In a series of private speeches delivered sometime in 2023 and 2024, Russ Vought made more incendiary comments about civil servants who make up, as they perceive it, “the administrative state.”
Vought’s addresses, uncovered by ProPublica, add to the growing evidence that Vought and his theocratic associates have knives out for any facets of government that refuse to bend a knee to Donald Trump‘s fascist ideologues.
Vought does not hide his agenda or shy away from using extreme rhetoric in public. But the apocalyptic tone and hard-line policy prescriptions in the two private speeches go further than his earlier pronouncements.
Vought was the architect of Trump Administration‘s “Schedule F” scheme at OMB, instituted after his loss to Joe Biden in November 2020 (President Biden immediately repealed it soon after taking office). In large part, the newly unearthed comments by Vought pick up where Schedule F left off—doubling- and tripling-down on the far-right’s open warfare on government workers.
In other words, they will actually “re-traumatize” civil servants since their initial op did plenty of damage to morale already.
