Introduction

“Can someone please get the pigeons out of my office ceiling?!”
-@russvought, July 17, 2023, via X.[1]

Nothing about the political career of Donald Trump has been conventional. He won the 2016 presidency as the first candidate to ever do so with zero political or military experience, ran a whirlwind campaign amidst a pandemic in a losing effort in 2020, and won again in 2024 en route to becoming just the second candidate to ever win two non-consecutive terms in office. There has been no shortage of wacky headlines from the Donald’s nine-year-and-counting foray into public office. With that being said, the above post from his Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought may represent one of the crazier stories of the last decade of American politics. 

It is no secret that Trump and his Grand Old Party (GOP) allies spent the entire duration of the Biden presidency formulating a return to power. While many expected his 2020 election loss to derail his chances of a future GOP nomination, Trump and his allies wasted no time in plotting the art of their eventual comeback. For his own part, Trump remained active on social media and in the news cycle, maintaining a base of supporters that was at risk of shifting after his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. His years between 2021 and 2024 were mostly marred by various court cases and legal issues that, despite resulting in multiple felony convictions, did not result in jail time and seemed to only bolster the view of him as a political martyr among his allies. All the while, he continued to raise money from various high-level donors while attempting to maintain his unprecedented stronghold of the GOP by influencing the midterms via endorsements in order to prop up his loyalists across the country. 

Aside from Trump, his closest allies began to prepare Project 2025,[2] the sweeping policy agenda that has seemed to govern the actions of the current administration since the moment Trump regained office. With the groundwork being laid in 2022 by leaders of the Heritage Foundation, the movement gained greater publicity in the lead-up to the 2024 election, especially for its self-description as a “plan to unite the conservative movement and the American people against elite rule and woke culture warriors.”[3] One of the major architects of this plan, working from a pigeon-infested office mere blocks from the Capitol, was a man by the name of Russell Vought.[4]

Regardless of where you stand politically, there are two fundamental truths about Donald Trump that must be understood and acknowledged to be able to analyze any aspect of his life or that of those around him. Firstly, nothing about him is accidental. For all intents and purposes, his rise from the mires of the Manhattan real estate jungle to the Presidency of the United States has been less a series of fortunate events (although he has undeniably benefited from some luck) than a meticulously strategized set of campaigns, media appearances, and moves to surround himself with people who have put him in progressively better positions to succeed. Those within his inner circle who he has carefully surrounded himself with have been the biggest catalysts to his unprecedented rise from real estate and media mogul to world leader. From his beginnings under his father Fred in the Trump Organization, to his mentorship under Roy Cohn in the 1970s and 80s, to his modern political ascent with the stewardship of advisors such as Steve Bannon and Roger Stone, Trump’s accomplishments have nearly always seemed to be connected to the ability of the people he surrounded himself with to aid his pursuits. If there is one quality of Trump’s that stands out as the catalyst for his sustained success, it is his skill in assembling an inner circle that works to his advantage. And, in the current iteration of the Trump saga of his second term as President of the United States, there is perhaps no more important figure within his inner circle than one Russell Thurlow Vought.

II. The Man Behind the Curtain

“My parents worked 

really long hours to put me through school. But they also 

worked long hours to pay for the Government in their lives, and 

I often have wondered what they would have been free to build 

and give without such a high burden.”
-Russell Vought, 2017[5]

Russell Vought, having previously served within the Heritage Foundation, entered Trump’s official circle during his first term when he was confirmed as Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget. He was promoted to acting OMB Director in 2019 after the promotion of former director Mick Mulvaney to Chief of Staff, and in 2020 he was confirmed as permanent director of the OMB. After Joe Biden’s 2020 election win, Vought was ousted from office following the appointment of the new Presidential cabinet, and thereafter he would establish himself as one of the top dogs in the push to return Trump and his agenda to Washington in 2025. 

Following his exile from the White House, Vought set up shop in a office not far from the Capitol,[6] where he managed the Center for Renewing America, “a pro-Trump think tank that served as a critical outside adviser to the hard-right faction of House Republicans.”[7] He complained of walls infested with rats (or pigeons, no one could tell which).[8] It was this office where he spent the entire duration of the Biden presidency, like Napoleon exiled in Elba, planning the return of the Trump administration. 

Much like Trump himself, Vought’s strategy since 2021 has appeared to be motivated by retribution of some sort. During his stay in the rat-infested office, he was noted to keep the walls entirely empty aside from newspaper clippings of rival Kevin McCarthy’s failures.[9] The animosity between the two began in 2023 after McCarthy came to an agreement with President Biden to extend the debt ceiling, a move that Vought vehemently disapproved of and responded to by becoming a major catalyst in the largely unprecedented move by the GOP to debate on and vote McCarthy out of office.[10] His role in facilitating that move was representative of his actions during his time away from the White House, laying the groundwork for the legal tools he would eventually make use of in 2025.

In addition to ousting McCarthy, Vought continued to plan Project 2025 by fundraising and amending its policy agenda to include his goals of extreme cuts to welfare programs and bureaucracy. He had developed a hatred of bureaucracy since he was a child, with the above quote from his 2017 confirmation hearing mentioning how he had seen his parents pay for the “burden” of a big government. Shortly after his victory in the 2024 election, then president-elect Trump described Vought in his nomination for OMB Director as someone who “knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end Weaponized Government.”[11] For his part, Vought has remained true to proliferating Project 2025’s version of unitary executive theory. He has spoken openly about viewing his role as OMB Director as a tool of the President to gain total power over the executive branch, and in the words of Bannon, he has used that mentality to become “MAGA’s bulldog”[12] during Trump’s second term.

III. Washington’s Watchdog

“In many respects he’s become a puppet master,”
-Rep. Rosa DeLauro, 2025[13]

Since retaking office, Vought’s years of research and preparation have allowed him to wield the OMB to take power away from federal bureaucracy and instill it within the executive branch, specifically the President. His reputation within the administration has become that of a tireless worker who understands his role deeper than anyone else in Washington, a tool he has used to take advantage of procedural intricacies a less-prepared man would never have considered. He first laid the groundwork to revive Schedule F,[14] a first-Trump term policy repealed at the start of the Biden administration. Under Schedule F, federal workers become more vulnerable to the discretion of the President, as it excludes thousands of federal employees from civil service protections guaranteed under the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978.[15] The argument in favor of Schedule F is that the Act mentions the exclusion of federal employees “whose position has been determined to be of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character”[16] from the protections it introduced. However, much criticism of the revival of Schedule F in 2025 was brought up around the fact that it mentioned that federal employees would be “required to faithfully implement administration policies to the best of their ability, consistent with their constitutional oath and the vesting of executive authority solely in the President,” and that failure to do so would be a fireable offense.[17] Regardless, Vought’s facilitation of the move allowed Trump to gain a greater scope of control over the hiring and firing of employees of the federal government with little regulation on potential wrongful terminations. Additionally, the change freed up space for a database of around 20,000 Republican staffers for the new administration.

From there, Vought honed in on expanding the OMB as a tool of his interpretation of unitary executive theory. He had visions of unprecedentedly large budget cuts, wishing for “two trillion dollars in cuts to Medicaid, more than six hundred billion dollars in cuts to the Affordable Care Act, and more than four hundred billion dollars in cuts to SNAP.”[18] In July, the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act aided those visions, slashing over a trillion dollars in funding in those areas.[19] That same month, he directed what was, according to CNN, “the first successful legislative effort to cancel funds appropriated by Congress in a quarter century,”[20] slashing $9 billion from spending on foreign aid as well as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in a move that not only consolidated Trump’s stronghold of the budget but also marked one of the first steps in the administration’s unprecedented reupholstering of press norms. 

Additionally, one of the more controversial methods of action Vought has deployed as part of his strategy has been the so-called “pocket rescission,” in which the President employs his powers under the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974[21] to cancel funds appropriated by Congress without being checked. Recently, the power was used to cancel $4.9 billion in foreign aid, a move that raised questions from members of both parties regarding its constitutionality. According to Maine Senator Susan Collins, “Given that this package was sent to Congress very close to the end of the fiscal year when the funds are scheduled to expire, this is an apparent attempt to rescind appropriated funds without congressional approval,”[22] going on to label the rescinding effort as a “clear violation of the law.” According to the Government Accountability Office, a pocket rescission is explicitly illegal, and the power to allocate funds belongs solely to Congress. The GAO claims that “A pocket rescission could allow a president to avoid spending the money regardless of whether Congress approves the rescission request. This would cede Congress’s power of the purse by allowing a president to, in effect, change the law by shortening the period of availability for fixed-period funds.”[23] The ensuing impasse on federal funding then led to a government shutdown on October 1st,[24] which is still ongoing as of this writing, and much has been made by the administration of the Democrats’ culpability in causing the shutdown. 

IV. Conclusion

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.”
-Russell Vought, 2024[25]

So what comes next? We are at a point in American history that many scholars are describing as a form of democratic backsliding, with much criticism falling on perceived oversteps of power by figures such as Trump and Vought. On the other hand, Vought views his role since Election Night as the byproduct of intense preparation and an unparalleled knowledge of legislation. In 2023, during his stay in the pigeon-infested outhouse, he claimed of the executive branch that “the degree of complexity and minutia is so high and the conservative movement is largely unprepared for that. Our best guys go in there and they’re like, you know, kind of deer in the headlights.”[26]

Through nine months of the Trump administration, Vought has managed to execute his plan to perfection. Seemingly prepared for every roadblock at every turn, he has managed to recommend and facilitate policy actions that continue to skirt what many consider to be constitutional by just enough to continue marching towards his idealized vision of unitary executive theory.  Trump did hire him for this particular reason. While he is not known to be a particularly close acquaintance of the President’s, Coral Davenport of the New York Times states that “the president recognizes in Mr. Vought something that he highly values: a seasoned loyalist who knows how to use the federal budget to deliver what Mr. Trump wants.”[27]

The constitutionality of this administration’s actions remain the subject of debate from politicians and legal scholars alike, and Vought continues to play a polarizing role as the architect of much of the chaos. What is clear, based on the first nine months of this administration, is that almost no one in Washington is better prepared to do his job than the bespectacled “bulldog” of MAGA. From the perspective of his political opponents, there may be little they can do to oppose his aims. Nearly five years ago, in December 2020, in the aftermath of Trump’s intense presidential election loss to Joe Biden, Vought claimed that his administration had no shortage of ambitions for a potential four more years in office. “But,” the ever-prepared OMB director said, “there’s also certain things that require a little bit more time in the wilderness to be able to think through and refine.”[28]

[1] Russ Vought (@russvought), “Can someone please get the pigeons out of my office ceiling?!,” X (July 17, 2023), https://x.com/russvought/status/1680998023281750020.

[2] Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership – The Conservative Promise, HERITAGE FOUNDATION (2023), https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Coral Davenport, “Russell Vought’s Plans for Trump’s Budget Could Reshape Washington,” N.Y. Times (Sept. 29, 2025), https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/29/us/politics/russell-vought-trump-budget.html.

[5] U.S. Senate, “Hearing Before the Committee on the Budget,” 115th Cong., S. Event LC51146 (2018), https://www.congress.gov/event/115th-congress/senate-event/LC51146/text.

[6] Annie Karni & Luke Broadwater, Mad House: How Donald Trump, MAGA Mean Girls, a Former Used Car Salesman, a Florida Nepo Baby, and a Man with Rats in His Walls Broke Congress (Random House 2025).

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Davenport, supra note 4.

[11] Donald J. Trump, “Statement by President-Elect Donald J. Trump Announcing the Nomination of Russell Thurlow Vought,” The American Presidency Project (Dec. 9, 2016), https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-president-elect-donald-j-trump-announcing-the-nomination-russell-thurlow-vought.

[12] Davenport, supra note 4.

[13] Phil Mattingly & Jeremy Herb, “Russ Vought: The Shutdown Architect at the Heart of Trump’s Budget Plans,” CNN (Oct. 2, 2025), https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/02/politics/russ-vought-shutdown-architect.

[14] Rachel Leingang, “Russ Vought and Elon Musk Join Forces for Project 2025,” The Guardian (May 16, 2025), https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/16/russ-vought-trump-project-2025-musk.

[15] Exec. Order 13957, Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service, 85 Fed. Reg. 67631 (Oct. 21, 2020), https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-creating-schedule-f-excepted-service/.

[16] S. 2640, 95th Cong. (1978), https://www.congress.gov/bill/95th-congress/senate-bill/2640.

[17] Exec. Order, “Restoring Accountability to Policy-Influencing Positions Within the Federal Workforce,” White House (Jan. 20, 2025), https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/restoring-accountability-to-policy-influencing-positions-within-the-federal-workforce/.

[18] Karni & Broadwater, supra note 6.

[19] H.R. 1, 119th Cong. (2025), https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1/text.

[20] Mattingly and Herb, supra note 13.

[21] Cong. Research Serv., Presidential Rescission Authority: History and Legal Context, R48432 (2025), https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48432.

[22] “Senator Collins Statement on OMB’s Rescissions Proposal,” U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations (May 8, 2018), https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/news/majority/senator-collins-statement-on-ombs-rescissions-proposal.

[23]“What Is a Pocket Rescission and Is It Legal?,” U.S. Gov’t Accountability Office (GAO) Blog (Mar. 3, 2023), https://www.gao.gov/blog/what-pocket-rescission-and-it-legal.

[24] Anthony Zurcher & James Fitzgerald, “Russ Vought: The Man Behind Trump’s Project 2025,” BBC News (Feb. 10, 2025), https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crrj1znp0pyo.amp.

[25] Hugo Lowell, “Who Is Russell Vought, Trump’s OMB Chief and Architect of Project 2025?,” The Guardian (Feb. 10, 2025), https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/10/who-is-russell-vought-trump-office-of-management-and-budget.

[26] Mattingly and Herb, supra note 13.

[27] Davenport, supra note 4.