Russell Vought Directs Next Phase Of Project 2025-Planned Purge
Vought sent an OMB memo that instructs federal agencies to plan for mass firings and screening new hires. This aligns with Project 2025's plan to replace civil servants with loyalists.
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This week, Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director and key Project 2025 architect, Russell Vought, moved the Trump Administration’s purge of federal workers into its next phase. His plan directly follows the steps laid out in Project 2025.
On Wednesday, Vought sent an OMB memo that ordered federal agencies to submit their plans for mass layoffs by March 13. There weren’t any specific firing benchmarks outlined in the memo, but Vought called for the “maximum elimination of functions that are not statutorily mandated.”
This comes after the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) instructed federal agencies to begin firing most of their estimated 200,000 employees in a probationary status earlier this month - a move that has since been blocked by a federal judge.
Elon Musk moved with ferocity and sloppiness in his DOGE-led firings. Vought, who has been expanding his power within the Trump Administration, is aiming for a more methodical and perhaps more worrying approach, with potentially hundreds of thousands of firings to come.
Vought’s new memo lays the groundwork for an even bigger purge of the federal workforce and cites Trump’s executive order that directs agencies to “promptly undertake preparations to initiate large-scale reductions in force.”
Vought calls the March 13 deadline for “initial agency cuts and reductions” Phase 1, which includes deciding “whether the agency or any of its subcomponents should be eliminated or consolidated.” Phase 2 calls for each agency to “outline a positive vision for more productive, efficient agency operations going forward” by April 14.
Phase 2 of Vought’s plan is notable because it includes a directive for screening new hires, explicitly calling for agencies to create “internal processes that ensure agency leadership has visibility and/or direct sign-off on all potential job offers and candidates prior to extending offers.”
Sound familiar? That’s because this plan directly follows the steps outlined in Project 2025.
As someone who has been covering Project 2025 since 2023, I immediately recognized Vought’s memo as directly following Project 2025’s 920-page policy playbook. Project 2025 outlines how to “dismantle the administrative state,” an objective Trump, Musk, and Vought have been pursuing. It involves not only purging nonpartisan civil servants but also replacing them with trained loyalists. Vought’s Phase 1 and Phase 2 of his memo mirror that plan.
Step 1 of the Project 2025 purge of civil servants calls for the re-implementation of Schedule F so Trump can strip civil servant protections from thousands of workers. The Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, who leads Project 2025, has publicly discussed this plan as being necessary for “institutionalizing Trumpism.” This is also something that was called for in Trump’s Agenda 47. On Trump’s first day in office, he signed an executive order that re-implemented a version of Schedule F.
Step 2 is to then move to fire tens of thousands of federal workers. As I’ve covered extensively in this newsletter, we’ve already begun to see the mass firings of federal workers. The Trump Administration started with mostly probationary employees because they have not yet attained civil servant protections. But with Vought’s memo, it appears they are going to expand that horizon and include more civil servants and test the legality of their Schedule F executive order in court.
Step 3 of the plan is to replace these fired nonpartisan civil servants with loyalists. Project 2025 has a detailed plan for how to accomplish this quickly. That is why they created their database of conservatives eager to serve in the federal government. Project 2025 and its partner organizations spent the past year recruiting and training thousands of right-wing loyalists so they’d be ready for this moment.
I went on MSNBC in October 2024 and spoke about how Project 2025’s loyalist recruitment and training effort was ongoing even after Trump lied about his ties to the project. Reporting indicates Trump has since used the Project 2025 loyalist database to staff his administration.
With Vought’s memo framing Phase 1 of his plan as a mass firing of federal workers and Phase 2 including guidance for screening new hires, it raises the possibility that loyalty tests could be part of the hiring process - something that has reportedly been happening in this administration.
All this evidence is why the Associated Press framed Vought’s plan accurately with this headline: “A Project 2025 author carries out his vision for mass federal layoffs.”
Vought is a self-proclaimed Christian Nationalist and was the key connective point between Project 2025 and Trumpworld. Vought was in charge of crafting Project 2025’s first 180-day plan. Vought’s Center for Renewing America was also a partner organization of Project 2025. He was also the policy director of the RNC’s 2024 platform writing committee. I wrote a more in-depth piece about Vought’s authoritarian worldview and Trump Admin actions last week.
Russell Vought opens his chapter on executive power in Project 2025’s policy playbook (Page 43) by quoting Article II of the Constitution in his very first sentence - the basis for the unitary executive theory. Vought lambasts the federal bureaucracy and the notion of “independence.” Vought argues that the President must act with a “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”
These ongoing and planned mass firings are certainly part of that plan to twist the bureaucracy into Trump’s image.
In October 2024, ProPublica published a recording that revealed more about how Vought was thinking about these purges. He not only wants firings, he wants federal workers to be “in trauma”:
“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… We want to put them in trauma.”
This isn’t about “efficiency” or cost-cutting or rooting out fraud. It’s about control. This is a transformation of the federal government into an unaccountable tool of Trump and the far-right.
Vought is the ugly monster behind the other monsters. Thank you for bringing to light Ahmed! Here is an interesting look at what's happening now:
https://bsky.app/profile/adambonica.bsky.social/post/3ljaz33ilp225
You nailed it on this one for sure, Ahmed. I’m glad I waited until the morning to read it though. Don’t you just want to scream it from the rooftops! Wake up, America, before it’s too late.