I'm Brooke Gladstone, and this is the On the Media Midweek podcast. Last week, amid a dismal news cycle, a flicker of sunshine, Russell Vote, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, the man behind the firing of thousands of federal workers from various agencies, the man who famously said he'd put federal workers in trauma,

got a setback in his plan to kill,

the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Vote had called the Bureau a, quote,

woke and weaponized agency against disfavored industries and individuals, and he'd spent much of

the last year firing its staff and choking off funding. But last Friday, he was ordered by a

federal judge to request money from the Federal Reserve to keep the agency afloat. Senator Elizabeth Warren,

who's credited with creating the agency after the 2008 financial collapse, was in a celebratory mood.

The CFPB, she said, is, quote,

an agency that has returned more than $21 billion directly to consumers

cheated by big banks and giant corporations.

But today, Russ Vote was forced to request funding for the agency because we fought back in the courts.

Back in October, I spoke to ProPublica reporter Andy Kroll, who'd just written a profile about vote. At that time,

vote was described by his boss as...

Darth Vader. You know Darth Vader, right? Donald Trump.

They call him Darth Vader. I call him a fine man. But he's cutting Democrat priorities,

and they're never going to get him back.

Whereupon Andy Crowell won up Trump's casting of this particular bureaucrat by dubbing him

shadow president.

The sources that I interviewed for this story work across the federal government and who

deal with OMB in some cases on a day-to-day basis,

that's how they described him to me.

...