Russell Vought will have immense power to implement Project 2025’s anti- LGBTQ+ agenda

December 21 2024, 08:15

Russell Vought, a prominent figure in conservative politics and the architect behind Project 2025, has been named as President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), an office that oversees every federal agencies’ funding, performance, data collection, and communication to ensure that it aligns with the president’s agenda.

As such, Vought, who served as director of the OMB during Trump’s first term, could wield tremendous power to implement the largely Christian nationalist vision of both Trump and the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing organization that authored Project 2025, the blueprint for Trump’s second presidency. This vision would largely roll back hard-won LGBTQ+ rights and protections.

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Russell Vought At a Glance

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Location: Arlington, Virginia
Party Affiliation: Republican
Race/Ethnicity: White
Gender Identity: Male
Sexual Orientation: Straight
Pronouns: He/Him
LGBTQ+ Ally: No

Social Media

X: @RussVought
Website: AmericaRenewing.com

Biography

Russell Vought, born on March 26, 1976, in Washington, D.C., and raised in Virginia, is a prominent American political figure known for his influential roles in government and conservative policy circles. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Wheaton College, Illinois, and a Juris Doctor from George Washington University Law School.

Vought’s career in public service includes significant positions such as serving as a legislative assistant for Sen. Phil Gramm, policy director for the House Republican Conference, and executive director of the Republican Study Committee. He also held the position of vice president at Heritage Action for America, the lobbying arm of The Heritage Foundation.

In 2018, Vought was appointed Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) under President Donald Trump. He later served as acting director and was confirmed as OMB director in July 2020, overseeing the administration’s fiscal policies during a critical period.

After his tenure at the OMB, Vought founded the Center for Renewing America in 2021, focusing on advancing conservative policies and combating critical race theory. He played a pivotal role in Project 2025, a conservative initiative aimed at reshaping the federal government. In November 2024, President-elect Donald Trump announced his intention to nominate Vought to lead the OMB once again.

Vought’s views have been described as aligning with Christian nationalism, advocating for the integration of Christian principles into government and society.

Vought’s stance on LGBTQ+ issues

While Vought hasn’t made many public statements on various LGBTQ+ issues, his largely anti-LGBTQ+ views may be inferred from his work on Project 2025 and his Center for Renewing America.

Same-sex marriage

Project 2025 calls for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to be renamed the Department of Life and for the agency to officially define a family as consisting of a married father and mother and children. Project 2025 calls for federal funds to support only a “biblically based” definition of family that “support[s] the formation of stable, married, nuclear families.”

The plan’s concept of a biblical nuclear family includes the idea that children should only be raised by their “biological” fathers and mothers because the “male-female dyad is essential to human nature.” This claim of parental hetero-superiority has been called “baseless” by the American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

These changes would not only limit LGBTQ+ couples access to family planning options, like access to in vitro fertilization (IVF), it would also nearly eliminate queer couples’ ability to foster and adopt children. In fact, Project 2025 would offer federal protections and support to agencies that discriminate against queer couples and LGBTQ+ families,

Furthermore, Project 2025 proposes that only “faith-based recipients who reaffirm that marriage is between one man and one woman” would be eligible for Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education grants, funds that finance educational programs for familial life skills.

Trans children in sports

Vought has called the inclusion of trans athletes in sports, “the end of women’s sports [and] female-only spaces, etc.”

Kinzinger has never been a conservative. Latest example is he is one of a handful of Republicans pushing a terrible compromise on gender identity issues, the so-called Fairness for All Act. The end of women's sports, female-only spaces, etc. https://t.co/g4cvDNdeVK
— Russ Vought (@russvought) March 16, 2021

In a letter opposing the Fairness for All Act, a Republican LGBTQ+ anti-discrimination bill with huge religious exemptions, Vought’s Center for Renewing America wrote, “Female-only spaces should be off limits to men who identify as women. Female sports should not be destroyed by male competitors.”

Project 2025’s authors want to ban trans students from playing on sports teams associated with their gender. He has supported initiatives that would tie Title IX protections for female athletes to “biological sex” and deny federal funding to schools that permit transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports.

Project 2025 would eliminate any legal recognition of trans identity to begin with, making the inclusion of trans athletes in sports conceivably impossible.

Transgender access to public bathrooms

In general, Project 2025 aims to end any legal recognition of trans identities and seeks to entirely deny the existence of such individuals, defining one’s gender identity as exclusively either “male” or “female” based entirely by the sex they were assigned at birth.

Additionally, Vought’s Center for Renewing America has written that trans bathroom access allows “biological males to enter girls’ bathrooms and dressing rooms in schools, places of public accommodation, and government facilities.”

His organization considers trans public accommodations laws in general “an ill-defined and radical attempt to reorder American civilization” that pushes “a false and unscientific view that biology is fluid and a mutable social construct that can be altered merely by the cognitive choice of an individual” and the “misguided view that public policy affirming male and female biology is immoral.”

If trans people are allowed into bathrooms matching their gender identity, “Women and girls would face immediate discrimination and unnecessary obstacles when it comes to … going to the restroom in public facilities, or maintaining privacy in the workplace,” Vought’s organization claims.

Don’t say gay/LGBTQ+ discussions in schools

Vought has voiced support for a 2021 executive order signed by then-Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey requiring schools to notify parents ahead of time of any curriculum addressing sexuality and allowing them to opt their children out of such instruction. Project 2025 would apply this nationally while largely eradicating LGBTQ+ content in schools and prohibiting school districts from requiring teachers to speak about it.

The foreword to Project 2025 states, “The noxious tenets of ‘critical race theory’ and ‘gender ideology’ should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country. These theories poison our children.” It goes on to equate LGBTQ+-inclusive content as “pornography” that should be criminalized — a common aim of right-wing “parents rights” groups that have sought to ban queer-inclusive content in schools and public libraries.

“Children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries,” the foreword adds. “Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children … has no claim to First Amendment protection…. Pornography should be outlawed… Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.”

Project 2025 also wants Congress to pass a federal Parents’ Bill of Rights that would allow parents to sue public schools for including any curricular content that offends them, the free speech organization PEN America writes. Doing so would subject schools to costly lawsuits that cow them into teaching only watered-down versions of history, social studies, literature and other humanities.

Project 2025 also seeks to eliminate the Department of Education (DOE), the federal agency that (among other things) enforces anti-discrimination laws to ensure that all children are treated equally regardless of LGBTQ+ identity. The DOE tracks demographic information needed to document inequities in education. With such tracking ended, discrimination against queer students and viewpoints could easily proliferate while hidden from public view.

Discrimination protections

Project 2025 seeks to remove key terms associated with sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) from all federal rules and regulations, including the following: gender, gender identity, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health and reproductive rights. In doing so, it would severely prohibit federal agencies — such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) or the Department of Housing and Urban Development —from tracking data related to LGBTQ+ inequalities or enforcing anti-discrimination measures.

The blueprint seeks to repeal policies from the Obama and Biden administrations as well as the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2020 Bostock v. Clayton County that view anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination as a form of sex-based discrimination already prohibited by federal law. These policies help ensure equal access to government institutions and civil rights regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.

“The President should direct agencies to rescind regulations interpreting sex discrimination provisions as prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, sex characteristics” Project 2025 states, urging federal workers to instead “focus their enforcement of sex discrimination laws on the biological binary meaning of ‘sex.’”

Furthermore, the document seeks to end all federal funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs that help competently attract and serve people from diverse cultural backgrounds. In fact, Project 2025 views DEI policies as forms of “affirmative discrimination” against white, heterosexual, and Christian identities.

Any person found to have participated in such initiatives — even within “state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers” — would be subject to investigation by the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and susceptible to possible discipline or firing.

Lastly, Project 2025 calls for expanding legal protections for any individual or group that discriminates on the basis of religious beliefs. This could allow discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals in various contexts, including employment and public services.

Gender-affirming care for minors

Project 2025 describes gender-affirming care for minors as a “social contagion” that especially affects young girls and claims that “radical gender ideology is having a devastating effect on school-aged children today.” It also refers to such care as a form of “mutilation” and “child abuse” and suggests punishing any adults who help kids obtain it.

My side is not the one killing kids and encouraging girls to have their breasts removed.
— Russ Vought (@russvought) October 7, 2022

Project 2025 suggests that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) should “immediately end its collection of data on gender identity, which legitimizes the unscientific notion that men can become women (and vice versa).”

The report also calls for the National Institutes of Health to fund studies into “the short-term and long-term negative effects” of gender-affirming care, from social affirmation to surgery, and the use of so-called “reparative therapy” to convince children that they are not transgender, The 19th reported.

Russell Vought’s career

Graduated from George Washington University with a Bachelor of Arts in political science
Earned a Juris Doctor degree from the George Washington University Law School
Served as policy director for the Republican Study Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives
Worked as vice president of Heritage Action for America, the advocacy arm of The Heritage Foundation
Served as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) under President Donald Trump from 2017 to 2019
Appointed as director of the OMB in 2019, a role he held until 2021
Played a key role in shaping the Trump administration’s fiscal policies, including budget proposals and spending priorities
Became president of the Center for Renewing America, a conservative think tank, in 2021
Served as a leading architect of Project 2025, a conservative policy agenda aimed at reshaping the federal government and executive branch for a future Republican administration

Vought could majorly erode LGBTQ+ discrimination protections

Russell Vought’s oversight of the OMB could help implement systemic changes that would allow anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination and inequalities to worsen nationwide for years to come. Empowered by the Heritage Foundation, far-right Christian Nationalists, and Trump’s supporters, he would have the authority to erase and exclude LGBTQ+ people from numerous facets of public life and civil inclusion.

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