JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
And I'm Juana Summers in Washington, where House Republicans just passed President Trump's tax and spending bill and sent it to his desk for a signature. The bill cuts nearly a trillion dollars from Medicaid spending over the next 10 years. The White House and Congress drove the legislation, but trimming the federal budget and shrinking the size of the federal government are consistent with the vision of Project 2025 coauthor and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought.
MCKAY COPPINS: All of the nonpartisan federal agencies that exist in the federal government, staffed largely by civil servants, technocrats, bureaucrats, he believes that that was never in the vision of the founders, that it's unconstitutional and that to return to the vision of the founding fathers, those agencies should either be eliminated or effectively politicized.
SUMMERS: That's Atlantic magazine staff writer McKay Coppins. He wrote a recent profile of Vought, and I spoke to him yesterday about the OMB director's agenda.
COPPINS: You know, if you were to listen to Vought's speeches over the years or read his essays, as I have, you would see a strain of what, you know, he would call fiscal conservatism, right? I think that the so-called Big Beautiful Bill targets some elements of the government that people like Vought see as too woke or, you know, insufficiently conservative. But the reality is that the most kind of radical part of Vought's ideological project is not any one set of specific cuts. It's his long-term vision for who should control the federal government.
SUMMERS: Now, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the cuts in this bill could lead to nearly 12 million people losing their health insurance in 10 years. How do these cuts - if you can address this to health care - align with Vought's overarching vision of the government?
COPPINS: Vought has said in the past that he is convinced that 1 out of every 5 or $6 of spending in Medicaid is improper spending. I should say that experts and fact-checkers have said that there's no basis for that belief - that to the degree that there is any kind of fraud or abuse in the Medicaid program, it's a much smaller percentage than that. I think that it's not a surprise that Vought and his allies are going after Medicaid and that they're not particularly, you know, sympathetic to claims that this will lead to wide-scale loss of medical coverage because they just believe, whether there's basis for it or not, that a lot of this money is going to improper sources and that it's fraudulent and needs to be taken care of.
SUMMERS: You know, I do wonder that, given the Congressional Budget Office found that the Republican tax and spending bill would add roughly $3 trillion to the deficit over the next decade, do you get a sense of how Vought thinks about the nation's debt?
COPPINS: Well, this is kind of the most striking thing about this bill. And it kind of puts the lie to the idea that this is fiscal conservatism at work, right?
SUMMERS: Right.
COPPINS: Which raises the question of what exactly Vought is trying to accomplish here - is it really trying to, you know, shrink the deficit, or is he trying to unravel the federal government and kind of rebuild a new constitutional order? I would think that the latter is a better description of his ideological project, based on the things that he's said and written. And I should also add, he has not been especially coy about this. You know, just a few years ago, he wrote an essay in which he argued that we are living in a, quote, "post-constitutional time," and that the right needs to throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have developed over the last 200 years. So he is pretty upfront about the radicalism of his project.
SUMMERS: Well, so much has happened. I'll just point out we are only halfway through the first year of President Trump's second term.
COPPINS: (Laughter).
SUMMERS: What do you think Vought's going to focus on next?
COPPINS: In talking to some of his ideological allies like Steve Bannon, for example, who is a big fan of what Vought is doing, they believe that some of the biggest provocations are yet to come. He is a big believer in the idea of presidential impoundment power, which is to say that the president can effectively cut congressionally mandated federal spending unilaterally, without congressional approval. And some of the big fights over that are probably going to come this fall. I think Vought is going to be looking to pick fights with Congress and the judiciary in hopes that these fights will effectively end with the president having much more power than he did before.
SUMMERS: McKay Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic. His piece is called "The Visionary of Trump 2.0." McKay, thank you.
COPPINS: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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