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Trump Lackey Fumed at Musk in Secret MAGA Civil War Clash

Budget bigwig Russell Vought appears to have quietly railed against the perceived messiness of the DOGE chief’s slash-and-burn attacks on federal bureaucracy.

Few at the MAGA White House would appear to have been happier seeing the tail end of Elon Musk’s tenure as government efficiency czar than Donald Trump’s budget bigwig Russell Vought.

“We’re going to let DOGE break things, and we’ll pick up the pieces later,” the Office of Management and Budget chief is reported to have told his team as they watched the Tesla founder slash and burn his way through the federal government earlier this year, according to a Monday profile by The New York Times.

Vought is also understood to have been “outraged when DOGE sowed chaos by sending out an email requiring federal workers to detail five accomplishments each week or lose their jobs”—not because he was against firing those perceived to have underperformed, but because he felt there were ways of doing so without creating “needless liability.”

The budget chief, who also served at the same post during the first Trump administration, has a decades-long pedigree as an arch-conservative crusader against federal bureaucracy and “wasteful” government spending, having once boasted of wanting to “traumatize” government employees into being scared of going to work “because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

He’s widely seen as a key architect of MAGA’s ongoing efforts to centralize power around the White House, but the NYT writes he “felt sidelined and undermined by the haphazard chaos of the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency.”

With the Tesla CEO now having departed the White House, entering a self-imposed exile from MAGAland following a spectacularly messy public divorce from Trump earlier in May, Vought would now appear to be enjoying his day in the sun, and making good on promises to his staff of picking up the pieces later on.

Over the past few months, the budget chief has pressured legislators into cancelling $9 billion earmarked for foreign aid and broadcasting. He’s also successfully campaigned to slash Medicaid and food stamps, pushed to eradicate hundreds of environmental, health, transport and worker safety regulations, and gutted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

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His office is reportedly now telling federal agencies to brace for further mass firings in the event Congress fails to strike a funding deal and avoid a shutdown this week, as well as potentially facilitating a further $4.9 billion cut to foreign aid by the White House.

That last move, according to The New York Times, would rely largely on a procedural maneuver known as a “pocket rescission,” which would allow the Trump administration to bypass House approval by simply eliminating those spending pledges unless Congress, potentially suspended by that stage, votes otherwise by the end of the fiscal year on September 30.

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Legal experts told the newspaper that much of Vought’s work thus far, in particular his efforts to help centralize power around the executive branch, has increasingly imperiled the very foundations of U.S. democracy.

“One of the main sources of power that Congress has over the executive branch is the budget,” as Georgetown University law professor Eloise Pasachoff put it. “If the executive branch isn’t controlled by the power of the purse, then there is very little that will control the president. It’s a fundamental challenge to the liberty of every single person in America.”

The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House and the Office for Management and Budget for comment on this story. A spokesperson for Vought described the NYT’s account of the budget chief’s dissatisfaction with Musk as “false.”

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