Russell Vought: Trump appointee who wants federal workers to be ‘in trauma’

Russell Vought testifies before the US Senate committee on the budget on his nomination on Capitol Hill in Washington DC on 22 January. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

If federal employees are feeling traumatized right now, Russell Vought, the new head of the office of management and budget (OMB), probably has something to do with it.

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in a video revealed by ProPublica and the research group Documented in October. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down … We want to put them in trauma.”