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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
As the government shutdown enters its 21st day, President Trump has vowed to target so-called Democrat agencies. On Friday, Trump’s powerful director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, announced an $11 billion funding cut to the Army Corps of Engineers projects in the Democrat-led cities of Baltimore, New York, San Francisco and Boston.
Vought was lead author of the far-right conservative blueprint, Project 2025, which Trump previously disavowed. He now serves as Trump’s top budget adviser. Politico reports Senate Majority Leader John Thune recently warned fellow lawmakers during budget negotiations, “We don’t control what [Vought’s] going to do,” unquote. Earlier in the shutdown, Trump posted an AI-generated video set to Blue Oyster Cult’s classic song, “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper,” depicting Vought as the Grim Reaper of Washington, D.C.
Well, today we look at “the shadow president,” as some call him. This is part of a video accompanying a new investigation by ProPublica reporter Andy Kroll, who’ll join us in a minute.
ANDY KROLL: I had heard the name Russ Vought, but he was always just slightly outside the field of vision. And then I got my hands on this video.
RUSSELL VOUGHT: 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.
ANDY KROLL: He talks about this goal of wanting to traumatize federal workers.
RUSSELL VOUGHT: We want to put them in trauma.
ANDY KROLL: That just planted a seed in my mind that I had to try to figure out who this person is. He declined my request for an interview, so I set out to talk to everyone I possibly could, watch every video, listen to every podcast. I obtained hours of briefings to his supporters that had never been published before.
RUSSELL VOUGHT: America has experienced nothing short of a quiet revolution. … We know the CRT and the transgender sewage that’s being pumped into our schools and institutions. … A border invasion furthering, quite frankly, a reverse colonization. … We’re actually trying to save the country.
ANDY KROLL: Those recordings really helped me understand his evolution from this numbers wonk to a full-fledged leader of the MAGA movement.
LAURA BARRÓN-LÓPEZ: One of the key authors of Project 2025, Russell Vought, …
JOY REID: … told the reporters that Trump would deploy the military to silence the unrest.
RUSSELL VOUGHT: I think you have to rehabilitate Christian nationalism. … You have the largest deportation in history. … Block funding for Planned Parenthood. … I want to be the person who crushes the deep state. … Yeah, I called for trauma within the bureaucracies. The bureaucracies hate the American people.
ANDY KROLL: He really has a vision to change the direction of American history.
RUSSELL VOUGHT: We must do our duty for the course of this country, quite frankly, for the course of Western civilization and for the course of history.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by Andy Kroll, investigative reporter for ProPublica. This video accompanies his new article headlined “The Shadow President.”
Andy, welcome back to Democracy Now! Just lay out exactly who Russ Vought is, the man behind Project 2025, the project that President Trump said he didn’t know about, and what he’s doing right now, why Republicans, as well as Democrats, fear him.
ANDY KROLL: It’s great to be back, Amy. Thanks for having me.
I would argue that Russ Vought is arguably the most important aide, adviser to President Donald Trump in the administration right now. I know viewers and listeners know names like Stephen Miller. They think of Miller perhaps as maybe the number two to President Trump. But right now, in the middle of this shutdown, the 21st day, Russ Vought is as influential as anyone in this administration has been. He is a driving force — probably the driving force — behind this shutdown, and in particular the White House’s efforts to lay off workers in huge numbers across the federal government, to use the threat of more layoffs, to use the threat of frozen funding to key projects as leverage or just as punishment to Democrats and, again, to nonpartisan civil workers.
He is also, as the White House budget director, but really as this sort of visionary in the Trump administration, someone who is single-handedly, at times, pushing forward this Project 2025 agenda, that he had a key role in enacting, and really just playing a instrumental but behind-the-scenes, largely, role in pushing this Trump administration agenda forward here on the domestic front. Again, he’s described as, you know, a budget expert, as the president’s numbers guy, but really he’s so much more than that, someone, again, who sources that I talked to in the federal government described as, basically, a second commander-in-chief, a shadow president. That is how visceral and how influential his presence has been in just the nine months of this presidency so far.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But, Andy, I wanted to ask you — 40 years ago, during the first term of Ronald Reagan, there was another budget director by the name of David Stockman, who became infamous for his cutting of taxes and especially of government spending. What do you see is unique or different about the way that Vought is operating?
ANDY KROLL: Yeah, and I love that reference, Juan, because I read a lot about David Stockman when I was working on this piece, and in particular revisited Stockman’s book. I’m going to mangle the title. I think it’s The Triumph of Politics. What Stockman wrote about back during the Reagan administration, in that first few years, was how politics got in the way of what Stockman wanted to accomplish on the policy side, in terms of dramatically cutting budgets, dramatically scaling back the social safety net, government programs and so on. In some ways, you know, Stockman wrote that book almost as a lament to not — for not being able to see out this vision that he had.
Forty years later, we have Russ Vought, and Vought is succeeding, in many ways, where Stockman did not, and probably has learned a lesson or two. Now, why has Vought succeeded? In some ways, he’s succeeded because he has tested, and in some cases flouted entirely, the rule of law, defying laws passed by Congress that say you need to spend this money on these programs, defying laws by Congress that say you need to be transparent about what the Office of Management and Budget, which Vought runs, is doing with funding, when it’s freezing funding, when it’s holding funding back entirely. Vought has a much more aggressive agenda in terms of how to enact the kinds of cuts, the kinds of dramatic pullbacks in terms of what the federal government does, than Stockman wanted. I mean, they were probably aligned in terms of the vision, the policy, the ideology. What Vought has done now, probably learning from the past, is how to be much more aggressive in terms of enacting that vision and really not letting laws, judicial precedents get in the way of pushing through a really, really aggressive conservative agenda.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what about the response of the Republican majorities in the House and Senate to what is, basically, this — this not just chipping away, but demolishing the power of Congress over the federal purse?
ANDY KROLL: Yeah, it’s a really remarkable thing, Juan, to witness. And it is, I would say, an important difference between the Reagan era and today. You know, in the Reagan era, you had a Congress that stood up for itself, that asserted its Article I constitutional responsibilities to control the power of the purse. That is what Congress does. Article II says that the executive will take care to enact the laws that Congress passes.
Vought is doing something now that the Reagan administration did not do, or at least not to the extent that Trump is doing now, which is essentially flouting Congress’s Article I power. I mean, this is basic constitutional 101 stuff, checks and balances, separation of powers. Vought has essentially said to Congress, “I am going to step on your power of the purse constitutional authority. I’m going to freeze funding that you have already appropriated by law. I am going to block programs that you have said, Congress, Republicans and Democrats, that you want funded. And do something about it. You know, challenge me.”
And Congress has not done that. The Republican majorities in the House and the Senate have essentially let Russ Vought and the Trump White House trample all over them. And you see these half-measure, weak comments from Majority Leader Thune, Speaker Johnson, you know, “Well, you know, we don’t know if we quite like what Mr. Vought is doing,” but they have not asserted their Article I authority. And in the process, the White House has essentially trampled over them and scrambled the very basic three-part democratic system that we have in the process. It’s really a remarkable thing to be watching in real time.
AMY GOODMAN: Your ProPublica video report features a clip from 2023 conference of Vought’s Center for Renewing America, when Vought is on a stage with Trump ally Steve Bannon.
STEVE BANNON: And I realize there’s some people that question Trump, but look at that command performance he gave the other night. I mean, it’s like Charlemagne. That’s like a Viking chieftain standing up there. Russ can — he’s a very imperfect instrument, right? But he’s an instrument of the Lord. He’s an instrument of the Lord for his vengeance, OK?
AMY GOODMAN: “He’s an instrument of the Lord for his vengeance,” Steve Bannon said about Andy Kroll [sic], who was sitting next to him. As we wrap up about — he was saying about Russell Vought. Andy Kroll, your final response to the significance of what he’s doing and if you see anything being able to stop him, including the Supreme Court, or would they?
ANDY KROLL: I think that’s where a lot of these battles involving Russ Vought’s extremely aggressive actions, his vision of this very powerful unitary executive — these things are headed to the courts, and ultimately, I believe, the United States Supreme Court, cases about whether the president can impound federal funds, cases about whether the president can act unilaterally to fire tens or hundreds of thousands of federal workers, breaking government unions in the process. We are headed for a pretty titanic court battle, court decision, I would say, in the next year or two, and one that could really change the way we think about how our representative democracy works.
AMY GOODMAN: Andy Kroll, investigative reporter for ProPublica. We’ll link to your piece, “The Shadow President.”
Next up, Armed Only with a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud, a new HBO documentary, airs tonight. Stay with us.
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AMY GOODMAN: “Dear Someone” by Lila Downs, performing in our Democracy Now! studio.
