People familiar with The Boys The universe knows Vought — the omnipotent mega-corporation that owns superheroes, politicians, the news cycle, and, by extension, the world. A stitched-together monster of Disney’s cultural reach, Amazon’s logistics, Meta’s data appetite and Goldman Sachs’s greed, it runs everything and answers to no one. But in Washington today, there’s a man with the same name who is quietly attempting something even more audacious: dismantling the American state and rebuilding it in the image of Donald J. Trump.That man is Russell Vought, a mild-mannered technocrat with tortoiseshell glasses and a nasal voice, who now holds more power than perhaps any unelected official in American history. In a second Trump administration dominated by reality-TV instincts, cable-news pugilists and tech-bro disruptors, Vought stands out as the most quietly competent, ruthlessly effective figure in the room — a bureaucratic revolutionary whose spreadsheets have done more damage than Elon Musk’s chainsaws or Steve Bannon’s podcasts ever could.
From Evangelical Roots to Conservative Crusader
Vought’s story begins far from the marble halls of Washington. Raised in a devout Christian household in Connecticut, he was steeped in a worldview that saw government authority as an extension of divine will. His mother founded a Bible-centric school where students were asked to “defend the statement that all governmental power comes from God.”After Wheaton College — the “evangelical Harvard” — Vought headed to Capitol Hill, starting in the mailroom of Senator Phil Gramm’s office and absorbing a dogma of fiscal puritanism. Gramm’s “Dickey Flatt test” — whether any federal dollar improved the life of an ordinary American — became Vought’s own. But by the late 2000s, he was disillusioned. Republicans talked about small government but voted for corporate handouts. “If there’s an opinion in this leadership room, it’s ninety-five per cent wrong,” he later said.He left Congress to co-found Heritage Action, an ideological enforcement arm of the Heritage Foundation that bullied Republicans into far-right positions and even helped trigger a government shutdown over Obamacare in 2013. This uncompromising approach would become his trademark: ideological purity over compromise, institutional trauma over incrementalism.
The First Trump Term: Learning How to Break Things
Vought entered the Trump orbit as a senior adviser at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) — the bureaucratic nerve center that reviews regulations, vets executive orders, and controls the disbursement of every federal dollar. It is a post invisible to most Americans but immensely powerful. “Every goddam thing in the executive branch goes through OMB,” one former official said.During Trump’s first term, Vought proved indispensable. When Congress refused to fund the border wall, he found a way to redirect Pentagon money to build it. When Trump wanted to pressure Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden, Vought froze $214 million in military aid — an illegal maneuver that helped trigger the first impeachment.But the experience also taught him a lesson: Trump’s chaotic instincts and the bureaucracy’s inertia blunted the administration’s ambitions. Despite all the rage and rhetoric, most of the “deep state” survived intact. Vought spent four years learning how it worked — and how to break it.
DOGE Was the Headline. Vaught Was the Hand Behind It.
When Trump returned to power, it was Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that captured the public imagination — tech billionaires with no government experience brandishing chainsaws and promising to “feed USAID into the wood chipper.” But insiders know DOGE was often just the theatre. The real architect of the purge was Vought.It was Vought who supplied DOGE with its target lists — obscure quasi-government agencies, regulatory watchdogs, and entire bureaucracies that only someone with decades of insider knowledge would know how to kill. It was Vought who orchestrated DOGE’s hostile takeover of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, freezing investigations, shutting down operations, and laying off 80% of staff in a matter of months.As one official put it, Musk “terrified the shit out of people” and broke the status quo — but it was Vought who turned that fear into functional policy. DOGE was the hammer; Vaught was the hand that swung it.
Christian Nationalism as Policy Blueprint
Vought isn’t just a bureaucrat. He’s an ideologue—and not a subtle one. He proudly calls himself a “Christian nationalist,” declaring America was “meant to be a Christian nation” and warning that the country is in the “late stages of a Marxist takeover.”In his worldview, the American state has been hijacked by a permanent class of bureaucrats and judges — a “cartel” — and must be smashed by “radical constitutionalists” led by Trump, whom he calls “a gift of God.” The Justice Department should no longer be independent. Civil servants should be fireable at will. Entire agencies — from environmental regulators to workplace-safety watchdogs — should be dismantled.This is not abstract rhetoric. Vought’s think tank, the Center for Renewing America, has published detailed plans on how to invoke the Insurrection Act against domestic protests, how to fire tens of thousands of union-protected federal employees, and how to freeze billions in congressional appropriations without a vote. He even built “shadow” legal teams to help the next administration anticipate and neutralize internal resistance.
The Yes Minister Problem — And How Vought Solved It
For decades, the defining truth of governance — satirized brilliantly in the British classic Yes Minister — was that the bureaucracy always wins. Ministers come and go, but the civil servants endure, obfuscate, and outlast them. Presidents rail against the “deep state,” but the machine absorbs the blows and keeps humming. Russell Vought has cracked that problem.His solution is as elegant as it is ruthless: if bureaucrats are impossible to control, remove their incentives, starve their budgets, or simply fire them. Instead of trying to cajole the permanent state into compliance, Vought is reengineering the terrain so that resistance becomes futile.Agencies that refuse to cooperate have their funding frozen or redirected. Bureaucrats who try to block the president’s agenda are dismissed or reassigned. Independent watchdogs like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are neutered by leadership changes, mass layoffs, and legal paralysis. Even the very laws that once shielded bureaucrats — like the Impoundment Control Act — are being chipped away by aggressive reinterpretations and legal brinkmanship.It’s a simple but devastating logic: a bureaucracy cannot resist if it no longer has the money, manpower, or mandate to do so.
Weaponizing the Purse
At the core of Vought’s power is money — or, more precisely, the ability to control who gets it and who doesn’t. The OMB disburses every cent of the $7 trillion federal budget, making it a chokepoint for the entire government. Vought has weaponised that chokepoint with unprecedented audacity.Impoundment and Rescission: He revived the Nixon-era practice of withholding congressionally approved funds — an act long ruled unconstitutional — and pushed for “pocket rescissions,” where money is frozen until it expires.Funding as Leverage: He has frozen or canceled over $410 billion in spending, from Head Start programs to HIV prevention, to force agencies into compliance. He even shut down a legally mandated transparency website, claiming “national security” — a move a judge later deemed illegal.Ideological Budgets: His budgets are laced with culture-war framing. A 2022 plan used the word “woke” 77 times and argued for cuts to agencies ranging from OSHA to Veterans Affairs as part of a crusade against “woke and weaponised” government.The results are seismic. Foreign aid has been gutted. NIH research, including cystic fibrosis treatments, has been starved of funds. And agencies have begun agreeing to policy changes simply to “get the funnel to open back up.”
The Shadow President
Today, Vought’s power eclipses that of most Cabinet secretaries — and, at times, rivals Trump’s own. Agencies report to him before they report to the White House. Thousands of federal workers have already been terminated, with more to come. He decides which “Democrat agencies” to starve or shutter, and his word can paralyse entire sectors of government.This is not the loud, chaotic populism of Trump rallies or the meme-warrior antics of the online right. It’s something far more methodical — a slow-motion institutional coup waged through budgetary footnotes and regulatory fine print. Vought is not destroying the state from outside. He is hollowing it out from within, one appropriation at a time.
The Revolution Will Be Administered
Russell Vought may never trend on social media. He doesn’t have Elon Musk’s flair for spectacle or Trump’s gift for demagoguery. But that’s precisely why he’s so dangerous. Revolutions are usually associated with mobs, manifestos and mass movements. Vought’s revolution is administrative. It’s waged through legal reinterpretations, obscure budgetary tools, and the slow suffocation of the administrative state.If Trumpism 1.0 was a chaotic experiment in populist governance, Trumpism 2.0 is an organized campaign for authoritarian control — and Vought is its chief architect. In the end, the man who shares a name with a fictional megacorp may prove even more powerful than its comic-book counterpart. Because while Vought International sells superheroes, Russell Vought sells something far more potent: the idea that democracy itself is optional.
