FOIAengine: Vought’s Center for Renewing America Shows the Priorities of OMB’s New Director. But Will He Be in Synch with Musk?
This week, we’re looking at the events, and the players, involved in the shambolic roll-out of the Trump Administration’s planned-and-quickly-canceled federal spending freeze. A lot happened last week. It was, according to a CNN headline, “45 Hours of Chaos.”
True. But there is more to the story.
If Senate Democrats are to believed, the aborted freeze’s mastermind is the most important cabinet-level appointee you’ve probably never heard of: Russell Vought (pronounced “vote”), President Trump’s nominee to be director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. “It is almost easy at first to overlook Vought,” the Economist wrote last month, “with his tortoiseshell spectacles, neatly trimmed beard and scholarly demeanor. That would be a mistake. Mr. Vought’s calm exterior belies an incendiary streak, fueled by his religious convictions.”
OMB and its nearly 500 employees administer the federal budget and oversee federal agencies, giving OMB’s director arguing rights about almost everything in the executive branch. Vought, coming back to OMB for a second stretch (he ran the office during the last half of Trump’s first term), has already signaled that he plans to be aggressive. Puppeteering the freeze, even before being confirmed, showed his moxie and intent.
Vought served as the policy director for the 2024 Republican platform and has a long MAGA history, which makes him a lightning rod for criticism from the left. The Christian nationalist, who told senators last week that the 2020 election was “rigged,” got the nod again from Trump because “Russ knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end Weaponized Government, and he will help us return Self Governance to the People.”
Vought has his name on at least one noteworthy Freedom of Information Act request, more on that below. But he didn’t face the same obloquy as some of Trump’s other nominees. In fact, Vought veritably skated under the radar. His confirmation vote will be close (and it likely will have occurred by the time you read this), but he will squeak through. During a Senate Budget Committee vote last week, his nomination advanced on an 11-0 vote. The rare “unanimous” committee approval was because all the Democrats on the panel boycotted the vote and instead called a news conference to denounce Vought and his spending freeze. Politico called it a “Vought of confidence.”
A recent New York Times op-ed added to Vought’s street cred with the far right. “If Russell Vought is confirmed,” the piece said, “he will continue to enact and accelerate the radical, sweeping agenda he began to implement in that same position during the final two years of the first Trump administration. . . . [I]t’s clear that he and the Administration plan nothing less than a full-scale assault on the regulatory and spending powers of the executive branch, reversing trends that have been underway since the early 20th century.”
Yet, given Vought’s fearsome reputation, the rollout of the federal spending freeze – announced by OMB in a late-night memo to federal agencies and departments on a Monday night, then walked back on Tuesday, totally rescinded on Wednesday, and blocked by the courts almost instantly – played like serio-comic political theatre. We wondered if the AI search engine, Perplexity, saw the irony. Yes, even the bot got it: The irony? Vought, a man who built his entire career around shrinking government, kept getting thwarted by the very Republican administration he was serving. Talk about bureaucratic comedy.
Between Trump’s last term and this one, Vought stayed busy. Within a week after Trump left office, Vought started the Center for Renewing America. It’s a right-leaning non-profit with a can’t-miss MAGA tag line, “For God, For Country, For Community.” Vought brought over two of his top OMB deputies, chief of staff Ashlea Frazier and communications director Rachel Semmel, to join him. They quickly raised millions – and, it appears, gave themselves a raise. Vought’s financial disclosure listed his 2024 compensation as $542,204 in salary and bonuses.
The Center for Renewing America played important roles in fashioning the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint for the second Trump term. You can read our recent story, “How Project 2025 Targets Pentagon Leadership,” here. Our database of over 1,400 executive branch personnel targeted by Project 2025 is here.
In its IRS filings, the Center for Renewing America lists two affiliates: a lobbying arm, Citizens for Renewing America, and the American Accountability Foundation. The Center and its affiliates are among the hundreds of well-financed “dark money” political groups that have proliferated in recent years. Dark money refers to spending meant to influence political outcomes where the source of the money is not disclosed. Read more about dark money here. (Full disclosure: I am on the board and executive committee of Open Secrets, the independent nonprofit group that serves as the premier trusted authority on money in American politics.)
Last summer, Vought was caught on tape revealing that his Center was secretly drafting hundreds of executive orders, regulations, and memos that would lay the groundwork for rapid action on Trump’s plans, describing his work as creating “shadow” agencies. “Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies,” Vought said. “And we are working doggedly on that, whether it’s destroying their agencies’ notion of independence [or] whether that is thinking through how the deportation would work.”
Trump’s disavowal of Project 2025, Vought added, was just “graduate-level politics.” He claimed that Trump “blessed” Vought’s organization and “he’s very supportive of what we do.”
When we dug into PoliScio Analytics’ competitive-intelligence database FOIAengine, which tracks FOIA requests in as close to real-time as their availability allows, we found 130 FOIA requests from the American Accountability Foundation (a 2022 New Yorker article by Jane Mayer called that group a “slime machine”; see our 2024 related story). But there was only one from Vought and just a handful coming from Vought’s Center for Renewing America. Still, Vought’s 2021 FOIA request to the Education Department was an early signal of his efforts to come.
Vought’s sweeping request targeted the Abolitionist Teaching Network. He sought “(1) records relating to using, discussing, or citing ATN or any material produced by ATN in Department publications or guidance documents; (2) records relating to any communications between any ATN representative and the Department; and (3) records relating to any communications between Department officers or employees and any other component of the Executive Branch, including the White House Office, the Executive Office of the President, and any other department or agency of the U.S. Government.”
ATN’s website features what it calls a “guide for racial justice and abolitionist social and emotional learning” as well as “a database for queer, trans, and non-binary educators and students.”
The Center for Renewing America’s website lists “Woke and Weaponized” as one of its many policy issues:
“The threat of radical philosophies, rooted in Marxism, such as critical race theory, is vast, real, and increasingly existential. This framework views all of society through a racialized prism of identity groups, with minorities being the oppressed and white people serving as the oppressors. Ultimately, these radicals seek to erase the American idea that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Center for Renewing America knows that in order to revitalize the American spirit and restore our great nation, this far-left ideology must be defeated. We are committed to that mission and stand ready with millions of citizens to stop this cultural revolution.”
What’s yet to be seen is how Vought will get along with his compatriot at the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk. Neither man is known for playing nice.
Vought tried to stir up trouble for another tech billionaire, Mark Zuckerburg, by filing a complaint against Zuckerburg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, with the Internal Revenue Service. Vought asked the IRS to claw back charitable deductions taken by the couple, “based on more than $400 million channeled, directly or indirectly, to one or more of the following three entities: the (1) Center for Tech & Civic Life, (2) National Vote at Home Institute, and (3) Center for Election Innovation & Research.”
Already, Vought and Musk are defendants in a lawsuit filed on Inauguration Day that seeks to have DOGE declared a Federal Advisory Committee. That would require Vought and Musk to open their meetings to the public.
Could be interesting.
FOIAengine access now is available for all professional members of Investigative Reporters and Editors, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the quality of journalism. IRE is the world’s oldest and largest association of investigative journalists. Following the federal government’s shutdown of FOIAonline.gov last year, FOIAengine is the only source for the most comprehensive, fully searchable archive of FOIA requests across dozens of federal departments and agencies. FOIAengine has more robust functionality and searching capabilities, and standardizes data from different agencies to make it easier to work with. PoliScio Analytics is proud to be partnering with IRE to provide this valuable content to investigative reporters worldwide.
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Next: Thousands of news media FOIA requests to the Pentagon.
John A. Jenkins, co-creator of FOIAengine, is a Washington journalist and publisher whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, GQ, and elsewhere. He is a four-time recipient of the American Bar Association’s Gavel Award Certificate of Merit for his legal reporting and analysis. His most recent book is The Partisan: The Life of William Rehnquist. Jenkins founded Law Street Media in 2013. Prior to that, he was President of CQ Press, the textbook and reference publishing enterprise of Congressional Quarterly. FOIAengine is a product of PoliScio Analytics (PoliScio.com), a new venture specializing in U.S. political and governmental research, co-founded by Jenkins and Washington lawyer Randy Miller. Learn more about FOIAengine here. To review FOIA requests mentioned in this article, subscribe to FOIAengine.
Write to John A. Jenkins at JAJ@PoliScio.com.
