Business
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.
Layoffs have continued with another tech company saying it was cutting people to enable it to use more artificial intelligence.
Groupon announced in a security filing this month that it will cut up to 400 jobs, or nearly 25% of its worldwide workforce, as part of a broader restructuring plan to make the platform AI-native. The Chicago company plans to carry out the layoffs in the coming months.
Earlier the company’s Chief Executive Officer Dušan Šenkypl had said the company “fell short of our expectations” last quarter.
Since 2022, more than 800,000 tech workers have been laid off, according to Layoffs.fyi, a website that tracks job cuts.
The surge in pink slips started in 2023, when companies that had gone on hiring sprees during the COVID-19 pandemic began to cut back. From January to April this year, U.S. tech employers announced 85,411 job cuts, up 33% from the same period last year, according to global outplacement and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Groupon said in the filing that the decision to shift toward an AI-based company is to “better deliver on our mission, serving both customers and merchants.”
The company said the layoffs will cost it as much as $13 million, but save it more than $20 million per year.
This announcement comes as many e-commerce companies are shifting their business models to AI to reduce costs by automating many roles.
Artificial intelligence has also triggered fierce competition for top talent and is also fueling tens of thousands of layoffs this year. The result is that the class divide is widening in Silicon Valley as a tiny group of employees are landing unprecedented packages for AI skills, while many others struggle to find work.
The have-nots are doing everything that used to guarantee great jobs — refreshing resumes, optimizing LinkedIn profiles and doing interviews — but companies are much more picky these days. The tech jobless are rethinking their lives. Some are taking pay cuts, while others are leaving tech. Some are going back to study or launch startups. Some have retired.
Groupon shares, which have fallen 27% over the last 12 months, slipped 1% on Thursday to $21.20.
Walt Disney Co.’s ABC has filed renewal applications with the Federal Communications Commission “under protest” after an order mandating a years-early review of the network’s eight television station licenses.
The criticism was part of the network’s applications for the FCC review, which were filed ahead of a deadline Thursday. In an objection to the early renewal, Disney’s New York station WABC called the FCC order “unlawful, arbitrary and unconstitutional” and said it was “legally indefensible.”
“The Commission had not demanded early renewal in over five decades,” the station wrote in its filing. “And it has never before demanded simultaneous license renewal applications from a group of stations commonly owned with a network as it has here. The order has no legitimate purpose.”
The licenses for the eight ABC-owned TV stations, including KABC in Los Angeles, were originally scheduled for renewal between 2028 and 2031.
The FCC order came shortly after ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about First Lady Melania Trump looking like an “expectant widow” days before a gunman tried to breach the White House Correspondents’ Assn. gala last month that President Trump attended.
Trump has frequently threatened to have TV station licenses pulled when he is unhappy with their coverage, but the order is the first time the government has acted on his wishes, sparking anger from free speech advocates. The FCC has said the order is part of an investigation into whether Disney’s diversity and inclusion policies violate federal law and the agency’s rules against “unlawful discrimination.”
In its response, WABC said the “only plausible reason” to issue the order was to “punish the station for speech the government does not like.”
“The ultimate injury here is not to the station or its parent company. It is to the public,” WABC wrote. “When a broadcaster must weigh regulatory retaliation before making editorial decisions, the public loses access to journalism that is free from government influence.”
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said in a statement Thursday that Disney filed its applications to renew its broadcast licenses only after the company was told its previous answers were “disingenuous, deficient and improper.”
“Contrary to Disney’s claim that the FCC called in their broadcast licenses for early renewal for no reason, the record shows something very different,” Carr said. “Broadcast licensees have a unique obligation to operate in the public interest. The FCC will follow the facts and law wherever they may lead.”
FCC Commissioner Anna M. Gomez, the panel’s only Democrat who has backed Disney in its fight, cheered the Burbank media and entertainment company’s filing, saying in a post on X that she was “glad to see them expose the FCC’s actions as nothing more than naked political retribution and an unlawful assault on free speech and a free press.”
Times staff writer Meg James contributed to this report.
Andrew here. Warning: If you bet on prediction markets about things you could know about from your work, it may be insider trading. That’s the lesson from new charges against an employee of Google.
Also, Jamie Dimon is thinking about spending $20 billion on acquisitions; we go through some possible targets. And take our quiz about the U.F.C. fight scheduled to take place at the White House.
Gaming prediction markets
In the public’s view, prediction markets are a way to bet on the N.B.A. playoffs, the Texas Senate race or what Costco executives will say on their next earnings call.
They’re also often seen as a hive of insider trading, a view reinforced by charges filed on Wednesday against a Google employee who made more than $1 million on Polymarket. The case raises more questions about how these platforms are policed — and who should do the policing.
What happened: The Google employee, Michele Spagnuolo (who used the handle AlphaRaccoon), was accused of betting on what people were searching for on Google — wagers he was sure to win because he had access to internal search data.
“Spagnuolo correctly predicted virtually all of the outcomes on these positions,” the Commodity Futures Trading Commission wrote in its complaint.
A Google representative said in a statement that using confidential information for making these kinds of bets was “a serious breach of our policies.”
Spagnuolo isn’t the only person charged with insider trading on Polymarket. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan last month accused Master Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke, a U.S. Special Forces soldier, of betting on the capture of Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, an operation he participated in.
Insider trading is an increasing problem for prediction markets. Polymarket has faced significant scrutiny because its unregulated offshore platform has long made it easy to bet anonymously. (Kalshi, which is regulated in the U.S., has also suffered from insider trading.)
Polymarket has started clamping down on that practice, according to The Information — though some longtime users have chafed at those efforts. “Polymarket will go down the drain if they make KYC mandatory,” one user wrote on the company’s Discord discussion forum, referring to “know your customer” practices.
What are policymakers doing? Critics have accused the C.F.T.C., the primary American regulator of prediction markets, of failing to adequately police the industry. (Mike Selig, the commission’s chairman, told ABC News that his agency actively patrolled for wrongdoing.)
Some lawmakers are seeking to crack down on insider trading, including Representative James Comer, the Kentucky Republican who leads the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and several bipartisan groups of senators.
Why it matters: Prediction markets have become big businesses. (Kalshi was most recently valued at $22 billion.) But a growing perception that they’re rife with cheating could threaten their popularity.
HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING
The Trump administration is reportedly preparing to fund U.S. drone companies. Shares in Unusual Machines, a drone start-up in which Donald Trump Jr. is an investor and advisory board member, are soaring in premarket trading after The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed sources, reported on the potential investments. (The Times hasn’t independently confirmed the report.) The deals, aimed at bolstering domestic production, are still in the negotiation stage — equity stakes are a possibility — as the Pentagon vets the companies, The Journal adds.
Investors brace for Thursday’s inflation data. The Personal Consumption Expenditures report for April, which will be closely watched by the Fed, is expected to show on Thursday that headline inflation hit a three-year high of 3.9 percent. The wartime energy spike is a big culprit, and that’s likely to tie the Fed’s hands on interest rates. Lisa Cook, a Fed governor whom President Trump has tried to fire, is the latest policymaker to say that there’s even a rate increase in the cards.
Jensen Huang reportedly agrees to join the board of a Chinese university. Huang, the Nvidia C.E.O., is expected to be the latest U.S. business leader to join the advisory board of Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management, The Financial Times reports. Tim Cook, Apple’s departing C.E.O., is the chairman, and Michael Dell and Elon Musk are members. (Nvidia is trying to jump-start business in China as the Washington-Beijing trade war continues.) Laura Loomer, a right-wing agitator, quickly seized on the Huang news, calling it “a massive scandal!!!!” on social media, and a national security risk.
What might Dimon buy?
Jamie Dimon, the C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, is sitting on a pile of cash and says he’s open to a deal. He even put a number on it: up to $20 billion.
While that’s not a big sum relative to the bank’s assets, it got us thinking: Where could JPMorgan, whose last major acquisition was First Republic during the 2023 regional-banking crisis, go fishing for a company to buy? Brian O’Keefe asked Mike Mayo, a banking analyst at Wells Fargo.
Here are three possibilities:
Wealth management. Driven by solid margins and lucrative high-net-worth customers, this area of finance has experienced an M.&A. boom in recent years. (The First Republic deal already bolstered JPMorgan’s wealth-advisory ranks.) Such a move would tick a lot of boxes, Mayo said, adding, “It could be a high-end private bank, it could be kind of a mass-affluent brokerage firm, it could be wealth advisory.”
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Mary Erdoes, who runs JPMorgan’s wealth management division, told analysts in February that her unit had reviewed 25 potential deals last year and passed on all of them.
Payments. JPMorgan has invested heavily in new payment platforms, including in JPM Coin, a digital token it has tested with Coinbase and Mastercard. The bank handles between $5 trillion and $10 trillion in transactions daily, Mayo said. “There could be more opportunities to enhance the efficiency, the effectiveness, the timeliness or the geographic reach in the payments area,” he added.
Digital banking. Dimon recently singled out Revolut, the British banking app that is plotting expansion into the U.S., as an emerging competitive threat. “To the extent that an acquisition could help JPMorgan become the next Revolut outside the United States, that would seem to be attractive,” Mayo noted.
There are some big asterisks to consider. Because of its size, JPMorgan would most likely be barred from buying another U.S. lender on antitrust grounds. For that reason, Mayo thinks that a deal, if there is one, would probably happen abroad.
Dimon himself is being coy. The bank may have amassed ample capital for acquisitions, but “it’s not burning a hole in our pocket at all,” Dimon said on Wednesday at an investor conference. “If it sits there for a while, no problem,” he added.
Dimon did not suggest any potential targets on Wednesday.
Here are some guesses:
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Aberdeen Group, Invesco or Julius Baer in wealth management?
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Revolut is too big, but how about Wise or Toast in payments?
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Or what about Monzo or Bunq, fintech banks that have grown rapidly in Europe?
Meta will charge for its chatbot
Meta will begin charging customers for access to its A.I.-powered chatbot, a big change for a company best known for its free products — and the latest sign that even deep-pocketed companies are wrestling with the enormous cost of artificial intelligence.
On Wednesday, we looked at how companies were reining in the costs of consuming A.I., including by switching to cheaper models. Meta’s move shows that the companies supplying A.I. models are also reckoning with ballooning costs, and seeking revenue to make up for those losses.
Meta is spending a fortune on A.I. Last month the company increased its 2026 capital expenditure forecast to as high as $145 billion, and Meta’s C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, said it would spend at least $600 billion on A.I. infrastructure in the next few years.
Some investors have looked skeptically on that plan. The company’s stock is down 2.3 percent this year.
Meta will use paid subscriptions to offset some of its A.I. investment. The basic tier of the chatbot, Meta One Plus, will be $7.99 per month. A premium version, Meta One Premium, will cost $19.99. From Bloomberg, which reported the subscription news earlier:
Meta has long argued that its A.I. investments are already paying off in the form of highly targeted and efficient advertising, which is improved thanks to A.I. models. But the company is also looking for other ways to recoup its A.I. spending, and consumer chatbot subscriptions have become popular with several other A.I. competitors, including Alphabet Inc.’s Google and OpenAI. Both rivals offer similarly priced subscription tiers.
The company has sought to expand its subscription business, testing plans for WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook. It has also tried to cut costs in other corners of its business. This month, Meta laid off 10 percent of its employee base, about 8,000 workers.
Investors, eager to see revenue gains from A.I., cheered Meta’s subscription-chatbot plan. The company’s stock price was up 3.7 percent at the market close on Wednesday.
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Elsewhere, shares in the software maker Snowflake are soaring in premarket trading on Thursday after it reported strong quarterly results that suggested that A.I. agents weren’t clobbering its core subscription business. Salesforce’s analyst call on Wednesday, however, renewed fears that this sector was still vulnerable to A.I. disruption.
Quiz: U.F.C. on the South Lawn
This question comes from a recent Times article. Click an answer to see if you’re right. (The link will be free.)
President Trump is getting ready to celebrate his 80th birthday — and America’s 250th — with an evening of mixed martial arts. Preparations are underway to host Ultimate Fighting Championship matches in an octagon on the White House’s South Lawn on June 14. Construction of the temporary arena, along with a 90-foot-tall arch known as “The Claw,” featuring LED lights and audio equipment, began this week.
U.F.C. plans to spend around $60 million on the event, said Mark Shapiro, the president and chief operating officer of TKO Group Holdings, U.F.C.’s parent company, on a recent earnings call. (He added that U.F.C. would lose about $30 million on the event but that it would be “an investment for the long term.”)
The expenses include about $700,000 to repair the lawn after the fight, Dana White, the U.F.C. president and chief executive, told Sports Business Journal.
How many people will the temporary arena hold for the U.F.C. event at the White House?
THE SPEED READ
Deals
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“SpaceX-Tesla Merger Is ‘Only a Matter of When,’ Early Investor Says” (Bloomberg)
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Shares in the European food-delivery company Delivery Hero are down sharply on Thursday after Uber, which is pursuing a takeover bid for the company, raised its stake to nearly 37 percent. (WSJ)
Politics, policy and regulation
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The attorneys general of New York and New Jersey subpoenaed FIFA over soaring World Cup ticket prices. (WSJ)
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Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said he would impose a 100 percent tax on payouts to state residents from the $1.8 billion fund tied to the Justice Department’s settlement with President Trump. (Politico)
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