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Russell Vought, Trump’s Budget Chief, Wants to Cut ‘Woke’ Spending

Published

11 months ago

March 28, 2025

Russell Vought, Trump’s Budget Chief, Wants to Cut ‘Woke’ Spending

Years before President Trump returned to the White House, his budget chief, Russell T. Vought, began mapping out a plan to shrink the federal government.

In Mr. Vought’s design, spending would be slashed by about $9 trillion over the next decade. Entire federal programs — from housing vouchers to student loans — would be eliminated. The government would fire thousands of civil workers, including those who investigated tax fraud. And Washington would restrict aid to the poor, requiring Americans to work in exchange for benefits.

The ideas formed the bedrock of Mr. Vought’s plan to end the “woke and weaponized” bureaucracy, a policy guide he issued in 2022 for fellow conservatives entering a key budget battle. His full vision did not come to fruition at the time, but the roughly 100-page blueprint has taken on heightened significance since Mr. Trump won re-election — and reinstalled Mr. Vought to his perch — foreshadowing their shared aim to reel in the size and reach of government.

In the perennial fight over the federal balance sheet, few officials are more important than Mr. Vought. As head of the Office of Management and Budget, he wields vast power over the United States government, its workers and the millions of people whose lives are shaped by the ebb and flow of federal funds.

Mr. Vought brings an aggressive style to the job, one revealed in podcast interviews and public writings, particularly in the years after Mr. Trump’s 2020 defeat. A longtime budget expert, he sketched out a vision for expansive presidential power in Project 2025, the conservative blueprint prepared by the Heritage Foundation for Mr. Trump. And in 2021, Mr. Vought founded his own organization, the Center for Renewing America, which describes itself as dedicated to “God, country and community.”

There, Mr. Vought refined an ambition to marry extreme fiscal austerity with Christian values, pledging to eliminate federal programs seen as too wasteful, “woke” or secular. In scrutinizing the budget, his approach has made him a natural ally of Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

Now back at O.M.B., Mr. Vought has assembled a team of like-minded advisers who are working to prepare Mr. Trump’s 2026 budget proposal. That blueprint may guide Congress in its work to extend a set of expensive and expiring tax cuts enacted in Mr. Trump’s first term.

Documents reviewed by The New York Times showed that as recently as late February, O.M.B. staff were compiling recommendations for sweeping cuts to programs that Republicans have long wanted to slash. Those cuts include imposing work requirements for recipients of food stamps, ending public service student loan forgiveness and phasing out certain federal Medicaid funds for states.

The president and Mr. Vought also subscribe to the idea that the White House should have expansive powers over the nation’s purse strings, halting or canceling federal spending even if Congress instructs otherwise. That stance has emboldened the White House to already interrupt the distribution of billions of dollars, including foreign aid, infrastructure spending and payments to food banks.

The delays have provoked lawsuits, and in a largely unnoticed move, they have triggered an investigation by the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan watchdog established by Congress that acknowledged its inquiries in February. Some Democrats contend that the budget office has violated the law in other ways, after it quietly disabled a government website on Monday that tracked the regular outflow of federal dollars.

“Taking down this website is not just illegal, it is a brazen move to hide this administration’s spending from the American people and from Congress,” said Senator Patty Murray of Washington and Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the leading Democratic appropriators, in a statement this week.

Mr. Vought declined through a spokeswoman to be interviewed. In a preamble to his 2022 policy guide, he wrote: “The evidence of America’s fiscal brokenness is everywhere.”

Mr. Vought’s calls for austerity are hardly novel in Washington, where policymakers often lament the nation’s growing $36 trillion debt, but they carry new force at a moment when Mr. Trump looks to reshape the federal bureaucracy.

As DOGE agents blitz federal agencies — shuttering entire programs, dismissing thousands of workers and burrowing into sensitive federal computer systems — Mr. Vought has toiled quietly to lay the foundation for “making these cuts permanent in the long term,” he explained in an interview with Fox Business in February.

The same month, Mr. Vought ordered agencies to submit detailed plans by March and April indicating how they would cut spending, lay off workers and sell office buildings to save money and ensure they “advance the president’s policy priorities,” according to a memo sent to agency leaders.

James C. Capretta, a former O.M.B. official now serving as a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said Mr. Vought’s actions reflected the view that “the federal executive branch really should be at the service of a president in a manner that goes beyond professional management of the agencies.”

The reorganization arrived weeks after the budget office, under interim leadership while Mr. Vought awaited Senate confirmation, froze nearly all federal spending. While political pressure and multiple lawsuits forced the White House to rescind that policy, budget officials have continued to halt the disbursement of some federal payments. Another arrived this week, when the Trump administration essentially refused to spend about $3 billion in emergency money to combat narcotics and fund other programs, a move that drew a rare bipartisan rebuke in the Senate.

“Every day, there is a headline about another institution, about funding that has been discontinued,” said Skye Perryman, the president of Democracy Forward, a left-leaning advocacy group that has sued O.M.B. over its actions.

The freezes underscored Mr. Vought’s long-held belief that the budget office must serve as the White House “air-traffic control system,” as he wrote in a chapter for Project 2025. There, and in much of his work, Mr. Vought has long criticized civil workers, portraying some of their actions as motivated by their “own agenda.” He previously promised to put them “in trauma,” he said in a video first surfaced by ProPublica.

“They’re constantly hiding the ball,” Mr. Vought said during a May 2023 podcast interview, adding that Republicans needed to “micromanage the heck out of everything that is part of your agency, or make sure that your right arms are.”

With the help of Mr. Trump, the two men have established a team in recent weeks that echoes Mr. Vought’s views.

The roster includes Mark Paoletta, the budget office’s general counsel, who served with Mr. Vought during the first Trump administration and later at the Center for Renewing America. Mr. Paoletta represented Virginia Thomas, the wife of the Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, during a House investigation into Mr. Trump’s efforts to remain in power after the 2020 election. Mr. Paoletta drafted the since-revoked order that froze nearly all federal spending.

Jeffrey Bossert Clark, who is serving in a key O.M.B. office that oversees regulation, previously faced possible contempt of Congress charges for refusing to testify about accusations that he sought to undo the results of the 2020 race.

And Dan Bishop, whom Mr. Trump appointed as deputy director, is a former Republican congressman who, while serving in the North Carolina legislature, sponsored a bill that restricted transgender people from using their preferred public restrooms. The Senate confirmed his nomination on Wednesday.

Testifying this month, Mr. Bishop acknowledged that he agreed with those who believe the 2020 election had been rigged. The former congressman said the president had a mandate to pursue “an end to the waste and the Washington status quo.”

The comments angered Democrats, who recalled Mr. Trump’s first term, when he and Mr. Vought halted congressionally authorized aid to Ukraine in a standoff that laid the groundwork for House Democrats to impeach the president. The budget adviser maintained in 2021 — and, years later, at his own nomination hearing — that the White House had acted lawfully.

After the Senate confirmed him along party lines, Mr. Vought helped to secure a deal to stave off a government shutdown, wooing Republicans with a promise that the administration would take aggressive steps to slash spending. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump signaled that the White House could begin by submitting to Congress a formal list of proposed cuts, reflecting some of the savings identified by DOGE.

“I assume they’ll total everything up and get it to us,” Representative Ralph Norman, a South Carolina Republican and member of the House Budget Committee, said in an interview. “What the president will have will be sweet music to all of us who want a very conservative budget.”

At his Center for Renewing America, Mr. Vought in 2022 previewed his pursuit of stark cuts, targeting benefit programs including Medicaid. He proposed limiting its funding and eligibility, an idea he has resurfaced in recent weeks.

“You can get sizable levels of savings and reforms,” Mr. Vought told the Senate Budget Committee this year.

The term “woke” appeared 77 times in Mr. Vought’s document. The proposal looked to slash the “woke agenda” at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, targeting money meant for “niche and small population groups.” It proposed jettisoning billions of dollars in “woke foreign aid spending”; eliminating entire programs for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities; and striking the “secular, woke religion” of climate change from the federal ledger.

“That is the central and immediate threat facing the country — the one that all our statesmen must rise tall to vanquish,” Mr. Vought wrote in the preamble to his budget. “The battle cannot wait.”

Alan Rappeport contributed reporting.

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Business

Trump orders federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s AI after clash with Pentagon

Published

5 hours ago

February 27, 2026

Press Room

Trump orders federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s AI after clash with Pentagon

President Trump on Friday directed federal agencies to stop using technology from San Francisco artificial intelligence company Anthropic, escalating a high-profile clash between the AI startup and the Pentagon over safety.

In a Friday post on the social media site Truth Social, Trump described the company as “radical left” and “woke.”

“We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again!” Trump said.

The president’s harsh words mark a major escalation in the ongoing battle between some in the Trump administration and several technology companies over the use of artificial intelligence in defense tech.

Anthropic has been sparring with the Pentagon, which had threatened to end its $200-million contract with the company on Friday if it didn’t loosen restrictions on its AI model so it could be used for more military purposes. Anthropic had been asking for more guarantees that its tech wouldn’t be used for surveillance of Americans or autonomous weapons.

The tussle could hobble Anthropic’s business with the government. The Trump administration said the company was added to a sweeping national security blacklist, ordering federal agencies to immediately discontinue use of its products and barring any government contractors from maintaining ties with it.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who met with Anthropic’s Chief Executive Dario Amodei this week, criticized the tech company after Trump’s Truth Social post.

“Anthropic delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon,” he wrote Friday on social media site X.

Anthropic didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Anthropic announced a two-year agreement with the Department of Defense in July to “prototype frontier AI capabilities that advance U.S. national security.”

The company has an AI chatbot called Claude, but it also built a custom AI system for U.S. national security customers.

On Thursday, Amodei signaled the company wouldn’t cave to the Department of Defense’s demands to loosen safety restrictions on its AI models.

The government has emphasized in negotiations that it wants to use Anthropic’s technology only for legal purposes, and the safeguards Anthropic wants are already covered by the law.

Still, Amodei was worried about Washington’s commitment.

“We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner,” he said in a blog post. “However, in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values.”

Tech workers have backed Anthropic’s stance.

Unions and worker groups representing 700,000 employees at Amazon, Google and Microsoft said this week in a joint statement that they’re urging their employers to reject these demands as well if they have additional contracts with the Pentagon.

“Our employers are already complicit in providing their technologies to power mass atrocities and war crimes; capitulating to the Pentagon’s intimidation will only further implicate our labor in violence and repression,” the statement said.

Anthropic’s standoff with the U.S. government could benefit its competitors, such as Elon Musk’s xAI or OpenAI.

Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and one of Anthropic’s biggest competitors, told CNBC in an interview that he trusts Anthropic.

“I think they really do care about safety, and I’ve been happy that they’ve been supporting our war fighters,” he said. “I’m not sure where this is going to go.”

Anthropic has distinguished itself from its rivals by touting its concern about AI safety.

The company, valued at roughly $380 billion, is legally required to balance making money with advancing the company’s public benefit of “responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity.”

Developers, businesses, government agencies and other organizations use Anthropic’s tools. Its chatbot can generate code, write text and perform other tasks. Anthropic also offers an AI assistant for consumers and makes money from paid subscriptions as well as contracts. Unlike OpenAI, which is testing ads in ChatGPT, Anthropic has pledged not to show ads in its chatbot Claude.

The company has roughly 2,000 employees and has revenue equivalent to about $14 billion a year.

Business

Video: The Web of Companies Owned by Elon Musk

Published

16 hours ago

February 27, 2026

Press Room

Video: The Web of Companies Owned by Elon Musk

new video loaded: The Web of Companies Owned by Elon Musk

In mapping out Elon Musk’s wealth, our investigation found that Mr. Musk is behind more than 90 companies in Texas. Kirsten Grind, a New York Times Investigations reporter, explains what her team found.

By Kirsten Grind, Melanie Bencosme, James Surdam and Sean Havey

February 27, 2026

Business

Commentary: How Trump helped foreign markets outperform U.S. stocks during his first year in office

Published

18 hours ago

February 27, 2026

Press Room

Commentary: How Trump helped foreign markets outperform U.S. stocks during his first year in office

Trump has crowed about the gains in the U.S. stock market during his term, but in 2025 investors saw more opportunity in the rest of the world.

If you’re a stock market investor you might be feeling pretty good about how your portfolio of U.S. equities fared in the first year of President Trump’s term.

All the major market indices seemed to be firing on all cylinders, with the Standard & Poor’s 500 index gaining 17.9% through the full year.

But if you’re the type of investor who looks for things to regret, pay no attention to the rest of the world’s stock markets. That’s because overseas markets did better than the U.S. market in 2025 — a lot better. The MSCI World ex-USA index — that is, all the stock markets except the U.S. — gained more than 32% last year, nearly double the percentage gains of U.S. markets.

That’s a major departure from recent trends. Since 2013, the MSCI US index had bested the non-U.S. index every year except 2017 and 2022, sometimes by a wide margin — in 2024, for instance, the U.S. index gained 24.6%, while non-U.S. markets gained only 4.7%.

The Trump trade is dead. Long live the anti-Trump trade.

— Katie Martin, Financial Times

Broken down into individual country markets (also by MSCI indices), in 2025 the U.S. ranked 21st out of 23 developed markets, with only New Zealand and Denmark doing worse. Leading the pack were Austria and Spain, with 86% gains, but superior records were turned in by Finland, Ireland and Hong Kong, with gains of 50% or more; and the Netherlands, Norway, Britain and Japan, with gains of 40% or more.

Investment analysts cite several factors to explain this trend. Judging by traditional metrics such as price/earnings multiples, the U.S. markets have been much more expensive than those in the rest of the world. Indeed, they’re historically expensive. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index traded in 2025 at about 23 times expected corporate earnings; the historical average is 18 times earnings.

Investment managers also have become nervous about the concentration of market gains within the U.S. technology sector, especially in companies associated with artificial intelligence R&D. Fears that AI is an investment bubble that could take down the S&P’s highest fliers have investors looking elsewhere for returns.

But one factor recurs in almost all the market analyses tracking relative performance by U.S. and non-U.S. markets: Donald Trump.

Investors started 2025 with optimism about Trump’s influence on trading opportunities, given his apparent commitment to deregulation and his braggadocio about America’s dominant position in the world and his determination to preserve, even increase it.

That hasn’t been the case for months.

”The Trump trade is dead. Long live the anti-Trump trade,” Katie Martin of the Financial Times wrote this week. “Wherever you look in financial markets, you see signs that global investors are going out of their way to avoid Donald Trump’s America.”

Two Trump policy initiatives are commonly cited by wary investment experts. One, of course, is Trump’s on-and-off tariffs, which have left investors with little ability to assess international trade flows. The Supreme Court’s invalidation of most Trump tariffs and the bellicosity of his response, which included the immediate imposition of new 10% tariffs across the board and the threat to increase them to 15%, have done nothing to settle investors’ nerves.

Then there’s Trump’s driving down the value of the dollar through his agitation for lower interest rates, among other policies. For overseas investors, a weaker dollar makes U.S. assets more expensive relative to the outside world.

It would be one thing if trade flows and the dollar’s value reflected economic conditions that investors could themselves parse in creating a picture of investment opportunities. That’s not the case just now. “The current uncertainty is entirely man-made (largely by one orange-hued man in particular) but could well continue at least until the US mid-term elections in November,” Sam Burns of Mill Street Research wrote on Dec. 29.

Trump hasn’t been shy about trumpeting U.S. stock market gains as emblems of his policy wisdom. “The stock market has set 53 all-time record highs since the election,” he said in his State of the Union address Tuesday. “Think of that, one year, boosting pensions, 401(k)s and retirement accounts for the millions and the millions of Americans.”

Trump asserted: “Since I took office, the typical 401(k) balance is up by at least $30,000. That’s a lot of money. … Because the stock market has done so well, setting all those records, your 401(k)s are way up.”

Trump’s figure doesn’t conform to findings by retirement professionals such as the 401(k) overseers at Bank of America. They reported that the average account balance grew by only about $13,000 in 2025. I asked the White House for the source of Trump’s claim, but haven’t heard back.

Interpreting stock market returns as snapshots of the economy is a mug’s game. Despite that, at her recent appearance before a House committee, Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi tried to deflect questions about her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein records by crowing about it.

“The Dow is over 50,000 right now, she declared. “Americans’ 401(k)s and retirement savings are booming. That’s what we should be talking about.”

I predicted that the administration would use the Dow industrial average’s break above 50,000 to assert that “the overall economy is firing on all cylinders, thanks to his policies.” The Dow reached that mark on Feb. 6. But Feb. 11, the day of Bondi’s testimony, was the last day the index closed above 50,000. On Thursday, it closed at 49,499.50, or about 1.4% below its Feb. 10 peak close of 50,188.14.

To use a metric suggested by economist Justin Wolfers of the University of Michigan, if you invested $48,488 in the Dow on the day Trump took office last year, when the Dow closed at 48,448 points, you would have had $50,000 on Feb. 6. That’s a gain of about 3.2%. But if you had invested the same amount in the global stock market not including the U.S. (based on the MSCI World ex-USA index), on that same day you would have had nearly $60,000. That’s a gain of nearly 24%.

Broader market indices tell essentially the same story. From Jan. 17, 2025, the last day before Trump’s inauguration, through Thursday’s close, the MSCI US stock index gained a cumulative 16.3%. But the world index minus the U.S. gained nearly 42%.

The gulf between U.S. and non-U.S. performance has continued into the current year. The S&P 500 has gained about 0.74% this year through Wednesday, while the MSCI World ex-USA index has gained about 8.9%. That’s “the best start for a calendar year for global stocks relative to the S&P 500 going back to at least 1996,” Morningstar reports.

It wouldn’t be unusual for the discrepancy between the U.S. and global markets to shrink or even reverse itself over the course of this year.

That’s what happened in 2017, when overseas markets as tracked by MSCI beat the U.S. by more than three percentage points, and 2022, when global markets lost money but U.S. markets underperformed the rest of the world by more than five percentage points.

Economic conditions change, and often the stock markets march to their own drummers. The one thing less likely to change is that Trump is set to remain president until Jan. 20, 2029. Make your investment bets accordingly.