While making his official exit from the White House, Elon Musk has repeatedlygriped that he and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had been made the administration’s “whipping boy,” absorbing blame and outrage for just about everything the president and his team has done that people don’t like. The twist is, this is one of the rare times the Tesla billionaire is actually right about something.

For the past five months, Musk has been a useful punching bag for Democrats, the broad left, the press, and just about anyone looking to politically wound the second Trump administration. And who can blame them? His bizarre behavior, flagrant corruption, and general unlikability was tailor-made for clicks and shares, not to mention made him an easy target for Trump critics looking to tie the president to a sinking rock, which had real political consequences for the administration.

So it’s not surprising that even as the media pumps out pieces taking stock of Musk’s time in government, that coverage is peppered with insistences that Musk isn’t really leaving, and that he’ll continue to exert influence on the Trump White House from outside and thus be responsible for whatever it ends up doing next. This will no doubt be at least a little true, and the public certainly seems to agree. But trying to keep the spotlight on a departed Musk may not be as politically effective as critics hope, and it risks failing to understand what is actually going on in the Trump White House.

The reality is that while Musk was and still is a convenient political foil, even when he was in the thick of things at the White House he was still only doing the dirty, hands-on work of someone else: Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025 and Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director.

Anyone hoping to properly hold the Trump administration to account, not to mention understand what the people running it are trying to do, needs to shift their focus from the billionaire and onto Vought. If US politics was Kill Bill, Musk and his DOGE team would be the wacky, colorful henchman the Bride spends most of her time and energy dealing with, while the faceless Bill waits, untouched, and directs things from dark rooms far away from the action.

Shifting focus to Vought will be tricky because he has spent this first half-year of maximum outrage against the DOGE cuts working quietly and out of sight, is far less click- and ratings-friendly than the outrageous Musk, and is generally a less erratic, more media-trained figure who’s not likely to create the same cluster of political headaches for the White House. But besides the president himself, he is the driving force of the Trump agenda — and is now going to start acting like it.

The Wall Street Journalreported as early as a month ago that, with Musk on the outs, Vought will now become the official architect of Trump’s austerity program, working with Congress to make further cuts and get legislative sign-off for some of those already made under Musk, while also doing the media rounds to sell it to the public. This past Sunday, Vought was on CNN defending the cuts and other parts of the White House agenda.

But it’s not as if he was twiddling his thumbs before. Vought was, even before he was appointed to a government role, the one behind Trump’s disastrous January executive order pausing all federal grants, which the White House was forced to quickly rescind. The entire legal theory and approach underpinning DOGE — that the US president can simply refuse to spend the money Congress authorized for various agencies and programs, and can dismantle or wholesale eliminate them at will — comes from Vought, who has been closelyinvolved in DOGE’s cuts from the moment they started. Trump’s second term has as a whole closelyfollowed Project 2025, the policy blueprint Vought was so central to creating, and he admitted to undercover reporters last year that he would still be shaping Trump policy from outside government even if he wasn’t given a White House post.

Look at the budgets and policies Vought has written and called for while he worked in Congress or as an activist, you’ll quickly see that the cuts attributed to Musk would have happened one way or another as long as Vought was in the White House. Over the years Vought has favored privatizing the US Postal Service and repealing Obamacare, as well as cutting or eliminating the Department of Education, Medicaid, USAID, public broadcasting, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Federal Aviation Authority, and many more.

You will also see where the Trump administration is likely to go in the future. Vought has long had the big entitlements like Social Security (which he wants to privatize) and Medicare in his crosshairs, and he openly told an interviewer two years ago that his goal is to use this current spate of cuts to condition the public to the idea, so that somewhere down the line they can attack these big, previously “untouchable” programs.

But this is exactly why Vought could, in fact, become as much of a political liability for Trump as Musk was — it would just require substantive and well-targeted criticism that’s less well-catered to salacious headlines than Musk’s tenure. So far, that hasn’t happened.

The liberal press has tended to frame Vought as a scary “Christian nationalist,” a term that doesn’t mean much to the average person and might even sound appealing to a public that is still majority Christian and, like any population, thinks of its own national interest as its top priority. Meanwhile, in her Sunday interview with the OMB director, CNN’s Dana Bash spent a lot of time on the topic of Vought’s “impoundment” theory and its constitutionality, an important but arcane legal subject that isn’t likely to resonate with many.

What is both accurate and a more effective line of criticism is that Vought’s ideology — a militant anti-government zealotry that means he literally considers government investment in infrastructure completely illegitimate, and wants to eliminate or sell to the highest bidder just about every government program, from Medicaid to NASA — is alien and unappealing to most modern Americans, including Trump’s own working-class base, and will hurt them and their loved ones. A thirty-year record high majority of Americans now wants the government to do more to solve the country’s problems, not do less or barely exist, as Vought dreams of.

If you understand Vought’s history, then you know the entire course of his career is defined by the fact that his political goals have consistently proven so toxic with ordinary Americans, including Republican voters, that they have never been able to get democratically enacted. Vought’s big complaint is that every time he wrote out a budget that took away people’s health care and dissolved half the government (except for the Pentagon, of course), it would never pass, because Republican members of Congress who paid lip service to his anti-government ideology would get cold feet when they realized they would be savaged by their constituents if they ever dared put it into practice.

This is what eventually led Vought to Trump. Vought has openly said that both the US political consensus and mainstream legal opinion are so far from his anti-government vision, that the only way to make it reality is to take radical, unprecedented steps — like entrusting an all-powerful president to single-handedly dismantle the federal government and wage war on the other branches if they get in the way. This is astoundingly undemocratic, but it’s also undemocratic by necessity, because it is in the service of a political agenda that would be repellent to most Americans if they were properly informed about it.

In fact, it has already proven to be: just look at the furious public backlash to the Vought-authored grant pause, which forced GOP members of Congress to pressure the White House to undo it, or the anger Republicans are fielding in town halls over a Medicaid-decimating budget modeled on what Vought had plotted out.

Musk’s exit should be an opportunity to refocus scrutiny on Vought, who has been able to fly somewhat under the radar the past five months thanks to the Tesla billionaire’s attention-seeking. Vought may not be as colorful of a character, but if the public is accurately told what he believes and plans to do, they will be left just as disturbed by his influence in the White House.