How do you confirm a man who said, on the record, into a microphone, that his goal was to put career civil servants ‘in trauma’ — and then go home and eat dinner like nothing happened? I ask because the Senate did exactly that on Thursday, installing Russell Vought as the director of the Office of Management and Budget by a vote of 53 to 47, and by Friday morning the city had already moved on to the next thing, which in Washington is always the next thing.
I had dinner Tuesday night at Eliza’s place in Kalorama. The usual crowd: a retired ambassador who still corrects your pronunciation of ‘Doha,’ a bipartisan lobbyist I will describe only as bipartisan, and a woman from the Hudson Institute who was very invested in the asparagus. Vought came up the way appointments always come up now, which is to say someone sighed and someone else poured more wine and a third person said, ‘Well, elections have consequences.’ That sentence is the civic equivalent of a shrug emoji, and it has been doing more heavy lifting in this town than the entire Architect of the Capitol’s office.
Here is what Russell Vought has actually written, in his own hand, under his own name, for anyone with a functioning search bar. He wants to revive ‘impoundment,’ which is the charming Nixon-era practice of the executive branch simply refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated, on the grounds that the Constitution said so if you squint at it sideways. He wants to purge the federal workforce. He wants agencies to answer to the president the way a retriever answers to a whistle. None of this was hidden. He went on podcasts. He gave speeches. He wrote a chapter. The man came with a user’s manual.
And the Senate read the manual, and then fifty-three senators voted yes.
I am old enough to remember when ‘advice and consent’ was supposed to mean something — not a hurdle, exactly, but at least a speed bump. A reason to slow down, ask a question, look a nominee in the eye and say, ‘Sir, you proposed putting the people who issue my mother’s Social Security check into a state of clinical distress — could you expand on that?’ Instead we got the usual performance: stern opening statements, pointed questions that the nominee graciously declined to answer, and a procedural vote scheduled for a Thursday because nothing bad ever happens on a Thursday.
My sister-in-law Judy, who has worked at the National Archives for twenty-six years and has opinions about humidity that would frighten you, called me the morning after the vote. She wasn’t crying. Judy does not cry. She said, in the flat tone of a person describing weather, ‘They’re going to come for us, and the people who could have stopped it won’t remember they had the chance.’ Then she asked if I wanted her lasagna recipe, because Judy copes by feeding people, and I said yes, because I cope by writing columns no one in power will read.
The bipartisan lobbyist at Eliza’s table — and I want to be clear, he is bipartisan in the sense that he will take a check from anyone — leaned over the bread course and explained to me, patiently, that Vought is ‘actually very smart’ and ‘understands the machine.’ This is what passes for a defense in this city now. Not that a nominee is decent, or qualified in the old-fashioned sense, or even particularly competent. Just that he understands the machine. The problem, I wanted to say and did not say, because I am still occasionally invited to Eliza’s, is that understanding the machine is precisely the credential of the person who intends to break it.
What I find almost funnier than the vote is the surrounding theater. Democrats held the floor all night. They read from Vought’s writings. They wore their serious faces. They produced the kind of speeches that get excerpted on MSNBC and then aggressively ignored by the only people in a position to act on them, which is to say themselves. At no point did anyone threaten a single thing that might have cost a single colleague a single ounce of comfort. It was civic disapproval in its purest form: expressed, archived, and entirely non-binding.
And the Republicans who voted yes — including the handful who, in quieter rooms, will tell you privately that they have concerns — performed a different kind of theater. The theater of the inevitable. ‘The president is entitled to his team.’ ‘He’ll be constrained by the institution.’ ‘He’s not as extreme as his writing.’ Every one of those sentences is a door, and every one of those doors opens onto the same hallway, and at the end of the hallway is a man with a list and a legal theory.
I want to be precise about something, because precision is the last thing any of us have left. Vought is not unusual in this town for being radical. Washington is full of radicals; it’s a feature of the place. He is unusual for being radical out loud, in full paragraphs, with footnotes. He told us what he would do. The Senate was furnished with the documents. The press described them accurately. And then fifty-three grown adults, most of whom will send me a Christmas card, voted to give him the keys to the federal budget anyway.
This is the thing I keep trying to get people to see, and failing, and trying again. The danger in a moment like this one is not the ideologue. Ideologues are common as pigeons. The danger is the enabler who has convinced himself he is a moderate because he still wears a blue blazer and still goes to Eliza’s dinners and still says ‘well, elections have consequences’ while the fork travels from the plate to the mouth.
When the histories of this period are written — and they will be written, by people Judy is currently training — the question will not be what Russell Vought did with the Office of Management and Budget. We already know roughly what he intends. The question will be what the other ninety-nine senators were doing on February 6, 2025, while fifty-three of their colleagues handed him the office. And the answer, for most of them, is going to be: the dishes. They were doing the dishes. They were pouring the wine. They were passing the salad. They were, as ever, waiting for someone else to be the one who said the obvious thing out loud.
I’ll be the one, then. Again. You were warned. In writing. By him. This was not a surprise. It was an appointment, in both senses of the word, and we kept it.