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February 10 2025 - 5:20pm
There has been a great deal of hue and cry over the activities of Elon Musk and DOGE within the new revolutionary Trump administration. More significant, though, was the confirmation of Russell Vought as head of the Office of Management and Budget late last week. These actions reveal much about the operation now underway, and further indicate some substantive policy priorities that may now be emerging for this new regime, beyond simply demolishing “woke”.
Firstly, Vought’s appointment shows Trump’s determination to avoid the mistakes of an earlier generation of conservatives. First time round, many assumed the machinery of government simply did what was asked, and cried “culture war” when this did not happen, all while failing to tackle the technical and managerial bone and sinew that produced these effects. So far, this time, every move has been oriented towards fighting a meta-policy battle viewed as a necessary preliminary to any actual policies: seizing control. And Vought, who also headed the OMB in 2016, has returned with a detailed plan for doing so.
Vought himself spelled this all out first in the chapter he wrote for the Heritage Foundation’s notorious Project 2025, and more recently in a lengthy interview with Tucker Carlson ahead of the election. There, he described his previous stint at the OMB, a supervisory department tasked with controlling the overall financing and efficient operation of all other programs: an “office of joined-up thinking”, if you will. Vought detailed the methods his institutional opponents used to evade any efforts at joining up the thinking: hiding pots of money, slow-walking policies, keeping officials in the dark, and otherwise obstructing presidential decisions. He detailed plans to claw financial control and the power to hire and fire civil servants away from the bureaucracy, and a slew of other instruments — dry and technical on the surface, but of paramount political importance — for reasserting control.
Now, with access to US Government IT systems already in the grip of a warband of youthful hackers led by a radicalized tech billionaire, the rest of the administrative and financial keys have been handed to another Trump loyalist, this time with a black belt in Swamp karate, and a grudge against everyone who thwarted him last time. And whether you view his approach as reining in an unacceptably powerful federal bureaucracy, or unacceptably politicizing a neutral public sector to the benefit of autocrats and billionaires, depends, as so much does in these Schmittian times, on where you’re standing.
Vought’s actions have also been in keeping with this new administration’s proclivity for getting inside its opponents’ “OODA loop” — a term developed by USAF general John Boyd to describe a method of disrupting military enemies by moving too fast for them to make sense of what’s happening. In line with this methodology, Vought set briskly to work over the weekend: 36 hours after assuming oversight of the OMB, he shuttered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This may seem obscure, but is the latest offensive in a long-running battle. The CFPB was set up as an independent body in the wake of the subprime crisis, with the aim of protecting ordinary citizens from predatory financial practices. Since its foundation, though, critics have complained of its Left-wing politicization, worsened when the original plan for bipartisan leadership was junked for a single, politically appointed director who triggered institutional drama in the early days of Trump 1.0.
More recently, too, Silicon Valley tech titans Mark Zuckerberg and Marc Andreessen have complained on Joe Rogan’s podcast of politicized CFPB regulation. Former Hill staffer and monopolies journalist Matt Stoller, meanwhile, suggests that such complaints are highly disingenuous and that Big Tech just doesn’t want regulatory oversight on plans to roll out the kind of “Everything apps” already popular in China, which effectively make their owners providers of consumer finance.
Are we witnessing Trump bringing a politicized Swamp bureaucracy to heel, or his Big Tech backers using that as cover to eliminate an agency that stands in their way? Perhaps both are true. Regardless, all of this should be of interest to frustrated Right-wingers on this side of the pond, especially those who do not identify as conservative.
Britain is now highly volatile. Even longstanding Labour loyalists are savaging Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s ideological vacuity and flimsy program, while the Continuity Tories are languishing and Reform UK is surging. All is to play for, though a would-be insurgent Right may have less time than Vought did to flesh out an equivalent program for moving from empty culture-war complaints to managerial offensive.
