The Government Accountability Office just issued a giant detailed report about how the Trump administration illegally impounded billions of dollars by suspending approval of any new electric vehicle charging projects. Predictably, however, the administration does not care and responded by just shrugging it off.
You are probably wishing you lived in an era where you did not have to care about dense GAO reports, and you could trust that the government was just sort of humming along. But we all live in the Trump era, which means that government projects are subject to the whims of President Donald Trump or Elon Musk, which is why you’re now reading about the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program. Lucky!
Back in February, the Federal Highway Administration—which is part of the Department of Transportation and currently being wildly mishandled by former reality TV star Sean Duffy—issued a memo saying that the new leadership of DOT has “decided to review the policies underlying the implementation of the NEVI Formula Program.”
Trump shakes hands with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy
The memo rescinded the Biden-era guidance for NEVI and suspended approval of all State Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Deployment plans. The only thing that would continue is reimbursement to states that have already incurred costs—but only until the administration gets around to issuing new guidance.
So why is the administration holding back this money? According to the FHWA memo, it’s the now-familiar justification for most of the administration’s actions in gutting programs: guidance has to be “updated to align with current U.S. DOT policy and priorities.”
There’s just one problem with holding back this money: the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which says that the executive branch cannot withhold funds already allocated by Congress. But the administration has been flouting the ICA for months, beginning with Trump’s attempt to freeze all federal spending, despite those funds already being appropriated by Congress.
So what happened when the GAO report dropped? Well, Russell Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, currently very busy implementing Project 2025, went on X to say the government was just going to ignore it. Oh, and also that the GAO “played a partisan role in the first-term impeachment hoax.”
The GAO is a boring thing, and that’s meant in the most complimentary way. It’s a congressional watchdog that examines government spending and provides Congress and agencies with “objective, non-partisan, fact-based information to help the government save money and work more efficiently.” Huh. That sounds a lot like it was already doing the sort of thing that the made-up Department of Government Efficiency says it was doing.
The GAO has 39 other open impoundment-related investigations, but Vought preemptively shrugged those off as well, saying that the GAO would call everything an impoundment to “grind our work to manage taxpayer dollars effectively to a halt” and that all investigations were “non-events with no consequence.”
While the administration is busy flat-out rejecting the oversight functions of the GAO, Republicans in Congress are busy flouting a different oversight body. Last week, when Senate Republicans voted to block California from setting its own emission standards, they did so by overriding the Senate parliamentarian. Like the GAO, the Senate parliamentarian is a nonpartisan body. It advises Congress on anything that requires interpretation of the rules of the Senate.
Both the GAO and the parliamentarian advised that the Congressional Review Act couldn’t be used to strip California of its emissions waivers because those waivers are not the same as agency rules. Paying that no mind, the GOP just overrode the parliamentarian.
It’s in no way clear what happens when Republicans just ignore oversight bodies. There seems to be no consequences for the administration upending checks and balances to grab as much power as possible for the executive branch.
Republicans in Congress seem to be on board with this, letting the administration impound funds with nary a peep. Ultimately, the stance of the GOP is that oversight is for suckers and that anyone who tells them they can’t do something should pound sand.
This isn’t governance; It’s defiance wrapped in pretending that refusing to spend duly allocated funds is actually a boon for taxpayers, saving them billions. We know those savings are a lie, but no one seems to have any idea how to stop the administration from doing whatever it wants.
Republican President-elect Donald Trump spent the closing months of his campaign trying to distance himself from a blueprint for his second term known as Project 2025.
Then, in the days after his victory, Trump picked major architects of the Heritage Foundation’s vision for key posts in his next administration, setting the stage for them to implement a conservative Christian agenda that has the potential to reshape the federal government and redefine rights long held by all Americans, though likely to disproportionately impact women, LGBTQ+ people and vulnerable populations like the elderly and disabled.
One of these architects is Russell Vought, whom Trump has again tapped to lead his Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, an under-the-radar entity to most Americans that wields immense influence over the federal government by crafting the president’s budget. If confirmed by the Senate, a very likely outcome, Vought will be optimally positioned to inject Project 2025’s priorities — many of which reflect his career-long push to dismantle programs for low-income Americans and expand the president’s authority — across the federal agencies and departments that OMB oversees.
Ben Olinsky, who advised Democratic former President Barack Obama on labor and workforce policy before joining the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress, where he works on issues related to the economy and governance, said that Vought’s vision for OMB as presented in Project 2025 is “to basically change the plumbing so they can do whatever they want without any meaningful checks and balances” during Trump’s second term.
“I think that it's important to really make sure [Americans] understand what the plans are for changing the plumbing,” Olinsky said.
Vought has firsthand knowledge of the OMB’s wide-ranging scope. During Trump’s first term, he was OMB’s deputy director, acting director and, finally, confirmed director. In those roles, he helped then-President Trump craft a plan to jettison job protections for thousands of federal workers and assisted with a legally ambiguous effort to redirect congressionally appropriated foreign aid for Ukraine.
Vought has used two pro-Trump groups he founded — the nonprofit Center for Renewing America and its advocacy arm, America Restoration Action — to discredit structural racism as a driver for inequality and attempt to stymie diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts. In August, he told a pair of British journalists posing as potential donors that the Center for Renewing America is “an organization I helped turn into the Death Star,” the fictional Star Wars space station that can destroy planets, and it “is accomplishing all of the debates you are reading about.”
The chapter that Vought wrote for Project 2025 details how the Office of Management and Budget could be a vehicle to advance the Christian nationalist agenda he favors — and he has not hesitated to talk about it.
Acting Office of Management and Budget director Russ Vought speaks during the daily press briefing at the White House in March 2019.
“I think you have to rehabilitate Christian nationalism,” Vought told the British journalists at the Centre for Climate Reporting, which released video of the conversation that was recorded using hidden cameras.
In an interview with conservative activist Tucker Carlson shortly after Trump’s reelection, Vought likened OMB to the “nerve center” through which a president can ensure their policy directives trickle down to the multitude of federal agencies and a civilian workforce of more than two million people.
“Properly understood, [OMB] is a President’s air-traffic control system with the ability and charge to ensure that all policy initiatives are flying in sync and with the authority to let planes take off and, at times, ground planes that are flying off course,” Vought wrote in Project 2025.
He sees two primary ways to ground wayward planes: by eliminating potential dissent within agencies and withholding money appropriated by Congress for projects and programs the president does not support.
Both would clear the way for Trump’s next administration to implement many of the priorities detailed in Project 2025, which could essentially redefine rights, systems and cultural norms for all Americans.
Some of Project 2025’s recommendations include restricting abortion access and supporting a “biblically based” definition of family, because the “male-female dyad is essential to human nature,” by replacing policies related to LGBTQ+ equity with those that “support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families.”
It also suggests transforming the FBI into a politically motivated entity to settle scores and barring U.S. citizens from receiving federal housing assistance if they live with anyone who is not a citizen or permanent legal resident, which would serve Trump’s campaign promise to take extraordinary measures to crack down on illegal immigration. During remarks in September titled “Theology of America’s Statecraft: The Case for Immigration Restriction,” Vought justified the separation of families and condemned so-called sanctuary cities, or those that pass laws that limit their cooperation with federal immigration authorities. “Failing to secure the border is a complete abdication of [the government’s] God-given responsibility,” he said.
Olinsky explained that while many of the policies in Project 2025 have been floating around Republican circles in Washington for years without gaining much traction, the document is a detailed roadmap that shows how its authors believe they can finally deliver on key pieces of their conservative Christian agenda.
“One, it says all of the quiet parts out loud about the full scope of the agenda. And then the second thing, which I think is something folks should really pay attention to, is it says how they're going to accomplish it, practically, by using executive action,” Olinsky said.
In many ways, Vought’s approach to bending the federal government to a president’s will began taking shape during Trump’s first administration. In late 2020, as Trump’s first term drew to a close, Vought helped him craft an executive order known as “Schedule F,” which reclassified thousands of civil servants and, with that, stripped them of their job protections; Vought recommended that close to 90 percent of OMB’s workforce be reclassified.
President Joe Biden rescinded the executive order on his third day in office. Project 2025 recommends reinstating it.
Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, a Democrat who sponsored the legislation to protect federal employees, warned of a “loyalty-based system that would impede the work of the federal government, expose people to intimidation and bring people into jobs that are not qualified to do them, thus risking the American public’s safety and quality of life.”
Vought is among the Trump loyalists who have been open about their desire to slash the federal workforce — as a route to purge critics, improve efficiency or both.
In the interview with Carlson, Vought said, “There certainly is going to be mass layoffs and firings, particularly at some of the agencies that we don’t even think should exist.” His language appeared to communicate an effort to ensure obedience and compliance. With the firings and layoffs, Vought said he wants to avoid having “really awesome Cabinet secretaries sitting on top of massive bureaucracies that largely don’t do what they tell them to do.”
Trump’s transition team did not respond to requests to discuss Vought’s selection for OMB or the chapter he wrote for Project 2025 about the agency. The 19th reached out to Vought through his Center for Renewing America, which likewise did not respond to a request for comment.
Power of the Purse
During Trump’s first term, OMB helped find money to begin building a small section of wall along the U.S.-Mexico border — a key campaign promise Trump made in 2016 — “because Congress wouldn’t give him the ordinary money,” Vought told Carlson.
Trump also enlisted OMB to withhold $400 million in military aid that Congress approved for Ukraine, as Trump and his associates tried to pressure the country to investigate Biden and his family. The move prompted the abuse-of-power case House Democrats made against Trump during his first impeachment, when Vought defied a subpoena to testify. The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan watchdog, concluded that the scheme violated the 1974 Impoundment Control Act. Days later, the Republican-led Senate acquitted Trump. (Trump had eventually released the aid.)
When Trump subsequently nominated Vought to lead OMB in 2020, Democrats opposed him because of his approach to impoundment authority. He was nonetheless confirmed.
Vought’s path to confirmation is all but certain this time around: Republicans control the Senate, the congressional chamber charged with approving presidential nominations. Very likely to feature in his confirmation hearings is Vought’s belief that the OMB can help Trump overcome opposition and implement policy priorities, possibly including those contained in Project 2025, by redirecting or refusing to spend funds appropriated by Congress, which under the Constitution holds the power of the purse.
“Making Impoundment Great Again!” Vought wrote in June on X, riffing on the “Make America Great Again” slogan that has come to define Trump’s movement.
A copy of Project 2025 is held during the 2024 Democratic National Convention.
Trump spent his campaign insisting that he had not read Project 2025 and did not know its authors. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” he wrote in a July post on his Truth Social platform.
But of the more than 350 people who contributed to Project 2025, at least 60 percent are linked to the incoming president, according to a list of contributors and their ties reviewed by The 19th. They range from appointees and nominees from Trump’s first administration, like Vought, to members of his previous transition team and those who served on commissions and as unofficial advisers.
Democrats, including Vice President Kamala Harris, seized on Project 2025 during their campaigns to highlight the dangers they believe are posed by a second Trump presidency. At 920 pages, it offers a vision of government that is far more detailed and specific than the policy proposals put forward by Trump directly. The “Agenda 47” on Trump’s campaign website was a list of 20 bullet points that included vague policies like “end the weaponization of government against the American people” and “unite our country by bringing it to new and record levels of success.”
When Trump announced Vought as his OMB pick, he said Vought “knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end Weaponized Government.” His other selections for OMB leadership posts include anti-abortion activist Ed Martin and Vought’s colleague at the Center for Renewing America, Mark Paoletta, whom the president-elect praised as a “conservative warrior.”
One question as Trump takes office on January 20 and Vought, if confirmed, helps him control the government’s workforce and purse strings, is which version of the country they will promote and whose rights are — and aren’t — protected.
Russell Vought sounds like a general marshaling troops for combat when he talks about taming a “woke and weaponized” federal government.
He recently described political opposition as “enemy fire that’s coming over the target,” while urging allies to be “fearless at the point of attack” and calling his policy proposals “battle plans.”
If former President Donald Trump wins a second term in November, Vought may get the opportunity to go on the offensive.
A chief architect of Project 2025 — the controversial conservative blueprint to remake the federal government — Vought is likely to be appointed to a high-ranking post in a second Trump administration. And he’s been drafting a so-far secret “180-Day Transition Playbook” to speed the plan’s implementation to avoid a repeat of the chaotic start that dogged Trump’s first term.
Among the small cadre of Trump advisers who has a mechanic’s understanding of how Washington operates, Vought has advised influential conservative lawmakers on Capitol Hill, held a top post in the Trump White House and later established his own pro-Trump think tank. Now, he’s being mentioned as a candidate to be Trump’s White House chief of staff, one of the most powerful positions in government.
“If we don’t have courage, then we will step away from the battle,” Vought said in June on former Trump aide Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast. “But our view is that’s where the country needs us, and we’re not going to save our country without a little confrontation.”
Conservative blueprint to change the government
Led by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, Project 2025 is a detailed 920-page handbook for governing under the next Republican administration. A whirlwind of hard-right ambitions, its proposals range from ousting thousands of civil servants and replacing them with Trump loyalists to reversing the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of medications used in abortions. Democrats for months have been using Project 2025 to hammer Trump and other Republicans, arguing to voters that it represents the former president’s true — and extreme — agenda.
Trump in recent weeks has sought to distance himself from Project 2025. He posted on social media he has not seen the plan and has “no idea who is in charge of it, and, unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it.”
Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025.
Trump’s attempts to reject the blueprint are complicated by the connections he has with many of its contributors. More than two dozen authors served in his administration, including Vought, who was director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.
The Trump campaign did not respond to questions about which Project 2025 proposals the former president opposes or whether Vought would be offered a high-level government position in a new Trump term.
Vought did not respond to an interview request or to questions first emailed in February to his think tank, the Center for Renewing America, which played a key role in creating Project 2025.
Those who know Vought described him as fiercely dedicated to Trump’s cause, if not to the former president himself.
“A very determined warrior is how I would see Russ,” said a former Trump administration official who worked with Vought in the White House and requested anonymity to speak candidly about him. “I don’t think he thinks about whether or not he likes Donald Trump as a person. I think he likes what Donald Trump represents in terms of the political forces he’s able to harness.”
Washington insider
Born in New York and raised in Connecticut, Vought has described his family as blue collar. His parents were devout Christians. Vought’s father, a Marine Corps veteran, was a union electrician and his mother was a schoolteacher.
Vought’s father, nicknamed Turk, didn’t stand for idleness or waste. Mark Maliszewski, an electrician who knew him, recalled that after a job Turk Vought would scold his co-workers if they tossed out still usable material.
“He’d go over and kick the garbage can,” Maliszewski said. “He’d say: ‘What is this? If those were quarters or dollars in that garbage can, you’d be picking them up.’”
Russell Vought graduated in 1998 from Wheaton College, a Christian school in Illinois that counts the famed evangelist Billy Graham among its alumni. He moved to Washington to work for Republicans who championed fiscal austerity and small government.
“I worked with a lot of different staff people and as far as work ethic, tenacity, intellect, knowledge (and) commitment to principle, Russell was one of the more impressive people I worked with,” said former GOP Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas, who hired Vought in 2003.
After honing his credentials as a fiscal hawk, Vought was named policy director of the House Republican Conference, the party’s primary messaging platform chaired at the time by then-Rep. Mike Pence, who went on to serve as Indiana governor and Trump’s vice president.
Vought left Capitol Hill for a lobbying organization attached to the Heritage Foundation. When Trump was elected, Vought became OMB’s deputy director.
Vought told senators his remarks were taken out of context and said he respected the right of every person to express their religious beliefs.
The Senate confirmed him to be OMB’s No. 2 by a single vote. He became acting director in early 2019 after his boss, Mick Mulvaney, was named Trump's acting chief of staff. Vought was confirmed as OMB director a year and half later as the COVID-19 pandemic was sweeping the globe.
Russell Vough served as acting director of the Office of Management under Donald Trump.
OMB is a typically sedate office that builds the president’s budget and reviews regulations. But with Vought at the helm, OMB was at the center of showdowns between Trump and Congress over federal spending and the legal bounds of presidential power.
After lawmakers refused to give Trump more money for his southern U.S. border wall, the budget office siphoned billions of dollars from the Pentagon and Treasury Department budgets to pay for it.
Under Vought, OMB also withheld military aid to Ukraine as Trump pressured President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to investigate President Joe Biden and his son. Vought refused to comply with a congressional demand to depose him during the subsequent Democrat-led House investigation that led to Trump’s first impeachment. The inquiry, Vought said, was a sham.
Following Trump's exit from the White House, Vought formed The Center for Renewing America. The organization’s mission is to be “the tip of the America First spear” and “to renew a consensus that America is a nation under God.”
Vought has defended the concept of Christian nationalism, which is a fusion of American and Christian values, symbols and identity. Christian nationalism, he wrote three years ago, “is a commitment to an institutional separation between church and state, but not the separation of Christianity from its influence on government and society.”
The only way to return America to the country the Founding Fathers envisioned is “radical constitutionalism,” Vought said on Bannon’s podcast. That means ensuring control of the executive branch rests solely with the president, not a vast federal bureaucracy.
Anticipating the fights to achieve this, Trump’s backers need to be “fearless, faithful and frugal in everything we do,” he said.
A declaration of less independence
Vought’s center was part of a coalition of conservative organizations, organized by the Heritage Foundation, that launched Project 2025 and crafted a detailed plan for governing in the next Republican administration.
The project’s public-facing document, “Mandate for Leadership,” examined nearly every corner of the federal government and urged reforms large and small to bridle a “behemoth” bureaucracy.
Project 2025 calls for the U.S. Education Department to be shuttered, and the Homeland Security Department dismantled, with its various parts absorbed by other federal offices. Diversity, inclusion and equity programs would be gutted. Promotions in the U.S. military to general or admiral would go under a microscope to ensure candidates haven’t prioritized issues like climate change or critical race theory.
In 2021, Russell Vough joined Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Dan Bishop to criticize "critical race theory" on Capitol Hill.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University history professor and author of "Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,” criticized Project 2025 as “a recipe for mass chaos, abuses of power, and dysfunction in government.”
The overarching theme of Project 2025 is to strip down the “administrative state.” This, according to the blueprint, is the mass of unelected government officials who pursue policy agendas at odds with the president’s plans.
In his public comments and in a Project 2025 chapter he wrote, Vought has said that no executive branch department or agency, including the Justice Department, should operate outside the president’s authority.
“The whole notion of independent agencies is anathema from the standpoint of the Constitution,” Vought said during a recent appearance on the Fox Business Network.
Critics warn this may leave the Justice Department and other investigative agencies vulnerable to a president who might pressure them to punish or probe a political foe. Trump, who has faced four separate prosecutions, has threatened retribution against Biden and other perceived enemies.
Diminishing the Justice Department’s independence would be a “radically bad idea,” said Paul Coggins, past president of the National Association of Former U.S. Attorneys.
“No president deserves to sic the Justice Department on his political enemies, or, frankly, to pull the Justice Department off his political friends,” he said.
It is not clear what job Vought might get in a second Trump administration. He could return as OMB director, the job he held at the end of Trump's presidency, or an even higher-ranking post.
“Russ would make a really, really good (White House) chief of staff,” Mulvaney said.
Whatever the position, Vought is expected to be one of Trump’s top field commanders in his campaign to dominate Washington.
