Can Nevada ride out Russ Vought?

When it comes to financing programs and services, Nevada has always been a notoriously cheap state – bottom of the good lists, top of the bad lists, etc. (Photo: Getty Images)

The semi-celebrities and quacks (not that they’re mutually exclusive) get a lot of attention, but one recent appointment announced by Donald Trump is cause for even more concern, and especially for historically low-government states like Nevada.

Trump on Friday named Russ Vought his director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Of all the Project 2025 authors, none is more eager to create chaos within and dismantle much of the federal bureaucracy than Vought

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought has declared. “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.”

Minimizing the the federal workforce and traumatizing what’s left of it is Vought’s raison d’etre.

That might sound all “ooh, cool, that’ll teach ’em” — until the federal government can’t competently distribute grandma’s monthly Social Security benefit or process your federal income tax refund.

In Nevada, there are many dedicated state and local government employees who work hard to deliver a vast array of programs and services – from nutrition programs for low-income families to processing tax abatements for multi-billion-dollar corporations.

As in every state, those myriad programs and services and initiatives are contingent on federal money, or federal cooperation, or clarity and timeliness of federal rules and regulations.

And while there are many dedicated Nevadans working to provide and/or administer government programs and services the best they can, there are very rarely enough of them. Nevada can be very generous to big business. But when it comes to financing government, Nevada has always been a notoriously cheap state – bottom of the good lists, top of the bad lists, etc.

Vought’s – and Trump’s – crusade against federal civil servants promises to wreak havoc on the delivery of programs and services in every state, red and blue alike.

All states will struggle to compensate for the carnage Vought vows to inflict on the United States civil service.

The states that will have the best fighting chance of safeguarding continued and competent delivery of vital services will be those with something approaching adequately funded and staffed state and local government. Nevada has never been one of those.

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A pleasant (if short-lived) surprise. But back to the aforementioned quacks and semi-celebrities… it’s as if Trump has been deliberately debasing his own supporters, nominating obviously outlandish and offensive people to jobs they have no business being anywhere near, for the depraved satisfaction of watching his followers – both those who are elected and those within the electorate – obsequiously go along with whatever he says or does.

Initially it looked as if Republican senators were prepared to surrender unconditionally, and  grovel in submission while Trump insults their intelligence and rubs their noses in it.

So their willingness to tell Trump to shove his nomination of Matt Gaetz you know where, is a fine thing.

So that’s on the bright side.

On the not so bright side… Yes, though it’s a low bar – subterranean, even – Pam Bondi, the person Trump has named to be AG instead of Gaetz, is far more competent than Gaetz. But she’s also no less loyal to Dear Leader, meaning she could be even worse for the nation and the rule of law than Gaetz. And not surprisingly – her being an extreme Trump loyalist and all – she has documented dalliances with corruption (shielding the Trump University grift) and rejecting reality (election denier).

Stay strong, Republican senators,

Portions of this column were originally published in recent editions of the Daily Current newsletter, which is free and which you can subscribe to here.

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