Russell Vought, man of an unfamiliar God

Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought's X-page bio includes the cryptic truncation: "Ephesians 2:4-5, 'But God.'" I kid you not. To be sure, neither does Russ.

At first it seems an odd little epigram for a government official — doubly odd, given that he works for a satanic sociopath. Yet the New Testament citation explains a lot about the ghastly disemboweler of human decency.

The clipped "But God" he punched into his brief bio is from the King James Version of Ephesians. Its thrust is God, who is rich in mercy ... Even when we were dead in sins. So, forgiveness, Olly olly oxen free.

A possibly apocryphal tale about the unworshipful W.C. Fields is that as he lay dying in a hospital bed, a friend popped into the room, shocked to find him reading The Bible. You? That? Why? asked his friend. Replied Fields, I'm looking for loopholes.     

Vought's preemptive strike — no sense in waiting for the curtains to close — appears to be not a hunt but his discovery of a biblically massive loophole. The soulless homunculus of Trumpian butchery knows, deep down, that he's dead in sins. "But God." That is, once physically dead, clean slate and all that.

Such is what I pondered this morning while reading a NYT piece on Vought's slashing of yet more staff at the Department of Education, in line with Trumpism's Project 2025 gutting of other vital agencies — most devastatingly, that of USAID, whose cuts are expected to cause, by 2030, as many as 14 million avoidable deaths worldwide, including 4.5 million children.

At Education (whose dismantlement is carried out by a former pro-wrestling executive), Vought's layoffs will leave the office handling special education programs with less than a half-dozen workers, a 95% reduction; cut the Office for Civil Rights' regional sites from 12 to one or two; and at the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, Vought is sacking, in the name of God, employees who oversee funds for low-income students.

Other employees affected by layoffs include those who supervise funding for charter schools, historically Black colleges, tribal universities, and after-school programs serving nearly 1.4 million young people, largely from lower-income households as well.

Of altogether negligible concern to Mr. Vought is that these offices and their particular responsibilities were, respectively, created and mandated by congressional statutes — and necessity. So many states had the ghoulish habit of slighting or simply dismissing the educational needs of American children most at risk of lives as ignorant as those of Republican legislators.

But what does he care? As Vought lies on his office couch he grins and giggles, unreservedly certain that his professed faith in Jesus will save his contemptible ass from eternal torment or oblivion (believer's choice, as I understand it).

So no, on second thought, his pithy, X-autobiographical epigram of "But God" isn't at all odd. It screams to Russell Vought's victims that he is secure in The Bible's assurance that despite the mounting evil, wholesale human destruction and wretched dishonoring of Christ's teachings he wrought when alive, whenever he checks out, all shall be forgiven by the heavenly Father.

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Cross-posted in Substack.