'Villains': This pre-election story told exactly what Trump would do to government workers

In late October, ProPublica published one of its most prophetic stories in our history. You can be forgiven if you missed it at the time. There was a lot going on in the days before the election, and the headlines were dominated by seemingly consequential issues like the racist humor of a comedian who addressed Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden.

But if you weren’t among the several hundred thousand people who read our story, “‘ Put Them in Trauma’: Inside a Key MAGA Leader’s Plans for a New Trump Agenda,” in real time, you may have seen it referenced since Trump took office in January.

The story drew on private recordings of a series of speeches given in 2023 and 2024 by Russell Vought obtained by our colleagues at Documented, a news site with a remarkable knack for uncovering information powerful interests would prefer remained secret.

Vought, a self-described Christian nationalist who served as the director of the Office of Management and Budget in Trump’s first term, was known for his provocative public pronouncements. But he went even further in private, envisaging a Trump presidency in which regulatory agencies would be shut down and career civil servants would be too depressed to get out of bed.

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in one recording. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.

“We want to put them in trauma.”

Vought spoke openly about the ongoing planning to defund independent federal agencies and demonize government scientists. “We have detailed agency plans,” he said. “We are writing the actual executive orders. We are writing the actual regulations now, and we are sorting out the legal authorities for all of what President Trump is running on.”

Vought argued that the radical steps were necessary because Trump’s opponents were themselves attempting to end democracy. “The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country,” he said in one speech. “Our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus, and they have aimed it at us. And they are going to continue to aim it until they no longer have to win elections.”

It’s hard to imagine a more prescient piece of journalism. The story captured, as few did, the breadth and ferocity of the coming attack on the federal government. Vought has returned to his post as the budget office’s director, and his plans for eviscerating entire agencies and decimating the morale of federal workers have turned into reality. Trump 47 looks very different from Trump 45, just as Vought told his audiences that it would.

So why didn’t this story drive more of a national conversation when it appeared?

As a news organization that tries to spur change by bringing new facts to light, we think about this question a lot. Our job at ProPublica is to both get the story and get it into the heads of a critical mass of citizens and elected officials.

I’ve been an investigative reporter and editor for nearly three decades, and I still struggle to predict which of our stories will catalyze national conversations. Our 2018 story about the recording of a young girl in a immigration detention center prompted the Trump administration to end its policy of family separation at the border. Many other powerful stories fail to break through.

Part of the problem, of course, is the proliferation of media. Every day, dozens of important-sounding stories vie for readers’ attention along with the flood of posts on social media and texts from friends and colleagues. And that’s not to mention all the podcasts and multipart dramas on Netflix and HBO.

This was an issue long before Trump and his allies adopted a “flood the zone” strategy with multiple norm-challenging actions, but it seems even more acute right now.

It is often said of journalists that we write the rough draft of history. But our work differs from historians in a crucial aspect: Scholars typically are chronicling events after the outcome is clear. As journalists, we face a tougher challenge as we try to find the stories in the cacophony of daily events that tell us something about where we’re going.

A lot of what we do as reporters is akin to squinting through opaque windows at events unfolding in a very dimly lit room. We can see who is inside and how they’re moving, but our lack of context often prevents us from understanding what’s really happening. We default to assuming that the future will be roughly like the past, guessing that, say, Trump 47 will be roughly like Trump 45 with fewer guardrails.

Vought could not have been clearer that this was not the case, and he had the credentials that should have made what he was saying entirely credible. After all, Vought was the author of the plan in Trump’s first term to make it easier to fire large numbers of civil servants. He was a key member of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation project that described in copious detail how a second Trump administration might unfold.

Still, there was at least one data point that perhaps prevented readers from viewing his speeches as predictive as they turned out to be. As our story made clear, Vought despises the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, a core Republican ally in bringing conservative voices into the judiciary and federal law enforcement. We quoted him as asserting that “the vaunted so-called Federalist Society and originalist judges” were serving as a “Praetorian Guard” for the Democrats.

That view would seem to make him something of a fringe thinker in MAGA world, which relied on the Federalist Society to pick the judges who make up the conservative supermajority on the high court.

Things look different today. Seen against the backdrop of recent events, Vought’s disdain for the rule-of-law scruples of Federalist Society legal thinkers seems entirely in line with Trump’s recent post suggesting a federal judge shouldn’t have authority over his administration.

Just a few weeks ago, Danielle Sassoon, one of the Federalist Society’s bright lights, a Yale Law graduate who had clerked for conservative icon Antonin Scalia, resigned as acting U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York rather than carry out orders from the Trump Justice Department. In refusing to drop the corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams, Sassoon wrote that she understood her duty as a prosecutor to mean “enforcing the law impartially, and that includes prosecuting a validly returned indictment regardless of whether its dismissal would be politically advantageous, to the defendant or those that appointed me.”

Many years ago, a New York Times investigative reporter and I were discussing a story we had worked on that had been sharply and justifiably criticized as new facts emerged. “I can be fair and accurate,” he said. “But fair, accurate and prescient is beyond me.”

It seems appropriate to give Vought the last word since the worldview he described has proven so accurate. What sounded grandiose in the preelection days seems today like a reasonable summary of the path Trump and his allies have chosen.

“We are here in the year of 2024, a year that very well [could] — and I believe it will — rival 1776 and 1860 for the complexity and the uncertainty of the forces arrayed against us,” Vought said, citing the years when the colonies declared independence from Britain and the first state seceded over President Abraham Lincoln’s election.

“God put us here for such a time as this.”

I’m not sure about the role of the almighty in ProPublica’s work in the coming years. But we feel equally strongly that we’re here for a “time such as this.”