I blogged previously about Kash Patel (FBI) and Jay Bhattacharya (NIH) but when I saw an article (below) on Daily Signal about Russ Vought (OMB) by the politics editor, I thought I’d better read it. And after I read it, I though I’d better share it. First of all, Vought is an excellent conservative. Second, he has a lot of experience. And third, he is an outspoken evangelical Christian.

Daily Signal:

The Office of Management and Budget is a less well-known entity within the executive branch, but few are as critical for ensuring the implementation of the president’s agenda. President-elect Donald Trump has once again placed that awesome responsibility in Russ Vought’s hands.

[…]Trump released a statement announcing Vought’s nomination as OMB director on Friday evening. “I am very pleased to nominate Russell Thurlow Vought, from the Great State of Virginia, as the Director of the United States Office of Management and Budget. He did an excellent job serving in this role in my First Term – We cut four Regulations for every new Regulation, and it was a Great Success! Russ graduated with a B.A. from Wheaton College, and received his J.D. from the Washington University School of Law,” Trump’s statement read.

“Russ has spent many years working in Public Policy in Washington, D.C., and is an aggressive cost cutter and deregulator who will help us implement our America First Agenda across all Agencies. Russ knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end Weaponized Government, and he will help us return Self Governance to the People. We will restore fiscal sanity to our Nation, and unleash the American People to new levels of Prosperity and Ingenuity. I look forward to working with you again, Russ. Congratulations. Together, we will Make America Great Again!”

So, this is the guy who did the cut four regulations for ever one new regulation. And he graduated from Wheaton College, back when Wheaton was still a conservative Christian school.

More:

In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Vought explained how OMB can… kill the deep state—a death by a thousand cuts.

“OMB is the nerve center of the federal government, particularly the executive branch,” Vought told Carlson. “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?’”

In short, “presidents use OMB to tame the bureaucracy,” Vought said.

“It is the President’s most important tool for dealing with the bureaucracy, the administrative state,” he reiterated. “And you know, the nice thing about President Trump is he knows that, and he knows how to use it effectively.”

And he’s experienced:

Vought was previously atop the OMB, first in an acting capacity and then confirmed by the Senate, for the second half of Trump’s first term.

As Trump and Vought prepared to depart the White House in 2021, Vought told the president of his intention to start the Center for Renewing America, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that sought to keep Trump’s policy vision alive in the nation’s capital. Trump was supportive of Vought’s endeavor, and the pair remained in close contact while Trump was out of power.

Vought’s fingerprints have been all over Republican politics and the conservative movement for the past four years. He wrote the Project 2025 chapter on how to reform the Executive Office of the President of the United States. In the media, he was an outspoken proponent for “draining the swamp” by making the federal agencies once again accountable to the president and the American people. And, over the summer, Vought lead the Republican National Convention’s policy platform committee.

Now, his fingerprints will be all over bringing the bureaucracy to heel.

I was snooping around in far-left communist atheist publications, and found this hand-wringing about Vought’s Christian convictions:

In 2021 he founded the Centre for Renewing America, an organisation whose mission is to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God”.

His religious views have provoked controversy. In Mr Vought’s confirmation hearing in 2017—he squeaked through by a single vote—Senator Bernie Sanders pointed to an article by Mr Vought in which he described Muslims as “condemned” for having rejected Jesus Christ. Mr Vought replied that he respected the right of every person to express their religious beliefs. In the secretly recorded meeting last year he said that elected leaders should discuss whether to prioritise Christian immigrants over those of other faiths. And he has called for a total abolition of abortion—a position that is too extreme for even most American conservatives.

But Mr Vought’s religiosity gives a scorching fervour to his criticism of politics and society, and that appeals to the Republican base. He regularly describes the federal government as “woke and weaponised” and has warned that the Democratic Party is “increasingly evil” because it forces secularism on families. He also was an early combatant in the pushback against diversity policies, which became a potent campaign theme for Mr Trump: in 2020 he wrote an official memo saying that anti-racism training in the federal government was divisive and anti-American.

So, let’s conclude with this. The best Trump pick, the one you’ve probably never heard of, is the most conservative one, and he’s in a great position to smash the secular left Deep State.