October 6, 2025
If White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller is at the head of the administration’s deployment of federal agents against undocumented immigrants, it appears that Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Russell Vought is running the administration’s approach to the government shutdown.
As Beth Reinhard explained in the Washington Post in June 2024, Vought is a hard-right Christian nationalist who drafted the plans for a second Trump term. Vought was the director of the Office of Management and Budget from July 2020 to January 2021 during the first Trump administration. In January 2021 he founded the Center for Renewing America, a pro-Trump think tank.
In 2022, Vought argued that the United States is in a “post constitutional moment” that “pays only lip service to the old Constitution.” He attributes that crisis to “the Left,” which he says “quietly adopted a strategy of institutional change,” by which he appears to mean the growth of the federal government to protect the rights of all Americans. He attributes that change to the presidency of President Woodrow Wilson beginning in 1913. Vought advocates what he calls “radical constitutionalism” to destroy the power of the modern administrative state and instead elevate the president to supreme authority.
When Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 2023, Vought advised its far-right members, calling for draconian cuts to government agencies, student loans, and housing, health care, and food assistance. He called for $2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid over ten years, more than $600 billion in cuts to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), more than $400 billion in cuts to food assistance, and so on.
Vought was a key player in the construction of Project 2025, the plan to gut the nonpartisan federal government and replace it with a dominant president and a team of loyalists who will impose religious rule on the United States. He wrote the section of Project 2025 that covers the presidency, calling for “aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch” to “bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will” and identifying the OMB as the means of enforcing the president’s agenda.
In August 2024, two men associated with the British nonprofit Centre for Climate Reporting secretly video recorded Vought assuring the men, who he thought might donate to the cause, that he and his Center for Renewing America were secretly writing a blueprint of executive orders, memos, and regulations that Donald J. Trump could enact immediately upon taking office a second time. Although Trump was saying he knew nothing about Project 2025, Vought assured the men that Trump was only disavowing Project 2025 for political reasons. In reality, Vought said, Trump is “very supportive of what we do.”
Since Trump took office, Vought’s predictions have come true. The administration has illegally slashed through programs Congress set up and for which it appropriated funds, and now is using the government shutdown to threaten more cuts to programs and to personnel. As soon as the government shutdown began on October 1, 2025, Vought announced that he would use the shutdown to continue his illegal cuts, vowing to cancel $26 billion in infrastructure and climate projects in states led by Democrats, and to fire—not just furlough, as a shutdown requires—federal employees.
But the program Vought is advancing is hugely unpopular. Republicans have called for cuts to the government for decades using rhetoric that suggested such cuts would only affect racial minorities and women. Those who voted for such cuts assumed they would not be affected by any of the proposed cuts. Now they are discovering otherwise.
There were signs of this dramatic disconnect between Republican rhetoric and reality in the 2024 campaign season: when voters in 2024 learned about Project 2025, only 4% of them wanted to see it enacted. At the time, Trump insisted he had nothing to do with the program. Now, though, he is boasting that he is meeting with Vought to decide which “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,” Trump posted on social media.
But it is increasingly clear that the cuts Vought and the MAGA Republicans are making to government programs are hitting a wide swath of Americans. Those cuts are no longer rhetorical, and members of the administration appear to be aware they are unpopular with a large part of their own base.
At a press briefing today, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins pointed out that while Trump had said Democrats would bear the blame for layoffs during the shutdown, in fact shutdowns only create furloughs. If the administration was choosing to lay people off instead of furloughing them, she asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, didn’t this mean the president was responsible for the layoffs? Leavitt responded: “This conversation about layoffs would not be happening right now if the Democrats did not vote to shut the government down.”
But the Democrats did not vote to shut the government down. They refused to vote in favor of a continuing resolution to fund the government—which was necessary because the Republicans have not managed to pass any appropriations bills—until Republicans reverse a drastic cut they have made to healthcare. Democrats want Republicans to agree to extend the premium tax credits for healthcare insurance that they permitted to lapse when they wrote the law they call the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act.”
Both Trump and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) have been open about their determination to roll back the ACA, also known as Obamacare, a policy advanced in Project 2025. In October 2024, Johnson told a crowd there would be “massive” changes to healthcare if voters reelected Trump. “We want to take a blowtorch to the regulatory state. These agencies have been weaponized against the people. It’s crushing the free market; it’s like a boot on the neck of job creators and entrepreneurs and risk takers. And so health care is one of the sectors, and we need this across the board,” he said.
Now, though, those hypothetical cuts are real, and without the extension of the premium tax credit, the cost of many Americans’ healthcare premiums will skyrocket. As NPR’s Selena Simmons-Duffin pointed out on Saturday, about 24 million Americans who don’t have health insurance through their jobs or through Medicaid buy health insurance in the Affordable Care Act marketplace. According to the nonpartisan health research organization KFF, without the extension of the tax credits, premiums will go up an average of 114% for consumers. Spiking premiums will mean the healthiest people decide to go without health insurance, sending prices up for everyone else.
Enrollment starts November 1, putting pressure on Congress to provide a fix before then. In a partisan twist, more than three in four people enrolled in ACA plans live in states Trump won in 2024. A KFF poll published October 3 shows that extending the premium tax credits is popular. Seventy-eight percent of Americans say they want Congress to extend the tax credits. That number includes 59% of Republicans and 57% of MAGA supporters.
On Sunday, Trump lashed out at the Fox News Channel for interviewing Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and letting him point out that Republicans had shut down the government rather than extend the premium tax credits. “Why is FoxNews…putting on Democrat Senator Mark Kelly to talk about, totally unabated or challenged, Healthcare?” Trump posted on social media. “The FAKE SPIN is so bad for Republicans that it is hard to believe that we WIN.”
On the White House South Lawn yesterday, a reporter asked Trump if he was open to extending the premium tax credit for purchasing healthcare insurance under the Affordable Care Act.
Trump answered: “We want to fix it so it works. It’s not working. Obamacare has been a disaster for the people. So we want to have it fixed so it works.”
Today Speaker Johnson tried to get out from under popular anger over the shutdown and spiking health insurance premiums. He said: “Let me look right into the camera and tell you very clearly: Republicans are the ones concerned about healthcare. Republicans are the party working around the clock everyday to fix healthcare. This is not talking points for us: we’ve done it.”
In fact, Johnson has sent the House home until October 14, and what he appears to mean by “working around the clock to fix healthcare” is that Republicans have made cuts to Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) in their budget reconciliation bill of July, claiming the cuts will address “waste, fraud, and abuse.” The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates those cuts will increase the number of people without health insurance by 10 million by 2034.
Yesterday, Meryl Kornfield and Lisa Rein of the Washington Post reported that another of Vought’s priorities is also on the table: the Trump administration is overhauling Social Security to eliminate age as a factor in evaluating disability claims, which are separate from retirement benefits. Right-wing thinkers say that since people are living longer and fewer work in manual jobs that hurt their bodies, many could adapt to desk work rather than claiming disability benefits.
In a statement, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) told the Washington Post journalists: “This is Phase One of the Republican campaign to force Americans to work into old age to access their earned Social Security benefits, and represents the largest cut to disability insurance in American history. Americans with disabilities have worked and paid into Social Security just like everybody else, and they do not deserve the indignity of more bureaucratic water torture to get what they paid for.”
The pushback against the administration’s politicization of the civil service—another hallmark of Project 2025—continued today when 282 former Department of Justice career officials wrote a letter warning that Trump and his appointees are destroying the Department of Justice. MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian reported that the former prosecutors, FBI agents, intelligence analysts, civil rights attorneys, and immigration judges called out the administration’s violation of court orders, destruction of anti-corruption units, endangering national security, and using law enforcement to persecute those Trump sees as enemies, saying, “We believe it’s our duty to sound the alarm.”
Today the New York City Bar Association drew its own line against the administration, warning that whatever legal advice officials are using to justify their attacks on Venezuelan boats will not protect them in court. The bar association called the strikes “illegal summary execution” that are “prohibited by both U.S. and international law,” or “murders.” It called for Trump to stop such attacks and for “Congress to remind the President that he lacks authority to continue to misuse our military forces for similar unlawful attacks on foreign vessels and their civilian crews and that continuation of such attacks is unlawful.”
—
Notes:
https://americanmind.org/salvo/renewing-american-purpose/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2023/02/19/russ-vought-republican-debt-ceiling-strategy/
https://time.com/7323278/trump-project-2025-government-shutdown/
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-health-care-shutdown-sobad/#
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/10/05/disability-social-security-age-benefits/
https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/news/ex-justice-officials-duty-warn-trump-rcna235868
https://www.nycbar.org/press-releases/unlawful-attacks-on-venezuelan-vessels/
X:
Acyn/status/1974869504652886037
Bluesky:
atrupar.com/post/3m2k5gtkvpz2a
factpostnews.bsky.social/post/3m2hqgc2cvj2x
THOUGHT CRIME: “Thanks to the example set by Donald Trump, his enablers and MAGA, I have become aware of the millions of Americans who would have betrayed Anne Frank.”
This is a test. With your #2 pencil, bubble in the letter for the truest statement:
O 1) Heavily-armed militarized personnel rappel down on your living quarters from military helicopters overhead at 1:00 a.m.
O 2) Military vehicles disgorge over 100 fully-armed personnel to attack your living quarters at 1:00 a.m.
O 3) These attackers in camouflage fatigues with axes are breaking down all doors in your building, exploding flash grenades, and ransacking everyone’s living units.
O 4) All the above are true, which Donald thinks earns him Nobel Peace Prize.