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Re-meet the once and future director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought.
President-elect Donald Trump spent the Friday evening before Thanksgiving filling out nearly the rest of his Cabinet. He plans for his Treasury secretary to be a hedge fund manager who’s called the Inflation Reduction Act “the Doomsday machine for the deficit”; he’s named a vaccine safety skeptic to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and his pick to head the Department of Labor is a Republican congresswoman who may want to ease the enforcement of child labor rules if confirmed.
And — in one of the most consequential moves yet for America’s standing in the fight to mitigate climate change — Trump also named Russ Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget. The decision comes as no surprise — Vought served as deputy director of the OMB under Trump in 2018 and took over the top job in 2019, serving until the end of Trump’s first presidency. The strategic communications group Climate Power had been sounding the alarm on his potential return to the office since this spring, which included sharing their research on him with me.
Unlike many Trump administration nominees, who tend to be loyalists with limited experience in the offices they’re appointed to oversee, Vought is noteworthy for having thought long and hard about how to “purge federal agencies of nonpartisan experts” and replace them with “partisan loyalists who would willingly follow any order without question, regardless of whether it was legal, constitutional, or the right thing to do for the people,” Joe Spielberger, the policy counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, an independent and nonpartisan watchdog group, told me when I covered Vought’s agenda earlier this year.
Vought plans to do so mainly by reinstating Schedule F, a job classification that would designate at least 50,000 career civil servants as “at-will” political employees, including climate scientists National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and others who sit on committees like the Clean Air Scientific Advisory. In Vought’s words in his chapter of Project 2025, “the Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding.” (In a recent conversation with Tucker Carlson, the pair speculated about being able to “fire them all.”) Vought already tried this once, at the end of Trump’s first term, and Biden swiftly reversed it upon taking office.
Beyond gutting America’s scientific corps, possibly for generations, if confirmed, Vought will immediately make his presence in the Trump administration felt, having spent the past few years secretly drafting “hundreds of executive orders, regulations, and memos that would lay the groundwork for rapid action on Trump’s plans,” according to reporting by CNN and based on undercover video released by the Centre for Climate Reporting, which recorded a candid conversation with former OMB director about his plans under false pretenses. “Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies,” Vought told his interviewers. “And we are working doggedly on that,” including by “destroying their agencies’ notion of independence.”
Though Trump (and his campaign) tried to deflect the influence of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 roadmap for his presidency, insisting he is an independent thinker not beholden to anyone, the president-elect’s appointment of Vought and other Project 2025 authors such as Brendan Carr, Tom Homan, and John Ratcliffe to powerful posts in his administration renders those denials specious, to say the least. More crucially, it suggests a certain intellectual deferral to Vought, enthroning him as one of the key architects of Trumpism 2.0. Through his Christian nationalist group, Center for Renewing America, Vought has spread his framework for solidifying executive power (and eliminating its checks and obstacles) throughout Washington’s right-wing intellectual circles, giving him a powerful base of support.
All this from the OMB, though — one of the, let’s face it, more boring offices of government? As Vought knows, however: If you control the budget, then you do everything.
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“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%.”
President Trump announced Tuesday during a cabinet meeting that he plans to impose a hefty tax on U.S. copper imports.
“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%,” he told reporters.
Copper traders and producers have anticipated tariffs on copper since Trump announced in February that his administration would investigate the national security implications of copper imports, calling the metal an “essential material for national security, economic strength, and industrial resilience.”
Trump has already imposed tariffs for similarly strategically and economically important metals such as steel and aluminum. The process for imposing these tariffs under section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 involves a finding by the Secretary of Commerce that the product being tariffed is essential to national security, and thus that the United States should be able to supply it on its own.
Copper has been referred to as the “metal of electrification” because of its centrality to a broad array of electrical technologies, including transmission lines, batteries, and electric motors. Electric vehicles contain around 180 pounds of copper on average. “Copper, scrap copper, and copper’s derivative products play a vital role in defense applications, infrastructure, and emerging technologies, including clean energy, electric vehicles, and advanced electronics,” the White House said in February.
Copper prices had risen around 25% this year through Monday. Prices for copper futures jumped by as much as 17% after the tariff announcement and are currently trading at around $5.50 a pound.
The tariffs, when implemented, could provide renewed impetus to expand copper mining in the United States. But tariffs can happen in a matter of months. A copper mine takes years to open — and that’s if investors decide to put the money toward the project in the first place. Congress took a swipe at the electric vehicle market in the U.S. last week, extinguishing subsidies for both consumers and manufacturers as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. That will undoubtedly shrink domestic demand for EV inputs like copper, which could make investors nervous about sinking years and dollars into new or expanded copper mines.
Even if the Trump administration succeeds in its efforts to accelerate permitting for and construction of new copper mines, the copper will need to be smelted and refined before it can be used, and China dominates the copper smelting and refining industry.
The U.S. produced just over 1.1 million tons of copper in 2023, with 850,000 tons being mined from ore and the balance recycled from scrap, according to United States Geological Survey data. It imported almost 900,000 tons.
With the prospect of tariffs driving up prices for domestically mined ore, the immediate beneficiaries are those who already have mines. Shares in Freeport-McMoRan, which operates seven copper mines in Arizona and New Mexico, were up over 4.5% in afternoon trading Tuesday.
“We had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them.”
A member of the House Freedom Caucus said Wednesday that he voted to advance President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits – raising the specter that Trump could try to go further than the megabill to stop usage of the credits.
Representative Ralph Norman, a Republican of North Carolina, said that while IRA tax credits were once a sticking point for him, after meeting with Trump “we had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them in his own way,” he told Eric Garcia, the Washington bureau chief of The Independent. Norman specifically cited tax credits for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version would phase out more slowly than House Republicans had wanted.
It’s not entirely clear what the president could do to unilaterally “deal with” tax credits already codified into law. Norman declined to answer direct questions from reporters about whether GOP holdouts like himself were seeking an executive order on the matter. But another Republican holdout on the bill, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, told reporters Wednesday that his vote was also conditional on blocking IRA “subsidies.”
“If the subsidies will flow, we’re not gonna be able to get there. If the subsidies are not gonna flow, then there might be a path," he said, according to Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News.
As of publication, Roy has still not voted on the rule that would allow the bill to proceed to the floor — one of only eight Republicans yet to formally weigh in. House Speaker Mike Johnson says he’ll, “keep the vote open for as long as it takes,” as President Trump aims to sign the giant tax package by the July 4th holiday. Norman voted to let the bill proceed to debate, and will reportedly now vote yes on it too.
Earlier Wednesday, Norman said he was “getting a handle on” whether his various misgivings could be handled by Trump via executive orders or through promises of future legislation. According to CNN, the congressman later said, “We got clarification on what’s going to be enforced. We got clarification on how the IRAs were going to be dealt with. We got clarification on the tax cuts — and still we’ll be meeting tomorrow on the specifics of it.”
Neither Norman nor Roy’s press offices responded to a request for comment.
The state’s senior senator, Thom Tillis, has been vocal about the need to maintain clean energy tax credits.
The majority of voters in North Carolina want Congress to leave the Inflation Reduction Act well enough alone, a new poll from Data for Progress finds.
The survey, which asked North Carolina voters specifically about the clean energy and climate provisions in the bill, presented respondents with a choice between two statements: “The IRA should be repealed by Congress” and “The IRA should be kept in place by Congress.” (“Don’t know” was also an option.)
The responses from voters broke down predictably along party lines, with 71% of Democrats preferring to keep the IRA in place compared to just 31% of Republicans, with half of independent voters in favor of keeping the climate law. Overall, half of North Carolina voters surveyed wanted the IRA to stick around, compared to 37% who’d rather see it go — a significant spread for a state that, prior to the passage of the climate law, was home to little in the way of clean energy development.
But North Carolina now has a lot to lose with the potential repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has pointed out. The IRA brought more than 17,000 jobs to the state, per Climate Power, along with $20 billion in investment spread out over 34 clean energy projects. Electric vehicle and charging manufacturers in particular have flocked to the state, with Toyota investing $13.9 billion in its Liberty EV battery manufacturing facility, which opened this past April.
North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis was one of the four co-authors of a letter sent to Majority Leader John Thune in April advocating for the preservation of the law. Together, they wrote that gutting the IRA’s tax credits “would create uncertainty, jeopardizing capital allocation, long-term project planning, and job creation in the energy sector and across our broader economy.” It seems that the majority of North Carolina voters are aligned with their senator — which is lucky for him, as he’s up for reelection in 2026.