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GUEST COMMENTARY - A former high-level Trump administration official who played a key role in crafting the far-right Project 2025 agenda said in closed-door speeches revealed Monday that he wants to traumatize career civil servants and lay the groundwork for Republican nominee Donald Trump to seize total, unfettered control of the federal government should he win the November 5 election.
In partnership with the watchdog organization Documented, ProPublica on Monday published several videos of two private speeches that Russell Vought—who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget during Trump's first term—delivered in 2023 and 2024.
During the previously unreported speeches, ProPublica and Documented observed, Vought "detailed plans to deploy the military in response to domestic unrest" and "defund the Environmental Protection Agency."
"The two speeches delivered by Vought, taken together, offer an unvarnished look at the animating ideology and political worldview of a key figure in the MAGA movement," the new reporting notes. "Echoing Trump's rhetoric, Vought implicitly endorsed the false claim of a stolen 2020 election and likened the media's debunkings of that claim to Chinese Communist propaganda."
Vought also laid out in unsettling terms his intention to leave federal employees "traumatically affected" as part of a sweeping effort to purge the government of scientists and other civil servants deemed disloyal to Trump.
"When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains," Vought said in a clip obtained by ProPublica and Documented. "We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so."
While Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, claiming he knows nothing about it and has "no idea who is behind it," at least 140 members of his first administration—including Vought—were involved in assembling the sprawling far-right agenda, which outlines plans to gut climate regulations, further roll back abortion access, slash summer food assistance programs for children, and cut taxes for the wealthy.
Vought, who heads the Center for Renewing America think tank, has dismissed Trump's effort to disavow Project 2025, telling an undercover journalist earlier this year that the Republican nominee is "very supportive of what we do."
In the 2024 speech obtained by ProPublica and Documented, Vought said that he and other Project 2025 leaders have assembled "detailed agency plans" and are "writing the actual executive orders" for Trump to sign if he defeats Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in the November 5 election.
"We are writing the actual regulations now," said Vought, "and we are sorting out the legal authorities for all of what President Trump is running on."
Specifically, ProPublica and Documented reported, Vought "laid out how his think tank is crafting the legal rationale for invoking the Insurrection Act, a law that gives the president broad power to use the military for domestic law enforcement."
Lamenting that Trump was talked out of invoking the Insurrection Act to crush mass racial justice demonstrations sparked by the police killing of George Floydin 2020, Vought said during the 2023 speech obtained by ProPublica and Documented that his preparations for a possible second Trump administration have included constructing a "shadow" Office of Legal Counsel, the body that advises presidents on their powers.
Vought, according to ProPublica and Documented, "made clear he wants the office to help Trump steamroll the kind of internal opposition he faced in his first term."
Jesse Eisinger, a senior editor at ProPublica, described Vought's assessment of the current state of the U.S. as "apocalyptic stuff," pointing to his stated view that the country is "in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover... in which our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus, and they have aimed it at us."
Vought—who has previously said he hopes to "rehabilitate Christian nationalism"—cast Trump as a kind of savior in one of the newly revealed speeches, calling him "a man who is so uniquely positioned to serve this role."
"He has seen what it has done to him, and he has seen what they are trying to do to the country," Vought added. "That is nothing more than a gift of God."
(Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams where this article was first published.)
