WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump on Friday said he’s nominating Russell Vought, a key architect of Project 2025, to lead the Office of Management and Budget, tapping a close ally who has pushed for strong presidential powers to take on the sprawling federal bureaucracy.
Vought, 48, served in the same role during part of Trump’s first term and later founded the Center for Renewing America, an advocacy group backing Trump’s agenda, following Trump’s 2020 election defeat.
“Russ knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end Weaponized Government, and he will help us return Self Governance to the People. We will restore fiscal sanity to our Nation, and unleash the American People to new levels of Prosperity and Ingenuity,” Trump said in a written statement.
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Russell Vought, Acting Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), speaks during a press briefing at the White House in Washington, DC, March 11, 2019.
The Office of Management of Budget produces the president’s annual budgets, implements the president’s priorities in the executive branch and coordinates with federal agencies and departments.
Vought, whose appointment requires Senate confirmation, wrote the chapter on executive power in Project 2025, the controversial policy blueprint created by the conservative Heritage Foundation that Trump tried to distance himself from during the 2024 campaign.
In it, Vought takes aim at federal regulatory agencies that aren’t under control of the White House. He wrote “the great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch” to “break the bureaucracy” to return power to the American people.
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Vought outlined a host of executive orders the next president should take, including reinstating Trump’s orders on the regulatory process that President Joe Biden overturned.
Vought, in a post on X, thanked Trump for the nomination. “There is unfinished business on behalf of the American people, and it’s an honor of a lifetime to get the call again,” he said.
The selection of Vought comes as Trump has tapped wealthy tech entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a new initiative dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency to find ways to dismantle the federal bureaucracy and slash government spending.
Musk and Ramaswamy have laid out a plan for Trump to cite presidential authority to eliminate “thousands of regulations” and a massive reduction in the federal workforce in his next administration. Any such undertaking would almost certainly faces challenges in the courts.
Trump announced the Vought pick on a whirlwind night of rapid-fire nominations that also included Scott Bessent as Treasury secretary; Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, R-Ore., as Labor secretary; Russ Vought as director of Office and Budget Management; Scott Turner as secretary of Department of Housing and Urban Development; Marty Makary as Food and Drug Administration commissioner; Dave Weldon director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and Janette Nesheiwat as U.S. Surgeon General.
Reach Joey Garrison on X @joeygarrison.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump taps Russell Vought, Project 2025 architect, to lead OMB
