Trump expected to tap Schedule F architect promising widespread federal layoffs to head OMB

President-elect Trump plans to turn to a familiar name to head his management and budget office, according to multiple reports, selecting his former director and architect of his Schedule F plan to once again lead the key White House agency. 

Trump plans to name Russ Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget, the agency through which budgetary, regulatory and, in many cases, federal workforce policy runs. Vought served as OMB’s deputy director from early in the first Trump administration and then took over as acting OMB head in January 2019. He was confirmed by the Senate for that post in July 2020. During his tenure, Vought repeatedly submitted budgets that would have gutted non-defense agencies and spearheaded efforts to remove civil service protections for much of the federal workforce. 

In an interview with Tucker Carlson this week, Carlson said Vought was very likely to lead OMB again and Vought did not dispute it. Brian Hughes, a spokesman for the Trump transition, declined to confirm the nomination, saying he would not speculate or get ahead of the official process. 

In that interview, Vought laid out his vision for the federal workforce, saying large-scale reductions-in-force would give the Trump administration the legal basis to shrink agencies. 

“There certainly is going to be mass layoffs and firings, particularly at some of the agencies that we don’t even think should exist,” Vought said. 

The former White House official played a key role in implementing Trump’s deregulatory agenda, including by removing agencies’ capacity to issue guidance without going through the formal rulemaking process. Vought also drew controversy when he oversaw the longest shutdown in U.S. history and took unprecedented action to keep agencies functioning despite the appropriations lapse, an approach that later drew rebuke from the Government Accountability Office. Toward the end of his tenure, Vought helped implement a Trump order to rid much of the federal government of diversity and inclusion efforts and threatened to discipline employees who participated in them. 

Since leaving office, Vought has helped stand up the Center for Renewing America and has consistently railed against what he views as the outsized role of federal civil servants have in implementing law. He has bemoaned federal workers for dragging their feet in implementing Trump administration policy during the former president’s first term and has advocated for increased accountability to prevent that from occurring again. 

Vought would also mark at least the third official who wrote a chapter for Project 2025, a policy shop set up by former Trump administration officials from which Trump previously tried to distance himself, that the president-elect has named to his new administration. Through that effort and his role heading CRA, Vought has been the lead advocate of whichever president took office in 2025 immediately reinstating Trump’s controversial Schedule F initiative. 

Vought attempted to help implement Trump’s late executive order in 2020, which removed merit-based civil-service protections from large swaths of the federal workforce. The order was written to apply to any federal employee in a policymaking position, though Vought interpreted that language broadly. 

While the clock ran out before Schedule F could take effect and President Biden immediately revoked it upon taking office, Vought sought to designate 88% of OMB as falling under Schedule F and eligible for politically based, at-will firings. In his interview with Carlson, Vought said he did that in part to set the tone for the rest of agency heads that “this should be viewed maximally.” He added that his understanding is Schedule F will be “a day one thing.” 

Federal employee groups that fought vociferously against Schedule F identified Vought in the years that followed as not just a key architect of the plan but, through Freedom of Information Act requests, as its lead advocate in interpreting it as loosely as possible. 

“It was obvious back then that Trump’s OMB tried to push Schedule F to the extreme, but now we know just how weak the rationale was,” National Treasury Employees Union Doreen Greenwald said this year after reviewing the agency’s internal documents. “This also shows that if given a second chance, Vought and others could use Schedule F to threaten the job of any federal employee they want with flimsy claims about handling policy documents or confidential memos.”

The Biden administration has, through the Office of Personnel Management, implemented regulations aimed at blocking such a system from taking effect. Congress has failed to take action to codify the rejection of Trump’s Schedule F proposal despite several legislative efforts to do so, however, so while Biden’s regulations will delay the Trump administration from taking reimplementation steps, they will not stop it.

Additionally, key lawmakers have already voiced their support for and said they would follow the Trump administration's lead to pursue legislative changes to support its civil service reform efforts. 

Separately from Schedule F, the Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency—a non-governmental commission Trump has vowed to stand up—is promising to reduce headcounts across federal agencies through mass layoffs and separation incentives. 

In his interview with Carlson, Vought said federal employees are “very resistant” to direction from political appointees and derisively referred to the civilian workforce as “the administrative state” and “the regime.” He added the federal employees built their “mountain” on the difficulty of firing them and said Trump appointees must enter government well-versed in the management tools at their disposal. 

In speeches over the last two years uncovered by ProPublica, Vought said he wants to put federal employees “in trauma” to the point they no longer want to go to work. 

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.”

Vought told Carlson this week the president has to move quickly with a “radical constitutional perspective” to dismantle the bureaucracy. No agencies should be treated as independent, he said, presidents should be able to pick and choose what federal appropriations to actually expend—a proposal Trump has himself backed—and federal employees should be at-will. When Carlson said most federal employees “suck” at their jobs, Vought agreed. 

“You’re telling the truth,” he said. “That’s why you gotta have a massive effort to dramatically reduce it, so the good ones rise to the top and everyone else is finding other work.”