McKay Coppins writes:

The opening act of Donald Trump’s second term was defined by the theatrical dismantling of much of the federal government by Elon Musk and his group of tech-savvy demolitionists. Everywhere you looked in those first 100 days, it seemed, Musk’s prestidigitation was on display. Look there—it’s Elon in a black MAGA hat waving around a chain saw onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Look here—it’s Elon introducing Fox News viewers to a teenage software engineer nicknamed “Big Balls” whom he’d hired to help slash the government. The performance had a certain improvised quality—pink slips dispersed and then hastily withdrawn, entire agencies mothballed overnight—and after a while, it started to feel like a torqued-up sequel to Trump’s first term: governance replaced by chaos and trolling.

But that version of the story misses a key character: Russell Vought.

Behind all the DOGE pyrotechnics, Vought—who serves as director of the Office of Management and Budget—is working methodically to advance a sophisticated ideological project decades in the making. If Musk is moving fast and breaking things, as the Silicon Valley dictum goes, Vought is taking the shattered pieces of the federal government and reassembling them into a radically new constitutional order.

“I’m not going to say it’s a misdirection play, but they’re the trauma-inducing shock troops,” Steve Bannon, who worked with Vought during Trump’s first term and remains in touch with him, told me of DOGE. “Russ has got a vision. He’s not an anarchist. He’s a true believer.”

Vought’s agenda includes shrinking the government, but it goes deeper than that. His vision of state power would effectively reject a century of jurisprudence and unravel the modern federal bureaucracy as we know it. A devotee of the so-called unitary executive theory, he wants to see the civil service gutted and repopulated with presidential loyalists, independent federal agencies politicized or eliminated, and absolute control of the executive branch concentrated in the Oval Office.

Despite having been a Trump adviser for nearly a decade, Vought has not cultivated the political celebrity of high-profile White House officials such as Stephen Miller and Karoline Leavitt. Vought rarely gives interviews (he declined my request), and when he does speak in public, he is usually explicating the wonkish intricacies of the federal government in a nasal voice. His job title is dull and opaque. Even his physical bearing is forgettable: Bald and bespectacled, with a graying beard, he looks a bit like a middle-school social-studies teacher.

But whereas Musk’s influence already seems to be waning, Vought remains among the most powerful figures in today’s Washington. As a co-author of Project 2025, and later a chair of the Republican National Convention’s platform committee, he drew up detailed plans to “tame the bureaucracy” once Trump returned to power. Now, as head of an agency that touches every aspect of the $6.8 trillion federal budget, Vought is in position to enact his vision. And he’s wasted little time.

In his early days as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—an independent agency that was designed to be insulated from partisan pressure—Vought sent layoff notices to 1,500 employees, closed the office, canceled contracts, and declined funding for the agency from the Federal Reserve. Across hundreds of other federal agencies, he is spearheading an effort to simply stop enforcing many regulations. And last month, Trump proposed a rule that would convert 50,000 federal workers into Schedule F employees, whom the president can fire at will—a policy that Vought has championed since the first term. Vought’s ideas, once seen as radical, are now being realized.

Vought’s critics have warned that elements of his agenda—for example, unilaterally cutting off funding for congressionally established agencies such as USAID—are eroding checks and balances and pushing the country toward a constitutional crisis. But in interviews over the past several weeks, some of his allies told me that’s the whole point. The kind of revolutionary upending of the constitutional order that Vought envisions won’t happen without deliberate fights with Congress and the judiciary, they told me. If a crisis is coming, it’s because Vought is courting one.

Bannon told me that mainstream Republicans have long complained about runaway federal bureaucracy but have never had the stomach to take on the problem directly. Vought, by contrast, is strategically forcing confrontations with the other branches of government. “What Russ represents, and what the Romneys and McConnells don’t understand, is that the old politics is over,” he said. “There’s no compromise here. One side is going to win, one side is going to lose, so let’s get it on.”

The White House did not respond to a list of questions I sent them for this story. But in a statement, Communications Director Steven Cheung called Vought a “patriot” and told me, “There is nobody more qualified or better suited to lead OMB in order to implement President Trump’s goals and priorities.”

Vought himself has written that we are living in a “post-Constitutional time.” Progressives, he argues, have so thoroughly “perverted” the Founders’ vision by filling the ranks of government with unaccountable technocrats that undoing the damage will require a “radical” plan of attack. “The Right needs to throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last two hundred years,” he wrote in an essay for The American Mind, a journal published by the Claremont Institute.

What exactly would such an approach look like in practice? Mike Davis, a Republican lawyer and a friend of Vought’s who helped steer judicial nominations in Trump’s first term, told me that he expects an escalating series of standoffs between the Trump administration and the judicial branch. He went so far as to say that if the Supreme Court issues a decision that constrains Trump’s executive power in a way the administration sees as unconstitutional, the president will have to defy it. “The reptiles will never drain the swamp,” Davis told me. “It’s going to take bold actions.” [Continue reading…]