The Lawyer Behind Vought’s Bureaucracy Crackdown

If Russ Vought sees his quest to dismantle the federal bureaucracy as a race against time, his lawyer sidekick Mark Paoletta is holding the stopwatch.

“Political capital is not the scarcest resource. You can always build it. Time is our scarcest resource,” Vought, the Office of Management and Budget director, said last week at the Reagan National Defense Forum. “That’s why we’re going at it with everything we’ve got and trying to bulldoze the bureaucracy where it exists.”

Vought, the point man for the administration’s efforts to slash the federal bureaucracy, has spent months assembling a team of legal, budget and political operatives who share his view that the administrative state is less a governing structure than an obstacle course.

Paoletta is at the center of that team, paving the legal road for just about every major action Vought has taken, from withholding congressionally appropriated funds to yanking back pay from furloughed workers – not to mention Trump passion projects like the construction of the Trumphiant Arch, according to public letters and four current and former officials who have worked with Paoletta. Like others in this story, they were granted anonymity to speak candidly.

In addition to being OMB’s general counsel, Paoletta also performs the duties of the administrator of OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs – a powerful perch from which each federal regulation is shaped before it is finalized. In an unusual dual arrangement, Paoletta is also the chief legal officer at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

OMB declined to comment. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Those who have worked with him describe Paoletta as deeply loyal, meticulous with statutory text and unafraid of confrontation, qualities that make him indispensable to Vought, who is keen to dismantle as much of the regulatory state from the inside as he can.

The two men, who bond over their love of the Yankees, according to a colleague, have grown close owing to their years in the trenches fighting to shrink the federal government.

“Russ and Mark developed a very close friendship and working relationship over the first term, through a lot of very difficult fights,” said Joe Grogan, who worked with both men in the Trump White House. “They stayed in touch, shared learnings and books and research between terms, so their friendship - born out of a working relationship - is based on deep loyalty, respect and a set of shared ideological values.”

Paoletta, who declined to comment, has advanced sweeping views of the president's power over Congress, including authoring a memo one week after the inauguration that ordered a pause on all federal spending. Though the memo was quickly yanked back, it landed like a bombshell at virtually every agency and was a harbinger of spending fights to come.

Inside the administration, Paoletta has become known as the lawyer willing to test limits rather than avoid them – sometimes going further than some in the White House or Justice Department prefer, according to three current and former officials.

Vought has relied on Paoletta’s willingness to push the boundaries of what is legal to assert control over federal spending, from the freeze memo that sent agencies scrambling to later confrontations with the Government Accountability Office, the Federal Reserve and other regulators.

Paoletta is no stranger to conflict. During the first Trump term, when he served as OMB’s general counsel, he often advocated for a broad interpretation of executive authority and previewed some of the little-known tools that would become a hallmark of the second term.

A longtime conservative lawyer and former chief counsel to Vice President Mike Pence, Paoletta has spent his career navigating and challenging the conventional boundaries of federal authority.

And conservative legal activist Mike Davis described having “gone into battle alongside” Paoletta “in the most crucial fights.”

“Paoletta’s biggest impact is advising President Trump and OMB Director Russ Vought how to successfully win spending fights with Congress and the courts, Davis said in a statement to POLITICO.

Trump’s transition team briefly considered him for attorney general, two people, one of whom was involved in the transition, told POLITICO.

“Mark isn’t going to go angle for a better job behind Russ’s back. And Russ isn’t gonna take advantage of Mark and hide information from him,” Grogan said.

A memo Paoletta authored in September of last year previewed many of the thorniest issues that would come between Congress and the Trump administration, which has sought numerous times to delay, claw back, redirect or otherwise just not spend money on policies it doesn’t agree with. That memo asserted that presidents possess inherent constitutional authority to impound federal funds and argued that “the power of impoundment is one such executive power vested in the President alone by Article II.”

Indeed, his imprint was felt even before Vought’s Senate confirmation. On January 27, 2025, OMB issued a memo - written by Paoletta - ordering agencies to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all federal financial assistance.”

The directive sent agencies scrambling and triggered alarm inside the West Wing, according to two of the officials. It was rescinded within 48 hours. “Mark almost lost his job for that. They went and released this memo without consulting the West Wing. He got ahead of his skis and didn’t follow procedure,” said a person familiar with the matter granted anonymity to describe the events. A second person familiar with the incident, also granted anonymity to discuss the episode, called it an example of growing pains in the early days of the White House noting that Elon Musk’s cost-cutting squad, DOGE, was a complicating factor.

But the signal was unmistakable: Vought’s OMB intended to probe the boundaries of its authority. A senior administration official granted anonymity to discuss internal processes disputed the notion that the West Wing did not know about the memo, adding that White House senior policy advisor May Mailman was looped in as the memo was developed.

Paoletta is also heavily invested in the fight against the Government Accountability Office — a group that he frequently derides as the “JV Congress” — penning three letters batting down the GAO, including one instructing the Department of Transportation to disregard a GAO ruling that the Trump administration violated the law by freezing electric vehicle funding.

When Trump turned up the pressure on the Federal Reserve over the summer, Paoletta wrote a letter from Vought to Jerome Powell, saying the federal reserve chair was not in compliance with the approved construction plan for renovations of the Federal Reserve’s Washington, DC headquarters. He joined an onsite inspection the following month alongside Vought and President Donald Trump.

On Oct. 3, 2025, an OMB memo bearing Paoletta’s signature opened the door to withholding back pay for federal workers furloughed during the government shutdown, an effort to squeeze Democrats.

During the shutdown, Paoletta also helped Vought navigate what the director once called “budgetary Twister,” identifying creative ways to move federal money around to pay troops and other programs the administration desired to keep afloat.

Paoletta’s influence extends beyond OMB. Because Vought served for nine months as acting head of the CFPB, Paoletta simultaneously served as the bureau’s chief legal officer. In April 2025, Paoletta penned a memo saying the agency “will focus its enforcement and supervision resources on pressing threats to consumers” – including shifting resources away from enforcement and monitoring that states can perform.

Paoletta’s fingerprints are also on earlier iterations of this philosophy. During Trump’s first term, after joining OMB from Pence’s office, he helped defend Trump’s expansive executive-branch interpretations.

And a day before Trump left office in 2021, Paoletta authored a letter to the House Budget Committee that previewed many of the little known executive-branch actions like pocket rescissions that would inform OMB’s actions in Trump’s second term.

Between Trump terms, Paoletta joined the Center for Renewing America, where he criticized President Joe Biden’s decision to freeze more than $1 billion in border wall funding and testified against legislation strengthening the Impoundment Control Act, arguing its provisions would lead to “micromanaging of the daily operations of the executive branch.”

“They have wet dreams of these moments,” one of the officials said of Vought and Paoletta’s focus on seizing the opportunity to enact change.

“In many ways, they’ve been more constrained than they’ve wanted to be. They feel like they have a mandate to conduct the most conservative and consequential politics of the administration, and they take that seriously. But quite frankly extreme change is not something Washington is used to, or that the West Wing wants to stomach every single day.”

Kyle Cheney contributed to this report.

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