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- [00:04]
A
This is in conversation from Apple News. I'm Shemit Sebastu. Today, how one man is quietly reshaping the federal government. Late last year, Investigative news outlet ProPublica published a video of a private speech given by a former Trump official in 2020 describing his goal of defunding and shrinking federal agencies.
- [00:37]
B
We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.
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A
The person speaking was Russell Vogt, Trump's director of the Office of Management and Budget, omb. In the first administration, when they wake.
- [00:48]
B
Up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want to put them in trauma.
- [00:58]
A
Today, Vogt is back in charge of OMB and one of the most influential figures in the current Trump admin. He's been at the center of moves to dismantle agencies like USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and has encouraged sweeping layoffs across the government. When ProPublica reporter Andy Kroll first came across that recording a year ago, it made a lasting impression on him.
- [01:22]
C
It got me thinking, why does this guy want to traumatize federal workers? The kinds of people that he worked with for four years when he was in the first administration? And this just really stuck with me in a way that I thought, I gotta keep reporting on this person.
- [01:38]
A
Andy has just come out with a profile of Vote called the Shadow President. Published with the New Yorker, the piece includes newly released videos of Vote discussing his views, beliefs, and plans for a second Trump term. Andy argues that much of what we're watching play out in the second Trump administration is a result of Vote's hard work and meticulous preparation, particularly in the years leading up to the 2024 election. Vogt himself declined to be interviewed for Andy's piece, and his spokesperson wouldn't answer a list of detailed questions. But when I spoke with Andy in the midst of the government shutdown, another battle where Vogt has played a central role, I asked him to explain Vogt's philosophy of government and how those ideas are now being translated into action by the current administration.
- [02:25]
C
What's been fascinating to watch is Russ Vote become one of the most important people in this administration. Watching him rise to a level where he is, again, one or two of the most important advisors and aides to President Trump, I would put him really right there next to Stephen Miller at this point. That was not the case in the first administration. It absolutely is the case now based on everything that we have seen, including most recently, how this shutdown has played out. What's striking about that then is these videos, these recordings, dozens of hours of new material that we obtained in this story really give us a window into what he thinks, what he believes. Building on this whole put them in trauma comment. He believes that a, quote, unquote, deep state bureaucracy has subverted American democracy, has gained far too much power, and that these individuals are unelected, they are not beholden to the will of the American public. You know, people aren't voting for who the scientists are at EPA in the way that they vote for members of Congress or a president. And that this deep state, again, has kind of subsumed the American government and needs to be dismantled, needs to be rooted out. That is a big part of his worldview. And obviously the things he has done in this administration, around mass firings, around, in some cases, dismantling entire agencies or rendering them ineffective in a complete way show how he has acted on that worldview. I think he also believes that there is a cultural corruption or sort of a cultural disintegration in the country. You know, he says, as we quote him in the speech, you know, we're on the verge of a Marxist takeover.
- [04:15]
B
The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover over of the country.
- [04:23]
C
It's not quite entirely clear what that exactly means, but I do think he sees what he would call, you know, sort of the. The agenda of the quote, unquote, left DEI and affirmative action, transgender rights, things that he deeply opposes and thinks are actually symptoms of a deep cultural, societal rot in the country need to be addressed. And we've seen exactly how they've done that in action in this administration as well. Freezing funding for programs that have anything to do with diversity, equity, inclusion. Freezing funding for programs that are related to, say, clean energy or environmental policies. And of course, the administration has taken great steps to put pressure on or penalize universities that had rules initiatives to try to explicitly diversify the student body. So again, we have in this, reporting what he says he thinks is wrong and what the many ills are. And then in the administration, we're seeing how they have actually moved to try to implement their agenda, to counteract all of those things they say are so bad that are happening now.
- [05:41]
A
And just to mention another dimension of his ideology that feels relevant. And there are clips of him talking about this, but he's been asked about the label Christian nationalist and has basically responded to say, that's a pretty apt description for what I identify as. It seems like religion does play a pretty large role in his not just worldview, but in his political view and view of what America as a country should be.
- [06:09]
C
Right, Absolutely right. He openly, publicly identifies as a Christian nationalist. We again lean on his own words in our story and quote him saying.
- [06:22]
B
The phrasing is too accurate to run away from the term. So you will see me diving into it to say, let's talk about this. I'm a Christian, I am a nationalist. And so we were meant to be a Christian nation.
- [06:38]
C
This has been a struggle or an argument within the Republican Party, the conservative movement writ large. Do you embrace this name, this label, or do you try to talk your way out of it? And Vogt has even tried to. He had this clunky term at one point, Christian nationism, that he was sort of road testing. But really, again, as we quote him as saying as late as 2023, yes, I am a Christian nationalist. This term is too accurate. But what does that mean? It's a label that people use, but what does it mean? And I think for him, again, relying on the things that he himself has said and written, it means that the country in his view or in the view of folks in his position, comes from a Judeo Christian origin. And that laws and rights, how we think about what a family looks like, how we think about what the moral fabric of the country looks like, flow from Judeo Christian teachings, principles.
- [07:49]
B
All of the issues that we work on are trying to broadly have a corrective and say we need to be a country that is for God. We need to be for country and for community in the sense that we want to really reflect on the fact that we are a nation that's built on Judeo Christian worldview.
- [08:09]
C
Now, of course, that leaves out a lot of people and he's pretty open about that. And, you know, not a supporter of marriage equality, not a supporter of trans rights. And also he has written before that other faiths are not compatible with that Judeo Christian worldview. And really that is what makes him such a, I think, important, newsworthy and revealing figure right now because he has this like, wonky, incredible command of how to use the levers of government to, you know, freeze money and lay off people en masse and to work the machinery of the bureaucracy. But then he also has this Christian nationalist Judeo Christian worldview agenda approach to what he does. And you don't see those two braided together in the way that you do with him.
- [09:03]
A
Interesting. It seems like a lot of people that you spoke to refer to vote as the sort of shadow president, in fact, the architect or at least one of the chief architects of a lot of what we're seeing unfold in the second Trump administration. How much power does Vote really have? I mean, I think the counterpoint to that is people say well he's head of this Office of Management and Budget omb, not a much discussed branch of government for most people. Doesn't really come up a whole lot until we're like really talking about government shutdowns and getting into the weeds of funding issues. Just not so well known. So how do you describe to people how powerful vote is in this position and maybe even outside of this position as his scope has grown bigger?
- [09:51]
C
I usually describe it in a couple of ways. The first way is to talk about what the Office of Management and Budget or OMB is. OMB sits at this sort of key intersection junction point in the day to day working of the American federal government. We all know that Congress passes laws and those laws come with money, saying we're going to spend this amount of money on these programs, these agencies, et cetera, et cetera. And you kind of think, okay, Congress approves the money, the money flies off to the EPA or the Justice Department or the Consumer Product Safety Commission, whatever, and off you go. But actually there is a very small but very important office in the middle of that called omb. And Ombudsman is essentially the place where the money flows and they apportion it out. Almost like a sort of loving but diligent parent that says I'm going to give you this money but I'm going to give it to you at a certain rate so that you don't spend it all at once and that, you know, you EPA don't run out of money three months before the end of the year and then we're all in trouble. In normal times, OMB is that loving diligent parent. Sometimes it's a pain in the you know what to the agencies because they want more money faster. In omb, these know it alls, these budget nerds over there are getting in the way and there is that push and pull. There is a tension there.
- [11:26]
A
Uh huh.
- [11:27]
C
In this administration. OMB has become the kink in the hose. OMB has repeatedly said we are holding back money that you National Institutes of Health or you Department of Education want or are entitled by law to receive. Because we're reviewing it. We're looking for anything DEI related. We're looking for anything that is contradictory to the President's agenda. That is not normal. It's happened a few times in the past but not only is it not normal, it's also often not legal. That's not how our system of government works. But that is something that Russ Vote has put to the test. And when I spoke to high level employees at the agencies across the government, that's where this shadow president idea came out. They said to me, Andy, we're spending so much time hashing it out with ombuds, haggling with them, fighting with them, or just like waiting on them to give us the money that Congress already said we should have that it feels like on a day to day basis. Russ Vogt is our commander in chief, not Donald Trump, because he's the guy who just sort of lives largest in our heads right now.
- [12:43]
A
Well, I want to loop back around to talk about some of these present day issues that we're seeing. But by the time he reaches this point in the first Trump administration of being appointed to the omb, tell us how he was starting to develop this understanding of where he could try and push the limits of the relationship between OMB and congressional funding and his own interpretation of the law surrounding all that.
- [13:19]
C
The first administration is really the early testing ground for his attempts to exert a real executive influence over what is normally the work of Congress. Congress has the power of the purse. Article 1 of the Constitution and the President is supposed to take care to implement what Congress has done. Article 2. But in that first administration vote and some of his close allies start to toy around with this concept called impoundment. Kind of a wonky term, but the idea is pretty simple, that the President has the power to not spend money Congress approves. Congress passed a law during the Nixon presidency saying that the President just can't freeze money that Congress approved because he disagrees. And there are a few small exceptions to that. You can ask Congress to rescind money, but you gotta ask them, they gotta vote on it. Impoundment is basically saying, I'm the President, I have the power to stop this money. And so I'm going to. That is what happened in the Ukraine security funding controversy that ultimately led to Donald Trump's first impeachment. Russell vote was a key player in this saga that obviously today feels like it happened 5 million years ago. But for those who might remember the faint outlines of this then President Trump was pressuring the President of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden. And then around the same time the Office of Management and Budget makes this decision to freeze several hundred million dollars of funding that was going to go to Ukraine. Russ Vogt was in the middle of that decision really forcing through the will of the White House. And Vote does not succeed using that impoundment power in the way that he seemingly hoped to in the first administration. But the groundwork was laid there. I always found this a fascinating detail, a revealing detail. One of the very last things that Vote did when he was in the first administration was write this very long letter to members of Congress laying out why omb, why Vote thought the president did have this power to freeze money, and why the law banning it was unconstitutional. They were fighting over this basically until the final hours of the first administration. So it's not surprising when they get back in office that they have used that empowerment power very aggressively, and not just on Ukraine funding, but on anything that they see as deviating from the Trump agenda.
- [16:07]
A
Well, let's talk about the years between after Trump lost the 2020 election. What is that period of time like for Vote? What was he reflecting on? It seems from the first administration?
- [16:20]
C
It's a period that I think really helps us understand why the current administration has done as much as they've done in just nine, 10 months. It's really a really important chapter in the larger Vote story. Vote refers to this period 21 to the 24 election as our years in exile.
- [16:41]
B
We did a lot of things in the first term. We had a ton of paradigm shifts, but one of the things we did not do was reductions in force. And we honestly learned about it in our years of exile.
- [16:51]
C
He takes this period to essentially learn the lessons of Trump 1.0 and figure out how to put the different pieces in place so that if there is a Trump 2.0, that it will avoid those mistakes, avoid the chaos, the disorganization, the inexperience of the first go round and be able to exert its will from literally day one. And this is not just publishing papers, writing tweets, going on tv, though. It is also that, as we reported, Vogt talks in detail about how he and his team at this think tank that he started spent time writing 350 executive orders, regulations and other legal documents, memoranda that a future President Trump could sign right there the moment he took office. I mean, think about that first day of the Trump administration. Trump goes to Capitol One arena in Washington, D.C. this big show of pomp and grandeur. Yeah, but what does he do? He sits on a stage at a desk and signs a stack of executive orders. Could you imagine Biden doing this? I don't think so. I don't think so. Russ Votes spent the years between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0 working to make that moment possible.
- [18:20]
A
I mean, I'll tell you, I remember it was probably in 2024. It was during the election season, reading about Project 2025. And that's at least the earliest point that I can pinpoint the name. Russell Vogt, appearing in some reporting, he was being described as one of the chief writers of Project 2025 and really an important architect of its framework. What's his relationship to Project 2025?
- [18:49]
C
He was one of the architects of Project 2025. Now, what does that mean in practice? It means a few things. He wrote one of the most important chapters of the 889 page policy ideology blueprint that Project 2025 published. It is one of the clearest, most comprehensive looks at his view of executive power. He describes in there how he thinks, say, the Justice Department, an agency that operates with a good degree of independence and for good reason, should be much more under the thumb of the White House. He writes in there about how other supposedly independent agencies really should not have that independence and that the president should be able to dictate what they do in a much more aggressive way. You see these views laid out in a way that he had not done up to that point in the Project 2025 playbook. Two fellows at his think tank wrote two other really important chapters. One on the Department of Homeland Security, which again is basically the immigration chapter, big deal. And then the other one on the Federal Trade Commission, another really important, though often overlooked agency in the federal government. And then behind the scenes, as he says in one of the speeches we.
- [20:18]
B
Reported on, the majority of my time right now is being spent chairing the transition portion of the Project 2025.
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C
We're doing this work drafting the orders, drafting the regulations, drafting the legal memos.
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B
We have detailed agency plans. We are writing the actual executive orders.
- [20:37]
C
So that the president doesn't have to waste one minute debating what is legal or moral or doable.
- [20:46]
B
I don't want President Trump having to lose a moment of time having fights in the Oval Office about whether something is legal or doable or moral.
- [20:57]
C
Vogt spends a lot of time talking about how frustrated he was from Trump 1.0 when lawyers would come around and say, you can't do that. That's not legal. You can't do that. That's in a gray area.
- [21:07]
B
And in our time in the administration, we lived in this place most of the time in the Oval Office, we would put forward some policy solution and then we'd have the Lawyers come in and say, it's not legal. You can't do that. That would overturn this precedent. There's a state law against that. This how is where so much of things break down in our country. And that's really what we specialize the most in. And we are trying to build almost a shadow Office of Management and budget.
- [21:36]
C
His Project 2025 work was intended to ensure the president could take action on his most ambitious agenda items from day one.
- [21:45]
A
And what did those early weeks look like of the second Trump administration from Russell Vote's perspective?
- [21:52]
C
It's a really interesting period because you have this wild variable thrown into the mix that no one saw coming in the form of the Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge. Doge's leader was, of course, Elon Musk. And from my own reporting, there was a lot of confusion, some uncertainty around where the work of Russ Vod and OMB ended and where the work of Doge and Elon Musk began.
- [22:24]
A
It sounds like in a lot of ways they should go hand in hand.
- [22:28]
C
It does. And in a lot of ways they did. But also, there were two conflicting approaches here. I mean, again, think about what we were just talking about, the years of preparation that went into Trump 2.0. There were not years of preparation for Doge. DOGE was hastily assembled. Its employees were recruited, trained, and brought to Washington in a span of weeks, maybe months. These Doge employees and their leader in Elon Musk did not have anything remotely resembling the understanding the command of how the government works that Russ Vogt does and that a lot of people at the Office of Management and Budget, his agency, do. That said there were some very clear examples where Vogt and Doge worked hand in glove. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was a target of Trump and his allies in the first administration, but in the second administration, Vote and the Doge team that he worked with essentially put the cfpb, as its former director described it, in a coma in a span of months. They did in rapid time what they could not do in the first administration. And then USAID is another example where they work together to try to dismantle that agency as fast as possible and succeeded. And so again, there's, you know, someone that I interviewed for the story said to me there were times when OMB and Doge Vote and Doge seemed to be at odds because the communication was off or the strategy wasn't there, wasn't aligned. But when they worked hand in glove, the effect was swift and for CFPB or usaid, devastating.
- [24:21]
A
You Know, one thing I haven't really asked you to describe so far is Vote's relationship with Trump himself. What were you able to gather about that relationship?
- [24:31]
C
What I gathered about that relationship is that Trump trusts Vote in a way that he does not trust a lot of people who work for him or work around him. I was told that there are a few reasons for that. Vote is not a Fox News host turned political activist or government employee. He is not someone who is looking to build a major national public profile for himself. Vogt is happy to toil behind the scenes, happy to toil in the background, happy to do his work without any fanfare. And I think when he does go on tv, which he does with a decent amount of regularity, it's really for strategic reasons in service of his agenda. And I think Trump appreciates that he trusts people who don't seem like they're trying to outshine him. And then more recently, Vote has served the president well, you know, according to the president's agenda in this government shutdown, because Vote is the one who is, in theory, deciding who to fire, what agencies to temporarily or permanently shut down, certainly the one in the driver's seat trying to turn up the heat on congressional Democrats to reach a deal. There's a AI generated video that Trump shared on social media that depicted Russ Vogt as the grim reaper of Washington, D.C. russ vote is the reaper. He will depend the funds and the brain. Here comes the rebirth. And dear babies, which I think in Trumpian terms is like the highest compliment you can be paid if you are the Office of Management and Budget director. So, again, I think that their relationship is a pretty unique one. And unlike most other relationships this president has with the people who work for him.
- [26:25]
A
Yeah, I mean, Vogt, as you've pointed out, seems to be quite a loyal figure. Are there any points on which he seems to diverge from Trump's view?
- [26:39]
C
I don't think that he is eager to make his disagreements with the president known. That is obviously a fast way to finding yourself out of a job in the Trump administration. But we can look at what Vogt believes around government spending, what his ideological views are, and some of the things that the administration does. And it wouldn't be hard to imagine disagreements on something like, for instance, spending almost $200 million at the Department of Homeland Security to buy private jets for Secretary Kristi Noem. Like that doesn't give off an impression of fiscal restraint in the way that Vote wants and supports and has been fighting for for most of his career. I Don't think that maybe this $300 million gilded ballroom sends a message as well of fiscal restraint, government spending, modesty. But you're not going to see Vote saying that publicly. And even when the one big, beautiful bill was playing out in Congress, there were analyses by the Congressional Budget Office that it was going to add several trillion dollars to the debt in the long term, the kind of thing that Russ Vogt railed against when he was in Congress as a staffer and then when he was an activist off the Hill. But he was out there stomping for the bill. And so I think that tells us that he understands if you're working for President Trump, any president, but especially this president, you've got to get in line. Even if it is on an issue, on a bill that maybe you've fought against in the past, you have to be seen as being on the team. And Vote is nothing if not on the team when he's in the administration.
- [28:30]
A
You described one of Vote's goals heading into this second Trump term as really wanting to take away all legal barriers for the president that might slow him down in signing some of these executive orders right off the bat and really moving fast on his agenda. And of course, we've seen that happen in this administration, just moving fast. But we have also seen plenty of legal challenges, some of which take, as we know, many months before they kind of arrive somewhere. Or in the meantime, actions that get frozen by a federal judge or just suspended temporarily while they continue to be litigated. How does Vote justify some of these actions that are clear tests of the law, especially when it comes to clawing back already appropriated funds?
- [29:20]
C
He takes a couple of different tacks when it comes to his arguments in support of things that seem on their face against the law or against the constitutional precedents, norms, and so on. This notion of impoundment is a really revealing one. Again, the idea that the president can freeze money that Congress has already approved because the president disagrees with it or thinks it's woke or wasteful or whatever. In this case, Vote is very clear that he believes there is a law on the books that is unconstitutional when it restrains the president's power to do that. That is not the way that most legal scholars, including conservative legal scholars going all the way up to the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, have interpreted the Take care clause, have interpreted Article 2 of the Constitution. But Vogt, again, is very open in stating that he does not believe this law is constitutional and that ultimately the Supreme Court should revisit it or revisit the idea behind it. So I think the longer term goal, though it may not be that long term, is to try to get these questions in front of a potentially favorable Supreme Court that could take them up and that could change the rules of the game on some of these very important questions.
- [30:51]
A
You know, I think about, I've had on this show now in the past year a number of constitutional law experts and historians, and a number of them have pointed out to me the way that the pendulum can swing, right? So if under this administration there is so much effort made to expand the power of the President, what happens when a Democrat is in office? And that question has been posed again and again. But I don't know if you were able to glean any understanding of how Vote thinks about that, the long term implications of securing more power for the executive branch in this way.
- [31:31]
C
When you look at his views of executive power, it's very clear that, that he embraces a very aggressive unitary executive theory. But what also comes through in his writings and in his speeches especially is this notion that the country is years or even months away from some kind of calamitous moment, a collapse almost. He talks in these not quite apocalyptic terms. But, you know, in one of the speeches we reported on ahead of the 2024 election, he said, we are here.
- [32:09]
B
In the year of 2024, a year that very well, and I believe it will rival 1776 and 1860.
- [32:18]
C
Something suggesting, you know, that we are on the verge of a civil war, that we are on the verge of the United States no longer existing or no longer existing in the way that it does now. I think that to me helps explain why he would seek these really aggressive powers with the knowledge that, yes, the pendulum swings. But I do think he is coming from this place where he thinks the country could soon be beyond saving or could soon be entering this catastrophic moment in its history and that we have to act now. I also think this is a theory some of the people who work in the federal government put toward me that I found interesting. I also think there is an element of you could do so much damage to take one term, or you could just have so much impact in four years with these powers that no Democratic president or Congress can fix what has been done in four years or eight years or maybe 20 years. You know, someone made a point to me. They brought up the example of President Reagan breaking the air traffic controllers union and how in this very, very small, specific way, that was a decision that rippled across decades. And this person said. Now imagine something similar to that, but for huge swaths of the federal government over decades. If you had the chance to do that and wanted to, you would grab these executive powers, you would make that argument and you would set the federal government back, or you would change it in ways that couldn't be undone for decades. So again, that's a theory from people who have observed vote very closely, people who have worked with him, people who have tried to read between the lines of the things that he says and does on questions like the very good question you posed. And again, it also fits with this notion that he's thinking in terms of the sweep of history. He's thinking longer than 4, 812 years. He's thinking 25, 50, 100 years.
- [34:32]
A
Well, Andy, thank you for coming to us and talking about this reporting that you've done over. It sounds like a very long period of time. I appreciate it.
- [34:40]
C
Enjoyed the conversation a lot. Thanks for having me.
- [34:46]
A
We'll include a link to the shadow president by andy Kroll for ProPublica and the new Yorker on our Show Notes page. If you're listening in the News app, that story is queued up to play for you next. And every weekend you can find new episodes of Apple News in conversation in the Apple News app. Just tap on the audio tab, that's the little headphones at the bottom to find.