The following is an abridged and edited speech delivered by Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russ Vought on Sept. 3 at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C.
It’s good to be with you this morning. It’s actually my first time at NatCon. I was talking with Yoram [Hazony] backstage on this, but I feel like I’m coming home, because I think this is, intellectually, a place that resonates deeply with me. Yoram, personally, his own writing, has deeply impacted my own intellectual journey, and so it’s exciting to be here. And, you know, as I was thinking about this talk, I was thinking about the extent to which there are so many overlapping aspects of the rise of Trump, President [Donald] Trump’s agenda, the America First movement, the last 10 years, and the rise of the national conservative movement.
And I think some of those things that I would draw out, number one, is just the very notion of a different type of conservatism, a conservatism that is durable, a conservatism that is oriented around preserving the country. We can actually talk about nations again. We can talk about countries again. We can remember that countries have borders, that it matters the extent to which we have a conversation about who is coming into the country and are they here on legal terms.
I remember in the 2017 election, Paul Ryan literally stepped into the campaign on the basis of a proposal from President Trump to screen individuals from countries that have many people in their country that are engaged in activities of terrorism that we would not want to bring to this country. And Paul Ryan, in the midst of a complete Conservative Incorporated freak out, said this is about the definition of conservatism.
He was right about that, and that is a conversation that I think that we’re able to have now, that we are remembering that a nation has many things that keep it together. Ours has a religious heritage in which its civic life is based on—the Judeo-Christian worldview. And that, while we may give religious liberty to everyone, there is an importance in a foundation and a structure to our system, when our Declaration says that we are created equal under one God. One God that all of our liberties flow from.
Similarly, when it comes to a community, that it matters we’re not just an economy, we’re not just a bunch of consumers. That, while we are those things, we are also people who are parents, we’re neighbors, we live in communities, and we don’t want drugs all over the streets and streets. We don’t want critical race theory taught in our schools. We don’t want a transgender contagion lying to our children. And these were all conversations that, before the national conservative movement and the rise of Trump, we were not able to have and we were called names. I’ll get to that in a second.
So I think that the first similarity between President Trump, this movement, this incredibly healthy, vibrant movement, is that definition of conservatism that I think is an older definition, but one that is more oriented towards preserving the country and passing it on to future generations.
There’s a certain, and this is the second point, there’s a certain toughness with this movement. Any of the things that I just talked about, until recently, would have gotten you called names. When I defended my faith in 2017, I had no idea that writing in defense of my college alma mater and its statement of faith would get me called a bigot when I came before the Senate. But it did. People took great offense that I defended, essentially, John 3:16, which is behind home plate at every baseball game.
And, so, any of the things that I talked about, whether it’s being more judicious with why we go to war—that gets you called an appeaser, that gets you called an isolationist. If you’re talking about issues of faith, that gets you called a bigot. If you’re talking about why we would want to possibly upend critical race theory, that would get you called a racist. And so, there’s a certain toughness to the national conservative movement that I think is entirely healthy and has allowed us to enter the moment that we’re in with a far better chance of success. And I think you’re seeing that success. In my own interaction with President Trump, he helped teach many of us this.
In 2020, we first learned about critical race theory, and I know many have been following it, people like [Christopher] Rufo and others, but for those of us in public office, we began to hear about it for the first time. And I remember when President Trump said, ‘I want you to get rid of it in the federal government, I want you to defund it.’ And I did do that. And we did it on a Friday afternoon. He didn’t want to wait until Tuesday. I’m thinking to myself, “Okay, are there going to be rioters on my lawn the next day? Is this going to be something? How’s this going to roll out?” And the next morning, I woke up and on X, Twitter at the time, and woke up to no fewer than 20 tweets, retweets from President Trump, leaning into this fight.
The notion that, in any way, we were going to take a back seat to defending the notion that we should all be equal under the sight of the law and that we’re not going to have state sanctioned racism was something that was anathema to him, and he gave us an example. And you know what? That was the first time a public official had done anything like that. Any time you throw the word racism at a public official, before that moment, they would go run, and that had been a Kryptonite of the Right for decades. That does not exist anymore.
And we saw it immediately after, when people would go to school board meetings with full recognition of what they might be up against. That, if they go to a school board meeting, and they were called a racist, that might make the press, and that, if you do a Google search of them, may be with them for the rest of their life, but it did not deter them.
And then we saw that move into the transgender fight as well, where you had people, coaches saying, ‘I’m not going to lie to my students about the difference between a man and a woman, a boy or girl.’ And that toughness, that ability to withstand the attacks of the Left, has been paramount. It has been the thing that the Left have not accounted for because it has been their strategic playbook for over 100 years.
And the last thing I would say in terms of these overlapping characteristics, is just the notion of a clock. I didn’t come up with it, but someone in this movement came up with the notion of “What time is it?” Do you have any idea what time it is as a country? Our philosophical agenda doesn’t have all the time in the world. There is a point of no return. That moment, it may not be 11:59, I personally believe it was pretty close to 11:59, but the notion of a clock—what are the fights that you are picking, what are the solutions that you are coming up with, will they actually solve the problem?
We’re at a moment of precipice, and it has allowed us in the last 10 years, particularly in the last four to five, to know how critical this last election was in many respects. It was not unlike a third major pivot point in our country: 1776, 1860, and I believe 2024, because of what was on the line.
What was on the line was that we had not just one existential issue, not just two existential issues, we had many, many existential issues, and all of those existential issues came through what I’m going to talk about today, which is the fact that we were up against a bureaucracy that was 100 years in the making. Some would call it the deep state. Some would call it the administrative state. I would call it the woke and weaponized administrative state because of the different characteristics and aspects of it. But we are now at the point after this election where we have a president who understands fully what is in front of him and has dealt aggressively and quickly with that.
Much work still remains, but we have a movement that is there to support that work. We are not reading people out of the party when they raise the issues. We don’t have a movement that’s writing op-eds against the president for the steps that he’s taking. There is great enthusiasm for what is going on.
Let me unpack a little bit for how this came about. At the turn of the last century, what you would have seen from the Left was great angst with our Constitution. They hated the separation of powers. They wanted constitutional amendments.
Over time, they stopped writing the op-eds, calling for constitutional amendments. And they chose innovation through incrementalism and institutions—never having an actual amendment but just changing the way these institutions are oriented towards each other. They introduced the living Constitution—a living Constitution says you don’t actually have to go by the words of the Constitution—and moved away from the way that the Constitution is supposed to work together, the separation of powers, where there’s actual conflict between the branches. They instead said, “Look, we’re going to change that. We’re going to, over time, move in a different direction. We’re going to change the way these institutions work and interact with each other.”
Number two, they went hard after the notion of an expert bureaucracy, where you take politics out of it, theoretically. Politics is never taken out of it. You try and take politics out of it. You give it to people who are there permanently, and you trust their “independent advice.”
This also came at the same time where Congress was increasingly giving more of its power, behind closed doors, to the executive branch to just write the laws, and this is what we largely find ourselves today. They want bills that are passed with lawmaking authority to the executive agencies. Congress would retain, not at the rank and file level, but at the leadership level and at the committee shape those decisions behind closed doors.
But notice what you don’t have. You don’t have a democratic debate. You don’t have trade-offs being made before the American people. You don’t have great debates in front of the House and the Senate. You have largely a cartel working behind closed doors. And they come once or twice a year with a mega bill, an omnibus bill, or some other must-pass bill, and they push everything into the light of day for one brief moment. That’s what you’ve got. And so that is a byproduct of being able to have a system based on these expert opinions that are largely unmovable.
And third, the whole notion of the spending process and spending has been reformed and moved in the opposite direction, to give Congress much more of the power than the executive branch. And this really picked up in the 1970s, where you took 200 years of presidents, who had the ability to spend less than the congressional appropriated ceiling, which is a major constitutional principle.
We would never say that Congress doesn’t have the power of the purse to appropriate, but the executive has the power to spend. And this was built on the foundation of what we learned and brought from the principles of the U.K., and that was an important notion: that Congress sets that ceiling, and presidents have the ability to spend less if they think it’s important, to prevent waste and abuse. And, literally, 200 years of presidents did this, from George Washington up until Richard Nixon.
And then at the lowest moment of the presidency, what do we have? We have the Impoundment Control Act that upends and says it is no longer a ceiling, it is a floor, you have to push all the money out the door. And that now orients the bureaucracy, who now have career civil service protections, to orient not from the president of the United States, but to the Congress that controls the purse strings. And so, we have a fundamentally different system. In some respects, it is a revolution that occurred over the last 100 years.
The last thing that was very, very important development was the notion of an “independent agency.” The Founders would not have any notion of what an independent agency is. All executive power is vested in the executive branch. It’s pretty simple. There are three branches, executive, legislative and judicial. …
And so those four developments over the last 100 years have created, heading into this election, woke and weaponized bureaucracy. Why do I call it woke and weaponized? Because what had been forming for many, many decades, but was very big, authoritative, and a waste of taxpayer money, really, in the last 10 years under Obama and Biden, had a new feature in that it was woke. The bureaucrats that you would find would be attempting to divide the country on the basis of race and identity most of the time. And they were newly weaponized.
They were aimed at the very American people that they were sent to keep secure and to protect. And that’s not just the Department of Justice, which we know well about, but that would be at the EPA that put a 77-year-old Navy veteran in jail for building ponds on his ranch to fight wildfires, or the Department of Labor, who went after a woman who was providing discounts to poor women to come into her shop, a consignment shop, put labels on the clothes so they could get discounts for their kids.
This is what we have been up against and the magnitude of this last election. Thankfully, President Trump won. He won in a convincing fashion, and we have now been embarked on deconstructing this administrative state, and we have done it largely in the same spots that I just mentioned.
So, instead of being overly concerned with what the post-Watergate consensus in this town has been, we have tried, the president has tried to have the view of what would the Founders have thought.
And I think you’ve seen that with regard to the aggressiveness that the president and his administration have gone at this problem, the way we’ve tried to go quickly. If Congress has given us authority that is too broad, then we’re going to use that authority aggressively to protect the American people. We’re not going to just be sitting back waiting on you to pass 100 days of legislation, that maybe you pass one and you don’t get to the rest.
Thankfully, we put as many as we possibly could in the One Big Beautiful Bill, and I think that will pay dividends. But step after step, it’s to move quickly, trying to think through what the Founders would have done in the circumstances, and be aggressive and not let this town define the art of politically possible. …
So there’s so much being done right now. I know everyone is very enthusiastic. I’m enthusiastic about it. It’s fun to be a part of. The president is an incredible person and leader. When you have an opportunity to see him up close and personal and see how he is responding to events and thinking of things that we’d never come up with, and then to marry that with having done the job before, the president has done this job, he’s thought about it for four years, and going as fast as we possibly can to make success.
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