I asked Russ Vought a deceptively simple question at this week’s Monitor Breakfast: “Are you now effectively the head of DOGE?”
The White House budget director bristled at the suggestion that, in his drive to slash the size of government, he’s become the new Elon Musk, the multibillionaire who ran the Department of Government Efficiency at the start of Trump 2.0.
“No, I’m not,” Mr. Vought said. “I’m the head of two agencies.”
Why We Wrote This
As people, Elon Musk and Russ Vought could hardly be more different. But they share a determination to shrink government. And Mr. Vought’s power to do it, as the Trump administration’s budget director, is enormous.
“Only two?” I half-joked, hinting at the Trump administration’s practice of giving top officials multiple jobs. In addition to budget director, Mr. Vought is also head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
“That’s it. It’s always been fake news that I was named head of DOGE based on a weird headline,” he said, referring to a Wall Street Journal article from May anticipating Mr. Musk’s departure from the administration.
Yet in key ways, Mr. Vought is picking up where Mr. Musk left off, working to get Congress to claw back money for agencies targeted by DOGE. The first “rescissions” package, $9 billion in funding for public broadcasting and foreign aid, passed early Friday.
At our breakfast Thursday, Mr. Vought said more rescissions are “likely to come soon,” but declined to provide specifics. My colleague Cameron Joseph’s news article about the breakfast highlighted that point.
More striking, perhaps, was his contrast in style to that of Mr. Musk. The DOGE king is a larger-than-life character who arrived in Washington with no experience in government. Mr. Vought is a reserved government official steeped in Washington ways, including years on Capitol Hill and a leading role in Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for President Donald Trump’s second term. In the first term, Mr. Vought served as deputy budget director before rising to director.
In short, he’s the anti-Musk. But their goal is the same: to downsize government, eliminate bureaucracy, and cut costs. “It wasn’t actually Musk holding a chainsaw,” a senior government official recently told Politico. “Musk was a chainsaw in Russ Vought’s hands.”
At our breakfast, Mr. Vought didn’t hesitate to spar with reporters about cuts to government programs, often highlighting what he described as a “fundamentally woke bureaucracy” at work. The National Institutes of Health? He rattled off a list of projects he found objectionable, including $5.1 million for “enhancing diversity of researchers at Northwestern University” and “$699,000 for studying cannabis use among sexual minority gender-diverse individuals.”
Thus far, some 51,000 federal employees have been laid off, yet budget deficits remain high. Mr. Vought suggests he’s only just begun.
But it is his breakfast comments about Congress, including the budget process, that got the most attention on Capitol Hill, especially his dismissive approach to bipartisanship. He refused to commit to funding levels agreed to in the next bipartisan funding bill.
“Who ran and won on an agenda of a bipartisan appropriations process? Literally no one,” Mr. Vought said.
Members learned of his comments quickly. GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said that Mr. Vought “disrespects” the government funding process. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer called him “a very grave danger” to democracy, and said he should be fired.
To be honest, I was most caught off guard when Mr. Vought said he was “having fun” in his job. He had noted the privilege of coming back to a job he had done before, and how he was able to “hit the ground running.” But I had to ask: What did he mean by fun? Work is work, I said. “What’s not fun?” he responded.
I reminded myself that Mr. Vought is known for reading budget documents in his spare time, even on weekends. In my note to him after the breakfast, I thanked him for coming and, yes, told him I had fun – which I did.
