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Donald Trump is very dumb, the people surrounding him are not.
Voldemort makes a return to the White House
Mary Drummer
30 Jan • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes
Working with former Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump helped reshape the federal judiciary for decades to come by appointing one quarter of active federal judges, including 30% of active appeals courts judges — which is one rung below the Supreme Court that has 3 Trump appointees.
Which is why Trump didn’t lose the battle over the funding freeze and in fact, Stephen Miller and Russell Vought got exactly what they wanted, and that was a way to tee up a case for the Supreme Court to rule on the extent of executive powers.
Russell Vought is Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). During the first Trump administration, Vought served as Deputy Director in the OMB before serving as Acting Director, until he was finally confirmed as OMB Director in July 2020.
As OMB director Vought “... took steps to expand the number of federal employees required to work during a government shutdown, froze military aid for Ukraine and railed against “wasteful spending” such as foreign aid and organizing unions in other nations.”
Freezing aid to Ukraine was later found to be in violation of the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 — a law that allows the president to request that Congress rescind previously appropriated funds. Congress does not have to vote on the request and can ignore it. The act was passed after Congress accused Richard Nixon of withholding funds from programs he didn’t agree with. Vought has gone on record saying he believes the Impoundment Act is unconstitutional.
Despite its seemingly boring title, the OMB is one of the most powerful agencies in the Executive Office of the President (EOP). According to former OMB Director, Jacob J. Lew:
“OMB is unique in that it touches every function of government and every sector of the economy, which makes it central to the business of running the country.”
In Executive Policymaking: The Role of the OMB in the Presidency, Professor Eloise Pasachoff breaks down the role of the OMB in the first Trump administration and how — just like now — it moved to push the limits of executive power:
“When it comes to budget preparation and management initiatives, it is largely just the policies the administration is pursuing that are controversial, not the use of the tools themselves. When it comes to budget execution, however, the administration has been not only pushing controversial policies but also engaging in controversial uses of these tools, straining their statutory basis and using them to the president’s own personal political advantage.”
A self-described Christian Nationalist, Vought seeks to implement what he calls “radical constitutionalism” and advocates for purging the federal government and expanding the power and authority of the president:
“The Right needs to throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last two hundred years and to study carefully the words of the Constitution and how the Founders would have responded in modern situations to the encroachments of other branches.”
On Tuesday, January 28, an email blast from the Office of Personnel Management was sent to tens of thousands of federal employees giving them the chance to resign now and get paid through the end of the fiscal year in September (something that is highly unlikely since the government is only currently funded through March 14th). The person behind the proposal? Elon Musk, the man who will lead the proposed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which will be housed in the OMB. And if you think Russell Vought would have objections to the kind of chaos this created, you would be wrong.
Vought laid out his plan to purge the federal government of nonpartisan civil servants and replace them with Trump sycophants in Executive Office of the President of the United States, the section he wrote in Project 2025. A key part is Schedule F: a plan to eliminate protections for civil service workers which makes it easier to fire them. Not only does Vought want to fire them, he wants to inflict as much trauma as possible:
In terms of the freezing of federal funds this week:
“[Stephen] Miller and his allies asked an OMB team led by Vought to write guidance for agencies on implementing Trump’s executive orders that reviewed and froze funding, a White House official said. Vought was deeply involved even though he has yet to be confirmed by the Senate as OMB director and is not actually employed by the government.”
Donald Trump is egotistical and dumb, which makes him easy to manipulate. And the people surrounding him know this, which is why I can’t help but assume this is what Russell Vought was thinking when he said Donald Trump being POTUS “is nothing more than a gift of God.”