# Center for Renewing America The **Center for Renewing America (CRA)** is the post-Trump-1.0 think tank that **operationalized the Project 2025 executive-power agenda** for the second Trump administration. Founded in 2021 by [[Russell Vought]] (Trump's first-term OMB Director), CRA is best understood not as a policy shop in the traditional Heritage / AEI sense but as a **executive-orders-and-personnel pre-staging operation** — its outputs are draft executive orders, OMB memos, regulatory rollbacks, and vetted personnel ready to be slotted into the administrative state on Day One. CRA is the **operational arm** of what was assembled in 2021–2024 as a coordinated post-Trump-1.0 infrastructure: think tank ([[Heritage Foundation]]), think tank ([[America First Policy Institute]]), legal arm (America First Legal under [[Stephen Miller]]), grassroots arm ([[Conservative Partnership Institute]]), and CRA as the **executive-branch transition mechanism**. By February 2025, Vought had been confirmed as OMB Director, returning to the office where his CRA work could now be implemented as policy. ## Founder & Origin [[Russell Vought]] served as Deputy Director then Director of the Office of Management and Budget in the first Trump administration. After Trump's loss in 2020 he founded CRA in 2021 with a stated mission of "renewing a consensus of America as a nation under God, with unique interests worthy of defending, that flow from its people, institutions, culture and history." The organization was incubated as a **project of the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI)** — Mark Meadows's MAGA-aligned 501(c)(3) — which provided over half of CRA's 2021 revenue and continues to share senior staff and board members with CRA. ## Programmatic Focus ### 1. Impoundment authority and OMB power CRA's flagship intellectual project is the **revival of presidential impoundment authority** — the claim that the president has constitutional authority to refuse to spend funds Congress has appropriated, and that the **1974 Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional**. CRA published extensive historical analysis arguing for this position from 2021–2024. During his February 2025 confirmation hearing, Vought testified that the president holds the authority to impound congressional appropriations — a position that, if implemented, would represent the most significant transfer of fiscal power from Congress to the executive in U.S. history. ### 2. Schedule F and the federal workforce CRA was the institutional home for the [[Schedule F]] policy — the reclassification of tens of thousands of career federal civil servants into a new "policy/confidential" category that would strip their civil-service protections and allow at-will firing. Schedule F was first issued by Trump in October 2020, rescinded by Biden in January 2021, and reissued on Day One of [[Trump 2.0]] (January 2025). CRA staff drafted both the original Schedule F EO and the reissued version. ### 3. Project 2025 contributions [[Russell Vought]] authored the **[[Executive Office of the President Hub]] chapter** of [[Project 2025]]'s *[[Mandate for Leadership]]* — the chapter that lays out the consolidation of OMB, NSC, and policy councils into a unified instrument of presidential power. The chapter is widely considered Project 2025's most operationally consequential, because OMB's regulatory-review and budget-execution authority touches every executive-branch agency. ### 4. Christian nationalism and the "fourth branch" CRA's framing of administrative-state dismantlement is explicitly fused with [[Christian Nationalism]] cultural objectives. Vought has spoken openly about his view that America is a Christian nation whose government should reflect Christian values, and CRA outputs frame federal-workforce reform, immigration restriction, and family-policy reform as part of an integrated "renewal" agenda. This distinguishes CRA from older libertarian/limited-government think tanks that frame the same reforms in purely fiscal or constitutional terms. ## Funding CRA does not disclose donors (501(c)(3) opacity) but tax filings show the organization grew from ~$1M in 2021 revenue (largely from CPI) to multi-million-dollar budgets by 2023–2024 as Project 2025 fundraising accelerated. Donor-advised funds, [[DonorsTrust]], and aligned conservative foundations have been documented routes. The affiliated **Citizens for Renewing America** 501(c)(4) handles the more politically active work. ## Personnel Pipeline (Trump 2.0 staffing) CRA staff and alumni populate critical Trump 2.0 positions: - **Russell Vought** — OMB Director (confirmed February 2025) - **CRA fellows and staff** — placed across OMB, OPM, agency leadership, and policy councils on the Project 2025 personnel database (CRA was a contributing recruiter) - **Coordination with America First Legal** — Stephen Miller's litigation arm operates symbiotically with CRA's executive-branch infrastructure work ## Why CRA Matters for the KB CRA is the **executive-power node** in the broader Project 2025 / MAGA-restoration architecture. Where [[Heritage Foundation]] supplied the policy book, [[America First Policy Institute]] supplied the personnel database, and [[Conservative Partnership Institute]] supplied the grassroots-and-Hill operations, CRA supplied the **executive-branch operational mechanics** — the draft EOs, the legal theories of presidential power, the OMB internal-process changes, and the Schedule F machinery. Understanding CRA is essential to understanding how Project 2025 is actually being implemented in 2025–2026, not just what it proposed. ## Open Questions / Watch List - **How far will impoundment claims survive judicial review?** The Impoundment Control Act has not been seriously tested in court since 1975 (*Train v. City of New York*); CRA-driven litigation in 2025–2026 is likely to produce a major SCOTUS test. - **Can the Schedule F reissuance survive the lawsuits already filed by federal employee unions and good-government groups?** - **Will CRA continue as Vought's vehicle while he serves at OMB**, or will it transition to a different leader and continue producing the next layer of policy outputs? - **Successor projects** — CRA has signaled work on a "Project 2029" agenda for the next conservative administration, and on state-level versions of the federal-workforce restructuring. ## Sources & Further Reading - [Center for Renewing America (official site)](https://americarenewing.com) - [Center for Renewing America – Conservative Partnership Institute](https://cpi.org/partner/center-for-renewing-america/) - [Center for Renewing America – SourceWatch](https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Center_for_Renewing_America) - [Center for Renewing America – Monitoring Influence](https://www.monitoringinfluence.org/org/the-center-for-renewing-america/) - [Donations have surged to groups linked to conservative Project 2025 (NBC News)](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/donations-surged-groups-linked-conservative-project-2025-rcna125638) - [U.S. Senate confirms Russ Vought, a Project 2025 author, to manage the nation's budget (Pennsylvania Capital-Star)](https://penncapital-star.com/2025/02/06/repub/u-s-senate-confirms-russ-vought-a-project-2025-author-to-manage-the-nations-budget/) - [New Trump budget chief wrote Project 2025's agenda for empowering the presidency (Tennessee Lookout)](https://tennesseelookout.com/2024/12/02/repub/new-trump-budget-chief-wrote-project-2025s-agenda-for-empowering-the-presidency/) - [Russell Vought: The Project 2025 Architect and OMB Nominee — National Women's Law Center](https://nwlc.org/russell-vought-the-project-2025-architect-and-omb-nominee-coming-for-our-democracy/) ## See Also - [[Russell Vought]] - [[Project 2025]] - [[Heritage Foundation]] - [[America First Policy Institute]] - [[Schedule F]] - [[Project 2025 Public Rollout]] - [[Dark Money Ecosystem]] - [[Christian Nationalism]]