Russell Vought on federal employees: “We want to put them in trauma.”

Wrecking the federal government is the ultimate goal.

This from the Washington Post, October 10, 2025:

“The shutdown layoffs are the culmination of years of groundwork laid by Vought, an architect of the Project 2025 playbook for Trump’s second term, which outlined a drastically reduced federal bureaucracy. Vought’s office had threatened mass dismissals during the shutdown, perhaps even stretching into the hundreds of thousands, and told agencies they should “retain the minimal number of employees necessary.” Trump told reporters before the shutdown that he might fire “a lot” of people, and once the shutdown began, Vice President JD Vance and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt indicated that cuts were coming, as well.”

The wholesale firings of federal employees that commenced recently are no surprise. The Trump regime has already illegally fired thousands of federal employees, abolished or crippled federal agencies and offices, and created a toxic work environment for those who remain. Now they’re withholding pay from loyal federal employees, many of whom are already underpaid, who have done nothing wrong. It’s chaos on a massive scale, but make no mistake – it’s deliberate chaos, as the quote above confirms.

This has been a dream of Republicans for decades, but up until now, there have always been enough laws, guidelines, norms, and principled people to prevent its becoming a reality. Now, thanks to a supine Congress that has abdicated its responsibility to monitor and check the executive branch and a complicit Supreme Court that has removed penalties for presidential wrongdoing, Vought will finally accomplish the task dreamed about by right-wing Republicans for decades.

Almost 45 years ago when Reagan said, “Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem,” Republicans were ready and willing, but not able, to do what is being done now. They have finally “found the key” opening the door to elimination of the “deep state” with the implementation of Project 2025. And a lot of people are going to suffer as a result. But the Christian nationalist crowd doesn’t care because their goal is to dominate, to obtain ever greater power, and to rule, rather than govern.

The plan to cripple the federal government was laid out very clearly in the Project 2025 document produced in 2023 by Russell Vought, current Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Here are some of the goals extracted from that document:

• Slash budgets and cut thousands of federal jobs

• Outlaw or decertify federal unions

• Eliminate federal wage setting systems

• Slash federal employee pensions

• Make it almost impossible to reverse disciplinary actions

• Bring back discriminatory hiring practices

• Privatize wherever possible

• Convert civil service protected jobs to political appointee positions1

Unless they are stopped, the federal government will be staffed with Trump loyalists, sycophants, and supporters who are given jobs, not based on competence, but on their willingness to do whatever they are told. In this new environment we already see that an oath to defend the Constitution means nothing. What kind of young person would want to begin a career with the federal government knowing that their first loyalty would have to be to Trump rather than the Constitution, the rule of law, and due process?

In OMB’s Vought we now have a powerful adversary of the merit system and federal employees. If he is successful, he will have destroyed more than 150 years of progress in building the best civil service system in the world and few citizens will be aware of what they have lost until it’s gone and the nation is in decline, ruled by unelected politicians and their unqualified appointees.

This isn’t the first Republican attempt to destroy the professional civil service. During the Reagan administration, the head of the Office of Personnel Management was dubbed “the Grinch.”2 It is a title that he certainly deserved, and more. Ask me how I know and I’ll tell you, in our next Project 2025 post. It’s a personal story.