THE ARCHITECT

TRUMP WANTS TO BE KING. RUSS VOUGHT HAS A PLAN TO MAKE IT HAPPEN.

- ISABELA DIAS

IN THE WANING DAYS OF THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY, RUSSELL VOUGHT, THE OUTGOING DIRECTOR OF THE OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET, HAD A REQUEST.

After years in Washington, DC, soaking in the minutiae of policy, Vought had come to both know and loathe the bureaucracy. A rare voice in an administration committed to “draining the swamp” who had actual Beltway experience, he found in the Trump era he could put his expertise to use.

A few weeks before the 2020 election, President Donald Trump signed an executive order creating a new category of at-will employees—so-called Schedule F positions—which would be exempt from the rules designed to protect civil servants from partisan hatchetmen. Despite Trump’s loss, Vought pushed to recategorize scores of omb roles. To an outsider, this might have seemed like a technical adjustment. But in practice, reassignment would have stripped 415 employees—68 percent of the agency’s personnel—of work protections, effectively making it easier for political appointees to fire them. Vought called it “another step to make Washington accountable to the American people.”

In the end, Vought couldn’t get it done by inauguration. But this combination of lofty public rhetoric and ruthless behindthe-scenes gamesmanship has become his trademark. By the tail end of Trump’s turbulent four years in the White House, the omb director had turned into one of the president’s most trusted and obsequious officials—an acolyte with a knack for making the half-formed schemes from his boss achievable.