A top Trump official appears to have made some inconvenient comments disappear from a federal website.
Russ Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget who eagerly carried out President Donald Trump’s sweeping cuts to research and the federal workforce, appears to have quietly had comments mentioning his daughter scrubbed from the government’s website for public feedback on federal proposals.
At least 42 public comments on a regulation proposed by Vought’s office that would give the Trump administration more control over federal science funding have been mysteriously removed, STAT News reports.
Ten of them mentioned that Vought, 50, has benefited from federally funded research because his daughter, who has cystic fibrosis, has been treated with Trikafta, a groundbreaking medicine whose development was aided by such research.
The top Project 2025 architect and his ex-wife have long spoken publicly about their daughter’s cystic fibrosis diagnosis and her treatment with Trikafta.
No specific reason was given for the comments’ removal; the website says only that they were withdrawn “per policy.” The OMB did not immediately respond to the Daily Beast’s request for comment.
One of the disappeared comments was submitted by Magdeleine Bradford-Butcher, who described how her daughter’s treatment with Trikafta had benefited from research funding and expressed concern that a study her daughter was participating in could be cut, STAT News reports.
In her comment, Bradford-Butcher pointed to parts of the proposed rule that concerned her before noting: “This is also deeply personal to Russell Vought.”
“He probably isn’t reading these but just in case: Russell, for the sake of your daughter and mine, please do not make these rules effective,” she wrote. “Let the scientists, the medical researchers, the experts who created miracle drugs for CF like Trikafta stay the course. Let’s fund them. Maybe our daughters will outlive us.”
The federal government’s regulations.gov website no longer displays her comment.
Legal experts and former OMB employees told STAT News that the removal of the comments and the lack of any explanation was far from routine.
“I don’t see anything obscene. I don’t see anything threatening,” Bridget Dooling, a law professor at Ohio State University and former OMB policy analyst, told the outlet. “I see somebody trying to make an argument by analogy and make an appeal to a public official based on a commonality in their personal life, and that is fair game for a comment.”
Stuart Shapiro, dean of the Rutgers School of Planning and Public Policy and a former OMB official, said, “It’s very weird because there’s no legal implication to those [comments] being on or off of regulations.gov.”
“There’s no reason to do it, unless it was offensive to the head of OMB there, which I suspect it might have [been],” he added.
In total, 496,606 comments have been received on the proposal, and a STAT analysis found that 95 percent opposed the OMB’s proposal. For now, the public outcry appears to be having an effect; the Senate’s temporary spending bill blocks implementation of the rule.
Vought, a driving force behind mass federal worker firings and efforts to slash billions in funding from Democratic-led states, has previously been depicted as the Grim Reaper in a bizarre AI-generated video posted by Trump.
