Trump taps Project 2025's Russell Vought to USADF, IAF boards

In his latest effort to take down two of the government’s smallest aid agencies, U.S. President Donald Trump has nominated Project 2025 architect Russell Vought — and current head of the White House’s budget office — to the boards of the U.S. African Development Foundation and the Inter-American Foundation. The appointments come after a whirlwind few weeks at the agencies, both of which have been gutted — at various levels of success — by the Trump administration in recent weeks. For more than 50 years, IAF has provided small grants to civil society organizations in Latin America. For nearly the same, USADF has funded small- and medium-sized entrepreneurs, businesses, and groups in Africa. Trump appointed Peter Marocco, the acting deputy administrator of USAID, as the president and board chair of both organizations. And while USADF’s president temporarily blocked that appointment by bringing Marocco to court, IAF has virtually disappeared. “Defendants have made clear their intentions: ignore statutory requirements, pretend that leadership of the agency does not exist, and shutter USADF,” stated a recent court document, which was filed on behalf of USADF’s President Ward Brehm late last week. “That is precisely what they did to USADF’s sister agency, the Inter-American Foundation.” Despite a judge’s temporary pause on Marocco’s appointment, DOGE staffers are referring to him as USADF’s president anyway, according to internal emails obtained by Devex. Similar messages confirm that Marocco is also communicating through an official IAF email address and acting as the sole decision-maker at the agency. Brehm’s lawsuit centers on the fact that Trump appointed Marocco to both boards without Senate confirmation. Now, it seems the president is trying to do just that — but this time, it’s with a different set of candidates in mind. Vought’s name surfaced on the Senate’s calendar on Monday, along with the nominations of two other political appointees: Kenneth Jackson, who is now serving as USAID’s assistant to the administrator for management and resources; and Laken Rapier, who is noted as a “senior FO advisor,” or front office adviser, in internal USAID documents. She seems to have spent her career as a public relations professional in Fort Worth, Texas. In recent weeks, Jackson has signed his name on countless termination letters cutting USAID staff. He also worked at the Millennium Challenge Corporation during Trump’s first presidency. Rapier has no mention of USAID on her professional profiles, but according to an internal memo by Nicholas Enrich, USAID’s acting assistant administrator for global health, Rapier shouted at Enrich about what she called a “false narrative in the media,” one that centered on the failure of USAID’s lifesaving humanitarian waivers. Vought is much better known — and not just for authoring the second chapter of Project 2025, a conservative wish list published before Trump took office. Last year, the president tried to distance himself from Project 2025 once it began getting blowback. But upon being reinstated, he promptly appointed many of its authors to his administration. That includes Vought, who became director of the Office of Management and Budget in early February. It’s the second time Vought has held the role, serving as deputy director and director during the first Trump administration. “The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power — including power currently held by the executive branch — to the American people,” Vought wrote in Project 2025. “Success in meeting that challenge will require a rare combination of boldness and self-denial: boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will and self-denial to use the bureaucratic machine to send power away from Washington and back to America’s families, faith communities, local governments, and states.” In the weeks since Vought’s confirmation, OMB has worked with the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to decimate agencies across the government. And late last month, Vought called the federal bureaucracy both “bloated” and “corrupt” while urging government agencies to reduce their staff. “The federal government is costly, inefficient, and deeply in debt. At the same time, it is not producing results for the American public,” wrote Vought in the memo, which included guidance for federal agencies to drastically reduce their workforce. “Instead, tax dollars are being siphoned off to fund unproductive and unnecessary programs that benefit radical interest groups while hurting hard-working American citizens.” Since Trump returned to the White House, some 200,000 federal workers at more than a dozen agencies — including up to 2,000 direct hires at USAID and thousands of other contractors — are estimated to have lost their jobs. If confirmed by the Senate, the man behind many of those terminations will serve on the USADF board until 2027 and the IAF’s board until 2030.