How to Break the Government

"The Office of Management and Budget is a strange institution. People who've worked there for decades struggle to describe it in terms a normal person would understand. It is part of the White House but gets treated like a Cabinet agency. O.M.B.'s workforce of about five hundred people is minuscule compared with most agencies, and yet its remit covers the entire government. The agency doesn't make policy or write regulations, but, crucially, it controls the flow of money from Congress to federal agencies."

"In normal times, the agency acts like a loving but diligent parent, dispensing money at regular intervals to insure the kids don't spend it all at once. But in the hands of Russell Vought, whom I've spent the past year reporting on, the O.M.B. has created more problems than it has solved, functioning as an ideological chokepoint, a tool with which to starve agencies of funding and to exert President Donald Trump's will across the seven-trillion-dollar federal bureaucracy."

"Vought is one of the leaders of the MAGA-era Republican Party. A native of Trumbull, Connecticut, Vought has spent his entire adult life in Washington, working on Capitol Hill and in the trenches of conservative activism. During Trump's first Administration, he worked at O.M.B. and was one of the President's most loyal aides. During the Biden years, he played a central role in Project 2025, seeking to translate the lessons of Trump's first Presidency into a more effective-and aggressive-second term."

The Office of Management and Budget oversees federal spending but does not set policy; it controls the flow of congressional funds to agencies. The OMB's roughly 500-person staff has governmentwide remit despite its small size. Under Russell Vought, OMB shifted from routine budget stewardship to an ideological enforcement mechanism, withholding resources to pressure agencies and implement presidential directives. Vought emerged from Capitol Hill and conservative activism, served in the Trump administration, and helped shape Project 2025 during the Biden years. His approach blends a fiscal conservative emphasis on limiting government spending with a culture-war agenda aimed at institutions perceived as 'woke.'

Read at The New Yorker