Project 2025 Author Nominated for Office of Management and Budget

Video above from Pro Publica.

When MAGA says “Deep State”, they mean Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, Environmental Laws, a Social Safety Net, and any ability of the government and rule of law to thwart the infinite greed of Billionaire oligarchs, like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, the Saudi Royal Family, and of course, Vladimir Putin.

They believe in an All Powerful Presidency, that they call “The Unitary Executive”.

New York Times:

President-elect Donald J. Trump on Friday picked a key figure in Project 2025 to lead the Office of Management and Budget, elevating a longtime ally who has spent the last four years making plans to rework the American government to enhance presidential power.

The would-be nominee, Russell T. Vought, would oversee the White House budget and help determine whether federal agencies comport with the president’s policies. The role requires Senate confirmation unless Mr. Trump is able to make recess appointments.

The choice of Mr. Vought would bring in a strongly ideological figure who played a pivotal role in Mr. Trump’s first term, when he also served as budget chief. Among other things, Mr. Vought helped come up with the idea of having Mr. Trump use emergency power to circumvent Congress’s decision about how much to spend on a border wall.

Mr. Vought was a leading figure in Project 2025, the effort by conservative organizations to build a governing blueprint for Mr. Trump should he take office once again. Mr. Trump tried to distance himself from the effort during his campaign, but he has put forward people with ties to the project for his administration since the election.

Mr. Vought’s role in Project 2025 was to oversee executive orders and other unilateral actions that Mr. Trump could take during his first six months in office, with the goal of tearing down and rebuilding executive branch institutions in a way that would enhance presidential power.

In an interview with The New York Times in 2023, Mr. Vought laid out an agenda of eliminating the independence of certain regulatory agencies that operate outside the direct control of the White House, such as the Federal Communications Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The independent structure of those agencies has been a central part of how Congress has set up the administrative state since the New Deal. But Mr. Vought sees the modern structure of government as a theft of the president’s rightful powers.

“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” Mr. Vought said at the time, adding of the Federal Reserve: “It’s very hard to square the Fed’s independence with the Constitution.”
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Even before Project 2025 became a campaign issue, Mr. Vought’s think tank was a home for proposals that were too radioactive even among the highly conservative audiences.

In one case, Mr. Vought’s group published a legal framework for Mr. Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy federal troops on domestic soil. Its public white paper on the topic framed the issue in terms of using the military to patrol the southern border against migrants. But the legal arguments would be the same to use troops to crush demonstrations by American protesters, like the racial justice protests that erupted in the summer of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, which sometimes turned violent.

Mr. Vought’s group listed using the Insurrection Act to stop riots as a “Day 1” idea, meaning one whose legal framework was already well established, and which could be put into effect by a president unilaterally, according to an internal email from early 2023 reviewed by The Times.

“Insurrection — stop riots ** — Day 1, easy,” the email said.

Mr. Vought also offered a professional home and employment to Jeffrey B. Clark, the former high-ranking Justice Department official criminally charged in Georgia in connection with efforts to overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 election loss in that state.

Mr. Clark wrote a paper, published by Mr. Vought’s group, that advocates eliminating the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department investigative independence from the White House — another idea listed on the group’s internal email.