Maybe Russ Vought Wouldn't Need The Bodyguards If He Spent This $15 Million On Food Instead
Cause, meet effect.
There was good news on Friday for anyone concerned that the Trump administration’s gutting of USAID that has led to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths from starvation and disease in the last year and will likely result in millions more over the rest of the decade: at least the agency had $15 million left over to pay for a full-time security detail for Russ Vought, the architect of much of that death and suffering!
We suppose this isn’t so much good news as it is the sort of news that history books often record as having inspired thriving guillotine production industries. Bonne chance avec ta vieille tête, Russ!
Vought, who also oversees the Office of Management and Budget and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is reportedly being protected by a dozen members of the US Marshals Service. Timothy Olyphant, how could you?
Vought was also famously an architect of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation blueprint for slashing federal spending and services while pushing the nation’s government to become more openly theocratic. He famously said that he wanted to traumatize federal employees, so they wouldn’t want to come to work. It’s hard to believe a guy like that has enemies!
Was Vought’s protection detail, which the $15 million reportedly funds through the end of this year, added in response to specific threats? It’s hard to say. Like so much else these days, it’s more of a vibe:
OMB spokesperson [Rachel] Cauley accused “The Left” - which she did not further identify - of pursuing a strategy that fuels an “assassination culture against public officials” and then expresses “shock about what it takes to keep them safe.”
Cauley has this backwards. What is happening is public officials like Vought are pursuing a strategy of cutting off the only food and medical care some of the world’s poorest people were getting, leaving American consumers at the mercy of corporations that take advantage of them in a myriad of unethical and cruel ways, and a thousand other degradations large and small. And, in Vought’s case, calling this destructive work “fun”.
Then Vought and his ilk – or the smooth-brained fucksticks they employ as spokespeople – express shock that they might have made people desperate and angry enough to threaten their safety
How does anyone read about the results of these cuts and then get offended that people are mad at them?
[A] new study published in The Lancet medical journal aims to quantify the human toll of those budget decisions – projecting that global aid cuts could lead to at least 9.4 million additional deaths by 2030, if the current funding trend continues. About 2.5 million of those deaths are projected to be children under the age of 5.
And remember, at one point the government had 500 tons of food in warehouses that it refused to distribute because of budget cuts. NGOs were begging, really begging, for the US to at least let them have that food so they could give it to the needy. Instead, the government destroyed it all by letting it spoil.
Wouldn’t it have been easier and less threatening to lots of lives, including your own, to not starve people? Then those people would be alive, and Russ Vought wouldn’t need a dozen US Marshals to watch his back while he’s sitting in the corner of the nearest singles bar, sadly stirring his Shirley Temple while every woman in the place ignores him?
Did none of these people have to read A Tale of Two Cities in eighth grade? Was it just us?
The Vought story is part of a wider story of Trump administration officials being such assholes that they need protection from the public that, in a healthy democracy, they would ostensibly serve. Stephen Miller reportedly has his own Secret Service detail and moved his family onto a military base after someone chalked some anodyne statements on the sidewalk outside his house. Kristi Noem is also living on a military base, having moved out of an apartment she rented in DC. Though to be fair, that might be as much so people won’t spot her married boy toy Corey Lewandowski bopping by for a quickie and a shower as it is because of fears for her safety.
Yr Wonkette is of two minds here. On the one hand, these people love to exaggerate the threats they think are coming at them from the left. They love to posit that cells of radical Marxist antifa super-soldiers are plotting against them, and will soon be unleashed by their master George Soros to rape and pillage and replace all the content on every streaming service with the entire Mosfilm library. Therefore, they need full-time security as they set about the hard business of saving America.
On the other hand, we really don’t give a shit.
None of us should even know who these people are. A president should not have an adviser so well-known for his cruelty that he gets enough death threats to warrant Secret Service protection. (Neither should an agency head get a security detail just because it makes them feel important.) The head of the Office of Management and Budget should be a colorless blob more neutral a wall painted beige. He should be duller than the entire eight-hour cut of Andy Warhol’s Empire. He should be the human equivalent of couscous.
Instead, these assholes rub our noses in their cruelty and then have the nerve to complain about their safety. There is an easy solution here, but you can more easily pass a camel through the eye of a needle than you can get Russ Vought to not suck.
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(1) extra security
(2) move onto military bases
(3) move into the Trump bunker
(4) you know what
I did NOT Vought for this!