October 17, 2025 · View in browser

From the wholesale gutting of federal agencies to the ongoing government shutdown, Russell Vought has drawn the road map for Trump’s second term. Vought has consolidated power to an extent that insiders say they feel like “he is the commander in chief.”

Russell Vought is one of the most powerful people in the Trump administration. For almost three decades, he worked in Congress and held prominent roles at conservative think tanks. But he was little known outside of political circles. He’s now the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget and the chief architect of President Donald Trump’s campaign to radically reduce the size of the federal bureaucracy. 

Watch ProPublica reporter Andy Kroll tell the story of Vought’s rise from a young staffer for Texas Sen. Phil Gramm to his role as the driving force behind Trump’s plan to dismantle the so-called “administrative state.” 

Vought declined to be interviewed, and a spokesperson for Vought at the OMB would not comment on the record in response to a detailed list of questions. Kroll’s account is drawn from dozens of interviews, thousands of pages of documents, and hours of videos and recordings of Vought’s briefings to supporters, including one where Vought says he wanted to put federal workers “in trauma.”

You can also read Kroll’s full profile of Vought, which was co-published with The New Yorker. 

This week, ProPublica reporter Anna Clark published a story about how one east-Michigan county is seeing raucous arguments in public meetings about whether to allow communities to continue adding fluoride to their water supply. She says the county is on the new front line of America’s fluoride wars. 

The public arguments were spurred by a three-page memo sent in June to St. Clair County’s Advisory Health Board by Dr. Remington Nevin, the medical director of the county’s Health Department. It urges the department to take steps to “prohibit the addition of fluoride” to public water systems because, he wrote in bold print, the additive is “a plausible developmental neurotoxicant” — a claim that runs counter to the assessment of many leading experts and health agencies, which have long celebrated fluoridation as a public health triumph.

On Oct. 15, the St. Clair health board voted to endorse the memo to take steps to prohibit the addition of fluoride to public water supplies. The state Department of Health and Human Services says it knows of no local health departments that have attempted such restrictions.

Read the memo. Then make your way to the full story. 

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