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.
Fernando Flores can spend eight hours a day pouring the same cup of coffee.
He is not a barista. He’s a robot puppeteer, trying to train humanoids.
He manipulates mechanical arms remotely, using hand and arm sensors to make them pick up a pot of coffee, pour it into a mug and put the pot back in the coffee maker. Flores checks for spills, then empties the mug back into the pot by hand and does it again — hundreds of times.
“The repetitiveness, it can cause some discomfort,” said Flores, who has the title of senior robotic pilot at San Francisco startup Encord. “It becomes second nature after a while.”
This Sisyphus of Silicon Valley is on the front lines of a rapidly expanding industry of robot trainers, preparing to teach and operate the army of humanoid robots scheduled to march out of nearby factories in the coming year. Encord practices, records and sells data about movement to the companies racing to bring humanoids to homes, offices and factories.
If tech companies’ optimistic plans are to be believed, a swarm of American-built robots is about to hit the market.
Tesla’s Fremont factory stopped car production this year to make way for production lines for its Optimus robots, with unbelievable plans to ramp up capacity to 1 million units a year. Palo Alto-based 1X Technologies is already manufacturing its 66-pound, 5-foot-6 humanoid named Neo at its factory in Hayward. The company received 10,000 preorders, and its first shipment is expected later this year. Figure AI’s humanoid factory in San Jose has increased its manufacturing capacity to produce one Figure 03 robot an hour, with the goal of producing 12,000 a year.
Fernando Flores demonstrates the articulation of a robot performing a whisking motion at Encord on May 21.
(Paul Kuroda / For The Times)
Goldman Sachs projects the global market for humanoids could reach $38 billion by 2035.
The AI of these humanoid robots needs an immense amount of data on human movement. How humans write, speak, code and compose was easily scraped off the internet, but the bots need more information to master how to stand, step, lift, squeeze, pour and perform other physical movements. That is where companies like Encord come in.
The $10 billion invested in robotics in 2026, according to CB Insights, has spawned an industry focused on training robots. Initially, that meant humans strapping iPhones to their foreheads, recording actions like cooking, cleaning and performing household chores. That, however, doesn’t capture the exact torque, force and grip required for a robot hand to work flawlessly.
Now, humans are directly guiding robots through expensive rigs that let them control the robots’ movements. Data collected using robot arms offer richer insights into motor skills and object manipulation. Encord charges clients up to $1,000 per hour for training data.
The information gathered from trainers controlling robots is “super important to bridge the next level of learning,” where robots will learn to correct mistakes and do the chores on their own, said Vineeth Velmurugan, head of robotics learning at Encord.
The company is already working with some of the top companies in robotics, but said it couldn’t share most names. Among the clients it could mention were Toyota Research Institute and Weave, which already has laundry-folding robots in a few homes.
Brian Gonzalez pulls an ethernet cable using a robotic arm at startup Encord on May 20.
(Paul Kuroda / For The Times)
Many of the new robotic data companies are focusing on industrial use cases. Robots can perform better in a structured, predictable environment, like a factory or warehouse.
Home tasks are tougher, as layouts and tasks are more varied and messy. While many bots have mastered walking, they still struggle to open doors, fridges and washing machines smoothly. They don’t know where or how to grasp a doorknob, handle or door edge or how much pulling, pushing or twisting force to apply.
Flores has mastered making the robot arms pour coffee, but he still often spills. When that happens, he deletes records of the attempt.
“Typically, we don’t want any mistakes,” he said. “If we have more than three consecutive mistakes within a 15‑second window, that’s not going to be good data.”
Inside Encord’s test facility in Hayward, it has replicated a standard American home with a fully furnished living room, kitchen and bathroom.
In the living room, a pilot rearranges an untidy study desk. She first scatters AA-size batteries, pens and scissors on the table, and walks back to the nearby control rig to make the robot arms place each one inside the tray of a desk organizer.
Depending on the day’s training, the pilots could be opening and closing refrigerator doors, whisking liquids in a bowl, sorting silverware or turning a water faucet on and off over and over until the robot arms get it right.
Cortney Weintz, left, and Tony Schiller record data with cameras at Encord.
(Paul Kuroda / For The Times)
In another corner of the facility, people wearing smart glasses place and pick up playing cards and sort plastic plates by hand, collecting first-person videos.
One key skill for the coming bot invasion: plugging in cables.
Companies want robots that can crawl into duct spaces, identify ports and plug cables to help build the massive data centers needed for AI. Encord replicated a real data center server rack, where an operator inserts blue cables into penny-sized sockets all day.
Many companies have entered this business. Meta-backed Scale AI and Palo Alto-based Micro1 are major players in the space. China has more than 40 state-owned robot data-collection facilities where hundreds of on-site humans mimic train bots how to move in the real world.
In Watertown, Mass., Tutor Intelligence has set up a 100-robot facility dedicated to harvesting movement data. Its robot arms, which are being trained to do factory work, are controlled by a human team split across Mexico, the Philippines and Boston. This is in part to train its robot, Sonny, which will hit the market later this year.
Elaine Batchlor sorts screws and bolts with a robot in a mockup at Encord.
(Paul Kuroda / For The Times)
“We built the Data Factory to bootstrap the initial intelligence for the Sonny robot, so that we can begin to deploy Sonny into the field,” said Josh Gruenstein, co-founder of Tutor. Ten of its remote operators are based in Boston, and the rest are international.
Remote operation is emerging as an integral part of the humanoid robot business. Employing teleoperators in countries where wages are much lower than in the U.S. could, in theory, mean a robot controlled by a human in another country could do a task at a fraction of the cost of having an American do it.
This month, a humanoid robot cleaning service in San Francisco called Gatsby completed a robot cleaning of a U.S. home using a teleoperator in Mexico.
The technology is still evolving, said Aron Frishberg, co-founder of Gatsby, but being a first mover means Gatsby is getting more training.
“There’s obviously stuff that goes wrong,” he said. “It’s really hard to get precise hand movements or arm movements and grab something.”
Encord co-founder Ulrik Hansen said it will be setting up a teleoperations center in its Hayward facility in the next three months. Even as more robots are deployed and master increasingly sophisticated tasks, they will still need humans to occasionally take control remotely.
“They will need some exception handling when they get things wrong,” he said.
Hundreds of teleoperators will learn where the system succeeds, where it breaks and step in when needed. Once those patterns emerge, Hansen said, they can move teleoperations to cheaper locations abroad or to the Midwest.
Back in Hayward, Flores created new coffee-pouring challenges for his robot arms. He changed what was on the counter around the coffee maker and moved the mug to different spots. It takes a lot of know-how to puppet and train a robot, he said.
“A lot of people would (guess) this might be easy, this is dumb,” Flores said. “There actually is thought here. There actually is critical thinking.”
A Carl’s Jr. franchisee is trying to close and sell his 59 locations in California after filing for bankruptcy protection in April.
The franchisee, Harshad Dharod, who has branches mostly in Southern California, intends to close 10 of the branches he controls and find a buyer for the remainder, according to a broker helping find buyers.
In earlier bankruptcy filings, Dharod had blamed California and Carl’s Jr. for his stores’ struggles. Dharod said a lack of support and innovation from Carl’s Jr. and an increase in labor costs from a $20 minimum wage left him unable to cover his expenses.
Dharod couldn’t be reached for comment.
A spokesperson for Carl’s Jr. and its parent company CKE Restaurants, said they are aware of Dharod’s decision to sell.
“This situation is specific to this individual franchisee’s financial and business circumstances,” said the spokesperson. “This has no impact on the operations of any other Carl’s Jr. locations.”
National Franchise Sales will oversee the sale, which spans Southern and Northern California.
A spokesperson for the broker said it already has interest from prospective buyers. The spokesperson said that when a franchise changes owners, employees and managers usually keep their jobs.
Carl’s Jr. began in 1941 as a hot dog cart on the corner of Florence and Central in Los Angeles and grew into one of the region’s best-known burger chains. It opened its first sit-down restaurants with expanded menus in Anaheim in 1946. Its smiling yellow star was born in the 1950s and rapidly spread across California throughout the 1970s.
Although it moved its headquarters from Carpinteria to Tennessee in the last 10 years, its menu still reflects its California origins, with items such as the Cali XL, a double cheeseburger. The chain was among the first to spot the meat-free trend and introduced plant-based burgers and the charbroiled turkey burger. In the early 2000s, it made a splash with commercials pointing to its California origins.
It has had a tough time this year remaining relevant amid new competitors and fast-food consumers who are becoming more picky about what they will pay for and eat, analysts say.
Like most restaurants, Carl’s Jr. has been struggling to attract customers at a time when many are increasingly concerned about inflation and the health of the economy. Some chains are slashing prices. Smaller chains can’t compete well in the price wars. Those without a strong brand identity and fan base have been suffering.
Dharod told the bankruptcy court that business had become particularly bad in the last two years, leaving him without sufficient access to cash to cover wages, rent, supplies and insurance. Although his outlets have generated more than $6 million in monthly revenue, they have been losing more than $600,000 per month this year.
He had to ask for special permission to use his daily cash flow to fund expenses, or risk running out of money and being forced to close his outlets.
A small group of the close to 1,000 employees working for the franchisee say the efforts to cut costs to the bone have left them overworked, understaffed and exposed to violence.
Some say they are getting injured as they have to do the work of multiple people. Some detailed violent interactions with customers, including robberies and physical assaults, and said the company didn’t provide safety training. Some have staged multiple walkouts in recent months to bring attention to their concerns.
A Delaware Court of Chancery judge delivered a blow to wrestling impresario Vince McMahon and other World Wrestling Entertainment officials earlier this week.
Judge J. Travis Laster, vice chancellor of the Delaware Court of Chancery, issued sanctions for “spoliation of evidence” in the shareholder lawsuit over the 2023 merger between Ultimate Fighting Championship and WWE.
Laster ruled on Tuesday that WWE executives destroyed evidence by using the auto-delete setting on the messaging app Signal, enabling potentially relevant communications to be deleted.
The ruling means the court will operate under the assumption that five potentially damaging statements are true while allowing the defendants to rebut them.
The statements, according to the ruling, include that McMahon’s decision on the merger was “influenced” by Endeavor Executive Chairman Ari Emanuel’s “promise” to provide him with a continued role at the company and to indemnify him and provide legal support as federal investigators were looking into claims of alleged sexual misconduct.
McMahon pursued a deal with Endeavor in 2022 before WWE initiated its strategic review process, and both McMahon and then-WWE President Nick Khan worked with The Raine Group, a strategic financial advisor, “to steer the process to Endeavor and away from other potential bidders,” the ruling states.
In September 2023, entertainment giant Endeavor, the parent company of UFC, acquired WWE and merged the two sports entities to form a new, publicly traded company, TKO Group Holdings, in a deal worth $21.4 billion.
A month later, a group of shareholders filed suit against McMahon and other company officials in Delaware Chancery Court, claiming McMahon orchestrated a “sham sale process.”
Representatives for McMahon, WWE and TKO were not immediately available for comment.
According to the suit, McMahon, WWE’s controlling shareholder, turned down higher offers and excluded other bidders who would have ousted him and instead chose a deal that favored Endeavor’s Emanuel, a “close friend and longtime ally,” enabling McMahon to continue running WWE and shielding him from federal investigations related to a raft of sexual misconduct claims.
The complaint also alleges that the $21.4-billion deal undervalued the company and was “far below the offers” WWE’s board could have received from other interested parties had they “made any effort to negotiate in good faith.”
The litigation is related to the 2022 investigation by WWE’s board that found that McMahon made at least $14.6 million in payments between 2006 and 2022 for “alleged misconduct.” McMahon has denied claims of misconduct.
The settlements were made to women, including WWE employees, who alleged that McMahon initiated unwanted sexual contact and coerced women into performing sexual acts on him. In one case, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, a woman claimed that McMahon sent her unsolicited nude photos of himself.
McMahon’s alleged misconduct became the subject of ongoing investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice.
“I am confident that the government’s investigation will be resolved without any findings of wrongdoing,” McMahon said in a statement to The Times in 2023.
Last January, the SEC announced it had settled charges against McMahon alleging he had violated federal securities laws by failing to disclose a pair of settlement agreements to WWE worth $10.5 million.
McMahon agreed to pay more than $1.7 million in a civil penalty and in reimbursement to WWE, without admitting or denying the agency’s findings. Federal prosecutors also have dropped their criminal investigation.
In January 2024, McMahon resigned as executive chairman of the board of TKO Group, one day after a former WWE employee, Janel Grant, sued the company, McMahon and former head of talent relations John Laurinaitis, alleging sexual assault, trafficking and emotional abuse.
Grant claimed that McMahon agreed to pay her $3 million in exchange for her silence.
The shareholder trial is set to begin on June 8. McMahon, Emanuel, Khan, TKO President Mark Shapiro, and WWE Chief Content Officer Paul “Triple H” Levesque are expected to testify.
-
Austin, TX4 minutes agoAustin Pets Alive! gets $10K donation, pet beds
-
Alabama11 minutes agoAlabama football in for some major recruiting news soon
-
Alaska14 minutes agoAfter dispute, Assembly allows small-scale farmers to continue selling hay and feed in Anchorage neighborhoods
-
Arizona19 minutes agoNature: Cactus blooms in Arizona
-
Arkansas26 minutes agoKansas baseball earns chance at NCAA regional title, defeats Arkansas
-
California29 minutes agoCalifornia reports one of largest drops in homelessness in past year, Hud reports
-
Colorado34 minutes agoPolice arrest burglary suspect in southeast Colorado Springs
-
Connecticut41 minutes agoMan arrested after stealing from Connecticut Children’s Hospital donation bin
