The ‘Shadow President’ Dismantling The Government
Fresh Air
NPR
4.4 • 34.4K Ratings
🗓️ 30 October 2025
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In a New Yorker article co-published with ProPublica, reporter Andy Kroll describes Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, as a "shadow president" with oversized influence. “I don't think you can take in the full sweep of what this administration has done in less than a year and not come away with thinking that chaos is a goal, and certainly an outcome that serves Vought and his team’s larger agenda of putting cracks in the federal government, shaking the stability of this typically rock-solid steady institution that is the federal bureaucracy,” Kroll says.
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Transcript
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| 0:27.2 | Russell Vote has been called The Shadow President, including by my guest, journalist Andy Crowell. |
| 0:33.7 | Vote is the director of the Office of Management and Budget. |
| 0:37.3 | Not the sexiest sounding title, |
| 0:39.3 | but he's the architect behind the Trump administration's dismantling a federal agencies, |
| 0:44.9 | slashing foreign aid, pausing or canceling over $400 billion for infrastructure and clean energy |
| 0:51.6 | projects in blue states, ending the Justice Department's |
| 0:55.2 | independence from the president, stuffing so many budget cuts in the so-called one big, beautiful |
| 1:00.9 | bill, and expanding the power of the president. He was also one of the people behind Project |
| 1:07.6 | 2025, which was intended to be a blueprint for a second Trump term, and that's |
| 1:13.6 | what it's become. Vote describes himself as a radical constitutionalist. Andy Kroll has been |
| 1:20.3 | investigating how vote has been using his power and what his goals are. Kroll covers the Justice |
| 1:26.9 | Department and Judiciary System for ProPublica, |
| 1:31.0 | where he's written extensively about vote. |
| 1:34.1 | Kroll has an article in The New Yorker in collaboration with ProPublica titled Donald Trump's |
| 1:39.8 | Deep State Wrecking Ball. |
| 1:42.0 | Kroll is also the journalist who first got access to and published |
| 1:45.6 | the video of votes saying this back in 2023. We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. |
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