Reading a piece in Vanity Fair by Molly Jong-Fast reminded me of my orientation session at the United State’s Bureau (now the Office of Management and Budget) of the Budget in 1965.
I was newly-hired as a Management Intern with responsibility for the largest independent agency’s budger–that of the Small business Administration.
Lyndon Johnson was President and I was the only out-in-the-open Republican in the building. (One young woman admitted in private that she, too, was a Republican, “But don’t tell anyone.”)
We were told that President Johnson was the first President to make full use of the Budget Bureau.
After the budget was put to bed in early January and I had nothing to do, I took on cleaning out the files.
Guess what I found.
The 1964 Democratic Party’s Small business Platform Plank,
Jong-Fast writes,
But for me, the scariest Cabinet pick, and one likely sail through a GOP-majority Senate, is Russell Vought, who’d be returning to run the Office of Management and Budget. You’ll remember Vought as a coauthor of the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump term, Project 2025, a wildly unpopular policy book that had about 13% support among registered voters, according to one poll. The playbook is so unpopular that Trump disavowed its contents this summer: “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying,” he wrote, adding that some of its assertions were “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.” As I noted in July, Trump “can try distancing himself from Project 2025, but his extremist agenda for America is written all over it.”
What makes Vought’s nomination so troubling is that he isn’t some TV personality or crank who had a brain worm. Vought is wildly competent. In his Project 2025 chapter, Vought wrote in favor of the “aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch” and depicted the OMB as playing a key role in this effort, as The Guardian notes. According to Vought, the office needs to be “intimately involved in all aspects of the White House policy process.” That’s not all. “The long, difficult road ahead of returning to our beloved Constitution starts with being honest with ourselves. It starts by recognizing that we are living in a post-Constitutional time,” Vought wrote in 2022. “Post-Constitutional” sounds bad.
Given Trump’s erratic nature, he could change direction on a whim. He also needs to be loved by his people, and Vought’s proposals may be very unpopular and hard to sell. But for now, at least, Trump appears to be on the same wavelength as Vought, who has suggested that the incoming president will be “a wrecking ball for the administrative state” on day one. And as Trump wrote upon nominating Vought: “Russ knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end Weaponized Government.”
The Budget Director when I was a Baby Budget Examiner as Charles Schultz.
He famously told Johnson, “You can have wither the Vietnam War or the Great So;ciety. Not both.”
Johnson did not follow his advice.
