Helped Lead Project 2025, Which Would Gut Checks and Balances and Harm Americans 

• Vought was an “architect” of radical Project 2025 plans to defund and dismantle key parts of the federal government. According to Paul Dans, the former director of Project 2025, Vought “directed” about a thousand people working on the project’s extreme proposals.

• Vought himself was the credited author of a key Project 2025 chapter on reforming the Executive Office of the President, where he urged “fearless” challenges to settled legal precedents and expanding political control of civil servants.

Threat To Weaponize Government Against Political Opponents

• President Trump said Vought knows how to “end Weaponized Government” and Vought’s group the Center for Renewing America called one of its budget proposals “A Commitment to End Woke and Weaponized Government.” But Vought and his group are poised to weaponize the federal government against Trump’s political enemies, with Vought supportive of using the military against the American People via the Insurrection Act. Notably, Trump repeatedly considered invoking the Act in his first term.

• Vought is also likely to weaponize government by undermining the Justice Department’s political independence and withholding federal spending appropriated by democratically-elected members of Congress.

History Of Trying To Slash Social Security And Medicare

• After Vought became acting director of OMB, his office proposed gutting a total of over $2.3 trillion from Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security in FY 2020 and then slashing $451 billion from Medicare and $920 billion from Medicaid in FY 2021.

• Prior to his time leading OMB, Vought had a long history of pushing cuts to Medicare, Social Security, and other major federal programs. As early as 2004, Vought became budget director of the House Republican Study Committee, which soon pushed cutting Medicare and Medicaid and backed the partial privatization of Social Security in 2005.

Opening The Door To Fringe Far-Right Figures

• Vought’s group Center for Renewing America hired Jeffrey Clark, who faced criminal charges for working to overturn the 2020 election, as its Director of Litigation. The group also named Steve Friend, a disgraced former FBI agent and January 6 conspiracy theorist, as a fellow on Domestic Intelligence and Security Services.

• Vought has “a close affiliation” with William Wolfe, a far-right figure who has argued that conservative Christians may soon need to “‘heed the call to arms.’”

• Vought once said groups designated as hate or extremist organizations by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SLPC) are actually “effective groups who love America.”