Trump & Russell Vought Plan To Exploit The Shutdown To Accelerate Project 2025
The Trump Administration is using the government shutdown as a pretext to speedrun their planned purges of federal workers, executing a key goal of Project 2025 - which Russell Vought helped craft.
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On Wednesday at 12:01 am, the federal government shut down after Republicans failed to meet Democratic demands to renew expiring Obamacare subsidies that would impact the healthcare of millions of Americans.
By 1 pm, Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought wasted no time in exploiting the shutdown and briefed House Republicans on mass, permanent layoffs that will take place, not just furloughs.
While the size and scope of the layoffs are currently unclear, Vought told House Republicans in that call that there will be a “consequential” reduction in force (RIF) in the next couple of days, according to multiple congressional reporters.
This came after OMB sent a memo instructing federal agencies to identify “programs, projects, or activities” that are “not consistent with the President’s priorities” so they can implement permanent cuts and layoffs.
Two federal worker labor unions have already sued, calling these proposed layoffs “cynical” and “unlawful.”
On Tuesday, President Trump explicitly said, “When you shut it down, you have to do layoffs. So, we’d be laying off a lot of people that are going to be very affected, and they’re Democrats. They’re gonna be Democrats.” Trump then repeated the lie that Democrats are seeking to give illegal immigrants healthcare.
On Wednesday, Russell Vought moved swiftly in attempting to freeze funding that punishes Democrats. Vought announced: “Roughly $18 billion in New York City infrastructure projects have been put on hold to ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional DEI principles.”
We need to be clear about what’s happening here. The Trump Administration is exploiting the government shutdown to accelerate the implementation of Project 2025.
I’ve been covering Project 2025 since 2023. After initial incompetent stumbles in the first few months of this administration, President Trump and his team have pursued or implemented 48% of Project 2025’s goals and policy prescriptions.
A central component of this authoritarian playbook is to twist the federal bureaucracy into a tool for the far-right. That involves not only purging nonpartisan civil servants, but replacing them with loyalists - as I outlined repeatedly on MSNBC in 2024.
According to the Trump Administration, they were already on track to hit 300,000 federal workers eliminated by the end of this year, about one-eighth of the total at the beginning of Trump’s second term. The government was already short-staffed.
Now, amid this shutdown, Russell Vought is seeking to use this moment to further his goal of purging federal workers.
Let’s dive in.
After Elon Musk ended his chaotic stint in government in May of this year, I wrote an article breaking down how Russell Vought was expanding his power within the administration and picking up where DOGE left off. This week, The New York Times published an article corroborating my thesis with the headline: “The Man Behind Trump’s Push for an All-Powerful Presidency.”
The subtitle reads ominously: “Russell T. Vought spent years drawing up plans to expand presidential power and shrink federal bureaucracy. Now he is moving closer to making that vision a reality, threatening to erode checks and balances.”
Russell Vought, a self-proclaimed Christian Nationalist, 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.
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.”
Vought has long been a proponent of the right-wing unitary executive theory, the stripping of civil service protections from federal workers, the gutting of agencies, the illegal use of impoundment to unilaterally freeze federal funds, and the elimination of independence from agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
Since returning to the White House, Vought has made moves on all those fronts.
The 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.”
After the purges, as Project 2025 outlines, the goal is to replace these thousands of 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. They spent the past two years recruiting and training thousands of right-wing professionals so they’d be ready for this moment.
The layoffs are just one piece of the Project 2025 puzzle.
Trump and his team of loyalists have already moved with reckless abandon in their effort to gut the federal bureaucracy, eliminate pockets of independence in the executive branch, unilaterally dismantle agencies, reshape the global order by undermining economic and diplomatic alliances, target civil liberties, and consolidate power in the presidency. They’ve done this by following the Project 2025 playbook.
Just as Project 2025 outlines, President Trump has reinstated Schedule F to strip civil service protections from federal workers, executed mass purges of federal workers, moved to unilaterally dismantle agencies like the Education Department, pursued extreme immigration crackdowns, rolled back Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, withdrew from global multilateral agreements, signed anti-LGBTQ+ executive orders, and implemented environmental regulation rollbacks.
The Trump Administration is now going to use the shutdown to make as much progress on Project 2025 as they possibly can. We’ll see if the courts act on the labor union lawsuits seeking to block these layoffs.
Let’s hope Democrats can get closer to pressuring Republicans to deliver on their healthcare demands soon, because the longer the shutdown goes on, the higher the risk of damage the Trump Administration could unleash.
