but it's not a slam dunk. And so I think Roosevelt is spoiling for a fight. There are two other men in a driver's seat in this administration. One of them is Vice President JD Vance, who seems very interested in using the power of the federal government to push for conservative ends, things like making policy that would support families.

JD Vance going head to head with the courts right now. And then you have Elon Musk, who is the unelected vice president, and he just simply seems to want to tear the government up, just shrink it, shrink it, shrink it. So these two guys both have a lot of power, they seem interested in handling it in different ways. Where does Russ Vogt fall in that spectrum? How does he navigate what seems to me like a tension? Yeah, and I think you're right that there are tensions, and I think we'll kind of see

those tensions come to the surface more and more as time moves on. I think for the time being, the way I would see it, is that Roosevelt sort of... it's not that he's necessarily anywhere specifically on that spectrum, but he shares bits and pieces with all of them. So, you know, for example, specifically, if you look at JD Vance and how he's been very suspicious of Big Tech, I mean, Roosevelt also is suspicious of Big Tech. His specific concern is that Big Tech has been too woke and has been sort of forcing this woke agenda on the American people. So to the extent that JD Vance wants to cut down Silicon Valley,

this is something that Roosevelt certainly buys into as well. And then like Elon Musk, he also really wants to shrink government as we've discussed. So I think to the extent that they are doing things that align with Russ Vogt's ideas, you know, he's very much happy to just kind of go along with both of them and whatever the tension is, he thinks the bigger vision is, you know, a much stronger White House, President Trump being relatively unencumbered. And he sees that both Vice President Vance and Elon Musk are pushing in that same direction. So I guess, I suppose one way that you might see it is that it's not that vote sees himself specifically as a handmaiden of whatever happens to be the Trumpian vision of government, but rather he sees Trump and Trump's allies as basically being battering

rams to destroy the status quo in government, especially the status quo in the bureaucracy, and to push through hopefully many of his beliefs. He really wants the president to have more power. He really wants much in the government to bend to the executive. And he wants to make changes that would do that. And he appears to be making changes that would do that. But what happens when the next time a Democrat is elected president? Like has he thought through the implications of what he wants to do here?

No doubt the implication would be that you'd begin to have this whipsawing between, you know, potentially an extreme Republican agenda, followed by something that would be much more appealing towards Democratic voters. Having said that, I think that, you know, he believes that his role is not just to do something that's a corrective for the last four years, but to do something that's a corrective for the last century. So I think he, you know, he's aware that a Democrat could begin to unwind some of his agenda, but he wants to demolish the civil service that's been built up, that's been strengthened and expanded, you know, going back to the time of Teddy Roosevelt, you know, well before even FDR.

So, you know, if he's able to dramatically shrink the government, to dramatically assert the president's power, to not spend all the money that's been appropriated, I think his belief would be that even if you have a democratic president, they would not be able to just completely reverse everything that he's done. So, I mean, yes, that's a risk to his agenda, but still, I think this is something that he thinks is required. I'm Nowell King. It's Today Explained.