Trump Picks Project 2025 Architect to Oversee Budget

Trump Picks Project 2025 Architect to Oversee Budget

By Michael Rainey
Monday, November 25, 2024

Happy Monday before Thanksgiving! Today, for the fourth and final time, President Joe Biden pardoned a pair of turkeys at the White House: Peach, a 41-pounder who reportedly loves to eat hotdish and tater tots, and Blossom, a 40-pounder who prefers cheese curds. The lucky pair will escape their intended role on the holiday table and live out their days at an educational center in their home state of Minnesota.

“He lives by the motto ‘keep calm and gobble on,’” Biden said of Peach, who shared the stage with the president on the White House lawn and provided some gobbled commentary on the event.

In a more somber tone, Biden reflected on the waning days of his administration. “This event marks the official start of the holiday season here in Washington,” Biden said. “It’s also my last time to speak here as your president during this season and give thanks and gratitude. So, let me say to you: It’s been the honor of my life. I’m forever grateful.”

Here’s what else is happening ahead of the big holiday.

Trump Picks Project 2025 Architect to Oversee Budget Office

President-elect Donald Trump has selected Russell Vought to run the Office of Management and Budget, the largest office within the executive branch. The decision brings one of the architects of the controversial Project 2025 governing plan by the Heritage Foundation deep into the heart of the White House, in a position that has enormous influence over Trump’s spending and policy priorities.

Vought led the OMB in the final two years of the first Trump administration, functioning as an acting director for more than a year before being confirmed in July 2020. After leaving the White House at the end of Trump’s first term, Vought founded the Center for Renewing America, a nonprofit organization that describes itself as the “tip of the America First spear.”

In a statement late Friday, Trump described Vought as “an aggressive cost cutter and deregulator who will help us implement our America First Agenda across all Agencies.” He said “Russ knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end Weaponized Government, and he will help us return Self Governance to the People,” adding that the incoming OMB chief “will restore fiscal sanity to our Nation.”

A MAGA intellectual: Vought has become one of the leaders on policy within Trump’s “Make American Great Again” movement. His main focuses are shrinking government and slashing spending, and he is expected to play a central role in the Trump administration’s self-declared war on the federal bureaucracy.

In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Vought said that he intends to move aggressively. “There certainly is going to be mass layoffs and firings, particularly at some of the agencies that we don’t even think should exist,” he said.

Previously, Vought made it clear that he views many federal employees as something like enemies who have abetted a “Marxist takeover” of the country. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said, per Government Executive. “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. 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.”

One project Vought is expected to be involved with is the effort to reclassify thousands of federal employees as political appointees, removing their civil service protections. The so-called Schedule F initiative was attempted at the end of the first Trump administration but ran into legal challenges and eventually ran out of time. Back then, Vought said the Schedule F rule change would allow him to designate up to 88% of the employees at OMB as political appointees, clearing the way for mass firings.

Project 2025 returns: Vought reportedly worked closely with the Heritage Foundation, where he once served as vice president of Heritage Action for America, the group's lobbying arm, to help create Project 2025, a 900-page blueprint for a potential second Trump administration.

More than 100 former Trump administration officials contributed to the Project 2025 effort, but Trump distanced himself from the hard-right plan for governance after Democrats began using some of its more extreme policy prescriptions in attack ads. Following his electoral victory, though, Trump has embraced some of the key Project 2025 contributors, including Vought at OMB, the incoming “border czar” Tom Homan, immigration hardliner Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff, and John Ratcliffe, Trump's pick to lead the CIA.

Number of the Day: 3-3-3

Treasury Secretary nominee Scott Bessent reportedly has pitched President-elect Trump with an economic plan he calls “3-3-3,” which involves raising GDP growth to a 3% annual rate through deregulation, reducing the annual budget deficit to 3% of GDP, and boosting domestic oil production by 3 million barrels a day.

The plan has been greeted with cheers on Wall Street, and stocks soared to record highs Monday as investors digested the news that Bessent is Trump’s Treasury pick, seeing him as a stabilizing force. Deficit hawks have also expressed approval, since a 3% budget deficit relative to GDP is about half what the U.S. is currently running, and at that level, the debt-to-GDP ratio would approach stabilization, a long-held goal for the hawks.

Still, none of that means that the 3-3-3 plan will be easy to achieve. The growth target is above the long-term estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, and some of the policies that the Trump administration plans to enact – including the mass deportation of immigrants, the imposition of high tariffs on all sorts of imported goods, and more tax cuts – may make it harder to boost the economy and reduce the deficit. On top of that, domestic oil production is already at record levels, and some analysts fear the global market is headed for a glut, raising questions about how much appetite there is among producers for raising output.

Biden Agenda Sparks $1 Trillion in Private Investment, White House Says

President Biden on Monday touted the success of his domestic investment agenda, announcing that it has prompted private firms to invest more than $1 trillion in manufacturing and clean energy.

“Today I’m proud to announce my Investing in America agenda—the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act—has helped attract over $1 trillion in announced private-sector investments,” Biden said in a statement. “These investments in industries of the future are ensuring the future is made in America, by American workers.”

Biden said more than 1.6 million construction and manufacturing jobs have been created over the last four years, spurred by the $1.2 trillion infrastructure package, the $500 billion clean energy legislation and the $53 billion high-tech manufacturing law.

The Biden administration said investments by private companies associated with the agenda include $119 billion for electric vehicles and batteries, $122 billion for clean power and $400 billion for semiconductor manufacturing facilities in Arizona, Ohio, Texas and New York.

Quote of the Day: Challenges Ahead

“The President-elect is promising to help out the working class by cutting taxes on major corporations and his fellow-billionaires. He’ll fix the deficit by slashing government revenues. He’ll bring down prices by introducing tariffs that raise them.”

— The New Yorker’s John Cassidy, writing Monday about the potential conflicts and contradictions that Scott Bessent, the hedge fund manager selected by President-elect Donald Trump to be Treasury Secretary, may have to deal with in the next administration.

Cassidy notes that there is little agreement on how Trump’s policies may play out in the real world, or even which policies could be enacted, and which could be set aside. “The optimistic argument, which Bessent has made publicly, is that tax cuts and deregulation will unleash a burst of capital investment, innovation, and G.D.P. growth,” Cassidy says. “At the other extreme, three researchers associated with the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington have outlined a scenario in which Trump’s entry to the White House heralds a global trade war, serious labor shortages, and efforts to undermine the independence of the Fed—a trifecta that causes G.D.P. growth to virtually cease and inflation to spike up dramatically.”

From the perspective of the global economy, the U.S. is still in an enviable position, Cassidy writes, with the dollar and Treasuries playing a dominant role, thanks in part to a stable legal and political system. “Inside a MAGA Administration, it will be his responsibility to bolster these perceptions externally and be a voice of reason internally,” Cassidy says of Bessent. “He will have his work cut out for him.”

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