The Trump appointee set on traumatizing the government

 

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November 25, 2024 On Friday, Donald Trump tapped Russ Vought to return to his post leading the Office of Management and Budget. Now before you close this email, thinking I'm here to warn you about the most boring role in government, I am here to tell you that you are sorely mistaken. As my colleague Isabela writes, the position is charged with executing the federal budget, and is, therefore, one of the most consequential for the next administration. Vought, a self-avowed Christian nationalist, is similarly anything but boring. In fact, he sounds like a downright terror set to help deliver some of MAGA's wildest ambitions. Yes, that's right, a terror. How else do you describe someone who in private speeches admits to hoping to traumatize federal workers? Who wants to ensure that whatever is left of the federal government is packed with absolutist Trump loyalists? That, to me, sounds like the words of a powerful weirdo wrapped up in the countenance of someone who looks like a mere humorless academic. Vought is now just weeks away from running a powerful agency that could turn Trump's authoritarian dreams into a reality. —Inae Oh P.S. Donald Trump and JD Vance have a long history of demeaning women—and they launched brutal, sexist attacks against Kamala Harris. But after winning the election, the role of misogyny and what happens next deserve a serious look. Join our Clara Jeffery and Jamilah King for a virtual conversation today, November 25, at 7:30 p.m. ET/4:30 p.m. PT.

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Trump’s Pick to Lead His Budget Office Wants to Use It to Deliver on MAGA’s Big Dreams "We want to put them in trauma," Russ Vought has said of federal workers. BY ISABELA DIAS

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I survived Katrina only to end up in the path of Helene. Now, nowhere feels safe. BRANDI HAND, AS TOLD TO JACKIE FLYNN MOGENSEN Elizabeth Warren warns that Trump’s transition “threatens the American public” BY JULIANNE MCSHANE Donald Trump’s Cabinet appointees are not the only source of controversy in his transition back to the White House. On Thursday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote the Administrator of the General Services Administration (GSA), which manages the functioning of federal agencies, to warn that the Trump transition team has refused to sign memoranda of understanding with the Biden-Harris administration. All prior presidents-elect have signed the agreements, which outline how the administrations will work together; one of them, for example, would allow the FBI under the current administration to conduct background checks on Trump’s nominees. Another would facilitate the Trump team’s national security clearances required to receive classified intelligence briefings before he assumes office. “The Trump team’s unprecedented refusal to sign agreements with the outgoing administration threatens the American public by hamstringing incoming officials’ ability to govern responsibly,” Warren writes. The refusal to publish the ethics code heightens “the risk of the incoming administration governing for the benefit of special interests rather than the American public.” On top of that, Trump’s transition team has yet to publish a full ethics code on the GSA website addressing how he will deal with his conflicts of interest, as required by a law that Trump himself passed in 2020. Warren’s letter notes that while the Trump team has published its own ethics code, “it includes nothing about how President-elect Trump will manage his own extensive financial conflicts of interest—which experts anticipate will be one of the most alarming corruption challenges of the incoming administration.” The refusal to publish the ethics code, Warren says, heightens “the risk of the incoming administration governing for the benefit of special interests rather than the American public.” As the New York Times reported Sunday, it’s possible these “special interests” could, in fact, be helping to fund the Trump transition: Because the Trump team has not signed a memorandum of understanding with the GSA that was due Sept. 1, they have been able to shield the names of donors to the transition. If the Trump transition had entered into the agreement, they would have to publicly disclose donors, each of whom would have an individual giving limit of $5,000—but the Trump team would have been able to access $7.2 million in federal funds to help with the costs of the transition. Trump is also reportedly the first president to circumvent this agreement, which seems to suggest his team thinks he can raise more from donors without being limited to the $5,000 cap per individual donor. But as one expert told the Times, it could come at a serious ethical cost: “When the money isn’t disclosed, it’s not clear how much everybody is giving, who is giving it and what they are getting in return for their donations,” said Heath Brown, a professor of public policy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who studies presidential transitions. “It’s an area where the vast majority of Americans would agree that they want to know who is paying that bill.” In her letter to the GSA, Warren asks them to respond by December 5 to questions about how the agency is engaging with the Trump transition and the impacts of the Trump team’s lack of compliance with federal law. Spokespeople for the Trump transition team and the GSA did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones on Sunday morning. The buried secrets of America’s Indian boarding schools BY HANNAH LEVINTOVA Stairs lead to the basement of Drexel Hall at the Red Cloud Indian School on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Some community members want the basement to be searched for unmarked graves.Mary Annette Pember/ICT Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters. In the early 1990s, Justin Pourier was a maintenance man at Red Cloud Indian School, a Catholic school on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. One day, he says he stumbled upon small graves in the school’s basement. For nearly 30 years, Pourier would be haunted by what he saw and told no one except his wife.  “Those are Native children down there…hopefully their spirit was able to travel on to whatever is beyond this world,” Pourier says. In 2022, he urged school officials to search the basement for the graves. Podcast Listen to Reveal's latest episode The hunt for unmarked graves of Native children isn’t happening just at Red Cloud, now called Maȟpíya Lúta. It’s one of more than 400 Indian boarding schools across the country that were part of a program designed by the federal government to “kill the Indian and save the man”—those were the actual words of one of the architects of the plan to destroy Native culture. In a historic first this fall, President Joe Biden apologized to Native Americans on behalf of the United States for the country’s past Indian boarding school policies. This week on Reveal, in a two-part collaboration with ICT (formerly Indian Country Today), we expose the painful legacy of boarding schools for Native children with ICT reporter Mary Annette Pember, a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Ojibwe. She’s been writing about these schools for more than two decades.  This is a rebroadcast of an episode that originally aired in October 2022. Toxic air pollution in India and Pakistan is “a disaster” BY UMAIR IRFAN

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The bureaucrat who could make Trump's authoritarian dreams real Russ Vought has a plan to take presidential power to new heights. BY ISABELA DIAS

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