With Musk Out, Russell Vought Quietly Advances DOGE Cuts To Tactical New Phase
The far-right mastermind behind Trump’s federal purges is no longer in the shadows. With Elon Musk and his loud approach out, Russell Vought is carrying out DOGE's mission more methodically.
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In the early months of President Trump’s second term, Elon Musk took a chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy, making reckless cuts that backfired in costly political and humanitarian ways.
As we left Trump’s first 100 days and entered this month, Musk announced that he would be stepping back from his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project to focus more on Tesla after its sales were deeply harmed by Musk’s self-inflicted reputational damage.
On Tuesday, Elon Musk went even further than his DOGE exit announcement, stating that he will also be pulling back his political spending. When asked about the midterms at the Qatar Econoimc Forum, Musk replied, “In terms of political spending, I'm going to do a lot less in the future… I think I've done enough."
But Musk’s political retreat hasn’t ended DOGE’s mission—it’s only made it quieter, and potentially more dangerous.
Now, as I’ve been warning for months, the Trump Administration is shifting gears. Early last month, I wrote an analysis piece on how the Trump Administration’s initial, sloppy, frenetic, Musk-led approach backfired politically and legally. I then broke down how they would likely move to a more methodical, Russell Vought-led phase of this effort to reshape the federal government into a tool of the far-right.
That’s exactly what we’re seeing.
The Wall Street Journal published a piece headlined, “Trump’s Budget Hawk Takes Over the DOGE Agenda,” reporting that “Russ Vought is picking up where Elon Musk is leaving off.” The Guardian also dropped a piece exploring this public shift in dynamics.
While this is surely a major shift in the public view of the DOGE effort, it’s been clear for a while now that Russell Vought has been the tactician behind Trump’s assault on the federal government.
I’ve been writing about Russell Vought and Project 2025 since the fall of 2023, and warning how his authoritarian worldview would be a driving force in a second Trump term. We’ve already seen this play out, with real consequences.
Russell Vought is now once again Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). He’s 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.
Now, at OMB, Vought is increasingly expanding his power within the Trump Administration.
In January and February of this year, I wrote multiple articles exploring how Russell Vought was methodically moving behind the scenes, directing cuts to federal agencies and executing the Project 2025 agenda while Elon Musk took on all of the public ire.
In late March, Politico confirmed my analysis, publishing an article on Vought and Musk’s alliance:
Musk, the impulsive Silicon Valley billionaire, provides the public face to the bureaucracy-slashing efforts and takes the heat for the budget-cratering, employee-firing and overall havoc-wreaking that has been unleashed on the federal government. Vought, the conservative budget wonk, brings the expertise, insider knowledge and ideology to a dramatic downsizing that both men see as necessary and transformational…
The men, who haven’t talked about their relationship publicly, have found a way not only to get along but collaborate as they complete one of the most aggressive makeovers of the federal government in modern history.
From the dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to the effort to fire hundreds of thousands of federal workers, Musk and Vought have been aligned in their goals.
As I wrote in my piece on Trump’s first 100 days, which examined how Project 2025 has been pursued, Vought was the real mastermind behind Trump’s remaking of the federal bureaucracy.
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).
So far, we’ve seen so many of these objectives take shape.
In February, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies,” which seeks to bring independent government agencies under direct White House control, with Russell Vought being given direct oversight. This is also straight from Project 2025
The agencies impacted include the SEC, FTC, and FCC.
In March, Vought made a move that takes the Trump Administration’s purge of federal workers into its next phase. Vought sent an OMB memo that instructed federal agencies to plan for mass firings and included guidance for screening new hires. As I outlined in my article covering this move, Phases 1 and 2 of Vought’s memo mirror the Project 2025 plan to purge nonpartisan civil servants and replace them with trained loyalists.
Since then, we’ve seen new cuts at the Education Department, Health and Human Services, and new cuts planned at the State Department.
The next thing we should be keeping an eye on is the Trump Administration’s revived Schedule F executive order that strips civil service protections from 50,000 federal workers, making them easier to fire and replace with loyalists. Russell Vought has long been an advocate of Schedule F and will surely oversee the firings that result from the reclassification of these federal workers. I broke this down in more detail in an article I wrote last month.
Beyond Schedule F, Vought’s plans are even bigger as he seeks to make DOGE’s cuts permanent, according to the Wall Street Journal piece I cited earlier:
In the coming months, DOGE is expected to focus more on regulation cutting, according to a Feb. 19 executive order that instructed agency leaders to begin rescinding “unlawful regulations” in coordination with DOGE and OMB…
Hoping to make some of DOGE’s changes permanent, the White House is expected to push Congress to act on a $9.3 billion rescissions package that would seek to claw back funding from the State Department, USAID, National Public Radio and PBS.
Bottom line: While Elon Musk is stepping back from leading the DOGE cuts that sparked so much backlash, Russell Vought is continuing those efforts with less fanfare.
Vought knows how government works and how to exploit loopholes in the law. Vought’s more methodical approach could be more effective and potentially perform better in the courts.
This is where journalism and public scrutiny will be key. Just because the cuts will no longer be highlighted by the noise of Musk’s chainsaw doesn’t mean they’re any less damaging.
