Former spouse: Divorced since 2023 from Mary Vought, VP of Strategic Initiatives at the Heritage Foundation; a fellow at Project 2025 advisory group the Claremont Institute; former Communications Director for Reps. Ron Johnson (R-WI); Rep. Michelle Bachman (R-MN), and other GOP officials.

P2025 links: A former staffer at Heritage Action, the lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation. A key author of the OMB chapter, architect of Project 2025’s proposal plan to radically overhaul the administrative state, and head of the Project 2025 advisory group CRA. 

Views: Vought is an avowed Christian nationalist who infamously stated that Muslims had a “deficient theology” while under questioning by Sen. Bernie Sanders in Vought’s OMB confirmation hearings. As head of CRA, he has advanced Christian nationalist agenda, fought critical race theory.

Qualifications: Former head of OMB under Trump 1.0; former head of the Republican National Committee. 

Disqualifications: Under Trump 1.0, Vought developed Schedule F to fire merit-based federal employees, and pushed budget proposals to cut Social Security and Medicare over a ten-year period. He also ordered OMB to stop trainings on CRT or “white privilege” and opposed any views of the US as a racist country.

Views: Vought aims to weaponize a resurrected Schedule F and purge the government of its professional workforce, eliminate the independence of federal regulatory agencies; and help install a loyalist Christian conservative corps in its place, while limiting Congressional and judicial oversight. Vought promotes “radical Constitutionalism” to reform the US Constitution and our laws. He backs using recess appointments and testing legal and Constitutional limits in order to implement Project 2025, if needed, and views OMB as the enforcement muscle for Trump 2.0. His agenda would eliminate our system of checks and balances. Vought’s opposition to discussion of CRT and DEI, which he labels “un-American,” is deemed white supremacist by critics.