The ‘grim reaper’
Trump labels Vought ‘grim reaper’ ahead of threatened shutdown layoffs
by Filip Timotija – 10/03/25 8:14 AM ET
President Trump labeled Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought the “grim reaper” Thursday, as the Trump administration prepares to move forward with threatened layoffs amid the government shutdown.
The president posted a video to Truth Social depicting Russell as the grim reaper who “wields the pen, the funds and the brain.”
The reaper could be seen in the 67-second video, generated by AI, walking through a dark hallway that has portraits of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).
The post came after Trump met with Vought to determine which of the “many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent,” as Trump wrote on social media.
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5536470-trump-vought-shutdown-layoffs-grim-reaper/
One headline reads:
Russell T. Vought, the White House budget director, has exerted his influence over nearly every corner of President Trump’s Washington with his command of the levers of the federal budget.Credit…Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
Who is Russel Vought:
Russel Vought, 49, has been a central figure in the Trump administration’s ambitious attempts to reshape the US government.
A graduate of Wheaton College and George Washington University Law School, Vought built his career in conservative circles, eventually becoming one of President Trump’s most trusted allies.
Raised in Trumbull, Connecticut, by his parents, a US Marine Corps veteran and an elementary school teacher, Vought has long championed the role of family and faith in shaping his worldview. He is married and has two daughters.
In addition to his role as OMB Director, Vought is credited with co-authoring Project 2025, a far-right blueprint aimed at drastically reforming the US government.
Back in 2024, an article in the Washington Post was quoted in a recent Substack by Heather Cox Richardson
As Beth Reinhard explained in the Washington Post in June 2024, Vought is a hard-right Christian nationalist who drafted the plans for a second Trump term. Vought was the director of the Office of Management and Budget from July 2020 to January 2021 during the first Trump administration. In January 2021 he founded the Center for Renewing America, a pro-Trump think tank.
In 2022, Vought argued that the United States is in a “post constitutional moment” that “pays only lip service to the old Constitution.” He attributes that crisis to “the Left,” which he says “quietly adopted a strategy of institutional change,” by which he appears to mean the growth of the federal government to protect the rights of all Americans. He attributes that change to the presidency of President Woodrow Wilson beginning in 1913. Vought advocates what he calls “radical constitutionalism” to destroy the power of the modern administrative state and instead elevate the president to supreme authority.
When Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 2023, Vought advised its far-right members, calling for draconian cuts to government agencies, student loans, and housing, health care, and food assistance. He called for $2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid over ten years, more than $600 billion in cuts to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), more than $400 billion in cuts to food assistance, and so on.
Vought was a key player in the construction of Project 2025, the plan to gut the nonpartisan federal government and replace it with a dominant president and a team of loyalists who will impose religious rule on the United States. He wrote the section of Project 2025 that covers the presidency, calling for “aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch” to “bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will” and identifying the OMB as the means of enforcing the president’s agenda.
In August 2024, two men associated with the British nonprofit Centre for Climate Reporting secretly video recorded Vought assuring the men, who he thought might donate to the cause, that he and his Center for Renewing America were secretly writing a blueprint of executive orders, memos, and regulations that Donald J. Trump could enact immediately upon taking office a second time. Although Trump was saying he knew nothing about Project 2025, Vought assured the men that Trump was only disavowing Project 2025 for political reasons. In reality, Vought said, Trump is “very supportive of what we do.”
Since Trump took office, Vought’s predictions have come true. The administration has illegally slashed through programs Congress set up and for which it appropriated funds, and now is using the government shutdown to threaten more cuts to programs and to personnel. As soon as the government shutdown began on October 1, 2025, Vought announced that he would use the shutdown to continue his illegal cuts, vowing to cancel $26 billion in infrastructure and climate projects in states led by Democrats, and to fire—not just furlough, as a shutdown requires—federal employees.
But the program Vought is advancing is hugely unpopular. Republicans have called for cuts to the government for decades using rhetoric that suggested such cuts would only affect racial minorities and women. Those who voted for such cuts assumed they would not be affected by any of the proposed cuts. Now they are discovering otherwise.
There were signs of this dramatic disconnect between Republican rhetoric and reality in the 2024 campaign season: when voters in 2024 learned about Project 2025, only 4% of them wanted to see it enacted. At the time, Trump insisted he had nothing to do with the program. Now, though, he is boasting that he is meeting with Vought to decide which “Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent.” “I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity,” Trump posted on social media.
But it is increasingly clear that the cuts Vought and the MAGA Republicans are making to government programs are hitting a wide swath of Americans. Those cuts are no longer rhetorical, and members of the administration appear to be aware they are unpopular with a large part of their own base.
At a press briefing today, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins pointed out that while Trump had said Democrats would bear the blame for layoffs during the shutdown, in fact shutdowns only create furloughs. If the administration was choosing to lay people off instead of furloughing them, she asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, didn’t this mean the president was responsible for the layoffs? Leavitt responded: “This conversation about layoffs would not be happening right now if the Democrats did not vote to shut the government down.”
But the Democrats did not vote to shut the government down. They refused to vote in favor of a continuing resolution to fund the government—which was necessary because the Republicans have not managed to pass any appropriations bills—until Republicans reverse a drastic cut they have made to healthcare. Democrats want Republicans to agree to extend the premium tax credits for healthcare insurance that they permitted to lapse when they wrote the law they call the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act.”
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