The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) will play a key role in strangling the power of unelected bureaucrats in the second Trump administration, believes Russ Vought, former department director and president of Center for Renewing America.
“Bureaucracies hate the American people,” Vought told Tucker Carlson. “The American people currently are not in control of their government, and the President hasn’t been either.”
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Vought’s ideas could be a fixture of the second Trump administration. Reports indicate President-elect Donald Trump is considering Vought to lead the department again.
The OMB is a very significant department that oversees the implementation of a president’s vision across the Executive Branch, and through it, Trump has the power to axe agency funding that will likely try to operate outside the scope of his agenda.
Trump vowed during the campaign to rid the federal bureaucracy — or “deep state,” as he calls it — of rogue and corrupt actors. Many of the tools to do so run through OMB, Vought explained in an interview with Carlson:
OMB is the nerve center of the federal government, particularly the executive branch … Office of Management and Budget has the ability to turn off the spending that’s going on at the agencies. It has all the regulations coming through it to assess whether it’s good or bad or too expensive or could be done a different way, or what does the President think, and then all of the government execution … So it really, presidents use OMB to tame the bureaucracy.
…The President has to move executively as fast and as aggressively as possible with a radical constitutional perspective to be able to dismantle the bureaucracy in their power centers. And I think there are a couple of ways to do it.
Number one is going after the whole notion of independence. There are no independent agencies. Congress may have viewed them as such, SEC or the FCC, CFPB, the whole alphabet suit, but that isn’t that is not something that the Constitution understands.
Vought explained how removing the notion of agency independence is particularly important for DOJ reforms:
There may be different strategies with each one of them about how you dismantle them, but as an administration, the whole notion of an independent agency should be thrown out, particularly with the Department of Justice, in which there’s literally no law. All it is is precedent from the Watergate era that the Attorney General and those lawyers don’t work for the President … we have to go at that as hard as we possibly can.
So you can apply the concept of destroying independence at every agency. I even saw it in aspects of OMB, with regard to who gets to make the decisions on statistics, right? Like there are little pockets of independence … we got to remove those, right? They’re unconstitutional.
The term “deep state” or “administrative state” describes the phenomenon of unaccountable and unelected administrative agencies, including the national security apparatus, exercising power to create and enforce their own rules. The administrative state uses its rule-making ability to essentially usurp the separation of powers between the three branches of government by creating a so-called fourth branch of government not formed by the Constitution.
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Many unelected bureaucrats within the administrative state also use their position to inflict their own agenda on citizens. For instance, before the “laptop from hell” story broke in 2020, 51 intel officials signed a letter that insinuated Hunter’s laptop was Russian disinformation. Politico peddled the letter under the title “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.” The 51 signatories, however, seemingly knew the Politico story was false at the time because the FBI had the laptop that Hunter abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop. President Joe Biden cited the story during a 2020 presidential debate with Trump to discredit the laptop’s contents. The story was reportedly planted by Secretary of State Antony Blinken for Biden to use during the event.
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.