The Senate confirmed Russ Vought to be director of the Office of Management and Budget, bringing in a juggernaut who is anticipated to invoke heightened executive power over the budget and the handling of federal employees.
The vote was along party lines, 53-47, after Democrats used a 30-hour overnight delay tactic, where more than a dozen senators complained about how the institutions they have long controlled are completely falling apart in the early days of the Trump administration.
Some senators mischaracterized OMB’s temporary freeze on some federal aid, which was recently blocked by a Biden-appointed judge, in order to malign Vought before his confirmation was scheduled.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a floor speech that Republicans are working on “confirming the most radical nominee, who has the most extreme agenda, to the most important agency in Washington.” But what Democrats are really afraid of is losing their decades-long stranglehold on the deep state bureaucrats, who actively thwarted Republican administrations and advanced far-left policy goals.
OMB, one of the most powerful offices in the federal government, has significant influence over the federal budget, regulatory framework, and employment.
With Vought now confirmed as director of OMB, a position he held in the first Trump administration, budget and employment reforms are set to go into hyper-speed. The Trump administration is already taking measures to cull career executive branch employees, including enacting a hiring freeze and developing plans to fire many more unnecessary workers. The administration already made all diversity, equity, and inclusion positions in the government obsolete.
Vought’s confirmation hearings highlighted many of the Democrats’ fears. Leftist concerns that Trump would use things like impoundment, Schedule F (now titled Schedule Policy/Career), and other mechanisms for reining in runaway spending and unelected bureaucrats were top-of-mind.
As The Federalist reported, the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 (ICA) blocks the executive branch from purposefully spending less money than it was allocated by congressional appropriations bills. That means if a task can be completed by the executive branch for less money than anticipated by Congress, the agency is still required to spend the leftover money — and, usually, that means wasting it on complete nonsense. The ICA puts the executive branch in a cycle of overspending, useless spending, and requesting ever more funding from Congress.
Democrats like this spending because they can use it to fund their wasteful and often destructive pet projects, and the executive branch cannot do much about it. Vought has said he believes this law is unconstitutional and illegally revokes power from the executive branch, power that had been used for the country’s entire history before the law’s passage in the middle of the palace coup against President Richard Nixon.
The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) is also a powerful office within OMB and has oversight over each federal regulation coming out of all agencies in the executive branch. Vought has signaled the office could use much more discretion with federal dollars for regulation.
Democrats are afraid that the federal workers they have spent so much time and effort placing in the depths of each executive agency could be cleaned out with Vought taking over OMB again. In his first stint at the helm of the agency, Vought implemented Schedule F — a kind of federal employment classification that effectively makes career civil servants that have policy-level influence at-will employees and therefore fireable by the president.
In his confirmation hearing, Vought explained how difficult it is to fire career employees in the federal government. He told Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, that the employees in the federal government right now do not really work for the president. Vought cited a web of “many laws and paradigms that have been put in place to ensure that the American people’s will, when they select the president, are not what prevails in the agenda setting process.”
Vought further said that the president’s ability to fire these people is essential to ending the weaponization of the federal agencies both against duly elected presidents and the American people who voted for him.
Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.
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