The Real Mastermind Behind Trump’s Imperial Presidency

Musk’s tenure in President Donald Trump’s second administration has been defined by chaos as much as cost-cutting. Musk has claimed to have cut $150 billion from the federal budget, a substantial sum if true. But independent analyses have suggested the real number may be much lower than advertised. Critics have accused his team of exaggerating or simply misunderstanding its impact, and its most dramatic defenestrations, USAID included, were blocked (at least temporarily) by federal judges. Musk’s own antics on social media, on podcasts and in public settings have at times come off as politically unproductive, ineffective, clownish or all of the above.

But as the events evolved, it became clear that people’s adversary wasn’t Musk, or any engineers they were really up against Russell Vought, the Trump loyalist who’d just been named director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) as well as acting director of the CFPB. Most of the people hadn’t heard of Vought before he became CFPB director, which is pretty much how Vought likes it. A self-described “boring budget guy,” he’s best known for co-authoring the 900-page policy playbook of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which has become something of a bible for Trump’s second term. Vought’s think tank, the Center for Renewing America, has produced numerous policy papers that advocate for such Trump fixations as the annexation of Greenland (“a prudent aim,” according to a CRA paper) and enacting broad tariffs (“just as sometimes a nation must go to war with guns and bombs, so sometimes are trade wars necessary”), among others. At the center of Vought’s ideology is the unitary executive theory, which critics say amounts to an argument that Trump should have wide latitude to do whatever he wants.

Vought’s unique combination of loyalty and knowledge of how the government actually works makes him perhaps the most powerful person in Washington not named Donald Trump. If you see a Republican politician or a member of the Trump administration talking about the “deep state,” or the “regime,” there’s an almost 100% chance they know his work. “Nobody in DC has a better grip on the numbers and the management process of the federal government than Russ Vought,” says Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist. “He’s one of the critical architects of the Trump restructuring of the US government.” This includes Musk, who’s been in regular contact with Vought from the start of the presidential transition and is seen by Vought’s allies as the public-facing arm of his agenda.

The example of the CFPB showed how this tag team has been working. While Musk took credit for the shutdown and his DOGE team attracted attention from union members, it was Vought who quietly did much of the actual work. On Feb. 8, his first full day as the CFPB’s interim director, Vought sent an email ordering employees to stop whatever they were doing and informed the Federal Reserve that the CFPB wouldn’t take any further funding for the year. In the days that followed, he closed the office, canceled most of the agency’s contracts, axed more than 200 employees and began preparations for far wider layoffs.

Contrasting Vought’s vision with the founding aims of the CFPB, which Senator Elizabeth Warren dreamed up as a response to the 2008 financial crisis, hints at the scope of Musk and Vought’s ambitions. But while Musk was the main character of the first two months of Trump’s second term, his influence in Washington may not last, amid questionable results, poor approval numbers and the shrinking share price of Musk’s publicly traded car company, Tesla Inc. Musk also engineered a high-profile embarrassment for Trump by injecting himself and funneling at least $20 million into the April 1 Wisconsin Supreme Court race on behalf of Trump’s candidate—who lost in a rout, after the race became a referendum on Musk. Buzz around Washington is that Musk may soon be on his way out. “He’s going to want to get back to his businesses full time,” Trump recently told reporters aboard Air Force One.

If he does, Vought would become even more important. A Trump administration official, who requested anonymity to share internal discussions, says Vought is widely perceived as preparing to pick up wherever Musk leaves off. Where Musk has shown a zeal for smash and grab, Vought has the institutional knowledge—and perhaps the patience—to make the DOGE cuts stick. Vought, this person says, “is waiting in the wings.”

For now, it’s not clear how much cost-cutting Musk has actually achieved or how lasting Vought’s efforts to traumatize the federal workforce will prove to be.

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