About That Russell Vought Freakout

Big Government Democrats have good reason to fear Donald Trump’s newly confirmed OMB director.

He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d strike fear into the hearts of the deep state, but there’s something about Russell Vought that had the Democrats in full freakout mode during his Senate confirmation hearings.

Vought, who looks a little like a young John Malkovich but without the sneering contempt and those “Cyrus the Virus” eyes, is Donald Trump’s newly confirmed director of the Office of Management and Budget. It’s a role he held briefly at the end of Trump’s first term, but his tenure was relatively uneventful. Indeed, he merited just two passing mentions in a tendentious 725-page tome by lefties Peter Baker and Susan Glasser.

Yet, in a remarkable albeit unsuccessful 30-hour protest, Senate Democrats held the floor, filibuster-like, from Wednesday morning until Thursday afternoon, railing against Vought and his sinister plans, as laid out in Evil Project 2025, to expand the power of the executive branch.

Minority Leader Chuck Schumer might’ve been right when he called OMB “the most important agency in Washington.” After all, the office exercises great influence over the federal budget, the regulatory environment, and government employment decisions. But Schumer’s desperate floor speech was downright histrionic: “Of all the harmful nominees, of all the extremists that Donald Trump has elevated, of all the hard-right ideologies who have come before the Senate, none of them hold a candle to Russell Vought. He is far and away the most dangerous to the American people.”

For good measure, Schumer called Vought the “godfather of the ultra-right” and “Project 2025 incarnate.”

As the UK’s Telegraph put it: “Vought’s political outlook is not hard to discern. During Joe Biden’s presidency he declared America was ‘in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover.’”

Sounds like a solid take to me.

As for Project 2025, it’s merely the umpteenth iteration of a doctrinaire Republican document that The Heritage Foundation has been regularly publishing since 1981. It’s essentially a conservative policy framework, the product of “more than 400 scholars and policy experts from around the country,” and Vought wrote a chapter in this 900-page version.

Still, the degree of high dudgeon is telling. During the Senate vote, Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren broke protocol and began to launch into a screed but was quickly shut down by the Republican adults in the room: “Pursuant to rule 12, no debate is permitted during a vote. The senator will suspend.”

The senator will suspend.

“God be praised,” said Vought after his confirmation. “Grateful to the President and the US Senate. Incredibly thankful for all the many who prayed me through. Now. Let’s. Go.” Indeed, let’s go. The Democrats are fearful because they know Vought is over the Deep State target. But rather than being genuinely afraid of Project 2025, they fear what Vought might do with the other levers within his office. For example, as The Federalist’s Breccan Thies writes of one particularly onerous piece of legislation that Vought might have his eyes on:

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. … 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.“

If you’re really wondering why the Democrats are filling their Depends over Vought’s confirmation, consider what he did at the tail end of the first Trump administration. As Thies writes: "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.”

But wait. I thought these folks worked in the executive branch. You know, for the chief executive of the United States. Yes, they do, but as Vought explained to newly minted Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno, “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 isn’t wasting any time. In a Saturday night memo, he ordered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to stop nearly all its work, and he closed the building for good measure.

Big Government Democrats are rightly fearful of reform, and Vought is a reformer. And when the history of Donald Trump’s second term is written, it might be that this bookish dude was the president’s most consequential appointment.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/114345-about-that-russell-vought-freakout-2025-02-10