Russ Vought, budget director in the Trump administration, has become a driving force behind House Republicans’ hostage strategy for the debt ceiling, The Washington Post reported last weekend. The vision he’s selling is one where brave conservatives finally manage to decimate the federal government without deep cuts to entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare. But even a quick glance at his pitch shows that he’s less trailblazer and more Pied Piper, luring the GOP to what will certainly be disaster.
Since leaving the White House, Vought has been busy running a think tank called the Center for Renewing America, which has a staff packed with other former Trump administration B-listers slash far-right luminaries. (Who knew that Kash Patel, Ken Cuccinelli and Jeff Clark were all officemates now?) From that post, Vought’s been shopping around a 10-year budget plan that he claims solves the math problem that Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., has faced in trying to present a set of demands to Democrats in exchange for raising the debt ceiling.
Even a quick glance at his pitch shows that he’s less trailblazer and more Pied Piper, luring the GOP to what will certainly be disaster.
In contrast to demands Republicans have made in similar debt-ceiling standoffs, Vought’s plan leaves Social Security and Medicare untouched, a position that Trump has encouraged and that political attacks have forced McCarthy to embrace. Instead, Vought is suggesting that Republicans go after a target that would be much more politically palatable in his view: “woke and weaponized government.” It’s a patently nonsense phrase that syncs with the GOP’s recent obsessions. Vought’s fingerprints are fittingly all over the origins of the House subcommittee investigating the supposed “weaponization of the federal government.”
A recent Newsweek op-ed from Vought that intended to make the case for his budget plan and that has been praised by the likes of Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, is best summarized as a grab bag of Trumpian buzzwords and ramblings. Here’s an example of the proof he offers for his “woke and weaponized government” thesis: “The global COVID-19 pandemic made it painfully obvious that a small scientific cabal could shut down the economy and mandate an experimental drug be jabbed into someone’s body as a necessary precondition of participation in society.”
Vought’s budget proposal itself isn’t much more nuanced. Rolling Stone had a great breakdown last month of some of the set pieces inside it, which “breaks down which line items in President Joe Biden’s budget are too ‘woke’ — a word that appears 77 times across its 104 pages.” But there’s a good reason why the proposal itself hides behind Vought’s “woke and weaponized” catchphrase: It’s built on the flimsiest of foundations.
Beyond the conspiratorial rhetoric, the math itself doesn’t check out. In total, Vought says that lawmakers can wipe out $9 trillion in federal spending over the next decade. That would include “$2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, the health program for the poor; more than $600 billion in cuts to the Affordable Care Act; more than $400 billion in cuts to food stamps; hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to educational subsidies; and a halving of the State Department and the Labor Department, among other federal agencies,” according to The Washington Post.
But an appendix to the proposal titled “Economic Assumptions” is what Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell recently called the “most important part” of the whole document. In it, Vought assumes that there will be massive economic growth in the coming years, far beyond what the Congressional Budget Office has projected, which he claims will come from “lower taxes, renewed deregulatory efforts, aggressive energy exploration, and spending restraint.” It also is predicated on a huge boost to workforce participation via Vought’s proposed cuts to the social safety net, a belief that determines that “making poverty much more miserable,” as Rampell puts it, “will force more people into desperation and thereby into the workforce.”
We’ve heard similar promises from other proposals, like the claim (which feels even more outlandish in hindsight) that the Trump tax cuts were going to pay for themselves in greater economic output. Republicans have also long targeted many of the programs that Vought is highlighting. It’s the updated framing, not the severity of the cuts, that is the difference between his proposed budget and the Trump administration’s budgets.
But Vought would know better than anyone that his policies are all bluster. Not a single one of the fiscal hawk-appeasing Trump budgets actually managed to pass, even with two years of complete GOP control of Congress. In Vought’s first year running OMB in 2019, the national debt grew by $1 trillion; it had grown another $2 trillion the year before, thanks to the tax cuts for the wealthy and businesses that Vought now wants to make permanent. (The $4 trillion debt increase thanks to Covid in 2020 is a whole other matter.)
Vought would know better than anyone that his policies are all bluster.
Vought is “selling conservatives a fantasy, which is achieving a balanced budget without cutting anything popular,” a nameless GOP official was willing to tell the Post. “We’re going to balance the budget by ‘ending woke?’ Give me a break.”
But it’s a fantasy that has captivated lawmakers, particularly those among the House Freedom Caucus who have been pressing the hardest for spending cuts in exchange for a debt ceiling hike. They’re being further bolstered by claims from right-wing lawyers and economists that breaching the debt ceiling won’t end in the U.S. defaulting on its debts — just being forced to pick and choose which of its other programs won’t get funding in coming months, which may mean that “payments many Americans reasonably anticipate may not arrive.”
Vought appears to think such a plan can be forced through by a divided majority in a single house of Congress with the debt ceiling as leverage. But it is doomed to fail for any number of reasons. In the immediate term, Democrats will stand in the way of its passing. In the medium term, there’s the looming economic catastrophe as interest rates on U.S. treasury bonds skyrocket amid uncertainty about the dollar. And longer term, the draconian cuts he proposes would surely prompt a backlash from working-class Americans who will suddenly see the assistance that they’ve relied on to make ends meet stripped away.
All of which leave Republicans holding the bag and Vought as the obvious scapegoat for the likely catastrophic electoral punishment the GOP will take for dancing to his tune.
