Latest / The Overlap / The Grim Reaper of the US Government: Russ Vought - Part 1

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The Grim Reaper of the US Government: Russ Vought - Part 1 · The Overlap

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We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning,
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we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.
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We want to put them in trauma. Hey there podcast listeners. Welcome back to The Overlap. If you
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are new to The Overlap, what we do is we kind of take relevant topics and bring them to a head.
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I am your co-host Joshua and with me is my co-host Will. Will, say hello.
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Hello Joshua and hello listeners.
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It's actually been a little bit of a minute. We actually were able to get a little bit caught
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up and a little bit ahead. I took a small vacation and am fully rested and moving on to a new job
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roll starting on Monday. But I am super happy to be back with you here and super happy to be back
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with Will in the passenger seat. It's funny because we're both co-hosts. So we both sit
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in the passenger seat. Nobody's driving. It's an AI car. Will, how was your last couple of weeks
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without being able to interact with me on a regular basis? Well, you know, there was just a
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palpable emptiness in my life that I just couldn't avoid. This deep hole.
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I woke up with the absence of you every morning. Whatever. It was your vacation too in a way.
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It was not. It was not. I did miss you my friend, but I'm glad you were where you were.
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Glad you were resting out before the next big adventure in your life.
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Yeah, for sure. And excited to see where that goes.
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Yeah, I think it's going to be good. Yeah. And it's exciting to be back in the 21st century
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after our little trip through the early 20th century. The dark times.
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Exactly. I think this in a way plays directly into the overall topic of fascism. We're going
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to talk about the fascist Russ Voigt today. He is what you would call a modern fascist.
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Indeed. So that was a quote in the opener from him. Let's go ahead and get started.
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All right. Well, our listeners have started without us in a sense. They got to hear a little
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quote there at the beginning. Just so you know, listeners, that was not a Bond villain,
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a clip from the latest Bond movie. It wasn't a general planning military coup or some sort of
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larger than life, evil, fictitious villainous character. The person who said that actually
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to your eyes would look less like a revolutionary and more like maybe your CPA who prepares your taxes.
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Exactly. If you saw Russ Voigt on the street, you probably wouldn't look twice at him.
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He's kind of a, let's say nerdy technocrat. He speaks in a very flat, nasally monotone,
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and he wears tortoiseshell glasses, standard issue blue suits, you know, like the little corona of
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close cropped hair. Maybe he was in the military. Maybe not. He looks for all the world exactly like
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the kind of federal bureaucrat he says he despises. You know, that reminds me just when you're
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doing the way you described him reminds me of the character. Do you ever watch the TV show heroes?
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Yes, I believe I did at the beginning. Yeah, it was, it started off on a pretty exciting note and
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then yeah, it took a dive into nothing. Yeah, but it was just this character throughout the show
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called HRG or horn room glasses. I know you said tortoise shell, not horn room, but it just reminded
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me like of his character. He didn't look very threatening. Like to look at him, you just like
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your eyes would pass right over him on the street, but he was like masterminding this entire plan to
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take over the world or whatever. It was crazy. So well, that's a perfect foreshadowing actually,
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for what we're going to talk about today. He does. Yeah. I think if you, if you picture the HRG
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character, you're not far off, right? But yeah, this is a story. Yeah, right. Although there's
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some mixed motivations there, but anyway, this isn't your story about a typical politician. This
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isn't the bombastic characters you see yelling and smacking the podium. This is a story of somebody
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who's effective behind the scenes. Who doesn't say much, doesn't get much attention, but he is
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potentially one of the most powerful political operatives in modern America. Yeah. So he's
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actually been called the shadow president and we're not talking about, you know, baby gurgles
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there, Stephen Miller, which Hey, maybe next. But we're talking about who they're calling the grim
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Reaper. The Darth Vader says the president of the federal government. And for the last 20 years,
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he's actually been meticulously building this almost intellectual framework. I think he would
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probably call it, which ultimately are like the legal justifications and a whole lot of
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political weaponry to kind of dismantle the entire American government from the inside out,
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which kind of follows upon, you know, the whole Curtis Yardman theme of layoff or furlough,
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furlough the government forever sort of an idea, right?
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So we're going to tell the story of rough spot today, and we're not going to start in a smoke
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filled room in Washington with, you know, leather chairs and lots of wood, dark wood furniture.
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We're going to start in Connecticut with a father, a garbage can, and a lesson about waste
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that would curdle into a national crusade. Yeah. So we're going to start off kind of in the making
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of Russ Vought and kind of the gospel, according to Turk. So to understand Russ Vought, the man,
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the myth, the legend, you kind of have to understand his father. His father's name was
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Thurlow Bunya Vought. And that's, it's quite possibly, I mean, it's definitely a villain name,
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but B-U-N-Y-E-A, like I've never heard that name. Maybe it's a family name, but his nickname was
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Turk. So Turk was for all intents and purposes, a Marine Corps veteran, so a Marine and was a
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Union electrician from Trumbull, Connecticut. Nothing crazy, nothing about that kind of sticks
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out. And so because of this very Unioned electrician family and upbringing, Russ actually
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describes his upbringing as very like blue collar down to earth, the man of the people,
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his father was an electrician, right? I mean, his mother, her name was Margaret,
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was just a school teacher. She taught elementary school and they were by all accounts devout
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Christians. The very kind that you probably expect, very evangelical, very run of the mill,
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pretty- pretty- And I think as they had one obsession, it seems to be that they could not
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stand waste or at least Turk couldn't stand waste, right? We're not talking about just like your,
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turn off the lights when you leave a room and make sure you shut the refrigerator.
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But he had a deep moral revulsion to waste. Which, you know, to be fair is a common theme,
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right? Like I had a lot of upbringing through my grandparents and my grandparents coming out of the
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depression. And I think this is actually probably pretty common for a lot of people. There was- You
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don't waste anything, anything that you can possibly reuse or build or rebuild or protect,
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you go ahead and do it. I mean, it's kind of a no-brainer. I don't think that there's anything-
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I don't think there's anything inherently bad about being- wanting to eliminate waste and
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eliminate the wastefulness. So there's actually this one story which for us Vaude is kind of a
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foundational myth. You know, how there anybody, any evil person always has this like- Right.
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-this one thing about them that kind of explains everything. Origin story. Exactly. An origin
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story and an electrician who used to work with Turk, a guy named Mark Maluszewski, after a job,
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the father would see his coworkers like tossing out leftover but still usable material. I mean,
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you're- if you think about it from that perspective, right, you're an electrician. What are going to be
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the things that you have left over? You know, it's going to be stuff like pieces of wire and pieces
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of wire and pieces of insulation and, and, you know, end caps and wire caps
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and those sorts of things.
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Um, uh, and, and he would just absolutely lose it.
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So Maliszewski recalled this kind of happening and was quoted as saying he'd
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go over and kick the garbage can and he'd say, what is this if those were quarters
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or dollars in that garbage can you'd be picking them up?
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I mean, that's, that's a pretty, uh, Wow.
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Pretty aggressive frugality right there, right?
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I mean, like basically if you see the world as anything that could find a use
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or could be redeemed for pennies or quarters or whatever, I mean, that's,
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that's a harsh lesson and it almost drives us to that level, like instead
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of morality, like it's immoral to throw away scrap wire or pieces of extra insulation.
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Right.
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Even if they were unusable, you know, like, I mean, what use do you have for
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a two inch piece of wire that you had to trim off the end of something, you know?
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Exactly.
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It leads to hoarding.
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I wonder if they had a hoarding issue.
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Possibly.
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So this, um, this gospel of scarcity, I guess is what we're going to call this.
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Yeah.
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So, I mean, that's, that's kind of his, that's, that's his, his origin story, right?
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Is to be as frugal as possible.
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And so, you know, I guess he sought to purge the sin of, of waste or inefficiency.
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Exactly.
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And he viewed it as a profound moral sin.
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I mean, imagine growing up with that, right?
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Like your dad, your dad imprints this, this view on you, this sort of personal
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dogma, this, this, like you said, the gospel of scarcity, right?
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It becomes sort of this, this underlying operating system for Russ's entire life.
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And like, you know, any good preacher, um, he kind of seeks out institutions to validate
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and amplify his, his beliefs and sort of that supports his ideas.
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So first he goes to, to Wheaton College in Illinois, which has been described
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as the evangelical Harvard.
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I'm pretty sure Harvard has a, you know, both a theology school and a divinity school.
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So they're already kind of the evangelical Harvard, but even more so that
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they feel the need to talk about this.
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Now he graduated from, um, from Wheaton in 1998.
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So I was entering high school, I think that was my freshman year of high school.
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He was graduating college.
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So Russ Vaught is really only like, I don't know, eight years older than me.
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Um, and a little less than you for you, Will, right?
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Like you're probably four.
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Right.
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I'm in my sophomore year of high school, so probably four.
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Yeah.
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Okay.
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Got it.
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Yeah.
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So this is kind of where his, his dad, that vis, visceral sort of hatred of the
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waste kind of gets this, this theological framework, right?
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So in a world divided into sort of righteous and then on the opposite end of that
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spectrum being sort of wasteful and then like the saved and the condemned kind of
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a viewpoint at this, this Wheaton College in, in Illinois.
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And then he makes his way to Washington, which I can only imagine is like the
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wretched hive of scum and villainy.
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If you're a, an anti waste person, right?
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Um, he gets a job in the mail room for Republican Senator Phil Graham of Texas.
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And Phil Graham, whether you, if you know him is not just any senator,
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he is a fierce budget hawk.
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He's notably famous for criticizing his own party for not being conservative enough.
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So, I mean, this is like the finishing school for Russ Vaught.
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And what's funny is, you know, it, it feels like it feels like a lot of this is in the
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past, right?
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You know, but like, I know who that guy was, like, I remember that guy.
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I was alive when all this was happening.
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And so it's kind of interesting to see him kind of coming up this way.
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Right.
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Like, so for, for Russ, it's kind of a direct pipeline, right?
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The, the moral absolutism kind of learned at his father's behest with that, that, that
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despising and, and that angry hatred of all things wasteful.
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And then he gets the theological structure from Wheaton.
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And then under Senator Graham, he gets this sort of this mentor, this, this
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political vocabulary, as well as a very distinct set of legislative tools.
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He learns how the government works.
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He learns how Congress actually makes the sausage and he likes the sausage.
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You know, and so he learns the mechanics of the budgets and appropriations and also.
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Who, you know, Graham was kind of famous for as well is for spending cuts from one of the
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people who created spending cuts within the government.
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So then when you see him later in his career, and he's out there trying to slash funding
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for everything from foreign aid to cancer research, you got to understand the backstory.
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And once you have the backstory, it starts to make a little bit more sense, right?
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This isn't fiscal policy.
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This isn't, you know, dry numbers from a bean counter.
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This is somebody who's on a holy war against the sin of waste.
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And it's like a purification ritual for him to cleanse the budget of waste.
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And when you, when you see, or sort of see yourself on a mission from God, or at least
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your father figure who occupies that God role in your childhood, the human cost of your
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crusade doesn't really affect the equation, right?
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I mean, yeah, if you just justify a genocide.
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So I mean, why not hold back or why hold back?
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Right.
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I should say.
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Exactly.
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So, you know, he started, he started just as a normal guy in a mailroom, right?
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Like he climbs very, very quickly.
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Now he's, he's clearly not just, you know, another, another kid who's on, in the GOP
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payroll, just trying to make it as a DC Washington insider, you know, grabbing cups
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of coffee and stuff, he actually ended up getting his law degree from George Washington
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University in 2004, two years after I graduated high school.
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Man, I'm starting to feel old.
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Are you, are you starting to feel old yet?
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I'm not starting, man.
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I'm way ahead of you.
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I got you.
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Well, a couple rounds in, you got to catch up.
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Well, that's, that's cause that's cause of children.
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I think that, you know, I I've staved it off a little while from not having children
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sucking both my wallet and my energy dry.
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So anyway, he, he kind of, uh, takes these, these legal credentials now, right?
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Like, uh, he's, he's now got his law degree from George Washington University and he
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sort of uses it like, uh, like a sword and shield in the overall fight against waste
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in Washington.
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Right.
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And so he basically takes them, those credentials, and he starts imagining,
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envisioning these holy war style mordor battles.
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Right.
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They're good against evil, then they'd be champions of frugality and efficiency.
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Versus the evil monsters of waste and one spending.
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And so his next job, next time he works for a congressman, now he's working for
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another congressman from Texas, Jacob Hensarling, and quickly becomes the budget
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director, then the executive director of the Republican Study Committee, which is,
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if you know of it, it's the heart of the Republican party in the house of
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representatives.
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It's where the real hardliners cook up their policies and Vaught is essentially
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running the kitchen.
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He's, he's, he's got the secret sauce or the RSC.
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Yeah.
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You know, I, I have to be honest.
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I mean, I, I kind of think, I don't really remember Hensarling.
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I, I think that the name sounds vaguely familiar.
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He's no longer in the Senate or Congress.
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Hell, he might be dead.
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Do you, do you have any memories of this guy?
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Because I think in general, when a congressman is kind of milk toast, I don't
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think he generally holds up, you know, to pressure.
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So the fact that I even remember his previous boss within Congress there, Phil
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Graham, to me kind of speaks to the milk toast, but maybe, maybe you remember him.
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I don't honestly.
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I'm, I'm, I'm hard to say.
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I do think, so I think it kind of holds up, right?
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The idea that if, if you didn't really make a difference, you also really don't
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make waves, nobody really remembers you either, which sometimes can be helpful.
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So yeah, his, his old boss Hensarling, the, the, the then Congressman kind of
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gushed about Russ Vaught.
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He was like, uh, infatuated with him a little.
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He said, uh, I've worked in a lot of, with a lot of different staff people, as far as
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work ethic, tenacity, intellect, knowledge, and commitment to principle.
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Russell was one of the more impressive people that I've worked with, you know, I
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mean, for whatever reason, and maybe it was the, the passion about waste.
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He seemed to be really well liked by this, by the people that he, he
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was directly working for.
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Right.
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Maybe these people are a little more frugal with their praise to say he's one of the
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more impressive people I worked with, but who knows, that may be high praise coming
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from, from Hensarling.
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Exactly.
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But that is really key is that from the very beginning, Vaught was not seen as a
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cynical operator, just playing the game.
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He wasn't a career politician.
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In that sense, he was a genuine, true believer, which is what probably makes
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him so effective.
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He's not trying to win on a news cycle.
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This is not a, some stunt or campaign preaching point or bullet point.
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He's actually trying to win a generational war as he sees it for the soul of the country.
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Yeah.
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Oh man.
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I did look it up, by the way.
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Hensarling is still alive and apparently he served from 2003 to 2019.
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So I mean, he's not there anymore, but, but he, at least he was there.
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Right.
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He, I mean, he was definitely career and he's still, you know, he's still eating
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that, that lifetime medical care in, in Washington, I'm sure.
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So we start to sort of move into what becomes Russ Vaught's actual career.
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Right.
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Like we've gotten, you know, we've skipped over a lot because, you know, the major thing
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here is that he was a hawk, excuse me, a hawk on waste.
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So he's on the fast track, right?
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Like he's, he's now working for his second Congressperson.
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He's smart.
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They see him as like a hardworking conservative ideologue.
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And then something happens.
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He looks at the Republican Party.
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And all of a sudden, much like the rest of us are feeling now, he becomes immediately
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disgusted, but for very different reasons.
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They say never meet your heroes.
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Well, it sounds like Russ Vaught met his heroes and Kim Way, in his own words, quote,
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"disillusioned with members of his parties, his party who claimed to care about balanced
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budgets and spending cuts, yet voted to approve bills loaded with pork barrel spending in
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corporate giveaways."
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Well, there you go.
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There it is.
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Right.
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I mean, it's waste, we don't want any waste unless that's waste coming to us.
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We see waste fraud and abuse again.
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Right.
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But if it's coming down my pipe, it's not waste, right?
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If it's feeding my hogs, we're good.
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To Vaught, those Republicans were, for lack of a better term, heretics.
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They preached the gospel of fiscal conservatism on Sunday morning out of the pulpit, but sin
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with the appropriators on Monday.
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Right?
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Yeah, I actually think, so I think a former Capitol Hill colleague of Vaught's kind of
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put it perfectly right.
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And so I found this quote.
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"I think he thought," and this is in quotes, "so I think he thought the Republican leadership
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was a bigger impediment to the conservative causes than Democrats were."
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Like, he literally, like, he said what all of us have been thinking all along, which
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is ultimately they're really the tax and spend, but they want to tax the poor and spend it
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on the rich as opposed to tax the rich and spend it on the poor.
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It's reverse Robin Hood over here.
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But that's why he was so disillusioned with the Republican Party.
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Right?
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He, the real enemy was not across the aisle sitting in the House or sitting in the Senate.
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It was really sitting right next to him, smiling, cutting deals, putting earmarks,
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loading those bills up with pork, and he hated it.
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So what is a true believer to do in this situation?
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Well, in 2010, excuse me, he quits his prestigious job in Congress, whereas most
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people might go off with a disillusionment and turn it into a lobbying job or a sad
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blog or some sort of voice in the wilderness.
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Vaught decides to build a machine to break his own party.
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So he decides to come back with the real power and begins assembling his war machine.
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Yes.
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He actually launches this new organization called Heritage Action for America.
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Now, this isn't like the sleepy academic heritage foundation that writes policy
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papers, because at the time that's, that's what the hell the heritage
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foundation really was, right?
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It was this think tank.
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I want to say think tank.
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I mean, that's probably the best way to describe it, but they talked theoretically
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about how to fix things within the government to more conservative
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ideals and conservative causes.
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Now we've talked, you know, previously about the 1971 document that sort of
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started the heritage foundation.
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He basically said, I'm going to start an actual Heritage Action for America
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organization, because he thought the heritage foundation was too much to
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milk toast.
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So he created it with this explicit mission, and I'm reading from their
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mission statement here, "to strong arm congressional Republicans to act more
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conservatively."
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Literally, to make them be more conservative by force.
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That's no joke.
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I mean, that's a fundamental shift in his career, right?
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He's no longer the brains.
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He's no longer an advisor in the back room cooking his policies up.
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He's not a bean counter.
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No bean counting, no.
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Now he is an enforcer full on.
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His job as he sees it as to threaten, cajole and punish Republicans who stray from the path of righteousness on waste, right?
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It's so gross to even like, like it's gross.
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But I mean, you know, in his way, I mean, he would see it as just being consistent, right?
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I mean, you're, he just wanted them to practice what they preach and if they didn't do it, then...
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Exactly.
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And I think that this is exactly what happens when you follow something to its
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logical conclusion, which in this case might be the end of America.
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Who knows.
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If some people have their way.
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We'll see.
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But yeah.
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So, I mean, here's where he learns the like, you know, he goes from learning warfare in the, the halls of West point or Annapolis to
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learning, you know, dirty fighting, right on the ground, you know, scrapping in the yard with the, the sort of visceral machinery of political warfare.
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And he decides that compromises betrayal, purity is the only virtue.
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So he's, he's now on a cleansing, now he's becoming an inquisitor, right?
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Or like a the inquisition.
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Yeah.
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This is the new Gilead.
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Yeah.
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Like sorting out heretics and dealing with...
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It has to be defined by the letter and the framework has to be followed to a T.
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Exactly.
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I think that this experience is kind of what forges him really into the perfect weapon for the Trump era.
24:05
And not the first one, because he did, he had a stint in the OMB during the first one, but it was, it was very mild compared to what we're seeing now.
24:13
Right.
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It sort of hardens Russ's belief that the real enemy is the person on your own side that doesn't have any conviction.
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Right.
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So unlike, unlike leftists and more and more liberal leaning sources, which we, we have a tendency to gatekeep and tear each other apart.
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One of the things that the Republicans have been consistently good at is standing behind the banner and keeping everything that happens behind the banner from being seen in the front.
24:43
Right.
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They appear to be very, I don't want to say monolithic, but they appear to be very strong in their conviction toward the GOP.
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Not necessarily, I mean, to conservatism by way of, of their, their statements of belief.
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But this is the first time we start to see really kind of MAGA become its own worldview where it kind of splits and breaks apart from mainstream Republicans.
25:11
Yeah.
25:11
It teaches him that kind of loyalty to the movement.
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And eventually, as we've seen in, in the news, just about every day, to the leader, all of those things are more important than the loyalty to a party or an institution.
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So it doesn't matter if the institution changes, if you, if your beliefs are the purity, then you can still follow your beliefs definitively.
25:36
Now, he was a man in a crane waiting for the wrecking ball to be attached.
25:44
And in 2016, a wrecking ball rode down an escalator.
25:49
We all remember that moment.
25:51
That escalator unfortunately worked.
25:53
Yeah, so when Trump wins in the first term, Vought is a natural fit for the administration, right?
26:00
He's there to drain the swamp.
26:01
He's there to clean up Washington.
26:04
And in April, 2017, Trump nominates Vought to be the deputy director of the office of management and budget, or the OMB.
26:13
And his confirmation hearing becomes the first time many Americans actually get a clear look at the core of his ideology, right?
26:19
This is the time where, you know, the committees gets asked questions and he's now going to, you know, fully unleash his ideology out there for the world to see.
26:28
Yeah.
26:28
So it actually comes up his ideology, right.
26:33
Because of an article he wrote kind of defending Wheaton College, which he was an alumni of for its treatment of a specific professor.
26:40
So in the article, Vought kind of laid out his theological views with really creepy clarity.
26:48
That's about the best way I could describe it.
26:50
You know, anytime we do the research for these podcasts, I'm like, sometimes I'm just like, oh, it's like when you're, you know, you're an EMS and you're only dealing with the worst cases on a regular basis of people who need emergency intervention on the way to the hospital.
27:06
Like it's creepy pasta.
27:08
That's just, that's just what it is.
27:10
Actually.
27:11
So Bernie Sanders in that, in that interview actually read his own words back to him in the hearing.
27:18
Yeah.
27:18
Which I believe said Muslims do not simply have a deficient theology.
27:23
They do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ, his son, and they stand condemned.
27:29
It's hard to walk back.
27:30
Yeah, absolutely.
27:31
And I will say that, I think what we're getting into in our, in our worldview, not even here in this point in 2016 when he, or when he came up for, I'm sorry, 2017 when he came up for review to be deemed appropriate for office and his
27:47
confirmation hearing, but what you said or what you believe really doesn't matter anymore.
27:52
They just kind of push everything through.
27:54
He asked him, Sanders asked him if he thought that his statement was Islamophobic and vaught without blinking, without questioning even his any internal, you know, look into himself.
28:10
He defended his words as a standard statement of Christian belief.
28:15
The exchange was pretty heated. It got, Bernie Sanders was, was right there on him.
28:20
Like he, he did not let up.
28:23
He got sarcastic and it was, it was kind of raw, a raw public display of a very aggressive brand of Christian nationalism that usually gets kept behind closed doors and secret meetings that none of us ever have to see.
28:41
Right.
28:41
I mean, it got so intense that his nomination basically deadlocked in the Senate 50 to 49 and it looked like Vaught might actually be defeated.
28:48
They might not get the office, but he unfortunately had an ace up his sleeve.
28:54
The tie breaking vote in that case was then cast by vice president of the United States.
28:59
Mike Pence.
29:00
Thanks Mike.
29:02
Who was Mike Pence?
29:03
Well, Mike Pence was Vaught's actually old boss back when Pence was the chairman of the house Republican conference.
29:11
So nice little, you know, nepotism or union to warm your inner soul.
29:17
Yeah.
29:17
Happy reunion.
29:18
So the symbolism here is, is perfect, right?
29:21
If the old guard of the religious, right.
29:24
In the person of Mike Pence, preaching down and personally pulling its most radical, most effective new operator into one of the most powerful positions in the U S government, the weapon that is Russ Vaught and his, his agenda has been forged.
29:37
And now it's in the hands of the executive branch.
29:40
Yeah, Vaught quickly becomes more, more important, but also more than just the deputy director at OMB.
29:51
In 2019, right before COVID hit his boss, Mick Mulvaney, uh, it's kind of moved over to be Trump's acting chief of staff.
30:00
And Russ Vaught immediately becomes the acting director of the OMB.
30:04
And almost immediately he handed the assignment.
30:08
Well, I, I guess maybe a better word would be the trigger to a constitutional crisis and the first impeachment of Donald Trump.
30:17
So in a now infamous story, as you may recall, the Trump White House was pressuring the government of Ukraine to announce an investigation into Trump's political rival, Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
30:28
So there, this is a takedown of Joe Biden, attempt to take down and to apply that pressure.
30:34
They decided that the Trump administration decided to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid that Congress had already approved for Ukraine.
30:42
Yeah, but you can't, so you can't actually just like not spend money Congress tells you to spend.
30:47
I know they're literally saying right now that you can, you know, like it's going, and it's going to the Supreme court and we're going to find out whether or not it's true.
30:57
But ultimately it was a long-held belief that ultimately when Congress says we have appropriated this money, it's to be spent in this fashion.
31:06
You can't just stop that it's illegal.
31:08
I mean, and I still hold to the fact that it is illegal.
31:12
So in order to actually stop the money flowing, right?
31:16
Like that went to the man in charge of the government's checkbook, the OMB, then acting director Vought ordered to freeze $214 million in security assistance.
31:34
And he said, sure.
31:36
He said, absolutely.
31:37
Mr. Leader, dear Commandant, Herr Hitler.
31:42
And now this is where his unique skill set comes into play, right, because he's been building his whole life around understanding how money flows in the government and how to stop it from flowing in one place and get it flowing somewhere else.
31:54
So it's not like he just issues a crude memo telling the budget office, you know, the people responsible for dispersing the funds, he's not just sending them a memo that says they don't send the money until they, you know, until they agree to investigate Biden.
32:09
That's too easy, right?
32:10
Instead, Vought uses his encyclopedic knowledge of the system and his law degree to use the arcane technical tools of his own office as a weapon, a political weapon.
32:21
Yeah.
32:21
Now the House Budget Committee did, they launched an enormous investigation.
32:26
This was all part of Trump's first impeachment, right?
32:29
So they later found that Russ's actions constituted a pattern of systemic abuse under Vought's management.
32:41
He actually used really, really obscure, very old, very archaic mechanisms, like the apportionment footnotes to quietly withhold the funds.
32:51
Not just, hey, you know, don't do this.
32:53
He found a very not used, not understood, extremely old footnote, just a little footnote to actually have a legal backing to do what he was doing in a way that could not be easily undone.
33:11
And anybody who knows or has ever been in a car accident, a court case will tie you up forever.
33:17
But if you do it and you say you got a legal reason to do it, it takes much longer to untangle the court case than it actually takes to turn the tap back on.
33:30
It was a pretty sophisticated attack.
33:32
I mean, it was kind of a case management or case study in separation of powers, right?
33:41
And, and it wasn't, it wasn't this like giant battle on the floor of the Senate.
33:45
It was literally just the, the, the eula of the, the budget documents of the Senate that not only does nobody read, they just click accept.
33:54
They also don't understand.
33:56
And only when it needs to be very fine toothpicked out, like a, like a knit being picked off of somebody's headlice, that he, he went that granular to find a justifiable reason to do this.
34:12
Right. This is the ultimate bureaucrat using the bureaucracy to destroy itself, turning it against itself and using the system's own complexity to paralyze the subverted.
34:24
This is 3D chess for you.
34:27
Yes.
34:27
And we talked about this, you know, in the Hitler, in the Hitler episodes, where ultimately he found very old, very distinct arguments to do what he was doing in a very legal way.
34:40
And look, the truth is he was doing something that is legal, or at least he believes so.
34:47
And it's still in court and this is six years later, you know, so eventually the government accountability office, or as we call it the GAO, which is basically like Congress's referee without any partisanship.
35:02
It's supposed to be a completely independent, nonpartisan referee.
35:07
Blows the whistle, right?
35:08
They issued a legal decision stating that the OMB under Vought had actually violated federal law.
35:14
The, the GOA stated flatly, and I quote, "faithful execution of the law does not permit the president to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law."
35:31
It's not a, not a veiled statement. There's no, no, you know, subterfuge there.
35:37
Pretty straightforward, right?
35:39
Yeah, the law requires you to do what, what Congress has enacted into law.
35:42
You're the executive branch, Congress makes the laws, you execute them.
35:47
Exactly.
35:48
Exactly.
35:49
And so a normal public servant might have, if not been afraid, might have at least had some contrition or some concern about this, this situation.
35:57
But Russ Vought was not, if you can't tell already, he was not a normal public servant.
36:03
Yeah, and he's still not.
36:04
So he actually treated the GAO's finding not as a legal ruling, right?
36:10
Like coming from the judiciary, but as, you know, an annoying suggestion from a rival gang.
36:16
And he actually refused to cooperate with the subsequent impeachment inquiry.
36:21
He literally defied a congressional subpoena and he called the entire investigation, a "Sham process" that is designed to re-litigate the last election.
36:34
Sorry, I wanted that to say retaliate, but was designed to re-litigate the last election.
36:40
So he said this is this completely nonpartisan department and bureau of the government is being entirely partisan so that they can undo the last election.
36:51
And it's always about making the other side look like they're fighting to invalidate a legitimate election.
36:56
Meanwhile, when you lose, it's because, you know, their election was stolen.
37:00
It wasn't fair.
37:02
Yeah.
37:02
And his official response to GAO, Vought's OMB argued that the GAO's legal opinions were illogical, that the GAO itself cannot constitutionally interpret laws.
37:15
Well, that's handy, right?
37:16
I mean, you have an office that's there to call the shots, right?
37:19
They're to referee.
37:21
And then you say, well, hey, they're not, they're not the ones allowed to do that.
37:23
Who is?
37:24
Well, I guess maybe the Supreme Court that we can stack.
37:26
Yeah.
37:28
He was basically, yeah, he was in effect declaring his office and the president to be above the law and beyond the reach of congressional oversight, which again has now been validated in certain Supreme Court decisions.
37:40
But his test case was a success.
37:41
He'd proven he was willing to break the law for the president and had developed a bureaucratic and legal tactics to do just that.
37:48
Yeah. So after Donald Trump loses, cause he's a loser, the 2020 election, many Republicans, obviously they run for the exits, right?
38:00
Like they disavow the president, especially after the extremely violent, terroristic January 6th Capitol riot, but not Russ Vought.
38:13
No.
38:14
He remains incredibly loyal to president Trump, then ex-president Trump, publicly echoing Trump's baseless claims about the election fraud.
38:25
Fraud.
38:26
And he doesn't take the break there, the four-year break.
38:29
He doesn't take that as a vacation.
38:31
He uses that period as a rearmament period.
38:34
So this is where he sort of, you know, goes back and goes back to the drawing board and founds a new think tank, which he calls the Center for Renewing America or the CRA. Add to our alphabet soup here.
38:48
The CRA's mission, actually their statement is it's a piece of work, but it aims to "renew a consensus of America as a nation under God, and to provide the ideological ammunition to sustain Trump's political movement."
39:09
So it's basically a government in exile, workshopping the next phase of their revolutionary coup.
39:20
And what's their main project while in exile?
39:23
Well, they spend the Biden years meticulously crafting legal arguments to justify the actions that got them in trouble the first time.
39:31
So they came up with a way to excuse everything they had done in the first term to bring it back in the second term with a vengeance.
39:38
Right. So Vaude and his allies, like his former lawyer, Mark Paoletta, develop an entirely new legal theory that impounding funds, of course, the very thing that got him in trouble with the Ukraine scandal, is actually a longstanding presidential power.
39:54
That the president has the power to wield the funds that he's been ordered by Congress to disperse.
40:01
He can actually wield those as a hammer against political opponents.
40:05
Yeah. And he is so pedantically annoying.
40:09
But the CRA immediately starts publishing papers with titles like "On the President's Lawful Authority to Deploy the National Guard to American Cities."
40:19
Where does that sound familiar from?
40:20
Right. They are systematically building the framework, the legal scaffolding, for a far more aggressive, far more lawless, in the grand sense,
40:34
second Trump's term.
40:37
So they're taking all of the failures of the first term and they're crafting these brilliant legal engineering solutions to make sure that they don't fail and maybe will never fail again.
40:50
Hints Project 2025.
40:53
Which we are now well into.
40:56
I guess we're wrapping up 2025, sort of.
40:59
Which there's still plenty of time to go.
41:02
But all of this work, all the legal theories, all the policy papers, all the CRA's project, culminates in this one place with a 900-page document that has become the single most terrifying and important text in American politics that most people will never read.
41:17
It's basically the mandate for leadership for the new administration, for the returning administration, better known as Project 2025.
41:25
This brings us to the end of Part 1 of the two-part series called "How Russ Vought Became the Grim Reaper of American Government."
41:33
Check back with us next week on the overlap as we continue to explore another villain in our descent into fascism.
41:40
[Music]