Trump picks Project 2025 co-author to lead White House’s budget office
In this June 2020 photo
(CNN) — President-elect Donald Trump has selected Russell Vought as his pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget, he said in a Truth Social post.
Vought was one of the key authors of Project 2025 – the conservative blueprint that Trump tried to distance himself from during the campaign. He was Trump’s former budget director during his first administration when Vought oversaw a widespread deregulation push.
OMB oversees the development and execution of the federal budget, and the office has significant influence over the president’s agenda.
“He did an excellent job serving in this role in my First Term – We cut four Regulations for every new Regulation, and it was a Great Success!” Trump said in the post.
During Trump’s first administration, Vought made a name for himself as a policy wonk committed to the MAGA movement. The president-elect has repeatedly praised Vought for doing an “incredible” and “fantastic” job at OMB.
After Trump left office, Vought started the Center for Renewing America, a nonprofit that describes itself as the “tip of the America First spear.” CRA was one of many right-leaning groups that partnered on Project 2025, a more than 900-page blueprint for Trump’s second term that was led by the Heritage Foundation. Vought personally authored the project’s chapter on the executive office of the president, and his group contributed to several other chapters of the plan as well.
Many of the project’s most conservative and controversial proposals became central planks in Democratic attacks on Trump – and Republicans up and down the ballot – this year.
And although Trump made clear he wanted little to do with it on the campaign trail, at least 140 people who worked in the first Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025, a CNN review found, including more than half of the people listed as authors, editors and contributors to “Mandate for Leadership,” the project’s extensive manifesto for overhauling the executive branch.
Vought also served as the policy director of the Republican National Convention committee that rewrote the GOP’s official platform this year – a sign of how central he is to Republicans’ policy goals.
Earlier this year, Vought was captured on hidden camera by undercover journalists talking about an agenda he was writing for the first 180 days of a new Trump administration.
Before serving as Trump’s budget director, Vought was the deputy director and later acting director of OMB. In 2018, then-Vice President Mike Pence cast a tie-breaking vote to save Vought’s confirmation as deputy director.
This story has been updated with additional details.
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