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Open in TheBrain

ctr renewing am cooch

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see vought CITS & CTR BOTH HIM

trifecta

SEE 2025 PJT

SEE MASS DEPORT fascism checks bal

see paoletta

see cooch

trump OMB ~ regs, envir

ctr picked up issue du jour he has no expertise w/ them, good to raise $/hype

xian?

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fake electors trump coup

vought OMB HIRED JEFFREY BOSSERT CLARK

paoletta of course

cooch and chad text msg gone

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ntbcw with advancING am freedom, VP sinecure?

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no lnx in orig

Letter from Washington

The Technocrat Engineering a Vast Expansion of Trump's Power

How Russell Vought, an author of Project 2025, is using a once low-profile budget office to decimate federal agencies, fire vast numbers of workers, and test the rule of law.

By Andy Kroll

October 17, 2025

:{“He has centralized decision-making power to an extent that he is the Commander-in-Chief,” a senior official said of Vought.

This article is a collaboration between The New Yorker and ProPublica.*

On the afternoon of February 12th, Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, summoned a small group of career staffers to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for a meeting about foreign aid. A storm had dumped nearly six inches of snow on Washington, D.C. The rest of the federal government was running on a two-hour delay, but Vought had offered his team no such reprieve. As they filed into a second-floor conference room decorated with photos of past O.M.B. directors, Vought took his seat at the center of a worn wooden table and laid his briefing materials out before him.

Vought, a bookish technocrat with an encyclopedic knowledge of the inner workings of the U.S. government, cuts an unusual figure in Trump’s inner circle of Fox News hosts and right-wing influencers. He speaks in a flat, nasally monotone and, with his tortoiseshell glasses, standard-issue blue suits, and corona of close-cropped hair, most resembles what he claims to despise: a federal bureaucrat. The Office of Management and Budget, like Vought himself, is little known outside the Beltway and poorly understood even among political insiders. What it lacks in cachet, however, it makes up for in the vast influence it wields across the government. Samuel Bagenstos, an O.M.B. general counsel during the Biden Administration, told me, “Every goddam thing in the executive branch goes through O.M.B.”

The O.M.B. reviews all significant regulations proposed by individual agencies. It vets executive orders before the President signs them. It issues workforce policies for more than two million federal employees. Most notably, every penny appropriated by Congress is dispensed by the O.M.B., making the agency a potential choke point in a federal bureaucracy that currently spends about seven trillion dollars a year. Shalanda Young, Vought’s predecessor, told me, “If you’re O.K. with your name not being in the spotlight and just getting stuff done,” then directing the O.M.B. “can be one of the most powerful jobs in D.C.”

During Donald Trump’s first term, Vought (whose name is pronounced “vote”) did more than perhaps anyone else to turn the President’s demands and personal grievances into government action. In 2019, after Congress refused to fund Trump’s border wall, Vought, then the acting director of the O.M.B., redirected billions of dollars in Department of Defense money to build it. Later that year, after the Trump White House pressured Ukraine’s government to investigate Joe Biden, who was running for President, Vought froze two hundred and fourteen million dollars in security assistance for Ukraine. “The President loved Russ because he could count on him,” Mark Paoletta, who has served as the O.M.B. general counsel in both Trump Administrations, said at a conservative policy summit in 2022, according to a recording I obtained. “He wasn’t a showboat, and he was committed to doing what the President wanted to do.”

After the pro-Trump riots at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, many Republicans, including top Administration officials, disavowed the President. Vought remained loyal. He echoed Trump’s baseless claims about election fraud and publicly defended people who were arrested for their participation in the melee. During the Biden years, Vought labored to translate the lessons of Trump’s tumultuous first term into a more effective second Presidency. He chaired the transition portion of Project 2025, a joint effort by a coalition of conservative groups to develop a road map for the next Republican Administration, helping to draft some three hundred and fifty executive orders, regulations, and other plans to more fully empower the President. “Despite his best thinking and the aggressive things they tried in Trump One, nothing really stuck,” a former O.M.B. branch chief who served under Vought during the first Trump Administration told me. “Most Administrations don’t get a four-year pause or have the chance to think about ‘Why isn’t this working?’ ” The former branch chief added, “Now he gets to come back and steamroll everyone.”

At the meeting in February, according to people familiar with the events, Vought’s directive was simple: slash foreign assistance to the greatest extent possible. The U.S. government shouldn’t support overseas anti-malaria initiatives, he argued, because buying mosquito nets doesn’t make Americans safer or more prosperous. He questioned why the U.S. funded an international vaccine alliance, given the anti-vaccine views of Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The conversation turned to the United States Institute of Peace, a government-funded nonprofit created under Ronald Reagan, which worked to prevent conflicts overseas; Vought asked what options existed to eliminate it. When he was told that the U.S.I.P. was funded by Congress and legally independent, he replied, “We’ll see what we can do.” (A few days later, Trump signed an executive order that directed the O.M.B. to dismantle the organization.)

The O.M.B. staffers had tried to anticipate Vought’s desired outcome for more than seven billion dollars that the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development spent each year on humanitarian assistance, including disaster relief and support for refugees and conflict victims. During the campaign, Trump had vowed to defund agencies that give money to people “who have no respect for us at all,” and Project 2025 had accused U.S.A.I.D. of pursuing a “divisive political and cultural agenda.” The staffers proposed a cut of fifty per cent.

Vought was unsatisfied. What would be the consequences, he asked, of a much larger reduction? A career official answered: less humanitarian aid would mean more people would die. “You could say that about any of these cuts,” Vought replied. A person familiar with the meeting described his reaction as “blasé.” Vought reiterated that he wanted spending on foreign aid to be as close to zero as possible, on the fastest timeline possible. Several analysts left the meeting rattled. Word of what had happened spread quickly among the O.M.B. staff. Another person familiar with the meeting later told me, “It was the day that broke me.”

What Vought has done in the nine months since Trump took office goes much further than slashing foreign aid. Relying on an expansive theory of Presidential power and a willingness to test the rule of law, he has frozen vast sums of federal spending, terminated tens of thousands of federal workers, and, in a few cases, brought entire agencies to a standstill. In early October, after Senate Democrats refused to vote for a budget resolution without additional health-care protections, effectively shutting down the government, Vought became the face of the White House’s response. On the second day of the closure, Trump shared an A.I.-generated video that depicted his budget director—who, by then, had threatened mass firings across the federal workforce and paused or cancelled twenty-six billion dollars in funding for infrastructure and clean-energy projects in blue states—as the Grim Reaper of Washington, D.C. “We work for the President of the United States,” a senior agency official who regularly deals with the O.M.B. told me. But right now “it feels like we work for Russ Vought. He has centralized decision-making power to an extent that he is the Commander-in-Chief.”

At the start of Trump’s second term, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which promised to slash spending and root out waste, dominated the headlines. A gaggle of tech bros, with little government experience, appeared to be marching into federal buildings and, with the President’s blessing, purging people and programs seen as “woke” or anti-Trump. The sight of Musk swinging a chainsaw onstage at a conservative conference captured the pell-mell approach, not to mention the brutality, of the billionaire’s plan to bring the federal government to heel.

But, according to court records, interviews, and other accounts from people close to Vought, DOGE’s efforts were guided, more than was previously known, by the O.M.B. director. Musk bragged about “feeding U.S.A.I.D. into the wood chipper,” but the details of the agency’s downsizing were ironed out by Vought’s office. When DOGE took aim at obscure quasi-government nonprofits, such as the United States Institute of Peace, O.M.B. veterans saw Vought’s influence at work. “I can’t imagine that the DOGE team knew to target all these little parts of the government without Russ pointing them there,” the former O.M.B. branch chief told me. Vought also orchestrated DOGE’s hostile takeover of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, crippling a regulator that Republicans had hoped to shutter during Trump’s first term. “DOGE is underneath the O.M.B.,” Michelle Martin, an official with Citizens for Renewing America, a grassroots group founded by Vought, said in May, according to a video of her remarks. “Honestly, a lot of what Elon began pinpointing . . . was at the direction of Russ.”

Vought, who declined to be interviewed for this story, voiced concerns about some of DOGE’s tactics—cancelling budget items that the O.M.B. had wanted to keep, for instance—but he mostly saw the department as a useful battering ram. An Administration official who has worked with Vought and Musk told me that DOGE showed Vought it was possible to ignore legal challenges and take dramatic action. “He has the benefit of Elon softening everyone up,” the official told me. “Elon terrified the shit out of people. He broke the status quo.”

Vought is a stated opponent of the status quo. One of the few prominent conservatives to embrace the label of “Christian nationalist,” he once told an audience that “the phrasing is too accurate to run away from the term. . . . I’m a Christian. I am a nationalist. We were meant to be a Christian nation.” American democracy, he has said, has been hijacked by rogue judges who make law from the bench and by a permanent class of government bureaucrats who want to advance “woke” policies designed to divide Americans and silence political opponents. “The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country, in which our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus,” Vought said in 2024, during a conference hosted by the Center for Renewing America, a nonprofit think tank that he also founded. “And they have aimed it at us.”

{The central struggle of our time, he says, pits the defenders of this “post-constitutional” order—what he calls the “cartel” or the “regime,” which in his telling includes Democrats and Republicans—against a group of “radical constitutionalists” fighting to destroy the deep state and return power to the Presidency and, ultimately, the people. Vought counts himself as a member of the latter group, which, in his view, also includes right-wing stalwarts such as the political strategist Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said in a private speech in 2023. “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.”}:

The ultimate radical constitutionalist, Vought says, is Donald Trump. In Vought’s view, Trump, the subject of four indictments during his time out of office, is a singular figure in the history of the American republic, a once persecuted leader who returns to power to defeat the deep state. “We have in Donald Trump a man who is so uniquely positioned to serve this role, a man whose own interests perfectly align with the interests of the country,” Vought said in his 2024 speech. “He has seen what it has done to him, and he has seen what they are trying to do to the country. That is nothing more than a gift of God.” As Bannon put it, sitting onstage with Vought at a closed-door conference in 2023, Trump is “a very imperfect instrument, right? But he’s an instrument of the Lord.”

In Vought’s vision for the U.S. government, an all-powerful executive branch would be able to fire workers, cancel programs, shutter agencies, and undo regulations that govern air and water quality, financial markets, workplace protections, and civil rights. The Department of Justice, meanwhile, would shed its historical independence and operate at the direction of the White House. All of this puts Vought at the center of what Steve Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown, described to me as the Trump Administration’s “complete disregard” for the law. “The President has no authority to not spend money Congress has appropriated—that’s not a debate,” he told me. “The President has no authority to fire civil servants who are protected by statute—that’s not a debate.” He added, “We are seeing exertions of executive power the likes of which we have never seen in this country.”

Vought, who is forty-nine, has spent his entire adult life in Washington. He met his wife, Mary, on Capitol Hill, where they both eventually worked for Mike Pence, at the time a Republican congressman from Indiana. (The Voughts divorced in 2023.) Yet, after nearly thirty years in the nation’s capital, he still views himself as an outsider. He once described his upbringing, in Trumbull, Connecticut, as “blue collar” and his parents as part of America’s “forgotten men and women.”

Vought’s father, Thurlow, served in the Marines and worked as an electrician. His mother, Margaret, spent more than twenty years as a schoolteacher and administrator. Before they married each other, Vought’s parents had both been widowed in their thirties and left to raise families on their own; Russ was their only child together. In 1981, when Russ was four, one of Thurlow’s daughters died in a car crash. Not long after the accident, Thurlow had a religious awakening. “That completely changed the direction of our immediate family,” one of Vought’s half sisters later wrote on social media.

Vought’s mother helped launch a Christian school, where the curriculum relied heavily on the Bible. One history book the school considered using included the instruction to “Defend the statement that all governmental power and authority come from God.” America was built on Judeo-Christian values, she told a local newspaper, and if the American people gave up on those values “then they’re going to have to pay the price based on sin, sickness, disease and anarchy.”

Vought attended a private Christian high school, then went to Illinois to study at Wheaton College, which is known as the “evangelical Harvard.” He moved to Washington after graduation and, in 1999, landed a job in the office of Phil Gramm, a Republican senator from Texas. Vought, who started in the mailroom, would later say that working for Gramm laid the “conservative foundation” for the rest of his life.

Gramm was an uncompromising budget hawk. He was famous for the “Dickey Flatt test,” named after a printer Gramm knew in Texas. For every dollar of federal spending, Gramm said, lawmakers must ask themselves: Did it improve the lives of people like Dickey Flatt? (In Gramm’s estimation, the answer was often no; every year, he introduced legislation designed to ruthlessly slash the budget.) Years later, when Vought testified before Congress, he said that people like his parents “have always been my test for federal spending. Did a particular program or spending increase help the nameless wagon pullers across our country, working hard at their job, trying to provide for their family and future?”

Under Gramm’s tutelage, Vought developed a reputation as a master of the arcane rules that can get legislation passed or killed. He climbed the ranks of the Republican Party, going on to advise Pence, who was then the leader of the House Republican Conference. But the closer Vought got to the center of congressional power, the more disillusioned he became. In the late two-thousands, when Republican lawmakers, who professed to care about deficits and balanced budgets, voted in favor of bills loaded with corporate giveaways and pork-barrel spending, Vought felt that they were abandoning their principles and duping their constituents. He later recalled of this time, “I would say, ‘If there’s an opinion in this leadership room, I’m telling you it’s ninety-five per cent wrong.’ ” A former Capitol Hill colleague of Vought’s told me, “I think he thought the Republican leadership was a bigger impediment to conservative causes than Democrats were.”

In 2010, Vought quit working for House Republicans and helped launch Heritage Action for America, an offshoot of the influential conservative think tank Heritage Foundation. The foundation was known for dense policy papers and its voluminous “Mandate for Leadership” governing guide. Heritage Action had a different purpose—to strong-arm Republicans in Congress into acting more conservatively.

Vought was instrumental in turning Heritage Action into the interest group that congressional Republicans feared most. He picked fights with Party leaders over agriculture subsidies and greenhouse-gas regulations, and published a scorecard that rated how lawmakers voted on key bills. In Heritage Action’s first year, according to a person familiar with Vought’s work there, he came up with an idea for a mailer that attacked Bob Corker, a Republican senator from Tennessee, for his vote to approve a nuclear-weapons treaty with Russia. The mailer featured a photograph of Corker alongside images of Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, and the Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Heritage Action’s tactics so infuriated the Republican leadership that Senator Mitch McConnell called on Heritage donors to stop funding the group. (McConnell did not respond to a request for comment.)

In 2013, Heritage Action announced a campaign to defund the Affordable Care Act. Vought and his colleagues toured the country, whipping up the grass roots, and poured millions of dollars into advertisements and lobbying. They wanted Republicans in the House and the Senate to insist that any spending bill passed to avert a shutdown must also defund Obamacare. The Republican lawmakers who embraced the strategy came to be known as the “suicide caucus,” and their protest led to a sixteen-day government shutdown. In the end, Republican leaders cut a deal to reopen the government, leaving Obamacare intact.

Heritage Action saw the 2016 Presidential election as an opportunity to put a true conservative back in the White House. The group’s C.E.O., Michael Needham, openly supported Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, who, three years earlier, had helped orchestrate the shutdown. Trump, at least initially, was treated with disdain. During an appearance on Fox News in 2015, Needham called him a “clown” who “needs to be out of the race.”

Vought and Trump couldn’t have been more different: one was a deacon at his Baptist church; the other was a twice-divorced philanderer who had been caught on camera bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy.” But, after Trump won the election, Vought was offered a job as a senior adviser at the O.M.B., where he’d dreamed of working since his days in Phil Gramm’s office. Years later, Vought would say that, at the time, he had no ambition of one day running the agency. He had planned to help with the transition and some of the O.M.B.’s early efforts, then go to seminary to become a pastor. But, he later said in a podcast interview, “God had other plans.”

In March, 2017, Trump signed an executive order that called for a top-to-bottom reorganization of the federal government. Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman, served as Trump’s first budget director, but, inside the O.M.B., Vought took the lead. According to a former senior staffer at the agency, Vought initially pushed for the President’s plan to eliminate U.S.A.I.D. and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He also wanted to fold the Department of Health and Human Services, along with food-stamps programs, into a new Department of Health and Public Welfare. “They wanted to call it that because they think it sounds bad,” a former O.M.B. analyst told me. In one meeting, according to a person in the room, Vought asked, “Why do we do economic assistance abroad at all?” The former O.M.B. analyst said, “There were very few, if any, debates where Russ wouldn’t take the most extreme option available to him, the most conservative, the most budget-cutting.”

Trump’s Cabinet secretaries resisted wholesale cuts. The former senior staffer recalled, “The general counsels at these agencies are calling the White House counsel and saying, ‘We’re not trying to introduce legislation to delete ourselves, are we?’ ” Few of the recommendations in Vought’s final reorganization plan, which was released in 2018, were implemented. But the document now reads like a guide to the second Trump Administration. “I didn’t realize it then,” the former O.M.B. senior staffer told me, “but I was writing the first draft of Project 2025.”

Vought increasingly clashed with the O.M.B.’s staff over proposed cuts to popular programs. Meals on Wheels, the food-delivery program, was a topic of intense debate. Even after O.M.B. staff explained how the program, which received more than nine hundred million dollars in funding from Congress, acted as a lifeline for homebound seniors, Vought and Mulvaney pushed for major cuts that would have hobbled its operations, according to the former O.M.B. senior staffer. The staffer added that it was often hard to reconcile Vought’s deeply held Christian faith—he hosted a prayer session for select colleagues—with his eagerness to cut programs that helped the vulnerable. “It always struck me as a strange thing,” the person said. “There’s compassion, but it only extends to certain people.”

In 2018, Mark Paoletta, a former attorney in the George H. W. Bush White House, joined the O.M.B. as general counsel. Paoletta was best known for publicly defending Clarence Thomas, who, during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing, in 1991, was accused of sexual harassment by his former colleague Anita Hill. Paoletta had worked on Capitol Hill, then entered private practice, where he advised politicians under scrutiny by Congress. Paoletta and Vought quickly forged an alliance. The former O.M.B. branch chief told me that the office’s culture changed after Paoletta arrived. “There was a shift that we were all deep state,” he said. “They thought we were pushing back because we had our own leftist-leaning agenda.” (Paoletta declined to comment.)

It was Vought’s idea to use an obscure budgetary maneuver called a rescission to claw back funds that Congress had already appropriated, according to Paoletta’s remarks at the conservative policy summit. In 2018, at Vought’s urging, Trump sent Congress the largest rescission request in decades, asking lawmakers to roll back more than fifteen billion dollars, including money for U.S.A.I.D.’s Ebola response, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and an Energy Department loan program for auto manufacturing. O.M.B. employees “looked at us like we were crazy,” Paoletta said. “They just thought it was something they didn’t do.” Once again, Vought’s own party thwarted him: the measure failed by a single vote in the Republican-held Senate.

Vought also encountered resistance inside the White House. When Congress refused to give Trump billions in funding to construct new border fencing, Vought and Paoletta devised a novel strategy. Trump could declare a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border, giving him the authority to seize money from other parts of the government. According to Paoletta, John Kelly, the President’s chief of staff, kept the plan from Trump. Paoletta said that Kelly’s message to the O.M.B. was “We don’t want to tell the President he has that authority, because God knows what he’ll do.”

Eventually, Trump badgered Mulvaney, the O.M.B. director, to find him the money for his wall. Mulvaney told the President that he’d been trying to meet with him about the issue, but that Kelly had blocked him. Within days, Trump replaced Kelly with Mulvaney. Vought took over as the acting director of the O.M.B., and money from the Defense Department was tapped to fund the wall. (Kelly did not respond to requests for comment.)

Under Vought, the O.M.B. produced budgets that called for more cuts than any in modern history. Congress all but ignored them. A former staffer in the O.M.B.’s legislative-affairs office recalled that Republicans didn’t believe Trump cared about the sweeping reductions included in his own annual budgets. “They kept saying, ‘The President’s not really pushing this or that cut—that’s a Russ Vought thing, isn’t it?’ ” the legislative-affairs staffer said.

In July, 2019, Trump asked the O.M.B. to freeze hundreds of millions of dollars in security assistance to the government of Ukraine. The request coincided with a phone call Trump had with President Volodymyr Zelensky in which Trump pressured him to investigate Biden and Biden’s son Hunter, who had served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. The money for Ukraine had already been approved by Congress, but Vought agreed to hold back the funds. Paoletta signed off on a memo authorizing the freeze. Under the law, the move was known as an impoundment. (The Government Accountability Office, an independent nonpartisan agency, later deemed it illegal.)

Any fan of “Schoolhouse Rock!” knows that the first job assigned to Congress in the Constitution is the power of the purse. The President, meanwhile, must “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” according to Article II of the Constitution. Most legal scholars interpret this to mean that the President’s duty is to spend the money Congress appropriates, and that the President does not have the power to withhold funds. In 1969, William Rehnquist, the conservative future Supreme Court Chief Justice, wrote that the impoundment power was “supported by neither reason nor precedent.”

The question of impoundment’s legality came to a head in the nineteen-seventies, when President Richard Nixon withheld billions in congressionally approved funds for environmental-cleanup efforts. Courts undid Nixon’s actions, and Congress eventually passed the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which outlawed the maneuver, leaving only narrow exceptions—rescissions—that required congressional sign-off. (Democrats are calling for restrictions on the rescission process as part of the current shutdown negotiations.) Over the years, the Impoundment Control Act would come to be viewed as sacrosanct at the O.M.B. That didn’t stop Vought. “I had been personally told, ‘Look, I want the money cut off until we can figure out where it’s going,’ ” Vought later said of the Ukraine funding in an interview with the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson. “It was like all hell broke loose within the bureaucracy.”

The impoundment triggered congressional investigations and, ultimately, Trump’s first impeachment. (Ukraine eventually received the money.) Vought refused to coöperate with investigators, calling the probe a “sham process that is designed to relitigate the last election.” One of the impeachment articles named Vought, saying that the President had pressured him and others not to respond to subpoenas. Trump, for his part, continued to express support for impoundment, calling it the “secret weapon” that could tame the “bloated federal bureaucracy.”

In early 2021, on one of the final days of Trump’s first term, Vought visited him in the Oval Office. Both men felt a sense of unfinished business, Vought would later recall. Only a few months earlier, when Vought was sworn in as the O.M.B. director, Trump had told him that, after three and a half years as President, he had finally got the hang of the job. “Russ, we’ve got to get another term,” Trump said. “We finally figured out how to do this.”

Vought, frustrated by what he saw as years of obstruction by civil servants, had recently pushed through a new policy to vastly expand the number of at-will employees in the government, making them easier to fire. But the COVID-19 pandemic had dashed any chance of leaving the government smaller than he’d found it. Trump had signed trillion-dollar stimulus bills to prop up the American economy; by the time he left office, the national debt had swelled by $7.8 trillion. After the violence on January 6th, a second Trump term looked less likely than ever. Vought, however, had not given up hope.

In the Oval Office, he told Trump that he would soon launch a new political operation that would keep the MAGA movement alive while attacking the policies of the incoming Biden Administration. Trump blessed the venture, with one request. That summer, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, national protests had forced a racial reckoning in the country. Trump wanted Vought, who as O.M.B. director had scrubbed training materials for federal employees of any references to “white privilege” and “systemic racism,” to find a way for conservatives to push back against the Black Lives Matter movement. “This was an assignment I was given from President Trump,” Vought later recalled. “I’m the budget guy. If I can talk about race, you can talk about race.”

A few days after Trump left office, Vought announced the launch of the Center for Renewing America, a MAGA think tank that aspired to act as an incubator for future Republican Administrations. Its activist arm, Citizens for Renewing America, would mobilize grassroots supporters to pressure elected officials to embrace the think tank’s agenda. The overarching goal, Vought wrote in an op-ed for the Federalist, was to “restore an old consensus in America that has been forgotten, that we are a people For God, For Country, and For Community.”

At the Center for Renewing America, Vought surrounded himself with other radical constitutionalists from the first Trump Administration. He brought on Jeffrey Clark, the Justice Department official who had tried to use his agency to help Trump overturn the 2020 election. (A D.C. disciplinary board recently recommended that Clark, who now works at the O.M.B., lose his law license as punishment for those efforts, an outcome that Clark is appealing and that his lawyer called a “travesty of justice.”) Kash Patel, Trump’s current F.B.I. director, and Ken Cuccinelli, a top immigration official in the first Trump Administration, joined as senior fellows. Working at the center, Cuccinelli explained at the conservative policy summit, allowed him to “stake out the outer boundary of reasonable constitutional law.”

The Center for Renewing America’s ideas included how the President could invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy military troops to American cities to put down protests; how the White House could freeze billions in federal funding without waiting for a vote in Congress; and how agency leaders could defy government unions and fire workers en masse. The think tank also set out to create shadow versions of the O.M.B. and of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to anticipate legal challenges and counter internal pushback. In his 2024 address, Vought explained, “I don’t want President Trump having to lose a moment of time having fights in the Oval Office about whether something is legal or doable or moral.”

Vought and his colleagues at the center also worked closely with the House Freedom Caucus to urge other congressional Republicans to use government shutdowns as a way of forcing through major policy changes. One of their first targets was critical race theory, a once obscure academic concept that had become a flashpoint during the 2020 racial-justice protests. According to previously unreported recordings of briefings held by Citizens for Renewing America, Vought said that he had pressured members of the Freedom Caucus to yoke a ban on critical race theory to must-pass bills on raising the debt limit and funding the government. “We have to have a Speaker that goes into these funding fights with a love for the shutdowns,” Vought said during a November, 2022, briefing call, “because they create an opportunity to save the country.”

But Republicans never shut down the government during the Biden Presidency, and Vought grew increasingly frustrated with them for not using more aggressive tactics. On one briefing call, he praised Cori Bush, a progressive Democrat from Missouri, after she camped out for several days on the Capitol steps to protest the end of a pandemic-era moratorium on evictions. Vought called her politics “very, very bad,” but he admired her methods: “We need this from Republicans.”

The centerpiece of Vought’s work during the Biden years was his campaign to popularize the concept of “woke and weaponized” government. The tagline brought together two of Vought’s rallying cries: “woke” policies, like diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and transgender rights, and a “weaponized” F.B.I. and Justice Department that had allegedly been wielded against the Democrats’ political enemies, including, most notably, Trump. When the Center for Renewing America released a federal budget blueprint in late 2022, calling for nearly nine trillion dollars in cuts in the course of ten years, the word “woke” appeared seventy-seven times across a hundred and three pages.

Jessica Riedl, a budget expert who works for the conservative Manhattan Institute, told me that it was “just silly” to claim, as the Center for Renewing America’s budget did, that Veterans Affairs, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and farm subsidies required enormous cuts for being too woke. “It’s a way to dress up spending cuts that aren’t popular on their own merits,” Riedl said. Vought described his framing as an attempt to “change paradigms.” “We have to be able to defund agencies,” he said in the private speech in 2023. “That is why these things have to be indelibly linked, and that is why we are focussing so much on ‘woke and weaponized.’ ”

Any hope that Vought had of implementing his ideas in a second Trump Administration nearly ran aground last summer. He had written a chapter of Project 2025’s eight-hundred-and-eighty-seven-page report, arguing for an expansion of executive power that would put the Justice Department and other traditionally independent agencies fully under Presidential control. Center for Renewing America fellows had written two more chapters in the report. But, as Election Day neared, Project 2025 became a liability for the Trump campaign. Polls showed that a majority of Americans opposed its most aggressive proposals, including removing the abortion drug mifepristone from the market, eliminating the Department of Education, and implementing Vought’s plan to more easily fire nonpolitical federal workers. As criticism of Project 2025 grew, Trump insisted that he knew “nothing” about it, while also claiming that “some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”

The month before the election, Politico reported that Donald Trump, Jr., had compiled a list of people who would not be allowed to serve in a second Trump Administration, including a number of leading contributors to Project 2025. But, according to a former Trump campaign official with close ties to the White House, Vought deftly navigated the controversy. “Russ is a consummate team player,” the official told me. “He was the one person at Project 2025 that we could have a conversation with during the course of the campaign.”

A week after Trump’s victory, the President-elect announced his plans for the Department of Government Efficiency. “It will become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time,” Trump said in a statement. He tapped two of his biggest backers to run it: Elon Musk, who had donated nearly three hundred million dollars to help elect Trump and other Republicans, and the biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who briefly ran for President on an anti-woke platform. Two days after the announcement, Vought met with Musk and Ramaswamy at Mar-a-Lago. Vought and Musk “hit it off,” according to the Times; both were “on the same wavelength in terms of taking the most extreme action possible.” Soon after the meeting, Trump nominated Vought to run the O.M.B.

One of DOGE’s first targets was the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The C.F.P.B. had first been proposed by Senator Elizabeth Warren, who, as a law professor, argued for the creation of a regulator that could protect Americans from predatory mortgages and hidden fees. Created by law in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the bureau developed a reputation as an aggressive enforcer of fair-lending and consumer-protection laws. The bureau’s work has led to nearly twenty billion dollars in direct relief to consumers and five billion dollars in civil penalties for alleged wrongdoing. For Vought, the bureau embodied the gross regulatory overreach that he loathed; outside of government, the agency’s biggest foes, Wall Street and Silicon Valley, were major funders of Trump’s second campaign.

On February 7th, Trump named Vought the bureau’s acting director, a role he would perform on top of his duties at the O.M.B. That morning, a small team of DOGE staffers arrived at the C.F.P.B.’s headquarters. According to previously unreported e-mails and depositions, the members of DOGE took orders from Vought as they disabled the C.F.P.B.’s website and decided which of the agency’s employees to fire. Musk weighed in on X: “CFPB RIP.”

Trump had targeted the C.F.P.B. during his first term. “There were days in Trump One where it felt like we were getting punched in the face,” one longtime employee told me. Over time, however, the President seemed to lose interest, and the C.F.P.B.’s last director under Trump, a political appointee named Kathy Kraninger, supported the bureau’s mission. In 2020, under Kraninger, the C.F.P.B. filed the second-highest number of enforcement actions in its nearly ten-year existence.

Current and former C.F.P.B. staff told me that they assumed a second Trump Administration would look like the first one. “Generally, we thought there would be a conservative agenda we’d be handed, and we’d figure out how to enact it,” the veteran employee said. Soon after taking over, Vought informed Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, which funds the C.F.P.B., that the agency would not need any more money. He barred C.F.P.B. employees from doing most types of work and told them not to go to the office. When confusion arose over what duties, if any, remained for the staff to do, Vought clarified the matter in a February 10th e-mail, telling employees to “stand down from performing any work task.”

In the following weeks, Vought and Paoletta stopped oversight activities, quashed ongoing investigations, and froze active enforcement cases, which included matters involving some of the largest banks in the nation, such as JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Capital One. Rohit Chopra, the bureau’s director under Biden, said that Vought’s actions had put the C.F.P.B. “in a coma.” The bureau’s top enforcement officer resigned in June, writing in a letter to colleagues that the C.F.P.B.’s leadership “has no intention to enforce the law in any meaningful way.”

The final blow came when Vought announced a plan to lay off more than eighty per cent of the C.F.P.B.’s employees. A federal appeals court ruled in August that the mass-firing plan could proceed. It took Vought four months to accomplish what the previous Trump Administration had been unable to do in four years.

The unwinding of the C.F.P.B., however, was quickly overshadowed by another Vought victory. That same month, he completed his assault on foreign aid. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who had been running what was left of U.S.A.I.D., announced that, with Trump’s approval, he had empowered Vought to officially eliminate the agency. “Russ is now at the helm to oversee the closeout of an agency that long ago went off the rails,” Rubio announced. “Congrats, Russ.”

Four months before the 2024 election, the Center for Renewing America had welcomed a small group of congressional staffers to its headquarters, a few blocks from the Capitol. Some of them worked for the House and Senate Budget Committees, which every year help set spending levels for the federal government. The purpose of the meeting was to brief the staffers on the center’s latest policy fight—an attempt to build the case for the use of impoundment.

At the briefing, Paoletta argued that the Impoundment Control Act was unconstitutional. Spending laws passed by Congress were a ceiling, not a floor, Paoletta argued, according to a person in the room. In that view—which most legal experts dismiss as a fringe position—the White House is not permitted to spend more than a law calls for, but it has the power to spend far less. “Congress passes statutes episodically, and often with conflicting purposes and demands,” Paoletta later wrote in an essay for the Center for Renewing America. “It is left to the President and his subordinates to harmonize their execution in a coherent manner.”

According to Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee, the Trump Administration has since frozen or cancelled more than four hundred and ten billion dollars in funding on everything from energy subsidies for low-income households and Head Start after-school programs to President George W. Bush’s H.I.V.-reduction initiative, PEPFAR, and artists’ grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Vought directed the National Institutes of Health to withhold—illegally, according to the Government Accountability Office—an estimated fifteen billion dollars in grants for outside research projects. The N.I.H. also moved to cap funding for so-called indirect costs, which research universities rely on to pay for their buildings, utilities, and administrative staff. Scientists I interviewed said that these cuts would inevitably lead to less medical research, including into a drug that Vought’s ex-wife credited with improving the life of their eleven-year-old daughter, who was born with cystic fibrosis. A scientist who receives government funding to study cystic-fibrosis treatment told me that, without sufficient money for indirect costs, “we probably won’t be able to do the research and will have to relinquish the grants.”

The O.M.B. claims that it is vetting federal spending to insure that the money does not fund “woke” programs. “We can confirm that President Trump and Director Vought are carefully scrutinizing spending that has previously run on autopilot or worse—toward transing our kids, the Green New Scam, and funding our own country’s invasion—just as the president promised,” an O.M.B. spokesperson told the Times in August. But blocking funds is also a way to pressure officials and agencies to comply with the Administration’s demands. “O.M.B. is like a giant funnel that everything has to go through in order to happen,” Lester Cash, a former O.M.B. employee, told me. “You can get agencies to agree to things just to get the funnel to open back up.”

In March, the O.M.B. took down a legally mandated public website that made it possible to track the funding freezes. The move elicited a rare show of bipartisanship. In a letter to Vought, the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees urged him to “restore public access to apportionment data in accordance with statute.” Vought said the information listed on the site was “predecisional” and a risk to national security. The O.M.B. restored the site only when a judge ruled that taking it down was illegal, saying that the government’s position relied “on an extravagant and unsupported theory of presidential power.”

The O.M.B.’s funding freezes have wreaked havoc. On June 30th, the Department of Education told state agencies that congressional appropriations for after-school activities and English-as-a-second-language instruction would not arrive the next day, as planned. The unexpected shortfall affected thousands of school districts, which served millions of students, in all fifty states. The Administration only backed down after both Democrats and Republicans criticized the move. “When something’s been appropriated, signed into law, and people are writing contracts based on the commitment of the federal government, and then they don’t know if they’re going to get it or not, it creates such chaos,” Don Bacon, a Republican House member from Nebraska, told me. “I’m not sure what the O.M.B. director thought he was doing.” (A spokesperson for Vought at the O.M.B. would not comment on the record in response to a detailed list of questions.)

In June, Trump sent a rescission request to Congress, seeking to cancel roughly nine billion dollars in funding for foreign aid and for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports NPR, PBS, and other public radio and TV stations nationwide. The programs were viewed, the senior agency official told me, as “soft targets,” a test to see if Vought could persuade Republicans to put aside their concerns about undermining Congress’s power of the purse. Unlike in Trump’s first term, Vought’s rescission plan succeeded. The measure, which faced opposition from Democrats and a few Republicans, passed after Vice-President J. D. Vance cast two tie-breaking procedural votes. Jeff Merkley, the top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, told me, “You’ve basically said to Congress, ‘Hey, compromise all you want, but we’re going to undo that in the way we want as soon as you’ve signed the bill.’ ”

On the Friday before Labor Day, Vought made his most audacious move yet. The White House sent Congress a new rescissions package, targeting nearly five billion dollars in foreign aid. But this time Vought informed lawmakers that he didn’t need their approval. He asserted that the President could make the request, putting a temporary freeze on the funds, then simply wait for the fiscal year to expire, on September 30th, at which point the money would be cancelled out. Vought called it a “pocket rescission,” but it was impoundment by another name. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, said it was a “clear violation of the law.”

The Government Accountability Office can sue the O.M.B. over an impoundment or pocket rescission to get the money released. In April, Gene Dodaro, who leads the Government Accountability Office, testified that his office had opened thirty-nine investigations into potential violations of the Impoundment Control Act by the Trump Administration. The O.M.B. has responded by attacking Dodaro’s agency. In one letter, Paoletta said that the O.M.B. would coöperate with the Government Accountability Office only if its demands didn’t get in the way of Trump’s agenda. In another letter, Paoletta told the Department of Transportation to ignore a Government Accountability Office ruling that found that the O.M.B. had illegally impounded money for electric-car development. Vought, for his part, has flatly declared that the Government Accountability Office “shouldn’t exist.”

Vought’s actions could provoke a challenge to the Impoundment Control Act in the Supreme Court. In the meantime, a number of current and former government employees told me that they worried about the long-term consequences of what he has already done: the terminating of vital research projects that could have led to life-saving breakthroughs; the nation’s lost standing as an international leader; the uncertainty cast over the fundamental workings of government. “They’ve given up on the idea that they need to persuade anybody,” Bagenstos, the former general counsel at the O.M.B., said of Vought and Paoletta. They’re “just going to use brute force and dominance.” As the former O.M.B. analyst told me, “They’ve dropped a grenade into the system.”

The government shutdown has illustrated, in the starkest terms, Vought’s expansive theory of executive power and his willingness to ignore Congress. On October 2nd, Trump posted on Truth Social that he would meet with Vought to decide which “Democrat Agencies” to cut on a temporary or permanent basis. A few days later, the O.M.B. released a memo claiming that, seemingly in defiance of a 2019 law, furloughed federal employees were not guaranteed back pay following a shutdown. Then, on October 10th, Vought announced that his campaign of mass firings across the bureaucracy had begun. So far, more than four thousand employees have been laid off, disrupting government services devoted to, among other things, cybersecurity efforts, special-education programs, substance-abuse treatment, and loans for small businesses. A federal judge put a temporary stop to the cuts, but that same day Vought predicted that the total number of firings would be “north of ten thousand.” As one official texted me, “Trauma achieved.” ♦

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.*}:

Published in the print edition of the October 27, 2025, issue, with the headline “The Shutdown Artist.”

*The New Yorker

Andy Kroll, an investigative reporter at ProPublica, is the author of the book “A Death on W Street.”

MASSIVE FAIL ON OMB BUDGET FREEZE PAOLETTA

OMFG KASH CONFIRMED SAME DAY

TMP 2 25

Remember Jeffrey Clark, the former acting assistant attorney general in the Trump DOJ’s environmental division? He became infamous in the first days of 2021, when Donald Trump tried, unsuccessfully, to install him as attorney general mid-coup attempt. Now, Clark is reportedly back in government, in a top post at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It’s an agency that Trump, Elon Musk and other allies have taken steps to paralyze in recent weeks.

You’ll recall Clark was behind efforts to use the power of the Justice Department to pressure Georgia lawmakers to throw out President Joe Biden’s win in the state not long after the 2020 election. While his name was ultimately dropped as a co-conspirator, Clark was initially indicted in Georgia as part of Fulton County’s racketeering case against Trump and his allies for attempts to overturn the results of the election there. Clark’s law license was also suspended for two years, and he faces threats of disbarment in D.C. for his efforts to help Trump subvert the will of the voters in 2020.

Now, according to new reporting from American Banker, Clark has been installed as a senior adviser to attorney Mark Paoletta, the CFPB’s new chief legal officer. Per American Banker:

Clark and at least five other new hires showed up in the CFPB’s email directory this weekend, according to people familiar with the situation. They are now listed as part of the CFPB’s front office working under acting CFPB Director Russel Vought, who is head of the Office of Management and Budget.

Clark’s placement at the CFPB comes as other Trump loyalists within the bureau push forward with plans to effectively shutter the agency. The ubiquitous Russ Vought took over as acting director earlier this month, and halted all of the agency’s investigations and even closed the building. In the past week, the Trump administration began purging employees.

On Friday, CFPB employees were alerted that they’d been placed on indefinite administrative leave. Those reports emerged just before the Trump administration agreed in court to a temporary pause on terminating staff. U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson on Friday issued an order stating the Trump administration had agreed to not fire more staff, delete agency data or transfer money out of its reserves — at least not until March 3. That’s when Berman Jackson will hold a hearing on a lawsuit that the National Treasury Employees Union filed on behalf of ousted CFPB staff. It is one of a handful of lawsuits that have been filed by former employees and other agency advocates in response to purges.

Musk and his cronies at DOGE have had their sights set on dismantling CFPB for weeks. Musk made those intentions public when he tweeted “CFPB RIP” earlier this month.

It is unclear what role Clark will play in his position at the bureau, which was created in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the brainchild of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), to monitor banking systems and protect Americans from financial scams. But Clark, Paoletta and Vought all worked together both in the first Trump administration, and also at a right-wing think tank they set up that advocates for expanding executive authority, the Center for Renewing America. The group recently published a piece — written by “CRA staff” — advocating for the bureau to be “shut down” and explaining how best to do it.

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1 25 trump j6 parsons, chris hayes said some scotus decision was actually written by Paoletta?

impoundment

The President’s Constitutional Power of Impoundment | The Center for Renewing America

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MAGA allies in the media make the case for Trump to ignore the Senate confirmation process

Written by Gideon Taaffe

Published 11/19/24

President-elect Donald Trump has called for Senate Republicans to let him make recess appointments for top positions in his upcoming administration, and his allies in right-wing media are making the case for his plan.

Trump named several picks for prominent cabinet positions that have drawn scrutiny for their inexperience and controversial statements, raising concerns that he is focused primarily on filling his administration with loyalists. He also signaled his intention to push through his picks without scrutiny by calling on Republican senators to let him make recess appointments.

His allies in right-wing media are now arguing that recess appointments would be justified and calling on senators to bend to his will and forgo their standard confirmation process.

Trump has demanded support to use recess appointments for top members of his cabinet, and he plans to fill multiple posts with right-wing media loyalists

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Bounties, self-deportation, and extremist sheriffs: How Project 2025 partners are planning for Trump’s mass deportations

Written by John Knefel

Published 11/21/24

Organizations on the advisory board of Project 2025, a sprawling plan to provide the incoming Republican presidential administration with policy and staffing recommendations, have responded to President-elect Donald Trump’s victory by promoting extreme approaches to carrying out his promise to deport upward of 10 million undocumented immigrants.

Right-wing think tanks the Center for Immigration Studies, The Claremont Institute, and the Center for Renewing America have all advanced anti-immigrant policies since Trump’s win. Some of their proposals include offering bounties for information on suspected undocumented people, conscripting far-right so-called “constitutional sheriffs” to serve as immigration enforcers, and attempting to make life so miserable for out-of-status immigrants that they flee the country — referred to euphemistically as “self-deportation.”

Trump has already named the two top officials who will be tasked with carrying out his mass deportation plan, and they both have direct connections to Project 2025. Tom Homan, Trump’s pick for “border czar,” is a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation, Project 2025’s lead organizer. He is also credited as a contributor in Project 2025’s policy book, Mandate for Leadership, which proposes drastic cuts to legal immigration in addition to harsh crackdowns on undocumented people. Homan has promised to “to run the biggest deportation operation this country has ever seen.”

Alongside Homan will be Stephen Miller — a top architect of Trump’s Muslim ban and family separation policies — who will serve as deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser in the new Trump administration. Miller and his conservative advocacy organization, America First Legal, attempted to distance themselves from Project 2025 amid growing backlash to the effort, but their fingerprints are all over it. Miller appeared in a Project 2025 promotional video, a top AFL executive authored a chapter in Mandate, and AFL was on the advisory board until it removed itself following public outcry.

But the likely influence that Project 2025 partners will have on Trump’s looming immigration policy extends far beyond Homan and Miller. Below are some of the coalition’s more extreme proposals.

Center for Immigration Studies pushes bounties, self-deportation

The Center for Immigration Studies is one of the three main branches of the Tanton network, named after John Tanton, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “the racist architect of the modern anti-immigrant movement.” The SPLC has designated CIS as an anti-immigrant hate group.

On November 13, CIS published a blog under the headline “The Trump Deportation Plan: Easier Done than Said.” The article argues for a stricter version of E-Verify — which uses Social Security data to determine employment eligibility — called G-Verify, which would require employers to electronically submit the eligibility form to the Department of Homeland Security.

The blog acknowledges that these programs “would not capture unauthorized migrants who work ‘off the books’” — a common critique of E-Verify, which critics argue actually pushes immigrant workers into unregulated markets.

That’s where the bounties come in. CIS continues, “However, lawful employees, business competitors, customers, or even family members who are aware of this unlawful practice might be willing to report the employer’s criminal practice to DHS in return for a small (say $2,000) reward and a promise of confidentiality.”

In another blog — this time for the National Review — CIS Executive Director Mark Krikorian revived the idea of “self-deportation,” which is to say coercing undocumented people into leaving the country by making life miserable for them.

“Persuading illegal aliens to go home on their own saves the government time and money,” Krikorian wrote.

“And it’s also preferable for the illegal aliens themselves, allowing them to return on their own terms,” he continued, “They can settle their affairs, pack up their belongings, and go home for Christmas — and not come back.” After arguing that immigrants leave the country all the time, he suggested that one reason might be that “little Mario came home one day from P.S. 666 insisting on being called Maria.”

Krikorian has been joined in resurrecting this once-radical proposition by Heritage Foundation President — and Project 2025 evangelist — Kevin Roberts, who recently pushed it on The Vince Coglianese Show. While praising his colleague Tom Homan as a fantastic hire, Roberts argued that “such a big part of this is trying to inspire self-deportation.”

As a sign of how far contemporary politics have shifted toward the nativist right, it’s worth remembering that Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) was roundly excoriated for proposing “self-deportation” as a central plank of his immigration plan during the 2012 presidential race. He was denounced at the time by liberal magazines, mainstream outlets like the Washington Post editorial board, and conservatives including former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and a little magazine called the National Review.

In another blog published following Trump’s win, CIS argued that “the time may have come for President Biden or President-elect Trump to deploy the [Alien Enemies Act] against Iranian nationals residing in the U.S.” Per the author’s own description, invoking the act would allow “the president to summarily detain and remove nationals of enemy nations” — i.e., Iran. As the Brennan Center for Justice notes, the Alien Enemies Act “is best known for its role in Japanese internment, a shameful part of U.S. history for which Congress, presidents, and the courts have apologized.”

The Claremont Institute is a MAGA-aligned think tank that publishes the right-wing blog The American Mind. While the conservative authors featured on The American Mind may not necessarily speak for the institution, they offer a clear window into the Trump movement.

On November 8, The American Mind posted a blog headlined “Mr. President, Deputize Your Local Sheriffs.” The piece was written by Kyle Shideler of the Center for Security Policy, an SPLC-designated hate group.

“President Trump should look to sheriffs to fill U.S. Marshal roles,” Shideler argued, for the purpose of facilitating “the cross-deputization of local sheriffs’ deputies and police officers along the Southern border, which is needed to address prohibitions against state and local officials enforcing federal immigration law.”

“That manpower will be required if Trump is to meet his campaign promise of securing the border and expelling millions of illegal aliens,” he continued.

Shideler further suggested that “conservative organizations” could “identify local law enforcement leaders who support the Trump agenda” — adding that “those who have participated in the Claremont Institute’s Sheriffs Fellowship would be an excellent place to start.”

Jessica Pishko — author of a recent book about sheriffs and right-wing movements — reported on Claremont’s inaugural sheriff fellows program in 2022. She revealed that it “presented for the sheriffs two sets of people in America: those communities sheriffs should police as freely and brutally as they see fit, and those ‘real’ Americans who should be considered virtually above the law.”

As Pishko and others have noted, many of Claremont’s honorees adhere to the far-right ideology of the constitutional sheriffs movement, which holds that sheriffs “should be the ultimate law enforcement authority in the U.S.”

The Center for Renewing America is a MAGA-aligned think tank founded by Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist and top architect of Project 2025.

On November 8, CRA published a white paper titled “Primer: U.S. Deportations — A Longstanding & Normal Process” which attempts to normalize and sanitize an earlier mass deportation undertaking officially known as “Operation Wetback” (though CRA’s authors don’t use that racist slur).

The authors argue that “mass deportations are a normal part of the president’s toolbox.”

“For example, in 1954, the U.S. government conducted a campaign that resulted in the mass deportation of Mexican nationals—1,100,000 persons,” they continue.

Left unmentioned is the humanitarian catastrophe unleashed by the mass deportations. As Dara Lind wrote for Vox when Trump praised the Eisenhower-era mass deportations in 2015, immigrants were “deported en masse: by train, by truck, by plane, and by cargo ship.” She adds that a “congressional investigation described conditions on one cargo ship as a ‘penal hell ship’ and compared it to a slave ship on the Middle Passage.”

In one mass raid, 88 people died of “sun stroke as a result of a round-up that had taken place in 112-degree heat,” according to a definitive account by Mae Ngai.

And as Professors Louis Hyman and Natasha Iskander argue, Operation Wetback was largely a propaganda campaign that “enforced the idea that American citizens are white.”

Nevertheless, the 1954 operation has become a touchstone for the Trumpist right. As but one example, Stephen Miller recently cited the “Eisenhower model” as justification for the potential deployment of the U.S. military “​​in a large-scale deportation operation.” CRA’s anodyne description of the 1950s deportations shows how embedded this history has become in the MAGA movement.

Trump’s new administration and its partners in the conservative policy ecosystem are laying the groundwork for the most nativist, xenophobic government in decades. From Homan and Miller to the think tanks providing them scaffolding, every sign suggests that the Trump administration will terrorize, surveil, and deport immigrants and their communities in record numbers. And Project 2025 and its partners will almost certainly continue to provide a roadmap for the draconian crackdown.

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Project 2025 partners celebrate Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity

Written by Jack Wheatley, Jacina Hollins-Borges & Sophie Lawton

Published 07/02/24

Project 2025 partners are taking a victory lap after the Supreme Court’s July 1 decision in Trump v. United States, which ruled that “former President Donald Trump is entitled to immunity from federal prosecution for official actions he took while in office, a landmark decision at the height of an election season that further delays the start of his criminal trial in Washington, D.C.”

Project 2025 is a comprehensive transition plan to guide a potential second Trump administration with policy proposals and staffing recommendations led by right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation, which joined other members of the project’s advisory board in celebrating the ruling on presidential immunity as a win for Trump and a defeat for Democrats.

Last week, Project 2025 partners also praised the Supreme Court decision overturning Chevron deference in a ruling that will restrict federal agencies' regulatory abilities and make it easier for corporations to challenge environmental protections, climate action, and rules that protect workers or regulate drugs and financial practices, among other issues..

On former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts}: marked the decision as “vital,” and claimed, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution.” Real America’s Voice, *War Room*, [7/2/24]|

The American Center for Law and Justice}: posted, “BREAKING: In a major ruling, the Supreme Court has agreed with our amicus brief that Presidents are entitled to immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts in office.” Twitter/X, [7/1/24]|

Related

  1. ### Project 2025 partners join right-wing media and climate deniers to celebrate SCOTUS decision overturning Chevron deference

06/28/24

  1. ### Fox's chief political anchor interviewed the architect of Project 2025. Here are some of the details he failed to mention.

09/19/24

  1. ### Fox praises “pro-worker” Trump despite his anti-overtime record

09/13/24

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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/17/us/politics/trump-plans-2025.html

Donald J. Trump intends to bring independent regulatory agencies under direct presidential control.

Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025

The former president and his backers aim to strengthen the power of the White House and limit the independence of federal agencies.

Jonathan SwanCharlie Savage Maggie Haberman

By Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman

Published July 17, 2023

Updated July 18, 2023

Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.

Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.

Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.

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Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.

He wants to revive the practice of “impounding” funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn’t like — a tactic that lawmakers banned under President Richard Nixon.

He intends to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda. And he plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as “the sick political class that hates our country.”

“The president’s plan should be to fundamentally reorient the federal government in a way that hasn’t been done since F.D.R.’s New Deal,” said John McEntee, a former White House personnel chief who began Mr. Trump’s systematic attempt to sweep out officials deemed to be disloyal in 2020 and who is now involved in mapping out the new approach.

“Our current executive branch,” Mr. McEntee added, “was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. There is no way to make the existing structure function in a conservative manner. It’s not enough to get the personnel right. What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.”

Mr. Trump and his advisers are making no secret of their intentions — proclaiming them in rallies and on his campaign website, describing them in white papers and openly discussing them.

“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” saidRussell T. Vought,who ran the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump White House and now runs a policy organization, the Center for Renewing America.

The strategy in talking openly about such “paradigm-shifting ideas” before the election, Mr. Vought said, is to “plant a flag” — both to shift the debate and to later be able to claim a mandate. He said he was delighted to see few of Mr. Trump’s Republican primary rivals defend the norm of Justice Department independence after the former president openly attacked it.

A Divided Congress

[Under Scrutiny: A licensing agreement between Ford Motor and a major Chinese battery maker is facing questions by Republican lawmakers, who say the deal could make Ford reliant on a company with links to forced labor.

Air Travel: The House overwhelmingly passed bipartisan legislation to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration for the next half-decade, moving at a time of growing dysfunction and disruption in the system to make a number of changes that affect passengers.

Supreme Court Ethics Bill: The Senate Judiciary Committee approved legislation that would impose strict new ethics rules on the Supreme Court, moving over Republican objections to address revelations about justices receiving financial benefits from wealthy benefactors.

U.C. Berkeley: A House select committee is requesting more information about a partnership between the university and several Chinese entities that it said could help China gain access to cutting-edge research.]

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign, said in a statement that the former president has “laid out a bold and transparent agenda for his second term, something no other candidate has done.” He added, “Voters will know exactly how President Trump will supercharge the economy, bring down inflation, secure the border, protect communities and eradicate the deep state that works against Americans once and for all.”

The two driving forces of this effort to reshape the executive branch are Mr. Trump’s own campaign policy shop and a well-funded network of conservative groups, many of which are populated by former senior Trump administration officials who would most likely play key roles in any second term.

Mr. Vought and Mr. McEntee are involved in Project 2025, a $22 million presidential transition operation that is preparing policies, personnel lists and transition plans to recommend to any Republican who may win the 2024 election. The transition project, the scale of which is unprecedented in conservative politics, is led by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has shaped the personnel and policies of Republican administrations since the Reagan presidency.

That work at Heritage dovetails with plans on the Trump campaign website to expand presidential power that were drafted primarily by two of Mr. Trump’s advisers, Vincent Haley and Ross Worthington, with input from other advisers, including Stephen Miller, the architect of the former president’s hard-line immigration agenda.

Some elements of the plans had been floated when Mr. Trump was in office but were impeded by internal concerns that they would be unworkable and could lead to setbacks. And for some veterans of Mr. Trump’s turbulent White House who came to question his fitness for leadership, the prospect of removing guardrails and centralizing even greater power over government directly in his hands sounded like a recipe for mayhem.

“It would be chaotic,” said John F. Kelly, Mr. Trump’s second White House chief of staff. “It just simply would be chaotic, because he’d continually be trying to exceed his authority but the sycophants would go along with it. It would be a nonstop gunfight with the Congress and the courts.”

The agenda being pursued has deep roots in the decades-long effort by conservative legal thinkers to undercut what has become known as the administrative state — agencies that enact regulations aimed at keeping the air and water clean and food, drugs and consumer products safe, but that cut into business profits.

Its legal underpinning is a maximalist version of the so-called unitary executive theory.

The legal theory rejects the idea that the government is composed of three separate branches with overlapping powers to check and balance each other. Instead, the theory’s adherents argue that Article 2 of the Constitution gives the president complete control of the executive branch, so Congress cannot empower agency heads to make decisions or restrict the president’s ability to fire them. Reagan administration lawyers developed the theory as they sought to advance a deregulatory agenda.

“The notion of independent federal agencies or federal employees who don’t answer to the president violates the very foundation of our democratic republic,” said Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, adding that the contributors to Project 2025 are committed to “dismantling this rogue administrative state.”

Personal power has always been a driving force for Mr. Trump. He often gestures toward it in a more simplistic manner, such as in 2019, when he declared to a cheering crowd, “I have an Article 2, where I have the right todo whatever I wantas president.”

Mr. Trump made the remark in reference to his claimed ability to directly fire Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in the Russia inquiry, which primed his hostility toward law enforcement and intelligence agencies. He also tried to get a subordinate to have Mr. Mueller ousted, but was defied.

Early in Mr. Trump’s presidency, his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, promised a “deconstruction of the administrative state.”But Mr. Trump installed people in other key roles who ended up telling him that more radical ideas were unworkable or illegal. In the final year of his presidency, he told aides he was fed up with being constrained by subordinates.

Now, Mr. Trump is laying out a far more expansive vision of power in any second term. And, in contrast with his disorganized transition after his surprise 2016 victory, he now benefits from a well-funded policymaking infrastructure, led by former officials who did not break with him after his attempts to overturn the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

One idea the people around Mr. Trump have developed centers on bringing independent agencies under his thumb.

Congress created these specialized technocratic agencies inside the executive branch and delegated to them some of its power to make rules for society. But it did so on the condition that it was not simply handing off that power to presidents to wield like kings — putting commissioners atop them whom presidents appoint but generally cannot fire before their terms end, while using its control of their budgets to keep them partly accountable to lawmakers as well. (Agency actions are also subject to court review.)

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Presidents of both parties have chafed at the agencies’ independence. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal created many of them, endorsed a proposal in 1937 to fold them all into cabinet departments under his control, but Congress did not enact it.

Later presidents sought to impose greater control over nonindependent agencies Congress created, like the Environmental Protection Agency, which is run by an administrator whom a president can remove at will. For example, President Ronald Reagan issued executive orders requiring nonindependent agencies to submit proposed regulations to the White House for review. But overall, presidents have largely left the independent agencies alone.

Mr. Trump’s allies are preparing to change that, drafting an executive order requiring independent agencies to submit actions to the White House for review.Mr. Trump endorsed the idea on his campaign website, vowing to bring them “under presidential authority.”

Such an order was drafted in Mr. Trump’s first term — and blessed by the Justice Department — but never issued amid internal concerns. Some of the concerns were over how to carry out reviews for agencies that are headed by multiple commissioners and subject to administrative procedures and open-meetings laws, as well as over how the market would react if the order chipped away at the Federal Reserve’s independence, people familiar with the matter said.

The former president views the civil service as a den of “deep staters” who were trying to thwart him at every turn in the White House.Credit...John Tully for The New York Times

The Federal Reserve was ultimately exempted in the draft executive order, but Mr. Trump did not sign it before his presidency ended. If Mr. Trump and his allies get another shot at power, the independence of the Federal Reserve — an institution Mr. Trump publicly railed at as president — could be up for debate. Notably, the Trump campaign website’s discussion of bringing independent agencies under presidential control is silent on whether that includes the Fed.

Asked whether presidents should be able to order interest rates lowered before elections, even if experts think that would hurt the long-term health of the economy, Mr. Vought said that would have to be worked out with Congress. But “at the bare minimum,” he said, the Federal Reserve’s regulatory functions should be subject to White House review.

“It’s very hard to square the Fed’s independence with the Constitution,” Mr. Vought said.

Other former Trump administration officials involved in the planning said there would also probably be a legal challenge to the limits on a president’s power to fire heads of independent agencies. Mr. Trump could remove an agency head, teeing up the question for the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court in 1935 and 1988 upheld the power of Congress to shield some executive branch officials from being fired without cause. But after justices appointed by Republicans since Reagan took control, it has started to erode those precedents.

Peter L. Strauss, professor emeritus of law at Columbia University and a critic of the strong version of the unitary executive theory, argued that it is constitutional and desirable for Congress, in creating and empowering an agency to perform some task, to also include some checks on the president’s control over officials “because we don’t want autocracy” and to prevent abuses.

“The regrettable fact is that the judiciary at the moment seems inclined to recognize that the president does have this kind of authority,” he said. “They are clawing away agency independence in ways that I find quite unfortunate and disrespectful of congressional choice.”

Mr. Trump has also vowed to impound funds, or refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress. After Nixon used the practice to aggressively block agency spending he was opposed to, on water pollution control, housing construction and other issues, Congress banned the tactic.

On his campaign website, Mr. Trump declared that presidents have a constitutional right to impound funds and said he would restore the practice — though he acknowledged it could result in a legal battle.

Mr. Trump and his allies also want to transform the civil service — government employees who are supposed to be nonpartisan professionals and experts with protections against being fired for political reasons.

The former president views the civil service as a den of “deep staters” who were trying to thwart him at every turn, including by raising legal or pragmatic objections to his immigration policies, among many other examples. Toward the end of his term, his aides drafted an executive order, “CreatingSchedule F in the Excepted Service,” that removed employment protections from career officials whose jobs were deemed linked to policymaking.

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Mr. Trump signed the order, which became known as Schedule F, near the end of his presidency, but President Biden rescinded it. Mr. Trump has vowed to immediately reinstitute it in a second term.

Critics say he could use it for a partisan purge. But James Sherk, a former Trump administration official who came up with the idea and now works at the America First Policy Institute — a think tank stocked heavily with former Trump officials — argued it would only be used against poor performers and people who actively impeded the elected president’s agenda.

“Schedule F expressly forbids hiring or firing based on political loyalty,” Mr. Sherk said. “Schedule F employees would keep their jobs if they served effectively and impartially.”

Mr. Trump himself has characterized his intentions rather differently — promising on his campaign website to “find and remove the radicals who have infiltrated the federal Department of Education” and listing a litany of targets at a rally last month.

“We will demolish the deep state,” Mr. Trump said at the rally in Michigan. “We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive outthe globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. And we will throw off thesick political class that hates our country.”

[Jonathan Swan is a political reporter who focuses on campaigns and Congress. As a reporter for Axios, he won an Emmy Award for his 2020 interview of then-President Donald J. Trump, and the White House Correspondents’ Association’s Aldo Beckman Award for “overall excellence in White House coverage” in 2022. More about Jonathan Swan

Charlie Savage is a Washington-based national security and legal policy correspondent. A recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, he previously worked at The Boston Globe and The Miami Herald. His most recent book is “Power Wars: The Relentless Rise of Presidential Authority and Secrecy.” More about Charlie Savage

Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent and the author of “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.” She was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on President Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia. More about Maggie Haberman

A version of this article appears in print on July 17, 2023, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump and Allies Seeking Vast Increase of His Power. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/15/us/politics/trump-indictment-justice-department.html?smid=tw-share

Jeffrey Clark,Former DOJ Official Implicated in Attempts to Overturn 2020 Election, Now Has Put Forward Maximalist ...

Quite the theory, and quite ironic from the team that insists the Biden DOJ has politicized the indictment of trump. Share this:.

.1 day ago

The Radical Strategy Behind Trump’s Promise to ‘Go After’ Biden

Conservatives with close ties to Donald J. Trump are laying out a “paradigm-shifting” legal rationale to erase the Justice Department’s independence from the president.

Donald Trump stands on a stage and points. He is in front of large white columns outside his golf club and an American flag is on the stage.

“I will totally obliterate the Deep State,” Donald Trump said on Tuesday evening at an event at his club in Bedminster, N.J., hours after his arraignment on federal charges.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

By Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman

June 15, 2023

When Donald J. Trump responded to his latest indictment by promising to appoint a special prosecutor if he’s re-elected to “go after” President Biden and his family, he signaled that a second Trump term would fully jettison the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence.

“I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” Mr. Trump said at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., on Tuesday night after his arraignment earlier that day in Miami. “I will totally obliterate the Deep State.”

Mr. Trump’s message was that the Justice Department charged him only because he is Mr. Biden’s political opponent, so he would invert that supposed politicization. In reality, under Attorney General Merrick Garland, two Trump-appointed prosecutors are already investigating Mr. Biden’s handling of classified documents and the financial dealings of his son, Hunter.

But by suggesting the current prosecutors investigating the Bidens were not “real,” Mr. Trump appeared to be promising his supporters that he would appoint an ally who would bring charges against his political enemies regardless of the facts.

The naked politics infusing Mr. Trump’s headline-generating threat underscored something significant. In his first term, Mr. Trump gradually ramped up pressure on the Justice Department, eroding its traditional independence from White House political control. He is now unabashedly saying he will throw that effort into overdrive if he returns to power.

Mr. Trump’s promise fits into a larger movement on the right to gut the F.B.I., overhaul a Justice Department conservatives claim has been “weaponized” against them and abandon the norm — which many Republicans view as a facade — that the department should operate independently from the president.

Two of the most important figures in this effort work at the same Washington-based organization, theCenter for Renewing America: Jeffrey B. Clark and Russell T. Vought. During the Trump presidency, Mr. Vought served as the director of the Office of Management and Budget. Mr. Clark, who oversaw the Justice Department’s civil and environmental divisions, was the only senior official at the department who tried to help Mr. Trump overturn the 2020 election.

Jeffrey B. Clark was the only senior official in the Justice Department who tried to help Mr. Trump overturn the 2020 election.

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Along with Mr. Clark, Russell T. Vought argues that presidents should treat the Justice Department no differently than any other cabinet agency.

Mr. Trump wanted to make Mr. Clark attorney general during his final days in office but stopped after the senior leadership of the Justice Department threatened to resign en masse. Mr. Clark is now a figure in one of the Justice Department’s investigations into Mr. Trump’s attempts to stay in power.

Mr. Clark and Mr. Vought are promoting a legal rationale that would fundamentally change the way presidents interact with the Justice Department. They argue that U.S. presidents should not keep federal law enforcement at arm’s length but instead should treat the Justice Department no differently than any other cabinet agency. They are condemning Mr. Biden and Democrats for what they claim is the politicization of the justice system, but at the same time pushing an intellectual framework that a future Republican president might use to justify directing individual law enforcement investigations.

Mr. Clark, who is a favorite of Mr. Trump’s and is likely to be in contention for a senior Justice Department position if Mr. Trump wins re-election in 2024, wrote a constitutional analysis, titled “The U.S. Justice Department is not independent,” that will most likely serve as a blueprint for a second Trump administration.

Like other conservatives, Mr. Clark adheres to the so-called unitary executive theory, which holds that the president of the United States has the power to directly control the entire federal bureaucracy and Congress cannot fracture that control by giving some officials independent decision-making authority.

There are debates among conservatives about how far to push that doctrine — and whether some agencies should be allowed to operate independently — but Mr. Clark takes a maximalist view. Mr. Trump does, too, though he’s never been caught reading the Federalist Papers.

In statements to The New York Times, both Mr. Clark and Mr. Vought leaned into their battle against the Justice Department, with Mr. Clark framing it as a fight over the survival of America itself.

Conservatives have been attacking President Biden and the Justice Department, claiming it has been “weaponized.”Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

“Biden and D.O.J. are baying for Trump’s blood so they can put fear into America,” Mr. Clark wrote in his statement. “The Constitution and our Article IV ‘Republican Form of Government’ cannot survive like this.”

Mr. Vought wrote in his statement that the Justice Department was “ground zero for the weaponization of the government against the American people.” He added, “Conservatives are waking up to the fact that federal law enforcement is weaponized against them and as a result are embracing paradigm-shifting policies to reverse that trend.”

Mr. Trump often exploited gaps between what the rules technically allow and the norms of self-restraint that guided past presidents of both parties. In 2021, House Democrats passed the Protecting Our Democracy Act, a legislative package intended to codify numerous previous norms as law, including requiring the Justice Department to give Congress logs of its contacts with White House officials. But Republicans portrayed the bill as an attack on Mr. Trump and it died in the Senate.

The modern era for the Justice Department traces back to the Watergate scandal and the period of government reforms that followed President Richard M. Nixon’s abuses. The norm took root that the president can set broad policies for the Justice Department — directing it to put greater resources and emphasis on particular types of crimes or adopting certain positions before the Supreme Court — but should not get involved in specific criminal case decisions absent extraordinary circumstances, such as if a case has foreign policy implications.

Since then, it has become routine at confirmation hearings for attorney general nominees to have senators elicit promises that they will resist any effort by the president to politicize law enforcement by intruding on matters of prosecutorial judgment and discretion.

As the Republican Party has morphed in response to Mr. Trump’s influence, his attacks on federal law enforcement — which trace back to the early Russia investigation in 2017, the backlash to his firing of then-F.B.I. director James B. Comey Jr. and the appointment of Robert S. Mueller III as special counsel — have become enmeshed in the ideology of his supporters.

Mr. Trump’s top rival for the Republican nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, also rejects the norm that the Justice Department should be independent.

Gov. Ron DeSantis has likewise argued that the Justice Department should be an extension of the executive branch.

“Republican presidents have accepted the canard that the D.O.J. and F.B.I. are — quote — ‘independent,’” Mr. DeSantis said in May on Fox News. “They are not independent agencies. They are part of the executive branch. They answer to the elected president of the United States.”

Several other Republican candidates acknowledged that Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents — as outlined in the indictment prepared by the special counsel, Jack Smith, and his team — was a serious problem. But even these candidates — including Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, and former Vice President Mike Pence — have also accused the Justice Department of being overly politicized and meting out unequal justice.

The most powerful conservative think tanks are working on plans that would go far beyond “reforming” the F.B.I., even though its Senate-confirmed directors in the modern era have all been Republicans. They want to rip it up and start again.

“The F.B.I. has become a political weapon for the ruling elite rather than an impartial, law-enforcement agency,” said Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, a mainstay of the conservative movement since the Reagan years. He added, “Small-ball reforms that increase accountability within the F.B.I. fail to meet the moment. The F.B.I. must be rebuilt from the ground up — reforming it in its current state is impossible.”

Conservative media channels and social media influencers have been hammering the F.B.I. and the Justice Department for months since the F.B.I. search of Mar-a-Lago, following a playbook they honed while defending Mr. Trump during the investigation into whether his campaign conspired with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election.

Senator Tim Scott is among the other Republican presidential candidates who say the Justice Department is politicized.Credit...Travis Dove for The New York Times

On its most-watched nighttime programs, Fox News has been all-in on attacks against the Justice Department, including the accusation, presented without evidence, that Mr. Biden had directed the prosecution of Mr. Trump. As the former president addressed his supporters on Tuesday night at his Bedminster club, Fox News displayed a split screen — Mr. Trump on the right and Mr. Biden on the left. The chyron on the bottom of the screen read: “Wannabe dictator speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested.”

As president, Mr. Trump saw his attorney general as simply another one of his personal lawyers. He was infuriated when his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from the Russia investigation — and then refused to reverse that decision to shut down the case.

After firing Mr. Sessions, Mr. Trump believed he had found someone who would do his bidding in William P. Barr, who had been in the role during George H.W. Bush’s presidency. Mr. Barr had an expansive view of a president’s constitutionally prescribed powers, and shared Mr. Trump’s critical views of the origins of the Russia investigation.

Under Mr. Barr, the Justice Department overruled career prosecutors’ recommendations on the length of a sentence for Mr. Trump’s longest-serving political adviser, Roger J. Stone Jr., and sought to shut down a case against Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who had already pleaded guilty. Both cases stemmed from the Russia investigation.

But when Mr. Trump wanted to use the Justice Department to stay in power after he lost the election, he grew enraged when Mr. Barr refused to comply. Mr. Barr ultimately resigned in late 2020.

Jonathan Swan is a political reporter who focuses on campaigns and Congress. As a reporter for Axios, he won an Emmy Award for his 2020 interview of then-President Donald J. Trump, and the White House Correspondents’ Association’s Aldo Beckman Award for “overall excellence in White House coverage” in 2022. @jonathanvswan

Charlie Savage is a Washington-based national security and legal policy correspondent. A recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, he previously worked at The Boston Globe and The Miami Herald. His most recent book is “Power Wars: The Relentless Rise of Presidential Authority and Secrecy.” @charlie_savage • Facebook

Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent and the author of “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.” She was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on President Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia. @maggieNYT

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https://www.mediamatters.org/critical-race-theory/anti-civil-rights-activist-chris-rufo-has-extensive-ties-christian-nationalist

no vid twt

anti-civil rights activist Christopher Rufo has extensive ties to a leading MAGA-aligned think tank led by a Christian nationalist that’s at the heart of several high-profile political battles in Washington, D.C. The think tank, the Center for Renewing America, was founded by Russ Vought, who has called for an “army” of believers with a “biblical worldview” to transform the federal bureaucracy into an ideological weapon to further his hard-right agenda. Vought and Rufo are both conservative media mainstays, and each appears frequently on Fox News and right-wing streaming shows.

Rufo’s ties to CRA are not hidden, but nor are they particularly well-known outside of the cloistered bubble of conservative activism. Although Rufo is primarily known for his rhetorical attacks on critical race theory (which he has admitted he knows nothing about) and LGBTQ people, he shares CRA’s goal of taking over existing institutions and remaking them as supposed paragons of conservatism.

That desire has been most clearly realized in Rufo’s hostile takeover of New College of Florida, facilitated by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ decision to appoint him and several other hard-liners to the school’s board of trustees. Rufo and DeSantis’ scheme bears significant resemblance to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s remaking of Central European University in Budapest, one of many points of overlap between U.S. conservatives and their European counterparts. Rufo is currently spending a month in Hungary, according to his Substack newsletter. 

Vought and CRA have been at the forefront of advocating for a policy known as Schedule F,a Trump-era scheme that allowed the administration to sidestep job protections for non-political career staffers. In an appearance on The Charlie Kirk Show, Vought and Kirk promoted the idea of implementing “ideological purity tests” for federal civil servants, and Vought estimated that he would need to fire around 10 percent of the workforce at federal agencies and departments. Vought has also argued the House of Representatives should adopt new rules to allow the chamber to target and possibly remove individual civil servants.

CRA occupies a divided position in the conservative political landscape at the moment, seemingly straddling the line between the Trump and DeSantis camps. Vought, the organization’s leader, is a frequent guest on Steve Bannon’s War Room, which has taken a pro-Trump, anti-DeSantis editorial position. The think tank more broadly is often described as being aligned with Trump as well. But Rufo is closely associated with DeSantis, for now at least, due to his appointment to the board at New College. And CRA senior fellow Ken Cuccinelli recently launched a pro-DeSantis PAC, urging the governor to run for president.

Probably the most important link between Rufo and Vought came during the Trump administration. When Rufo was able to transform critical race theory from a relatively obscure legal discipline into a right-wing bogeyman — thanks in large part to an appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight— it was Vought, then the head of the Office of Management and Budget, who was tasked with carrying out Trump’s order to remove any mention of CRT from federal trainings. Since then, their affinity appears to have grown.

Rufo reportedly recently held a private summit at the Santa Monica, California, outpost of The Manhattan Institute, where he is a senior fellow.The gathering’s focus was “planning for the next White House,” a priority Rufo shares with CRA. In a short video summarizing his thoughts on the event, Rufo praised Vought’s behind-the-scenes efforts in Congress’ ongoing battle over the federal budgetas an opportunity to inject far-right values into final legislation.

in the video, Rufo argued that earlier generations of conservatives tried to win budgeting arguments using dry facts and figures, but that that’s changing now.

“Some people, most notably Russ Vought, who is President Trump’s former OMB director, have pioneered a new approach to talking about the budget that I think has enormous potential,” Rufo said. “Russ talks about the ‘woke and weaponized bureaucracy.’ He talks about defunding $150 billion that is currently being spent to advance left-wing priorities that are antithetical to the values of the majority of citizens.”

“He’s saying, ‘You know what? We want to defund thewoke bureaucrats and DEI commissars who are putting critical race theory in all of the agencies of the government,’” Rufo added. The official CRA Twitter account posted Rufo’s video, and Vought replied, thanking Rufo for the shout-out.   

In the YouTube description of the video, Rufo praisesWade Miller, CRA’s executive director, who apparently attended the private summit. Miller, a former aide to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), describes himself as anti-antiracism in his Twitter bio. He recently posted a racist tweet claiming, without evidence, that Stanford medical school awarded postings to new surgery applicants based on their race and ethnicity, and that those selected probably weren’t the most qualified. [twt]

rufo also has ties to CRA visiting fellow Michael Young, who is prominent on right-wing Twitter under the handle @wokal_distance, primarily for invoking 1990s nostalgia toward reactionaryends. Rufo worked with Young and CRA on his anti-LGBTQ pamphlet “A Parent’s Guide to Radical Gender Theory.” The two interact regularly on Twitter, praising each other’s acumen and execution.

Whether CRA can keep one foot in on either side of the Trump dividing line without drawing the former president’s ire is an open question, as is the impact that DeSantis’falling poll numbers could have on Rufo’s brand and influence. For now, Rufo and Vought are trying to find ways to find a broader audience for their cruel, anti-civil rights proposals, and they’re willing to burn down anything that stands in their way.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/social-security/house-gop-reportedly-relying-christian-nationalist-and-right-wing-media-darling

mma 3 23

house budget overdue b/c benghazi fuckery?

right-wing media mainstay and former Trump official Russ Vought is advising a House Republican charge to drastically reduce federal aid for the working class and those in poverty, with an eye toward expanding the cuts to include universal programs — like Medicare and Social Security — in the future.

From a New York Times report:

After decades of futile efforts to cut the enormous costs of Social Security and Medicare, Republicans have pledged not to touch the biggest entitlement programs, whose spending grows automatically and are on an unsustainable trajectory as more Americans reach retirement age. Coupled with their promise not to raise taxes, that leaves the G.O.P. to consider a slash-and-burn approach to a slew of federal programs and agencies whose budgets are controlled by Congress.

As they meet privately to develop their plan, Republicans say they are relying heavily on a budget outline developed by Russell T. Vought, the former Trump administration budget director who now leads the far-right Center for Renewing America.

Vought, a Christian nationalist, heads the right-wing Center for Renewing America, a think tank closely aligned with former President Donald Trump and staffed with several officials from his administration. In addition to Vought, who served as head of the Office of Management and Budget, CRA’s staff also includes coup plotter Jeffrey Clark, former Pentagon official Kash Patel, and former Department of Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli.

Speaking with the Times, Vought argued conservatives should attempt to dismantle targeted programs before setting their sights on larger entitlement spending. “[A] work requirement food stamp program is a lot easier to sellthan premium support,” Vought told the Times, referencing a proposed change that would turn Medicare into a voucher system.

In an interview on Fox News a day before the Times piece came out, Vought made it clear that the larger goal was to go after Social Security and Medicare down the line. “The House Republicans are not making Social Security and Medicare a fight on this debt limit,” Vought said.

“The budget that I put forward, that they’re looking at, uses Medicaid and other easier-to-go entitlements, mandatory programs, and discretionary spending to get to balance in 10,” Vought said, referring to his goal of balancing the budget in 10 years.

He then returned to Social Security and Medicare. “We have to reform those programs over time, but I think if you care about those programs and you're a budget cutter the most important thing is to make progress on what you can cut in the appropriations process,” Vought continued. “The bureaucracy that's aimed against your people and then to go after the social safety net that has become a benefit hammock." [fox vid]

in contrast to the conservative approach, the Biden administration has proposed to increase taxes on income over $400,000 to address Medicare’s budget.

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon referenced Vought when he demanded “massive cuts” to federal programs, including Medicaid, last week at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Bannon regularly hosts Vought on his War Room podcast, and Vought is a common presence on Fox Business and occasionally on Fox News.. When Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Lauren Boebert (R-CO), and others on the far-right flank of the GOP House caucus opposed Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) speakership bid earlier this year, they turned to Vought for guidance. His think tank’s budget has become something of a north star for the House MAGA caucus, and he has made clear that he wants to rid the federal government of civil servants he and his supporters deem insufficiently committed to their far-right agenda.

Now, as Congress and the White House prepare for what is likely to be a long and painstaking budgetary process, Vought and the House Republicans who have aligned themselves with him are looking to eviscerate what little social safety net spending still exists in the United States. From the Times:

The outline includes a 45 percent cut to foreign aid; adding work requirements for food stamp and Medicaid beneficiaries; a 43 percent cut to housing programs, including phasing out the Section 8 program that pays a portion of monthly rent costs for low-income people; cutting the F.B.I.’s counterintelligence budget by nearly half; and eliminating Obamacare expansions to Medicaid to save tens of billions of dollars.

Nearly 40 states have accepted federal funding for expansion under the Affordable Care Act, providing health care coverage for an estimated 12 million individuals living near or below the poverty line.

Despite Vought’s vicious attacks on the working class, he is often presented in mainstream and conservative media as a populist figure. Conservative Washington Post columnist Henry Olsen wrote that Vought was pushing ideas that “animate the new populist conservatism.” Bloomberg described Vought’s think tank as one of the “organizations designed to push [Trump’s] populist agenda.” The conservative Daily Caller described CRA as “a right-populist group Vought helms.”

In a blog post introducing his think tank, Vought decried, in typically pompous prose, the “decades-long plundering of the American economy by multinational corporationseager to claim the benefits of American law while disclaiming all responsibility to provide remunerative employment to American workers.”

He added that the Center for Renewing America would focus on “challenging the policy architecture that has hollowed out productive work for America’s working class and transferred the gains of the American economy to the service-sector elites.”

The reality is that Vought is selling the same basic framework of anti-poor, anti-working class policies championed by Republicans for decades. Whatever conservative orthodoxies Trumpism may have broken with, right-wing populism is an empty set of ideas. Vought has nothing to offer to address the material needs of the working class; to the contrary, he is their class enemy and antagonist.

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sched fneutralized public sector unions?  note the bill does the opposite of what roy says it does; also thugswarm of action BS orgs c4??

an 7 22

Rep. Chip Roy's introduction Friday of a bill to make federal bureaucratic personnel at-will employees further stoked fears that marginalized workers will suffer discriminatory firings under a future Republican administration or even GOP-controlled Congress.

The Public Service Reform Act "will empower federal agencies to swiftly address misconduct and remove underperforming or ill-willed employees, creating a federal workforce focused on service to the American people," Roy (R-Texas) said in a statement.

The bill "would make all federal bureaucrats at-will employees—just like private sector workers—and claw back the inordinate protections some federal employees grossly abuse," he added.

The proposed legislation comes a week after reports that aides to former President Donald Trump are working to revive a plan to reclassify federal civil service personnel who worked under both Democratic and Republican administrations as at-will workers subject to easier termination.

Don Kettl, professor emeritus and former dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, told Government Executive that "this is obviously a huge and major change, an effort to gear up a major assault on the federal employment system" that "is being helped and aided unquestionably by a set of groups like America First Works, Heritage Action for America, FreedomWorks, and Citizens for Renewing America, who have endorsed the bill."

"Much of the debate has largely been about if Trump is reelected," he added, "but what this makes clear is the efforts to try to change the civil service aren't just Trump necessarily, and if Republicans take control of Congress following the midterms, this may very well go from idea to specific action."

According to Government Executive:

Although the bill stands nearly zero chance of passing in the current Congress, experts say that it, combined with recent news that conservative political operatives with Trump's endorsement have devised plans to revive Schedule F, a proposal to strip the civil service protections from tens of thousands of federal employees in "policy-related" positions, indicates the civil service system as we have known it for the last 150 years will be under attack under the next Republican administration.

Although Roy says his bill "will provide justice to federal employees who are victims of discrimination or whistleblower retaliation," Kettl warned that the measure "dramatically limits the amount of whistleblowing activity that's possible," noting that "it creates a disincentive to blow the whistle because your retirement benefits could be reduced."

"When you put it together," he added, "it's a very big deal" and "would dramatically change the incentives for individuals who are being dismissed because of whistleblowing."

Author and transgender activist Brynn Tannehill worries that, should at-will employment become reality, "a purge of trans people from federal service" would follow a return of Trump or another Republican president to the White House.

Commenting on the mass firingof progressive staffers by San Francisco's new tougher-on-crime district attorney following Chesa Boudin's recall, socialist organizer Julian LaRosa recently argued for a codified employment termination standard similar to the one realized in the limited laws that labor activists led by Local 32BJ of theService Employees International Unionhelped enactin Philadelphia and New York.

"Can we just get universal just cause in the workplace already?" he asked.

Testifying before New York City Council members in support of that city's 2021 just-cause law, former Chipotle worker Melanie Walker said she was suddenly fired by her manager one day for not smiling, even though there were no customers in the store.

"Everyone who's working needs to have some type of stability in your life," she said. "You should be able to go to work without thinking you have to be on eggshells all day, thinking that you can be fired at any moment for any cause."

"I'm loyal to you as a worker and you should be loyal to me," Walker added. "People still have to feed their families."

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9 22 MMA  https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-and-christian-nationalist-russ-vought-promote-ideological-purity-tests

Christian nationalist Russ Vought recently appeared on Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk’s radio show to discuss plans to purge at least 10% of federal career staffers under a new Trump administration. Vought described that portion of the federal workforce as “the roots of the problem” that prevented former President Donald Trump from fully implementing his agenda. During the interview, Kirk suggested that the next Republican administration subject civil servants to “ideological purity tests.”

Vought ran the powerful Office of Management and Budget under Trump and now heads up a right-wing think tank called the Center for Renewing America, whose mission is to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God.”While at OMB, Vought helped develop a policy called “**Schedule F**” as a tool that would allow a new conservative administration to circumvent job protections typically enjoyed by federal workers who aren’t politically appointed. 

Speaking on the September 23 edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, Vought claimed to have reclassified 90% of the workers in his own office under that job category

CitationFrom the September 23, 2022 edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble

“Schedule F is an authority that we discovered and developed at the end of the Trump administration to give the president the ability to reclassify career civil servants, who normally have permanency within the bureaucracy, to turn them into essentially at-will employees,” Vought told Kirk.

When asked by Kirk how many career employees he’d like to potentially sack using this authority, Vought set the floor at 10% of current workers, but suggested that he considers as much as 80% of the federal workforce to be ideological opponents.

“I would say that within my agency, we had, you know, 80% of it was left-leaning,” Vought said. “Their paradigms were all rooted in this permanent class, ruling class that defines the milieu of Washington, D.C.”

“And you can reason and work with that crowd, but there is about a 10% of activists that are animated by the wokeism, the anti-racist movement, to be able to come into these agencies and they'rejust activists,” Vought added.

Vought then told Kirk that someone in the human resources department at OMB described themselves and their colleagues as “committed anti-racists.”

Kirk responded by calling that person the leader of “a sleeper cell of a woke communist ideology who's just right there within our federal government.”

“You're going to have to figure out how to solve that, I don’t know,” Kirk continued. “But ideological purity tests are an interesting approach, but let's break up the federal government first and then we'll go from there.”

In July, Axios reported on discussions Trump allies were having about staffing their next administration, with the Schedule F being central to the framework. Vought reportedly has been a leader in these efforts: As Media Matters reported a week prior to Axios’ story, Vought stated publicly that he wants to build an “army” of hard-right activists with “Biblical worldview” to run the federal agencies that he can’t outright destroy. He’s been very clear that the goal is to get “ideologically committed individuals up and down the agencies,” and he’s been similarly clear that Schedule F is the way to do it.

Right-wing propagandist Christopher Rufo – known for launching bad-faith attacks on critical race theory and targeting children’s hospitals that provide care to trans youth – has pushed for a similar course of action.

“The idea is to centralize ideological control over the federal agencies in the White House and create a team at the Office of Management and Budget to enforce it,” Rufo said in an interview with conservative website IM-1776 in July.

In furtherance of those shared goals, Vought has attempted to turn the Center for Renewing America into a shadow government-in-waiting for Trump or another conservative president. In June, Vought brought on Jeffrey Clark, a former Department of Justice environmental lawyer and Trump’s top coup architect, as senior fellow at CRA. Kash Patel, another key figure in Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 election, is a CRA senior fellow as well. 

In the recent interview with Kirk, Vought expressed a common regret among former Trump officials that the administration wasted precious time in its first years adjusting to the steep learning curve of running the government.

“My hope is that we don’t have to do that again because we're laying the groundwork now,” Vought said, later adding, “We want to make sure that can never happen again and make sure that from day one, we can ensure that the agenda is being done.”

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mma 7 22

over the last several years, the United States has seen a dramatic rise in Christian nationalism, a loosely defined ideology that fuses patriarchy, xenophobia, and pretextual economic populism with an overtly biblical foundation and a deep distrust of democracy. This phenomenon has manifested in many ways, but one of the organizations driving the trend is a far-right think tank called the Center for Renewing America. 

Several former Trump administration officials are associated with the group, including its president, Russ Vought, who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump. Vought led the administration’s efforts to demonize critical race theory, including removing anti-racism training from federal agencies. He is a regular guest on Steve Bannon’s podcast War Room: Pandemic and on Fox News. His organization is one of several far-right groups under the umbrella of the Conservative Partnership Institute, whose top officials include former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows and right-wing legal activist Cleta Mitchell.Both Meadows and Mitchell were intimately involved in Trump’s attempted insurrection, as were at least 18 other people associated with CPI, including CRA senior fellow Kash Patel,  former Trump Pentagon official.  

Perhaps the most significant of Trump’s top coup allies is CRA senior fellow Jeffrey Clark,a former environmental lawyer at the Department of Justice who was hired by the think tank in June. About three weeks later, Clark was targeted in a raid by federal law enforcement. Little is publicly known about the investigation into Clark, but it may revolve around his proposal “to send a letter to state officials in Georgia falsely stating that the department had evidence that could lead Georgia to rescind its certification of Mr. Biden’s victory in that key swing state,” according to The New York Times.

CRA works on an array of disparate, seemingly unrelated issues. In addition to CRA-linked individuals’ considerable efforts to justify the January 6 insurrection, the organization has sown doubt about future “election integrity.” Vought has remained at the heart of the anti-critical race theory push even after he left OMB. He is virulently anti-trans, calling trans identity a “contagion” in a 2021 podcast, and CRA has supported anti-trans legislation and opposed laws that would ban discrimination based on sexual and gender identity. Senior fellow and immigration restrictionistKen Cuccinelli and Vought successfully lobbied counties in Texas to declare that they were under “invasion” by migrants. CRA is also an active participant in the conservative legal community, as exemplified by its **senior fellow**Mark Paoletta,who prepared Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas for their confirmation hearings. Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Vought celebrated Paoletta’s central role in the court’s rightward shift. 

What unites these issues is what Vought refers to as a “biblical worldview,” a concept that has long been prevalent on the religious right and refers to an all-encompassing ideology derived from a conservative interpretation of the Bible. Although Vought eschews the aesthetics of some of the street-fighting Christian fascists who terrorized Pride events in June, he overtly believes the United States should be a Christian nation. CRA’s mission is to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God.” Vought is signatory to a national conservative statement affirming that “the Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities.” Most revealingly, in 2021 Vought wrote an opinion piece for Newsweek with the headline: “Is There Anything Actually Wrong With 'Christian Nationalism?'

Vought argues that, no, there’s nothing wrong with Christian nationalism, so long as it’s defined in a circumscribed, non-threatening way.

“Once stripped of its superimposed liberal scar tissue, ‘Christian nationalism’ is actually a rather benign and useful description for those who believe in both preserving our country's Judeo-Christian heritage and making public policy decisions that are best for this country,” Vought writes.

This is a fig leaf. Christian nationalism as it actually operates — sometimes taking the modifier “white” at the beginning — endorses the racist “great replacement theory,” which posits that global elites are fueling non-white immigration to the United States to “replace” white people. The conspiracy theory holds that this upending of power relations will be done through demographic changes, and at the ballot box — which helps to explain CRA’s obsession with “secure borders” and “election integrity.”

For Vought, CRA’s issues of focus are not discrete policy battles. As he made clear recently on a right-wing podcast, he believes the country is in a Manichean war between the forces of good and evil. The battleground is so-called cultural issues, which, properly understood, are liberation movements to end racist and patriarchal oppression, but for Vought they must be opposed at every step of the way.

“These are the issues that if we don’t fight on we lose our civilization,” Vought said. “Critical race theory has to be front and center. Transgender contagion in our schools, impacting our daughters across the country, needs to be a front and center issue."

moment of truth pod]

vought wants to create an “army” of activists ready and waiting to serve in government who can be trusted to carry out a Christian nationalist agenda. And as former director of OMB, Vought has a unique insight into how to implement a whole-of-government approach to enacting a presidential directive, which is what he did with Trump’s initiative against so-called “critical race theory.”

“When the president says, ‘I want to not fund critical race theory through the federal government,’ that’s involving all of the agencies, and we have to then make sure that the president’s agenda is executed,” Vought said in the same interview [aud]

more broadly, Vought lamented that not enough religious right activists “operate on the basis of worldview.” As a result, less dogmatic “elite Christians” have adopted ideologies that “lack clarity at best” and are “damaging at worst.” Vought wants hardliners in the church and in the public sphere. In the context of running the government, that means replacing career staff with “ideologically committed individuals up and down the agencies.”

That idea aligns with the upcoming plans from the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, who, along with Vought and CRA, spearheaded the broader backlash against critical race theory. As Rufo said in a recent interview:

As we approach 2024, I will be publishing a policy paper on “eliminating left-wing ideologies in the federal government,” using the power of the presidency to fundamentally reshape the bureaucracy with a six-part program targeting budget, content, personnel, grantmaking, and oversight. The idea is to centralize ideological control over the federal agencies in the White House and create a team at the Office of Management and Budget to enforce it. We could easily wipe out a significant portion of the infrastructure for the left-wing ideologies within the federal bureaucracy and within the network of federal grantees and contractors, which would shift American politics in the right direction.

These plans are not theoretical. CRA is one of many hard-right organizations involved in the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project, a coalition of zealots determined to avoid some of the shortcomings and incompetencies of the Trump administration. (Vought is a former vice president of the organization’s grassroot and advocacy arm, Heritage Action for America.)

Vought has made no secret of what he would do if given the opportunity to serve as a Cabinet-level appointee in a Republican administration. He would attempt to eliminate or drastically curtail the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and others.

“We got to get after these agencies we talked about before, the administrative state, bigmoney, EPA, CDC, [and] NIH that's weaponized against the American people and we need to put them on the chopping block before we get to some other things down the road,” Vought said on Steve Bannon’s War Room.

A subsequent Supreme Court decision that drastically limited the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon emissions would likely serve as a template for Vought to dismantle broad swaths of the executive branch’s regulatory authority.

Vought’s antagonism toward the regulatory state extends to aspects of federal law enforcement, but only when those agencies are investigating conservatives for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk asked Vought about the Department of Justice’s supposed persecution of conservatives, including his colleague Jeffrey Clark, and how he thought it should be addressed.  The long-term plan is to structurally change it,” Vought said. “We've got to deconstruct the state that is weaponized against the American people.”

Like other organizations that have sprung up to harness Trumpism in the last several years, CRA’s broad influence remains limited. But its success in promoting the backlash against critical race theory shows it shouldn’t be underestimated, even though that topic may not have had the electoral influence Vought and others have claimed. What’s undeniable is that Vought and his fellow travelers have sweeping ambitions and the zeal of a true believer. They are telling us exactly what they are going to do if they return to power at the federal level, and it is a chilling vision of theocracy and repression.

vid Citation From the June 27, 2022, edition of Real America's Voice's The Charlie Kirk Show

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One of the most striking figures in former President Donald Trump’s increasingly desperate effort stay in power after losing the 2020 election was Jeffrey Clark, an environmental lawyer at the Justice Department who urged Trump to make him attorney general days before the insurrection so that he could drag the Justice Department into Trump’s schemes.

Clark’s superiors had resoundingly rejected his planto have the Justice Department send letters to leaders in battleground states Trump lost, letters that would have falsely claimed that the DOJ had “identified significant concerns” about the elections and suggested that legislators send pro-Trump electoral votes to Congress.

But after being rebuffed by DOJ leaders, Clark went around them to meet directly with Trump—multiple times. Three days before the insurrection, Clark urged Trump to name him attorney general. Other DOJ officials who had gotten wind of the meeting told Trump that such a move would lead to mass resignations. In the end, Trump blinked.[SAT NIGHT MASSACRE]

The Washington Post reported this week that Clark also requested an intelligence briefing about “an allegation that the Chinese were controlling US.-based voting machines via internet-connected smart thermostats,” a wild theory even for Trump’s stolen-election conspiracists and, not surprisingly, one that the DOJ did not consider credible.

Clark’s attempted end-run around the Justice Department has been documented by media and the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. Clark is expecting more negative attention from the committee,***he told Steve Bannon’s “War Room**” podcast after the committee’s first public hearing last week.

On Bannon’s June 13 show, Clark falsely claimed that the committee had no right to investigate his actions because, he said, he had nothing to do with the physical attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6. In fact, the committee has made it very clear from its inception that its focus is not only on the events of Jan. 6 but also on the related conspiracy to overturn the election that led up to the attack. Clark has reportedly cited the Fifth Amendment in refusing to answer committee questions. Bannon told Clark he would have him back on the show to address information about him that comes out in other Jan. 6 committee hearings.

Bannon isn’t the only Trumpworld figure rewarding Clark’s loyalty and apparent willingness to do anything to keep Trump in power. This morning, Center for Renewing America President Russ Vought,a former Trump administration official, announced that his group had hired Clark as a senior fellow to work on “election integrity” and other issues.

Vought was the guy who issued a ban on anti-racism training by federal agencies and contractors in the closing months of the Trump administration, part of a right-wing political strategy to mobilize angry voters via fearmongering about critical race theory. The Center has helped drive the manufactured anti-CRT panic; its toolkit has been promoted by the pro-Trump prayer-warriors at Intercessors for America. Vought has said the election of Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin was proof of its power as a culture war weapon.

Here’s how Vought characterized Clark’s attempted subversion of the presidential election:

He brought up legitimate concerns to President Trump about potential voter fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election. This isn’t just a defensible action, but one that true patriots should be proud of.

Now he’s under intense scrutiny from the January 6th committee. It’s clear they want to make him a centerpiece of their witch hunt despite the fact that he fought to expose potential voter fraud.

We should learn even more about Clark’s role in Trump’s bid to retain power in the days ahead. The House select committee is expected to focus one of its upcoming public hearings on actions taken by Trump and his team to pressure the Justice Department into supporting his voter fraud claims and intimidation efforts directed against state election officials.

Tags: Capitol Insurrection Election 2020Center for Renewing America Trump Administration

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rww tag 6 22

Jeffrey Clark Tried to Help Trump Overturn the Election. Now Team Trump Has His Back.

Russ Vought—Trump’s Critical Race Theory Guy—Says Virginia Win Proves Political Power of Culture-War Fights

The Dishonest and Harmful Right-Wing Attack on American School Boards

The Right-Wing Political Machine Is Out to Take Over School Boards by Fanning Fears of Critical Race Theory

Religious Right Pushes Effort To Whitewash History and Restrict Teaching About Systemic Racism

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no lnx few

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/national-conservative-manifesto-a-plan-for-fascism-but-it-s-not-hypothetical/

'National Conservative' manifesto: A plan for fascism — but it's not hypothetical

[Viktor Orbán in 2014, Wikimedia Commons

Trump endorses strongman Viktor Orbán in Hungarian election: ‘He has my complete support’]

Kathryn Joyce andSalon June 24, 2022

Last November in Orlando, dozens of the right's leading intellectuals, writers and think tank staffers gathered for the first meeting of the National Conservatism conference since the COVID pandemic hit, drawing journalists from across the political spectrum seeking to untangle what this high-brow gathering of avowed nationalists was all about. The emergence of the "NatCon" movement several years earlier had alarmed many liberal, centrist and even mainline conservative observers with its efforts to rehabilitate the concept of nationalism.But it energized many on the right who were starting to describe themselves as "post-liberal," meaning they were no longer satisfied with the conservative marriage of convenience that had existed since at least the Reagan era and had drawn together the religious right, anti-communists and free-marketeers in a potent but sometimes uneasy coalition. That consensus, they declared loudly, was dead, and a new conservative fusion must arise to take its place.

After the disruption of the pandemic, the loss of the presidency and the rage of Jan. 6, last fall's NatCon II conference was focused on the goal of building that new coalition along nationalist and post-liberal lines: blending extreme social conservatism with a skeptical approach to some forms of laissez-faire capitalism and a sharp hostility to both global or international authority and what they see as corporate-driven liberal cultural hegemony.

Now, the movement has formalized its ideas in a new manifesto, "National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles," released last week by the Edmund Burke Foundation. This ambitious document calls for the creation of a "world of independent nations" as the sole bulwark against "universalist ideologies" that would impose a "homogenizing, locality-destroying imperium over the entire globe." The credited authors include some leading lights of the NatCon world: Israeli political theorist and Burke Foundation chair Yoram Hazony, former American Enterprise Institute president Christopher DeMuth, First Things editor R.R. Reno and American Conservative columnist Rod Dreher.

But the list of signatories is much longer, and also far broader, ranging from right-wing mega-donor Peter Thiel to former Trump administration staffers Mark Meadows and Ken Cuccinelli, Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA, anti-critical race theory activist Christopher Rufo, multiple officials from Hillsdale College — a nerve center of contemporary right-wing politics — and numerous other think tank staffers and writers from across the spectrum of conservative media.

The manifesto hasn't gotten much attention so far — which isn't surprising, considering how much else is happening in the political realm. A column by David von Drehle in the Washington Post declared its contents akin to fascism, and a more substantial fisking in The Bulwark by Cathy Young found it "a document steeped in thinly veiled and sometimes distressingly overt authoritarian ideology." That's not wrong. But it's also worth observing that, in the battle to build a new conservative coalition, much of the NatCon platform has already won.

As Young notes, many of the NatCon's 10 priorities read, at first, like banal restatements of conservative ideology in general: national independence, the rule of law, God and public religion, free enterprise, family and children. But in ways both subtle and unsubtle, those familiar terms don't all mean what you'd think.

The NatCons hope to divorce nationalism from its association with the Nazis, who they claim were not "nationalist" at all.

The first two items, national independence and rejecting globalism and imperialism, follow one of the core, if questionable, goals of the NatCon movement, which is to divorce the concept of nationalism from its most powerful associations, such as the fascist regimes of Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy, which National Conservatives see as imperialist. Instead, NatCons want to attach the term to smaller, scrappier scrappy countries that resisted the Nazis or Soviet Communism.

While the manifesto holds that "Each nation capable of self-government should chart its own course," in alignment with its own legal, cultural and religious traditions, it warns against their "transferring" authority to any "transnational or supranational bodies" and advocates opposing "imperialism in its various forms." Those forms include modern-day China and Russia, of course, but also "the liberal imperialism of the last generation, which sought to gain power, influence and wealth by dominating other nations and trying to remake them in its own image."

The "liberalism" described here, as in most NatCon contexts, isn't the center-left politics of the Democratic Party, but rather "classical" liberalism, focused on individual rights, free trade and pluralistic cultures, which until recently was embraced by most mainstream conservatives as well. But within the post-liberal and NatCon world, that small-l liberalism contained the seeds of conservatism's undoing, leading inevitably to the big-L liberalism of progressive ideology by creating a culture in which it's too hard to raise children along traditionalist lines. In this view, societies that uphold pluralistic tolerance and diversity are inherently unfair by denying the majority the right to live in a culture that supports their values — in essence, allowing the minority to oppress the majority.

While both Young and von Drehle read the jabs at boomer "imperialism" as allusions to the Iraq War — which is at least partly true — "empire" for NatCons also has a larger meaning. First, they believe that international compacts, accords and governing bodies like the European Union or the UN infringe on national sovereignty, particularly when it comes to social issues. In the movement's conference this March in Brussels, Hazony sought to align the NatCon vision with Ukraine's fight against Russian aggression. Vladimir Putin's disdain for borders and national independence, he suggested, mirrored the attitudes of bureaucrats in Brussels and Washington. The obvious subtext was that Hungary and Poland — two post-liberal, overtly nationalist countries greatly admired within the movement — were facing EU sanctions over a variety of human rights issues, which Hungarian and Polish leaders rejected as an attempt to squash the rights of the nation-state, and sympathetic fellow speakers cast as the workings of a new "evil empire."

"Empire," in the NatCon world, refers to the right's long, losing battle in the cultural sphere, these days largely waged against what American conservatives call "woke corporations."

Secondly, and more broadly, "empire" in the NatCon world also refers to the sense of fighting a long, losing battle on the cultural front, largely against what American conservatives have taken to calling "woke corporations." This can take the form of Twitter bans, corporate Pride celebrations or the Walt Disney Company lobbying against Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law. (That same call to fight back against supposed ideological imperialism also underlies Rufo's recent calls for conservatives to "lay siege" to America's cultural institutions.)

That leads to one of the manifesto's next items, on "public religion," which declares that "No nation can long endure without humility and gratitude before God" and that therefore the Bible must be restored to its place "as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities, as the rightful inheritance of believers and non-believers alike."The manifesto goes on to say that, "Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private."

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BS

https://censortrack.org/case/citizens-renewing-america

INSANE! Twitter Censors Anti-Critical Race Theory Account

Kayla Sargent

June 11th, 2021

Twitter’s rampage against conservatives has not stopped with the platform now seemingly taking its orders from the left.

Rachel Bovard, Senior Director of Policy for the Conservative Partnership Institute, said that Twitter suspended the conservative think tank Citizens for Renewing America (CRA) after the group posted resources combating Critical Race Theory (CRT). She tweeted: “So @amrenewctr issues a toolkit for parents to help stop CRT in schools, Media Matters issues a baseless and wildly untrue hit on the Center, and mere hours later, Twitter suspends their account. Big Tech working very hard to protect racist ideologies from criticism.” Her tweet included a screenshot of what appears to be a message from Twitter that said, “We’ve temporarily limited some of your account features.” Bovard is a MRC Free Speech America board advisor. 

CRA President Russ Vought provided more insight as to why the organization’s content may have been suspended. “Twitter is now saying that our Renewing America accounts were suspended by ‘enforcement bots’ but wouldn't tell us what was flagged. This occurred soon after we launched an important anti-CRT tool kit and a radical left outlet put forward wild conspiracy theories about it,” he tweeted.

CRA recently published a toolkit for “Combatting Critical Race Theory in Your Community.” The toolkit said: “This guide is meant for anyone of any knowledge and experience level who is concerned about what children are being taught and how they are being treated, with an emphasis on making the banning of Critical Race Theory (CRT) the central theme by which you reclaim your schools.”

Leftist group, Media Matters for America, however, called the toolkit “a conspiracy theory about the overthrow of America’s constitutional system.” It also somehow drew an arbitrary connection between the toolkit’s language and what the organization called the “infamous white nationalist march in Charlottesville, Virginia.”

Media Matters for America received more than $1.5 million from liberal billionaire George Soros between 2010 and 2014.

Twitter has long silenced conservative voices on its platform. Its massive push to censor conservative voices resulted in the platform receiving a “F” grade from the Media Research Center in its first Big Tech Report Card. Twitter removed former President Donald Trump following the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol after he called for “peace.” The platform also slapped a “sensitive content” label on a graphic from the MRC. The graphic described the results of a recent poll in which fifty-three percent of respondents answered “no” to the question: “Should biological men be allowed to compete in women's sports?” 

Twitter did not respond to a request from MRC Free Speech America to confirm whether it had suspended CRA.

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an 4 22

former Trump administration hardline immigration officials are pressuring Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey to declare that their states are being "invaded" from Mexico to give thousands of state troopers and National Guard members sweeping new authority to turn back migrants, essentially bestowing enforcement powers that have been a federal responsibility.

That push comes as the Texas Republican governor is preparing to announce on Wednesday “unprecedented actions” to deter migrants coming to Texas in light of the Biden administration's decision announced last week that it will end Title 42, a public health law that has limited asylum to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

As San Antonio's KSAT reports, it's not known whether Abbott, who is up for reelection in November and is already installing more border barrier and allowing troopers to arrest migrants on trespassing charges, supports the aggressive proposals former Trump officials are pushing.

Border Patrol officials say they are planning for as many as 18,000 arrivals daily once the health policy, known as the Title 42 authority, expires in May. Last week, about 7,100 migrants were coming a day to the southern U.S. border.

"The way former Trump immigration officials see it," according to KSAT, "Texas and Arizona can pick up where the federal government leaves off once the policy ends. Their plan involves a novel interpretation of the U.S. Constitution to have the National Guard or state police forcibly send migrants to Mexico, without regard to immigration laws and law enforcement procedures. Border enforcement has always been a federal responsibility, and in Texas, state leaders have not been pushing for such a move."

Tom Homan, the former acting director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement under former President Donald Trump, said at a border security conference in San Antonio last week he had spoken with Abbott but gave no indication about whether the two-term governor supported the idea.

On Tuesday, while addressing conservative talk radio station KCRS, Abbott said this about the possibility of him invoking the authority: "We’ll be taking unprecedented action. Congress has to stop talking about it, has to stop complaining about it, has to stop going to the border and looking at it. Congress has to take action, just like Texas is taking action.”

In Arizona, the Center for Renewing America, a conservative policy think tank that includes Ken Cuccinelli, an immigration hardliner and former Homeland Security official under Trump, has argued that states are entitled to defend themselves from immediate danger or invasion, as it is defined by the “invasion clause,” under the “states self defense clause.

===

nh register

Opinion: Dark money behind school board conflicts

Christine Palm and Frank Hanley Santoro

Oct. 4, 2021

A woman carrying a sign protesting the teaching of critical race theory arrives at a Board of Education meeting at Central Middle School in Greenwich, Conn., on Thursday June 17, 2021. Members of the group Greenwich Patriots came out to the meeting to urge people to attend and speak at public comment toprotest masking, vaccinations for students and critical race theory..

Schools are the latest battleground in the culture wars. Protests over issues such as critical race theory, masks and vaccines have cropped up all over the state, including in the towns of Guilford, New Canaan, Glastonbury, Haddam, Cheshire, Bristol and Fairfield. The protesters often characterize themselves as concerned parents. This may be partially true, but it is not the whole story. If you dig deep enough, you will find a web of dark money fueling political operatives in so-called “astroturf” groups — those that purport to be grassroots but are in fact formed and funded by hidden corporate and political sponsors. Their agenda has little to do with improving public education.

Protesters have a right to state their opinions (even suicidal ones in the case of vaccine opposition). But as the right-wing agenda increasingly infiltrates small towns, members of local school boards might find themselves portrayed as purveyors of an “increasingly hostile” threat to the community “rooted in Marxism” who will “stop at nothing” as they are “trying to socially replace you.” Those are words from the websites of the Center For Renewing America and its Citizens Renewing America Toolkit.

In fact, hostility against board of education members has gotten so ugly that the National School Boards Association this past week asked President Biden for help from federal law enforcement agencies.In reality, most of these folks are hardworking volunteers who are far more concerned with balancing a budget than they are with a radical agenda — be it on the left or the right. And yet, recently in Haddam, police had to escort board members to their cars following a contentious meeting in which anti-maskers shouted through a bullhorn and drowned out much of the proceedings.

Clearly, something is afoot. Why is this happening suddenly and simultaneously in so many different places around the state (and indeed the country)? Why is the pattern so similar? Why does it seem peculiar to affluent Connecticut towns? Why do some protests turn disruptive? Why pick on CRT, which schools don’t even teach (it’s a post-secondary pedagogical tool)? This doesn’t sound like something that just happened to occur to parents at a local bake sale.

The explanation may lie with Steve Bannon. According to Bannon, “This is the Tea Party to the 10th power,” and “The path to save the nation is very simple. It’s going to go through the school boards.” Before he was pardoned by Trump, Bannon was the guy arrested at sea off Westbrook on a Chinese billionaire’s yacht for allegedly siphoning over a million dollars from a “We Build the Wall” scheme. According to news reports, he was also accused by an ex-wife of objecting to the Archer School in Los Angeles for his daughters because, she said, he “didn’t want the girls going to school with Jews.”

The phenomenon may also be explained byNicole Neily — the president of Parents Defending Education, whose targets include several Connecticut towns. PDE describes itself as a “grassroots” organization, and Neily once was quoted as saying, “We’re all working moms.” But according to several sources including Sourcewatch, Neily is a veteran operative of the Koch network. She’s not alone. Other astroturf operatives include Russ Vought, a former Trump official whose group publishes the “Toolkit” for taking over school boards; Christopher Rufo, whose anti-CRT activism earned him an invitation to the Trump White House; and Keri Rodriques, who was reportedly paid $388,000 in 2017 and 2018 for her advocacy work. Anti-CRT activity seems a profitable cottage industry for the apparatchiks of MAGA world.

Dark money is hard to ferret out because astroturf groups do not disclose their funders. But some information can be found. Among the sources are MassPoliticsProfs.org, the blog of Diane Ravitch, UnKochMyCampus.org, and a book called “Outside Money in School Board Elections.” Google searches also help. Our information is based largely on these sources.

A picture emerges of a shadowy and labyrinthine network of astroturf groups funded by big money. Funders include the Koch network, Turning Points USA, the DeVos Family Foundation, the Ed Uihlein Foundation, Donors’ Trust, and the Heritage Foundation. Some astroturf groups are local (Connecticut Parents Union). Most are national. Many have happy names like Citizens for Renewing America, the Center for Renewing America, Free to Learn, National Parents Union, Massachusetts Parents United, No Left Turn in Education, Moms for Liberty, and Fight for Schools. Some encourage their readers to report incidents (i.e., spy on teachers).One group calling itself School Board Watchlist models disruptive behavior on its website.

Our point is not necessarily to question the sincerity of the self-appointed disrupters, misguided though they are. But we believe they are pawns in a darker power grab of which they are probably unaware. The next time you hear that public schools are a threat to freedom, it’s good idea to follow the money.

Christine Palm is the state representative for the 36th Connecticut General Assembly District. Frank Hanley Santoro is a former assistant U.S. attorney.

---

===

OOPS bogus [evil but not wrong]

https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/center-for-renewing-america/

has c4 arm: Wade Miller is the executive director of Citizens for Renewing America, which is the advocacy arm of the center. Miller, an Iraq war veteran in the U.S. Marines, previously worked for Heritage Action for America and was the political director for Senator Ted Cruz’s 2018 re-election campaign

 Center for Renewing America is a right-leaning nonprofit organization created by Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget under former President Donald Trump. The organization’s work focuses onopposing censorship of conservatives big tech companies, opposing the spread of critical race theory, and advocating for stricter security measures in U.S. elections.

CONTENTS

Background

The Center for Renewing America is a conservative think tank founded by Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget during the Trump administration. Vought founded the center with a Capitol Hill area office about a week after leaving office in January 2021, initially with eight paid staffers. [1]

Former President Donald Trump has endorsed the Center for Renewing America. [2] The staff includes several former Trump administration officials. [3]

The center has an advocacy arm, Citizens for Renewing America. [4]

Policy Issues

The center’s key policy areas are taking on big tech, opposing the teaching of critical race theory in schools, supporting election integrity, advocating for secure borders, “ending endless wars,” opposing big government, and supporting “healthy communities.” [5]

Citizens for Renewing America created a 33-page handbook as an “A to Z guide” to stop the teaching of critical race theory in schools. The handbook, titled “Combatting Critical Race Theory in Your Community,” is meant to be a resource for both parents and state legislators. [6] [7]

Leadership

Russ Vought is the founder and president of the Center for Renewing America. He was previously director and deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Donald Trump. [8] Before working for the Trump administration,Vought was the vice president of Heritage Action for America.He was previously the policy director for the House Republican Conference under then-chairman Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) and was the executive director of the Republican Study Committee. [9]

Ashlea Frazier is the chief operating officer of the Center for Renewing America. She was previously the chief of staff for the OMB under Vought. Before that, Frazier worked for Hillsdale College’s Washington, D.C., campus and for The Heritage Foundation. [10]

Wade Miller is the executive director of Citizens for Renewing America, which is the advocacy arm of the center. Miller, an Iraq war veteran in the U.S. Marines, previously worked for Heritage Action for America and was the political director for Senator Ted Cruz’s 2018 re-election campaign. [11]

Rachel Semmel is the communications director for the Center for Renewing America. She was previously the communications director at the OMB under Vought. [12]

References

  1. Allison, Bill. “Trump acolytes craft parallel GOP universe so Trumpism lives on.” Detroit News. May 29, 2021. Accessed June 12, 2021. https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2021/05/29/trump-acolytes-craft-parallel-gop-universe-so-trumpism-lives-on/5253631001/ ^
  2. Allison, Bill. “Trump acolytes craft parallel GOP universe so Trumpism lives on.” Detroit News. May 29, 2021. Accessed June 12, 2021. https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2021/05/29/trump-acolytes-craft-parallel-gop-universe-so-trumpism-lives-on/5253631001/ ^
  3. “Our Staff.” Center for American Renewal.” Accessed June 12, 2021. https://americarenewing.com/about/ ^
  4. [1] Leach, Matt. “Former Trump official Russ Vought leads effort to train anti-CRT parents.” Fox News. June 8, 2021. Accessed June 12, 2021. https://www.foxnews.com/us/critical-race-theory-guide-conservative-think-tank ^
  5. “Policy Issues.” Center for Renewing America. Accessed June 12, 2021. https://americarenewing.com/issues/ ^
  6. [1] Leach, Matt. “Former Trump official Russ Vought leads effort to train anti-CRT parents.” Fox News. June 8, 2021. Accessed June 12, 2021. https://www.foxnews.com/us/critical-race-theory-guide-conservative-think-tank ^
  7. Pandolfo, Chris. “Conservative group empowers parents with knowledge to organize and confront critical race theory in schools.” TheBlaze. June 08, 2021. Accessed June 12, 2021. https://www.theblaze.com/news/conservative-group-empowers-parents-critical-race-theory  ^
  8. “Our Staff.” Center for American Renewal.” Accessed June 12, 2021. https://americarenewing.com/about/ ^
  9. “Our Staff.” Center for American Renewal.” Accessed June 12, 2021. https://americarenewing.com/about/ ^
  10. “Our Staff.” Center for American Renewal.” Accessed June 12, 2021. https://americarenewing.com/about/ ^
  11. “Our Staff.” Center for American Renewal.” Accessed June 12, 2021. https://americarenewing.com/about/ ^
  12. “Our Staff.” Center for American Renewal.” Accessed June 12, 2021. https://americarenewing.com/about/ ^

Related Profiles

GOVERNMENT AGENCIES
  1. ###### Trump Administration

Associated Organizations

  1. ###### Citizens for Renewing America (Non-profit)

===

off bs  https://americarenewing.com/about/

https://americarenewing.com/

“RUSSELL VOUGHT DID A FABULOUS JOB IN MY ADMINISTRATION, AND I HAVE NO DOUBT HE WILL DO A GREAT JOB IN CONTINUING OUR QUEST TO MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”

Donald J. Trump

45th President of the United States

OUR STAFF

RUSS VOUGHT

President

ASHLEA FRAZIER

Chief Operating Officer

WADE MILLER

Fellow & Executive Director of Citizens for Renewing America

RACHEL SEMMEL

Communications Director & Fellow

ANDREW HEIM

Director of Development

EDIE HEIPEL

Deputy Communications Director & Fellow

ADAM CANDEUB

Senior Fellow

KEN CUCCINELLI

Senior Fellow

MARK PAOLETTA

Senior Fellow

MICHAEL YOUNG

Visiting Fellow

BRODY (HOST): Welcome back to The Water Cooler,everybody. The border crisis continues to worsen with every passing day that the Biden administration is in office. In fact, new drone footage from Fox News over the Del Rio Bridge in Texas shows just over 8000 thousand migrants waiting to be processed, which is twice as many as it was just yesterday. And yet radio silence from border czar Kamala. I want a T-shirt that says that. No, I don't. And to make matters worse, this, of course, also comes as we're allowing thousands of Afghan refugees into our country, leaving plenty of reason for the American people to be concerned about the vetting process of all of these folks. Well, let's get more on that now. Joining me to weigh in, former acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America. Take a breath, Ken Cuccinelli. Ken, thank you for joining me, sir.

KEN CUCCINELLI (SENIOR FELLOW, CENTER FOR RENEWING AMERICA): Good to be with you, David.

BRODY: Well, look, Ken, obviously, we can't process all these people properly. I mean, so what do you think is going to happen, given that it's unlikely the administration is going to intervene? What's happening here?

CUCCINELLI: So with respect to the Afghans, the raw numbers are overwhelming for the vetting process. Realize I think most people – I certainly do – want to see those Afghans who truly helped our troops come over to escape the Taliban because they're being hunted. The Biden administration, of course, completely botched getting those folks out. But those are people we know something about, we know a fair bit about. And so the vetting is a lot of the vetting already took place when they were hired. So that's easy. The challenge and the objection that I have. that Center for Renewing America has, and so many others is bringing in 90 percent of these folks who aren't American citizens, who aren't potential SIVs. And SIVs, for your viewers, is a visa designation, special immigrant visa for the folks who helped us over there in Afghanistan and in Iraq. In Iraq, there were four thousand cases of fraud and they're investigating another hundred thousand, which should tell you how difficult this vetting process is. And that's for people we already know something about; the other 90 percent that the Biden administration is bringing over, we know nothing about or very little. We may get a little something from their documents, but now we're relying on getting information from the Taliban as the host government. This is not a workable situation from a security vetting standpoint. And this is a population that starts out fairly radical on the jihadist scale. I mean, left of center, Pew Foundation Longitudinal Study, five years, they found that 99 percent of Afghans want to live under Sharia law and 61 percent of them believe that non-Muslims should have to live under Sharia law. Almost 40 percent thought that there were some occasions where suicide, murder, blowing yourself up in defense of Islam was acceptable. This is not consistent with our tolerance of other religions in the First Amendment. It is not consistent with our values in this country and it's not being vetted for – not being vetted.

BRODY: Well, then that's where I want to go with this, the vetting process. I mean, you know, the deal. I just look it up on the Internet. But I mean, I see it there. This takes, what, a couple of years? A year. I mean, this is a very long process. And this is not there's no way – the Biden administration says, oh, biometrics, we got it taken care of. Come on, does anybody really believe they're going through the full vetting process here?

CUCCINELLI: No.

So the typical process is about 18 to 24 months. There are 14 steps. And that assumes we're getting the information we need from all the sources. Again, with the Taliban now in control over there makes this more difficult. And over the last 15 years, since the SIV program was set up, we did about seven hundred and fifty a year and now we're going to do 50 or a hundred thousand people that we don't have any information on in literally a matter of weeks. It's not possible, David. It's not possible.

BRODY: No, for sure. I'm glad you gave us that perspective. Ken, when it comes to Afghan refugees, tens of thousands of them are being resettled, as we know, all over the country. In fact, we heard from Stephen Miller not long ago here on this show that there are even more than that coming. He said this is just the beginning. So why haven't we at least closed the border temporarily while we figure this all out? I know it's a bold move, especially from the Biden administration, but wouldn't that be the logical play?

CUCCINELLI: David, there you go. Thinking logically, no place in this administration.

BRODY: My bad.

CUCCINELLI: So but honestly, another way to look at it is just a consistent element of their open borders policy. It isn't just our southern border. It's come in from anywhere. We don't care who you are or how dangerous you are, come on in. It's only the Republicans who are the threat. It isn't people from other countries, some of whom may want to destroy our country. I mean, that is the attitude of this administration. It's reflected on the southern border, including in how they're not dealing with the COVID threat as it relates to the southern border. It's consistent with their massive open-door policy with respect to Afghan refugees. And there's a long history, by the way, of dealing with refugee flows in the region near their home. That is a universal international consensus that America, Joe Biden's administration, is abandoning here at the risk of our security.

BRODY: Yeah, for sure. And that's a whole nother can of worms, if you will, or at least another topic to discuss. But you mentioned politics. Oh, shocking. The politics is involved in this because one does have to wonder if there's a political motive here for the left when it comes to allowing refugees in. Look at Minnesota. I mean, Minneapolis, to be exact. The Ilhan Omar, very far left, a Muslim, pretty extreme views. She's a representative out there in Minneapolis, they're resettling 300 refugees out there. That doesn't sound like a lot, but my guess is it's still more than they're letting on. I mean, you just want to wonder about this stuff.

CUCCINELLI: Yeah. I mean, once these folks are let leave the military bases that they're being housed on, including right in my backyard here at Quantico military base, Marine Corps base, they can go wherever they want. And the Somali experience in Minnesota is not a good one for America. This is not a case of assimilation. This is a case of setting up a balkanized pocket within the United States. And, yes, we are a country of immigrants, but that presumes that we're a melting pot. If you refuse to melt in, and I would suggest that the data we have on the average Afghan suggests that's a possibility, a strong possibility, and we've seen it with the Somali community in Minnesota, then you shouldn't be immigrating here. More accurately, America shouldn't be letting you immigrate here.

BRODY: And there have been not only Minnesota, but I think of Dearborn, Michigan, as we know with what's going on for there with Rashida Tlaib. We know the situation – they're doing a call to prayer in Dearborn, Michigan. They've been doing that for a while. But here's the point. You have all of that and you do wonder where this is going, because judges, even you mentioned Sharia law at the top of our show or top of the segment here. I mean, there are some judges. You just look it up. It's legitimate stuff. I mean, they are ruling saying, look, Sharia law needs to weigh in here, not the US judicial system. I mean, what in the world? This is the concern of quite a few Americans, and the left, they don't care and they don't get it and they don't want to get it.

CUCCINELLI: Well, I don't know, I think this is part of their goal. They really want to atomize this country. They want to atomized families, heck, individuals. They want to treat you as having however many genders you want. They believe that kind of societal destruction and chaos works to the advantage of their political power. And I think that's true. But it also works to the destruction of us all in the not very long run. And that's the path they're on. And look, this reconciliation bill, David, has a massive amnesty component in it. And the last election bill they had, had a massive element of letting illegal aliens and non-citizens vote without penalty in federal elections. This is part of a comprehensive strategy on the left. This is not a one-off occurrence.

BRODY: Very interesting. I'm glad you tied it all together. Ken Cuccinelli, great to have you on the show.

===

Cuccinelli is a champion of conservative policies, and a man of unimpeachable character. We have no doubt that he will execute the president’s agenda with the integrity, commitment, and excellence that we have known him to bring to every other position. He has our strongest support.

---

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Club for Growth

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election inetgrity ntwk

https://whoscounting.us/partner/citizens-for-renewing-america/

===

duck 7 22

:{https://citizensrenewingamerica.com:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}:

:{Citizens for Renewing America:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

Critical Race Theory Citizens for Renewing America will reject racism and cancel culture that divides communities and dehumanizes human beings. More Info Big Government Big Government Citizens for Renewing America is committed to opposing big government for its intrusiveness, cost, and tendency to crowd out civil society More Info See All Issues

TOOLKIT: Combatting Critical Race Theory In Your Community June 8, 2021. An A-to-Z guide on how to stop Critical Race Theory and reclaim your local school board

Proponents of Critical Race Theory use our university campuses to radicalize our own children, transforming them into angry "successor ideology" activists. They use their control of HR departments and boardrooms of corporate America to impose this radicalism in all private workplaces.

Contributions to Citizens for Renewing America are not tax deductible as charitable contributions for federal income tax purposes. Your gift to Citizens for Renewing America, a 501(c)(4) organization, will support mobilizing grassroots to hold Washington D.C. and state legislatures accountable while bringing the battle to the Left.

Citizens for Renewing America understands that a nation must be able to control its borders if it is to remain secure, sovereign, and free. More Info. Ending Endless Wars. Ending Endless Wars. Citizens for Renewing America will further a foreign policy agenda based on strength and securing America's interests.

:{https://americarenewing.com}:

:{The Center for Renewing America | To renew an American consensus of a ...:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

The Center for Renewing America | To renew an American consensus of anation under God with unique interests worthy of defending that flow from its people, institutions, and history, where individuals' enjoyment of freedom is predicated on just laws and healthy communities. Our Mission

:{https://citizensrenewingamerica.com}::{ › about}:

:{About | Citizens for Renewing America:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

Our Mission To renew an American consensus of a nation under God with unique interests worthy of defending that flow from its people, institutions, and history, where individuals' enjoyment of freedom is predicated on just laws and healthy communities. Our Staff Russ Vought President Wade Miller Executive Director Rachel Semmel

:{https://citizensrenewingamerica.com}::{ › issues}:

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Citizens for Renewing America understands that a nation must be able to control its borders if it is to remain secure, sovereign, and free More Info Ending Endless Wars Ending Endless Wars Citizens for Renewing America will further a foreign policy agenda based on strength and securing America's interests. More Info Big Government Big Government

:{https://www.influencewatch.org}::{ › non-profit › citizens-for-renewing-america}:

:{Citizens for Renewing America - InfluenceWatch:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

Citizens for Renewing America is the conservative-leaning advocacy group founded by Russell Vought, former budget director for President Donald Trump. The group published a handbook for parents and lawmakers opposed to teaching critical race theory in schools. Following the publication, Twitter briefly suspended the organization from its service.

:{https://www.influencewatch.org}::{ › non-profit › center-for-renewing-america}:

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The Center for Renewing America is a conservative think tank founded by Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget during the Trump administration. Vought founded the center with a Capitol Hill area office about a week after leaving office in January 2021, initially with eight paid staffers.

:{https://www.facebook.com}::{ › CitizensForRenewingAmerica}:

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Citizens for Renewing America - Home | Facebook See more of Citizens for Renewing America on Facebook Log In or Create New Account 3.0 out of 5 · Based on the opinion of 2 people Community See All 1,065 people like this 1,187 people follow this About See All Contact Citizens for Renewing America on Messenger Political Organization

:{https://americarenewing.com}::{ › about}:

:{About | The Center for Renewing America:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

Fellow & Executive Director of Citizens for Renewing America Rachel Semmel Communications Director & Fellow Andrew Heim Director of Development Edie Heipel Deputy Communications Director & Fellow Adam Candeub Senior Fellow Ken Cuccinelli Senior Fellow for Immigration and Homeland Security Mark Paoletta Senior Fellow Kash Patel

:{https://whoscounting.us}::{ › partner › citizens-for-renewing-america}:

:{:{Citizens for Renewing America - :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{Election Integrity Network :(style="background-color:#ff9900;"):}::{- Who's ...:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

Election Integrity Network is a project of Conservative Partnership Institute. We are a coalition of conservative leaders, organizations, public officials and citizens dedicated to securing the legality of every American vote.

...:{https://whoscounting.us:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}::{ › partner › citizens-for-renewing-america}:

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Election Integrity Network is a project of Conservative Partnership Institute. We are a coalition of conservative leaders, organizations, public officials and citizens dedicated to securing the legality of every American vote.

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:{https://americarenewing.com}::{ › press}:

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This is the website of Center for Renewing American and Citizens for Renewing America.

:{https://censortrack.org}::{ › case › citizens-renewing-america}:

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Jun 10, 2021Rachel Bovard, Senior Director of Policy for the Conservative Partnership Institute, said that Twitter suspended the conservative think tank Citizens for Renewing America (CRA) after the group posted resources combating Critical Race Theory (CRT).

:{https://texasscorecard.com}::{ › state › citizens-for-renewing-americas-plan-to-secure-the-border}:

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Jun 23, 2022Sebastian Castro | June 23, 2022 During an interview with Texas Scorecard at the Republican Party of Texas Convention last week, Wade Miller of Citizens for Renewing America described the organization's plan to secure the border against the ongoing invasion.

:{https://citizensrenewingamerica.com}::{ › issue_topic › secure-borders}:

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Citizens for Renewing America understands that a nation must be able to control its borders if it is to remain secure, sovereign, and free.

:{https://www.facebook.com}::{ › CitizensForRenewingAmerica › live}:

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Citizens for Renewing America. 1,164 likes · 22 talking about this. Political Organization

:{https://citizensrenewingamerica.com}::{ › issues › combatting-critical-race-theory-in-your-community}:

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Jun 8, 2021State Tracker: CRT Legislation. There are now a number of states that are aggressively attempting to curb Critical Race Theory (CRT) and prevent it from being taught in the classroom or espoused by state agencies. Below is an up-to-date assessment of active or signed CRT bills. ….

:{https://www.bizapedia.com}::{ › nd › citizens-for-renewing-america-inc.html}:

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Citizens For Renewing America, Inc. is a North Dakota Foreign Non-Profit Corporation filed On July 1, 2021. The company's filing status is listed as Active and its File Number is 0005556624. TheRegistered Agent on file for this company is Corporation Service Company and is located at 1709 N 19th St Ste 3, Bismarck, ND 58501-2121. TOWNHOUSE RENTAL?

:{https://twitter.com}::{ › amrenewcitizen}:

:{Citizens for Renewing America (@amrenewcitizen) | Twitter:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

May 18, 2021Citizens for Renewing America @amrenewcitizen May 12 Critical Race Theory, aka State Sanctioned Racism, isn't a ghost story without tangible evidence. CRT is becoming increasingly pervasive in education curriculum, government agencies, & corporate America. Here are just a few (of many) examples of CRT: 5 replies 19 retweets 22 likes

:{https://www.bizapedia.com}::{ › dc › citizens-for-renewing-america-inc.html}:

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Citizens For Renewing America, Inc. in Washington, DC | Company Info Company Information Company Contacts RUSSELL VOUGHT Governor 300 Independene Avenue, Se Washington, DC 20003 Reviews Write Review There are no reviews yet for this company. Questions Post Question There are no questions yet for this company. ADDITIONAL LINKS

:{https://www.bizapedia.com}::{ › us › citizens-for-renewing-america-inc.html}:

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CITIZENS FOR RENEWING AMERICA, INC. DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA FOR-PROFIT CORPORATION: WRITE REVIEW: Address: 300 Independence Avenue, Se Line2 Washington, DC 20003: Registered Agent: Ashley Frazier: Filing Date: May 19, 2021: File Number: C00007010158: Contact Us About The Company Profile For Citizens For Renewing America, Inc.

:{https://americarenewing.com}::{ › issue_topic › critical-race-theory}:

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The Center for Renewing America knows that in order to revitalize the American spirit and restore our great nation, this far-left ideology must be defeated. We are committed to that mission and stand ready with millions of citizens to stop this radical cultural revolution. UPDATED: Glossary of CRT-Related Terms

:{https://tennesseestar.com}::{ › 2022 › 06 › 02 › citizens-for-america-tennessee-state-director-aundrea-gomez-discusses-finding-her-place-away-from-the-woke}:

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Jun 2, 2022Live from Music Row Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy - broadcast on Nashville's Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. - host Leahy welcomed the newly appointed Tennessee State Director of Citizens for Renewing America, Aundrea Gomez, in-studio to talk about the personal experiences in public schools that led to her new ...

:{https://opencorporates.com}::{ › companies › us_dc › EXTUID_4300096}:

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Citizens for Renewing America, Inc. nonprofit branch. Company Number EXTUID_4300096 Native Company Number C00007010158 Status Active Incorporation Date 19 May 2021 (7 months ago) Company Type Non-Profit Corporation Jurisdiction District of Columbia (US) Branch Branch of Delaware (US) company Registered Address.

:{https://thefederalist.com}::{ › 2021 › 01 › 26 › how-to-lead-the-united-states-into-an-american-spring}:

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Jan 26, 2021The Center for Renewing America exists to provide that footing. Its mission statement is to restore an American consensus of a nation under God with unique interests worthy of defending that flow...

:{https://tennesseestar.com}::{ › tag › citizens-for-renewing-america}:

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Jun 2, 2022Citizens for Renewing America Tennessee State Director Aundrea Gomez Discusses Finding Her Place Away from the Woke June 2, 2022 June 2, 2022 Julie Carr Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed the Tennessee state director for Citizens for Renewing America, Aundrea Gomez in studio to talk about her personal ...

:{https://www.facebook.com}::{ › CitizensForRenewingAmerica › videos › 470375497387179}:

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Citizens for Renewing America. May 12 ·. Watch our Critical Race Theory press conference today with…. Russ Vought, President of Citizens for Renewing America (Former OMB Director for President Trump) &. Rep. Dan Bishop. Rep. Chip Roy. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Rep. Lauren Boebert.

:{https://baptistnews.com}::{ › tag › citizens-for-renewing-america}:

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Citizens for Renewing America. Who's behind the nationwide attacks on local school boards over Critical Race Theory? School boards across America are under attack by conservative parents whose fears of woke liberalism are being stoked by national organizations affiliated with Donald Trump and the Republican Party, as well as Fox News and ...

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