Meet Elon Musk’s Puppet Master: Russell Vought

Not if that Washington pro didn’t care. Like Steve Bannon and other hard-core Trump believers, Vought is a fanatical advocate for maximum disruption. “We are living in a post-constitutional time,” Vought has written, meaning that our current constitutional norms are so polluted by mainstream legal thinking over the past 100 years that we need to tear them down. In effect, Vought wants to repeal—not the industrial revolution, exactly, but certainly the governmental structures created to keep it from overpowering democratic governance. Firings are integral to this goal; so is demoralization. As Molly Redden, Andy Kroll, and Nick Surgey reported last October for Pro Publica, Vought was recorded saying in a private meeting:

We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.

We want to put them in trauma.

Mission accomplished. DOGE hasn’t done much to reduce the budget deficit; indeed, according to CNN analyst Zachary B. Wolf, DOGE could easily end up netting out as a loss to the Treasury of about $45 billion. But if Vought were serious about eliminating red ink, he wouldn’t be working so hard to pass a Big, Beautiful reconciliation bill that will more than double the budget deficit.

Musk pointed out the folly of the reconciliation bill on his way out the door. That was reported as Musk criticizing Trump, but more notably it was Musk slighting Vought. Pinocchio was giving Geppetto a little back talk. Vought took it in stride because his goal is demolition, not solvency, and (setting aside adverse judicial rulings that the administration may or may not obey) the wrecking ball continues to swing. Vought didn’t even bother to fold all of DOGE’s cuts into the administration’s proposed budget, he said last weekend on CNN, because he didn’t think he had to. But isn’t that impoundment, CNN’s Dana Bash asked Vought. “We are not in love with the law,” Vought replied. DOGE isn’t going anywhere.