The opening act of Donald Trump’s second term was defined by the theatrical dismantling of much of the federal government by Elon Musk and his group of tech-savvy demolitionists. Everywhere you looked in those first 100 days, it seemed, Musk’s prestidigitation was on display. Look there—it’s Elon in a black MAGA hat waving around a chain saw onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Look here—it’s Elon introducing Fox News viewers to a teenage software engineer nicknamed “Big Balls” whom he’d hired to help slash the government. The performance had a certain improvised quality—pink slips dispersed and then hastily withdrawn, entire agencies mothballed overnight—and after a while, it started to feel like a torqued-up sequel to Trump’s first term: governance replaced by chaos and trolling.

But that version of the story misses a key character: Russell Vought.

Behind all the DOGE pyrotechnics, Vought—who serves as director of the Office of Management and Budget—is working methodically to advance a sophisticated ideological project decades in the making. If Musk is moving fast and breaking things, as the Silicon Valley dictum goes, Vought is taking the shattered pieces of the federal government and reassembling them into a radically new constitutional order.

“I’m not going to say it’s a misdirection play, but they’re the trauma-inducing shock troops,” Steve Bannon, who worked with Vought during Trump’s first term and remains in touch with him, told me of DOGE. “Russ has got a vision. He’s not an anarchist. He’s a true believer.”

Vought’s agenda includes shrinking the government, but it goes deeper than that. His vision of state power would effectively reject a century of jurisprudence and unravel the modern federal bureaucracy as we know it. A devotee of the so-called unitary executive theory, he wants to see the civil service gutted and repopulated with presidential loyalists, independent federal agencies politicized or eliminated, and absolute control of the executive branch concentrated in the Oval Office.

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Despite having been a Trump adviser for nearly a decade, Vought has not cultivated the political celebrity of high-profile White House officials such as Stephen Miller and Karoline Leavitt. Vought rarely gives interviews (he declined my request), and when he does speak in public, he is usually explicating the wonkish intricacies of the federal government in a nasal voice. His job title is dull and opaque. Even his physical bearing is forgettable: Bald and bespectacled, with a graying beard, he looks a bit like a middle-school social-studies teacher.

But whereas Musk’s influence already seems to be waning, Vought remains among the most powerful figures in today’s Washington. As a co-author of Project 2025, and later a chair of the Republican National Convention’s platform committee, he drew up detailed plans to “tame the bureaucracy” once Trump returned to power. Now, as head of an agency that touches every aspect of the $6.8 trillion federal budget, Vought is in position to enact his vision. And he’s wasted little time.

In his early days as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—an independent agency that was designed to be insulated from partisan pressure—Vought sent layoff notices to 1,500 employees, closed the office, canceled contracts, and declined funding for the agency from the Federal Reserve. Across hundreds of other federal agencies, he is spearheading an effort to simply stop enforcing many regulations. And last month, Trump proposed a rule that would convert 50,000 federal workers into Schedule F employees, whom the president can fire at will—a policy that Vought has championed since the first term. Vought’s ideas, once seen as radical, are now being realized.

Vought’s critics have warned that elements of his agenda—for example, unilaterally cutting off funding for congressionally established agencies such as USAID—are eroding checks and balances and pushing the country toward a constitutional crisis. But in interviews over the past several weeks, some of his allies told me that’s the whole point. The kind of revolutionary upending of the constitutional order that Vought envisions won’t happen without deliberate fights with Congress and the judiciary, they told me. If a crisis is coming, it’s because Vought is courting one.

Bannon told me that mainstream Republicans have long complained about runaway federal bureaucracy but have never had the stomach to take on the problem directly. Vought, by contrast, is strategically forcing confrontations with the other branches of government. “What Russ represents, and what the Romneys and McConnells don’t understand, is that the old politics is over,” he said. “There’s no compromise here. One side is going to win, one side is going to lose, so let’s get it on.”

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The White House did not respond to a list of questions I sent them for this story. But in a statement, Communications Director Steven Cheung called Vought a “patriot” and told me, “There is nobody more qualified or better suited to lead OMB in order to implement President Trump’s goals and priorities.”

Vought himself has written that we are living in a “post-Constitutional time.” Progressives, he argues, have so thoroughly “perverted” the Founders’ vision by filling the ranks of government with unaccountable technocrats that undoing the damage will require a “radical” plan of attack. “The Right needs to throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last two hundred years,” he wrote in an essay for The American Mind, a journal published by the Claremont Institute.

What exactly would such an approach look like in practice? Mike Davis, a Republican lawyer and a friend of Vought’s who helped steer judicial nominations in Trump’s first term, told me that he expects an escalating series of standoffs between the Trump administration and the judicial branch. He went so far as to say that if the Supreme Court issues a decision that constrains Trump’s executive power in a way the administration sees as unconstitutional, the president will have to defy it. “The reptiles will never drain the swamp,” Davis told me. “It’s going to take bold actions.”

Vought’s radicalization was not a foregone conclusion. He grew up in Trumbull, Connecticut, with a devout family who sent him to a private Christian school and Bible camp in the summers. At Wheaton College, the evangelical university where he studied history and political science, Vought was bookish and a bit “nerdy,” according to one fellow graduate who knew him at the time. The former student, who requested anonymity to recount personal interactions, told me that Vought was a target of periodic pranks on their floor in Traber Hall. On one occasion, some of Vought’s dorm mates took a putrid-smelling bin that had been collecting dirty dishes in the common bathroom and hid it under his bed.

On Wheaton’s conservative campus, Vought didn’t stand out as particularly ideological. He made a brief foray into electoral politics with a failed bid for student-body vice president, during which he campaigned, according to Bloomberg Businessweek, on improving the school’s recycling program. His views began to take on a sharper edge when he got to Washington. He spent a decade working on Capitol Hill, including as a policy aide to the House Republican Conference under then-Chairman Mike Pence, and became the executive director of the Republican Study Committee, a conservative caucus founded to exert pressure on House GOP leadership from the right. In 2010, he left Congress to join the Heritage Foundation’s lobbying arm.

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Vought earned a reputation in Washington’s right-wing circles for his deep knowledge of how the federal government actually works. “There’s a category of conservative activists who say, ‘This is what should be done,’ and there’s a much smaller group who actually know how to make it happen. Russ is one of them,” Tom Fitton, the president of the conservative pressure group Judicial Watch, told me.

The early years of Barack Obama’s presidency inspired a wave of libertarian energy on the right. Tea Party activists railed against excessive federal spending and bloated bureaucracy. The popular rallying cry of the moment was to shrink the government down to the size where one could “drown it in a bathtub,” as Grover Norquist famously put it. But Vought wanted to go further than the Norquists of the world.

After Republicans failed to recapture the White House in 2012, Vought joined a small group of activists and operatives who began gathering a few blocks from the Capitol, at the Judicial Watch offices, to strategize. They called themselves Groundswell, and their stated mission, according to leaked documents, was bold if a bit grandiose: to wage a “30 front war” that would “fundamentally transform the nation.” The weekly meetings drew a who’s who of influential insurgents, including Ginni Thomas, Dan Bongino, Leonard Leo, and Bannon, who was then running Breitbart News. Their agenda was diffuse, but they were united in a shared conviction that the Republican establishment and much of the conservative movement were insufficiently radical. They were impatient with the standard small-government activism of the era—they wanted more confrontation, and were open to more extreme ideas.

The conservative commentator Erick Erickson, who first met Vought in 2004, recalls his friend explaining to him early in Obama’s first term the mechanisms by which the purportedly nonpartisan civil service had come to be teeming with Democrats intent on thwarting right-leaning policies and pushing left-wing ones. It was a prototype of the “woke and weaponized bureaucracy” rhetoric that Vought and his allies would deploy in the Trump era.

The unitary executive theory had been circulating in GOP circles since at least Ronald Reagan’s first term. The idea held that Article II of the Constitution gives the president absolute control over the executive branch, including nonpartisan civil servants and independent agencies such as the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Republicans had periodically experimented with ways of applying this principle: After Reagan took office in 1981, the Heritage Foundation lobbied the new administration to recruit partisan supporters to fill 5,000 new jobs created by the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act.

There was, during the Obama years, limited intellectual appetite on the right for a return of the imperial presidency. But Trump’s arrival in the Oval Office in 2017—and his running claims that the “deep state” was sabotaging his presidency—changed all of that. Suddenly, Republicans were eager to discover new and creative ways to tighten the president’s grip on the executive branch. Vought, who joined the administration as deputy director of OMB before eventually becoming director, was happy to offer his services.

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Unlike most OMB directors, whose only forays into political controversy are in drafting the president’s budget proposals, Vought quietly played a role in some of the Trump era’s most combustible moments. In 2019, when Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden, it was Vought’s office that withheld military aid to the country, eventually triggering Trump’s first impeachment. And when Congress refused to fund the border wall, it was Vought who convinced the president to declare a state of emergency so that he could redirect $3.6 billion from a military construction budget to the project.

Vought has expressed pride in his record of pushing boundaries in ways that unsettle less dogmatic Republicans. Whereas many religious conservatives distance themselves from the “Christian nationalist” label, Vought wears it proudly. At a Heritage event, he sarcastically derided some of the Cabinet officials in Trump’s first term, whom he described as “a bunch of people around him who were constantly sitting on eggs and saying, Oh my gosh, he’s getting me to violate the law.”

And in a 2023 speech at the Center for Renewing America, the think tank he led after Trump’s first term, Vought touted the virtues of cruelty as he held forth on his plans for the federal civil service. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said at a closed-door meeting, according to a video that was later leaked to ProPublica. “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.”

As disruptive as Vought’s early moves have been, his most dramatic provocations are likely still to come. Vought has been a vocal champion of reviving the presidential “impoundment” power, which would allow the president to effectively circumvent Congress to unilaterally withhold appropriated funds. Congress outlawed the practice in 1974, and the Supreme Court has ruled it unconstitutional. But Trump has publicly rejected this interpretation of the law, and Vought has called impoundment “a necessary remedy to our fiscal brokenness.”

Earlier this month, the White House released its proposed budget to Congress, calling for $163 billion in reductions to federal spending, and making many of DOGE’s cuts permanent. In a letter to Congress, Vought wrote that the proposed cuts aimed to root out “niche non-governmental organizations and institutions of higher education committed to radical gender and climate ideologies antithetical to the American way of life.” The proposal included slashing the budget for the CDC by nearly 40 percent, dramatically scaling back rental-assistance programs, and cutting aid to international-development banks.

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In a typical year, the president’s budget proposal is little more than a messaging document, with virtually no chance of becoming law as written. Congress has the power of the purse. But given Trump’s stated indifference to such conventions, this year’s White House budget could be less a proposal than a warning shot. It doesn’t require much imagination to envision how the coming budget fight could spiral into the kind of constitutional crisis that Vought’s allies are rooting for: Congress declines to enshrine Trump’s spending cuts as law. Trump cuts the funding anyway. Legal challenges follow, court orders are issued, and Trump defies them, claiming a decisive mandate from voters and sweeping power under the unitary executive theory.

Some conservatives, wary of concentrating so much power in the Oval Office, question the path that Vought is taking. Philip Wallach, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who recently wrote a book called Why Congress, told me that he generally supports Vought’s effort to rein in the so-called administrative state. But he is alarmed by what he considers to be Vought’s disregard for core constitutional principles such as separation of powers. “For those of us who care about constitutional government,” Wallach said, “this administration is creating a lot of moments of truth.”

Of course, partisan enthusiasm for executive power rarely outlasts the loss of the White House. But Vought’s allies trust that he knows what he’s doing. “He’s mindful enough to understand that eventually a Democrat will become president again,” Erickson told me. “So how do you make the bureaucracy responsive to the president of the day without making it powerful enough to work at cross-purposes with conservative goals when a Democrat is in there? One of the easiest ways is to downsize.”

In other words, the durability of Vought’s ideological project might depend on just how much of the federal government Trump can unravel before he leaves office.