Slash and burn: Trump budget chief relishes chance to cut, fire and cancel

Donald Trump’s social media post early on Thursday about looming cuts as a result of this week’s US government shutdown was a prime exhibit in the art of the troll.

“I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of Project 2025 fame,” Trump wrote, gleefully. “To determine which of the many Democrat agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent. I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity.”

In Vought, the director of the White House office of management and budget (OMB), Trump was invoking a figure who at times appears to have enjoyed inflicting pain on civil servants; last year, video footage emerged of Vought saying of federal workers: “We want to put them in trauma.”

The reference to Project 2025 – the rightwing blueprint for remaking American government of which Vought was a principal architect – may have been another deliberate taunt. Trump denied all knowledge of or connection to the 900-page document during the 2024 presidential election campaign, as Democrats sought to tie him to it.

Vought, 49, a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist, has indeed become a Democratic bogeyman, and now threatens to become the dark face of the current shutdown after vowing to use it to attack some of the party’s prized policy sacred cows.

On Wednesday, having briefed Republicans on Capitol Hill about his plans, he seemed to relish that role.

“Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled. More info to come from @ENERGY,” he posted on X. He then listed 16 states where the projects existed – all of which had voted for Kamala Harris .

Vought also announced the freezing of about $18bn in federal funding to two major infrastructure projects in New York, conscious that it is the home of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leaders in the Senate and House respectively – who had fruitlessly tried to avert the shutdown in 11th-hour negotiations.

It is a moment Vought has let known he has been waiting for.

Last week, he issued a memo making clear that permanent cuts would be in the offing if – in his words – “Democrats choose to pursue” closing the government.

“It has never been more important for the administration to be prepared for a shutdown,” he wrote.

“Programs that did not benefit from an infusion of mandatory appropriations will bear the brunt of a shutdown, and we must continue our planning efforts in the event Democrats decide to shut down the government.

“Agencies are directed to use this opportunity to consider reduction in force (RIF) notices for all employees in programs, projects, or activities (PPAs) … [including those that are] not consistent with the President’s priorities.”

Now Vought – who was also the OMB director during Trump’s first presidency – is in his element.

The scenario is in line with his stated desire to claw back Congress’s “power of the purse”, a principle supposedly guaranteed by the US constitution, but corrupted according to Vought’s worldview by spending that amounts to woke-driven “waste, fraud and abuse”.

He has championed the president’s right to impound funds that have been mandated by acts of Congress.

To that end, he has said would seek the supreme court’s opinion on the scope of the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, passed in the wake of Watergate with the aim of limiting a president’s ability to rescind spending, after members of Congress complained that Richard Nixon had abused his powers by excessively withholding funds for programs he disapproved of.

Consistent with that, the White House under Trump has rescinded billions of dollars from programs previously approved by Congress, in areas such as foreign aid.

However, with early polls indicating that a majority blames the shutdown on Trump and the Republicans – rather than the Democrats – fears are being voiced within the GOP that Vought may go too far.

“Russ is less politically in tune than the president,” Kevin Cramer, a Republican senator for North Dakota, told Semafor.

“We, as Republicans, have never had so much moral high ground on a government funding bill in our lives … I just don’t see why we would squander it, which I think is the risk of being aggressive with executive power in this moment.”