Strip-Mining Our Government for Parts

By Rob C.

Art by David Horsey

TL;DR: The 2025 government shutdown isn’t only about budget numbers or political theater — it’s a deliberate tactic in a longer campaign to hollow out the federal state. At the center of this campaign is Russell Vought: a Heritage Foundation vet, a former OMB director, Phil Gramm’s onetime Hill aide, and a principal architect of Project 2025. The goal is simple and brutal: dismantle public institutions, privatize what remains, and hand the federal commons to billionaire allies. This shutdown is the execution phase.

From Capitol Hill Aide to Architect of Dismemberment

Russell Vought’s résumé reads like a blueprint for the modern conservative (fascist) movement: legislative aide on Capitol Hill (including for Senator Phil Gramm), policy posts in House GOP offices, vice president of Heritage Action, and a leading voice in Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. He parlayed those institutional ties into OMB roles in the first Trump administration — and now, back in 2025, he’s using OMB as a blunt instrument.

That pedigree matters. Vought didn’t emerge from the ether; he was forged in the think-tank-to-Hill pipeline that exists to turn an ideological wish list into an administrative manual. Project 2025 isn’t a policy brochure — it’s a playbook for converting presidential power into a tool for permanent political and economic realignment.

Project 2025: A Fascist Manifesto

Open Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership and you don’t get a careful policy debate — you get a parts list. Which agencies to weaken. Which authorities to reassign. Which programs to privatize or kill. The Heritage Foundation’s project lays out specific executive orders and personnel changes designed to let an administration “reshape” the federal government quickly and thoroughly. This is not small-government conservatism in the abstract; it’s “targeted institutional demolition”.

Vought’s fingerprints are all over the manifesto — and he’s now in charge of executing parts of it while holding the levers at OMB. This is their strategy, blow it up, and grab what’s left. And a shutdown is a perfect mechanism for lighting the fuse: freeze funds, halt programs, institute layoffs, and create a “crisis” that justifies rapid “restructuring” and agency closures.

Strip-Mining by Shutdown: How It Works

A government shutdown is more than a political standoff. It’s tactical. The OMB can withhold or delay funds (”pocket rescissions”), delay projects, cancel grants, and use the chaos to argue that programs are inefficient or broken beyond repair. Those outraged headlines then become the pretext for privatizing services or transferring authority to private actors and contractors affiliated with the billionaire donors who funded the think tanks that wrote the plans in the first place. That loop — think tank → policy blueprint → administrative pause → privatization — is the extraction model in action.

Put bluntly: they starve the beast, then sell its carcass to supporters at a discount. It’s corporate enclosure, modern fascism. The Project 2025 agenda is the map; the shutdown is the bulldozer.

The People Behind the Playbook

Project 2025 is not just one man. It’s a network: Heritage Foundation policy architects, longtime conservative operatives, alumni of Republican Study Committee projects, and wealthy patrons who benefit when regulatory fences are dismantled. Many of these groups have spent decades arguing that government is the problem; now they’re showing what they meant by that — a systematic plan to shrink, sell, and privatize public functions. The ACLU, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other outlets have documented how Project 2025’s recommendations would shift power toward the presidency and away from independent agency oversight.

If you want to know why the shutdown matters beyond immediate pain at airports and national parks, look at who benefits when programs are stopped and then marketed as “inefficient.” The buyers are waiting. The Heritage Foundation built the product. The administration supplies the crisis. The privatizers close the deal.

Privatize Everything — And Call It “Efficiency”

This is where your country becomes a platform for private gain. Water systems, legal aid, environmental safeguards, housing supports, student loan servicing — the Project 2025 blueprint and related agendas openly contemplate shifting public functions into private hands, or gutting authorities so thoroughly they’re functionally dead. The consequence: fewer public safeguards, more contract dollars flowing to well-connected firms, and a permanent decline in democratic governance. (My book lays out how corporate buy-up and privatization erode democratic institutions and public goods.)

This is not a market experiment. It’s a transfer of public capital to private pocketbooks — and a political strategy to make the state incapable of acting in the public interest on the few occasions when it might.

Why This Is Worse Than Partisan Warfare

Partisan fights are normal. What we’re seeing now is institutional sabotage. The purpose isn’t to win a policy debate; it’s to hollow out the public capacity to govern. That weakens checks and balances, erodes civic trust, and makes the state easier to capture permanently. If you want to understand why oligarchic power prefers “less government,” look at who profits when the government can’t enforce rules, protect citizens, or deliver services. Spoiler: it isn’t the working class voter.

A Warning — And a Choice

This shutdown is not an accident of negotiation. It’s an operational tactic in a long campaign to privatize the public sphere. Russell Vought’s career — from Phil Gramm’s staffer to Heritage Action leadership to OMB director and Project 2025 architect — is the human story behind that campaign. He and his allies are not simply “small-government ideologues.” They’re pushing a deliberate program to strip mine the republic and hand its pieces to private interests. In essence – Fascism.

If that outcome sounds dystopian, that’s because it is. A government of, by, and for the people is an impediment to the plan’s economic beneficiaries. They don’t want a functioning public sector; they want bought compliance and privatized profit streams.

We can either watch the process accelerate — accept fewer protections, pay more for services, and see democratic institutions erode — or we can resist. Rebuild public institutions, demand accountability for privatization schemes, defend independent agencies, and elect leaders who treat government as the instrument of the common good rather than a harvestable asset.

Robert Cain is the author of Democracy for Sale: How Corporate Greed Is Corrupting Democracy and Endangering the Planet.