Donald Trump is trying to drastically reduce the power of the Deep State.
He’s using everything available to him to achieve this goal.
And Donald Trump has one secret weapon to take a sledgehammer to the Deep State.
Donald Trump uses obscure federal office to wage war with the Deep State
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is in charge of producing the budget, but it’s also in charge of implementing the President’s policies across the whole of the federal government.
OMB Director Russell Vought is back for President Donald Trump’s second term after serving in the same position during his first term.
Trump issued a slew of executive orders designed to reform the federal workforce and make it more responsive to the President.
He changed the job classification of tens of thousands of federal employees to remove their civil service protections so it would be easier to fire them, issued a federal hiring freeze, offered a buyout to millions of federal employees, and eliminated Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) across the federal government.
Vought took over at OMB after Trump provided him a head start on clearing out the federal bureaucracy.
The OMB director is typically an obscure position in the federal government, but left-wing activists, government employee unions, and Democrats are all terrified of him.
“OMB is up to its neck right now executing on the president’s priorities,” a White House official who worked with Vought during Trump’s first term told Politico. “Russ will arrive at a time when OMB is being asked to execute a huge swath of the president’s agenda.”
OMB Director wants to make sweeping changes to the bureaucracy
Vought wants to wrestle back control for the President over the vast unelected administrative states that run the federal government.
“He’s someone who is like a bull in a China shop, as far as his convictions are concerned,” an ally of Vought’s said.
One of the tactics that the OMB Director wants to use is challenging the constitutionality of the 1974 Impoundment Control Act that requires the President to spend money that Congress has appropriated.
Trump and his allies argue that the law is unconstitutional.
Presidents could simply refuse to spend money that Congress has allocated if the law is ruled unconstitutional.
Vought is expected to push for another federal spending freeze in the future.
The first spending freeze attempted by Trump was blocked by a federal court.
“They’ll wait until they have a clean, clear case to do something, and then they’ll try to move ahead with some authority. They’re pretty good at trying to make sure it’s targeted to places where they think they might have a good chance of winning the case,” former Bush White House associate director of budget James Capretta said.
Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, is already preparing to battle with Vought.
“Russ Vought does not belong in public service. He really should be thrown out. He is a dangerous person to our government and to that opportunity,” DeLauro said. “You know the name Grover Norquist — shrink government to the size that you can drown it in the bathtub. That’s what they are about. That’s it. And we’re gonna fight him every step of the way.”
The OMB is the office that the Trump administration can use to take a sledgehammer to the federal government.
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