Trump Selects Russell Vought To Once Again Lead OMB

 President-elect Donald Trump announced on Friday night that he has nominated Russell Vought to once again be the Director of the United States Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

“He did an excellent job serving in this role in my First Term,” Trump said in a statement. “We cut four Regulations for every new Regulation, and it was a Great Success!”

“Russ has spent many years working in Public Policy in Washington, D.C., and is an aggressive cost cutter and deregulator who will help us implement our America First Agenda across all Agencies,” Trump continued. “Russ knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end Weaponized Government, and he will help us return Self Governance to the People.”

Vought graduated with his bachelors degree from Wheaton College and received his J.D. from the Washington School of Law.

Trump said that Vought will help restore “fiscal sanity” to the U.S. and will help usher in a new era of prosperity and ingenuity.

Vought thanked Trump for the nomination and said that it was “an honor of a lifetime to get the call again” to serve his country.

 

He added that there was “unfinished business” that the administration planned to accomplish for the American people.

Trump’s reference to Vought being an “aggressive cost cutter” and helping restore the government to “fiscal sanity” comes after he announced the creation of a new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that aims to reduce wasteful government spending.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, whom Trump has tasked with leading DOGE, laid out their vision in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Wednesday.

Musk and Ramaswamy said that the way the government is currently run is “antidemocratic and antithetical to the Founders’ vision” because it takes the power out of the hands of elected leaders and places it in the hands of bureaucrats.

The department was created to “cut the federal government down to size,” they wrote. “The entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy represents an existential threat to our republic, and politicians have abetted it for too long.”

They said that the Trump transition team has hired them to lead a lean team of “small-government crusaders” who will “pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings.”

They continued:

A drastic reduction in federal regulations provides sound industrial logic for mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy. DOGE intends to work with embedded appointees in agencies to identify the minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions.

The department will work with legal experts and use “advanced technology” to determine where cuts can be made immediately that they say will “liberate individuals and businesses from illicit regulations never passed by Congress and stimulate the U.S. economy.”

They said that DOGE will aim to gut $500 billion in annual federal expenditures every year that are “unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended, from $535 million a year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and $1.5 billion for grants to international organizations to nearly $300 million to progressive groups like Planned Parenthood.”

They also advocated for large scale audits of federal contracts that have gone unexamined, which they argued would yield “significant savings” to taxpayers.

Musk and Ramaswamy said that they aim to dissolve the DOGE by July 4, 2026, hoping that they will have fixed many of the country’s spending problems by its 250th birthday.