A video that leaked publicly last fall revealed former Trump budget director Russ Vought saying he wanted to put federal employees “in trauma.”
In private speeches during events in 2023 and 2024, Vought made some comments that stunned federal workers and their backers when they were published last October by ProPublica. He said he wanted “bureaucrats to be traumatically affected” and federal workers to be viewed as “the villains.”
When he laid out his vision, Vought was the head of a conservative think tank whose party had lost the presidency. One year later, he’s one of the most powerful people in government. He’s using his post — and the government shutdown — to target federal workers, “Green New Deal” programs and environmental justice efforts the administration dislikes.
In his second stint as director of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, Vought has become the administration’s front man for its cuts to the federal workforce and government programs and the use of the government shutdown to accelerate those efforts. He suggested Wednesday that more than 10,000 federal employees could be fired during the shutdown, although a court ruling Wednesday could impede that effort.
President Donald Trump appears to be relishing the image of Vought, a longtime government insider and budget wonk, as a boogeyman coming for federal workers and government spending. And Vought appears to be embracing his role as the most powerful wonk in Washington, finally empowered to make bureaucratic cuts he could only dream about in the first Trump term.
“This is clearly his moment,” said Sean Spicer, former White House press secretary who served with Vought in the first Trump administration. “Russ has been concerned about the size of government and government spending and the debt for decades,” Spicer said.
Vought has “earned a great deal of respect from both the president and the conservative movement,” Spicer said.
The president this month praised Vought “of PROJECT 2025 Fame,” saying that Vought was offering recommendations to cut “Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM.” The day after the federal shutdown started, Trump posted a video on social media portraying Vought as the Grim Reaper holding a scythe in a room full of workers sitting at computers.
Trump “likes to have a little fun every now and then,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said after the video was posted. “We don’t like laying people off,” she said. “Nobody takes joy in that around here.”
The White House did not make Vought available for an interview for this story, nor did Vought respond to a request for comment, including about his reaction to the Grim Reaper video.
‘Keep those RIFs rolling’
Since the shutdown started, Vought has sought to accelerate cuts to the workforce and to programs in states that voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential contest.
Vought announced on Oct. 1 that the administration would cancel almost $8 billion in federal funding for green projects in 16 states that voted for Trump’s opponent in that presidential election.
“Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled,” Vought posted on the social media site X.
Vought declared on Oct. 3 that the administration was putting $2.1 billion for Chicago infrastructure projects on hold, another hit to a Democratic region as the administration continues to blame congressional Democrats for the shutdown.
And last Friday in a brief post sent out before the holiday weekend, Vought sent shock waves through the federal workforce with a one-sentence post on social media: “The RIFs have begun.”
Vought laid out details of his vision for shutdown cuts Wednesday during an interview on the Charlie Kirk Show podcast.
Vought discussed the administration’s layoff plans the same day that a federal judge in California blocked the administration from moving forward on shutdown layoffs, throwing a wrench — at least temporarily — into Vought’s plans.
Although the first Trump administration didn’t do layoffs in the first term, they “learned about it in our years of exile,” he said Wednesday.
Critics of the administration have blasted the shutdown as a pretext for mass layoffs, which have not occurred during previous government shutdowns.
But Vought said he’s trying to keep up momentum in one of the areas he can — cutting government spending — at a time when the shutdown has slowed work on other administration priorities.
“If there are policy opportunities to downsize the scope of the federal government, we want to use those opportunities,” he said Wednesday. “If I can only work on saving money, then I’m going to do everything I can to look for opportunities to downsize in areas where this administration has thought, this is our way towards a balanced budget.”
The administration is going to “keep those RIFs rolling throughout the shutdown,” Vought said. He’s also looking for opportunities “to have less bureaucracy,” he said, pointing to “Green New Deal programs” at the Energy Department and “environmental justice at EPA.”
Vought said he wants to be “very aggressive where we can be in shuttering the bureaucracy — not just the funding, but the bureaucracy.” Asked about the target number for layoffs, Vought said, “I think we’ll probably end up being north of 10,000.”
