We all know who this is . . . and we know that he left Washington in even worse condition than he found it.

Now meet the man who is picking up where Musk left off: Russell Vought, Director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Did I hear a chorus of voices asking “Who?” . . . or perhaps it was “So what?” that echoed throughout the hall. Who really cares about the government’s chief bean-counter?

Well, we should all care. Because, although his position does not earn him a place in the presidential cabinet, his department — the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) — is the largest one within the Executive Office of the U.S. President, and reports directly, and only, to the President.

According to the White House website, the OMB “ . . . serves the President of the United States in overseeing the implementation of his vision across the Executive Branch. Specifically, OMB’s mission is to assist the President in meeting his policy, budget, management and regulatory objectives and to fulfill the agency’s statutory responsibilities.”

In the current administration, that makes him Donald Trump’s #1 Lackey. And that is a position that carries with it a whole lot of power.

Now, that might be a good thing if the position were held by a clear-thinking, law-abiding, red-blooded American who might be able to rein in an out-of-control tyrant with a raging God complex. But Vought is cut from the same cloth as Trump, and is not just a puppet doing his boss’ bidding, but is on a long-term power trip of his own.

His history, both professional and political, is too lengthy, too complex, and too disturbing to reiterate here. For that, I urge you to peruse the article by Phil Mattingly and Jeremy Herb titled “Trump’s shutdown architect: Russ Vought’s plan to deconstruct the government was years in the making,” [CNN, October 2, 2025].

Most recently, however, as Congress fought over a budget for 2026 and the government headed toward a shutdown, Vought was busy preparing a 622-word directive that completely ignored and overrode all of the contingency plans from previous years.

This time, in the event of a shutdown, every federal agency would be required to submit detailed plans for mass layoffs.

Those plans would take immediate effect, and would only be shelved if Democrats agreed to a Republican funding measure they had already voted to reject. [Mattingly and Herb, CNN, id.] [Bold emphasis is mine.]

Thus, Vought — together with Trump’s willing Republican toadies in Congress — will have conspired to place the blame for the government’s closure on the Democrats who have fought to safeguard the rights and protections afforded Americans by the Constitution.

While Musk’s DOGE was focused on his astronomical budget cuts, Vought has quietly been jockeying into a position enabling him to dismantle the entire federal bureaucracy, becoming Trump’s go-to instrument of deconstruction and destruction.

And part of their plan involves another huge swath of layoffs — estimated by some administration officials to be as many as 300,000 by the end of the year — as punishment for the Democrats’ refusal to cave in to pressure to pass the Republicans’ budget by the end of the fiscal year.

We hear quite a lot about Vance, Rubio, Hegseth, Bondi, Kennedy, and Trump himself. But sometimes it’s the quiet ones who are most treacherous, and whom we should be watching most closely.

*. *. *

Through all of the agony of the last eight months, as I have witnessed my beautiful country being gutted by a cabal of rapacious, power-mad, uber-wealthy Draculas in modern guise, I have been haunted by one question that seems to me to have no logical answer:

Once they have achieved their goal of dismantling a government that has worked well for 250 years, breaking the country’s ties with all of its long-time allies, destroying its environment and infrastructure, and enslaving its populace . . . what will they have won?

And the only picture that comes to my mind is this:

But who will be left to rebuild it for them?

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
10/3/25