Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Russell Vought talks to reporters after a policy luncheon meeting on Capitol Hill, in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 15, 2025. REUTERS/Ken Cedeno
Although Donald Trump vehemently denied knowing anything about Project 2025 during the 2024 presidential race, far-right Christian nationalist Russell Vought — a major architect of the Project 2025 agenda — now heads the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Project 2025 called for federal government employees to be fired in huge numbers and replaced with an army of MAGA loyalists, and Vought has been pushing Project 2025's recommendations at OMB.
On Thursday morning, June 17, Vought attended a Christian Science Monitor breakfast — where, according to Politico's Katherine Tully-McManus, he openly expressed his disdain for bipartisanship.
Vought told reporters, "The appropriations process has to be less bipartisan…. There is no voter in the country that went to the polls and said, 'I'm voting for a bipartisan appropriations process.' That may be the view of something that appropriators want to maintain."
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The previous day, the U.S. Senate passed a rescissions package that includes major cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) as well as to foreign aid. And Vought is hoping that more cuts will be forthcoming.
Vought told reporters, "We are willing to send up additional rescissions. I think if this continues to pass, we're likely to send up another rescissions package that would come soon, and we'll be working on that to try to get that across the finish line. We're not there yet."
Politico's Nicholas Wu posted Tully-McManus' reporting on X, formerly Twitter. And Vought's comments against bipartisanship are generating a lot of discussion on the social media platform.
X user Roger Dodger posted, "That is one of the more obscene things I have heard. Just terrible."
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Another X user, Catherine H., sarcastically wrote, "Yeah, because why would you want a unified country?"
X user Scott Plante commented, "Not how democracies work, Russ."
Another X user, Biscuit Salad, wrote, "He is old, and any pretense that the two term president with a decade-long death grip on his party isn't 'the establishment' gets more hilarious every day."
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