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Russell Thurlow "Russ" Vought ( , born March 26, 1976) is an American government official and conservative political analyst who has served as the 44th director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) since February 2025. Vought previously served as director of the OMB in the first Trump administration from 2020 to 2021, and served as deputy director of the OMB from 2018 to 2020.
Vought is the founder of the Center for Renewing America, a conservative think tank aimed at countering progressive social values, promoting an "America First" foreign policy, addressing border security and immigration, and reforming the federal bureaucracy. He has also played a significant role in Project 2025, an initiative led by the Heritage Foundation that aims to advance conservative policies and reshape the federal government. In May 2024, he was appointed Policy Director of the Republican National Committee's platform committee.
On November 23, 2024, President-elect Donald Trump announced the nomination of Vought as Director of the OMB for his second term as president. Vought's nomination was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on February 6, 2025 by a vote of 53–47. On August 29, 2025, Vought took charge of the USAID closeout after it was folded into the U.S. Department of State.
Vought served as vice president of Heritage Action, the lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation. He was the executive director and budget director of the Republican Study Committee, the policy director for the Republican Conference of the United States House of Representatives, and a legislative assistant for U.S. Senator Phil Gramm.
During the confirmation hearings, Senator Bernie Sanders questioned Vought about a statement that "Muslims do not simply have a deficient theology. They do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ his Son, and they stand condemned." Various Christian organizations denounced Sanders's questioning as a violation of the No Religious Test Clause, and Emma Green of The Atlantic wrote that Sanders' questioning "flirted with the boundaries" of the No Religious Test Clause.
In 2019, Vought was one of nine government officials who defied a subpoena to testify before Congress in relation to the Trump–Ukraine scandal and the administration's decision to freeze military aid to Ukraine. The decision to freeze aid to Ukraine had led Democrats to launch the first impeachment of Donald Trump.
In May 2020, Vought elected to break the OMB's long-standing practice of publishing updated economic forecasts, citing disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
On September 4, 2020, Vought, at President Trump's direction, published an OMB memo instructing federal agencies to stop all training on "critical race theory" or "white privilege", along with "any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either (1) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil". The memo further directed that agencies begin to identify legal avenues to cancel contracts or otherwise divert the "millions of taxpayer dollars" being spent on such training, which it said "engenders division and resentment within the federal workforce."
In April 2021, The Washington Post fact-checker rated Vought's statement that only 5 to 7 percent of the Biden administration's $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan would go to "actual roads and bridges and ports and things that you and I would say is real infrastructure" as inaccurate to the degree of "Three Pinocchios" out of four.
On June 8, 2021, Citizens for Renewing America, the advocacy arm of Center for Renewing America, released a guide to "combatting critical race theory." Vought told Fox News the 33-page handbook is "a crash course in CRT, a 'one-stop shopping' for parents trying to hold their school board members accountable."
On June 22, 2022, Vought confirmed that federal agents conducted a search of the home of his organization's director of litigation, Jeffrey Clark, a former U.S. Department of Justice official who participated in efforts to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election.
In October 2024, ProPublica reported on speeches Vought had made at Center for Renewing America events. According to the report, Vought's proposals included plans to reshape government by using military force against protesters if deemed necessary, to defund agencies such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for the purpose of reducing federal influence, and to cast civil servants as obstructive to conservative agendas. Vought stated that he wanted to put the federal workforce "in trauma" and not go to work "because they are increasingly viewed as the villains".
dark money from a network of fundraising groups were received by nearly half of the organizations collaborating in the project. The project seeks to infuse the government and society with Christian values.
The Centre for Climate Reporting published an interview with Vought with two of its journalists posing as relatives of a potential donor in August 2024. In the video, Vought stated that his Center for Renewing America group had drafted over 350 executive orders, regulations, and memos for the second Trump administration. He described his work as creating "shadow" agencies. He called for banning pornography, acknowledging that an outright ban would be unpopular with the public, and instead supporting laws that would make pornography websites legally liable if used by minors. He also stated the president is not bound by the Posse Comitatus Act, which prevents federal troops from conducting civilian law enforcement. Vought summed up his core political ideology as "Christian nationalism".
On June 25, 2025, Vought told a Senate committee that the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a global anti-AIDS initiative, had spent $9.3 million funding abortions and "gender analysis" in Russia, a claim which The New York Times found to be false. On July 15, 2025, Vought said that the White House was on board with an amendment that would exempt the PEPFAR from budget cuts. A $400 million proposed cut to PEPFAR was subsequently removed from the rescission package by Senate Republicans.
In 2022, Vought began advocating for "radical constitutionalism" to reverse a current "post-Constitutional time"; he says this has been the result of a century of corruption of laws and institutions by the political left. He characterizes the federal bureaucracy as "woke and weaponized" and advocates replacing it with "radical constitutionalists". Vought proposes to "gut the FBI" and end the tradition of political independence of the U.S. Justice Department.
Vought has characterized his overarching objective to be aligning the federal bureaucracy to the will of an elected president and use such to send power from Washington D.C back to America's families, churches, local governments and states. He has repeatedly expressed desire to fundamentally reduce and reshape the federal bureaucracy.
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