Russ Vought Spars With Dems Over President’s Authority To Save Taxpayer Money

Russ Vought, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the powerful Office of Management and Budget (OMB), signaled a fight with Congress over executive authority on Wednesday, saying that Congress overstepped its authority in regard to the president’ ability to control appropriations.

While Republicans often focused on the national debt and the budget for the coming Trump term, Democrats tried to attack Vought for advocating greater executive authority over spending and civil service employment.

Many Democrats on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee focused their questioning on the Impoundment Control Act (ICA), a 1974 federal law blocking the executive branch from intentionally spending less money than was appropriated by Congress. Many credit the ICA for forcing the executive branch into a never-ending doom cycle of spending significantly more money than is needed, only because Congress appropriated it.

Vought said in the hearing that he and Trump believe the ICA is unconstitutional.

“For 200 years, presidents had the ability to spend less than an appropriation, if they could do it for less, and we have seen the extent to which this law has contributed to waste, fraud, and abuse,” Vought told Ranking Member Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich.

Peters was apoplectic with his answer, saying that because this law had been upheld by courts in the past, it had the exact same authority as the U.S. Constitution.

“So you’re you’re going to continue to challenge and break the law going forward?” Peters said, as though presenting a legal challenge to a law is some wicked act. Vought simply said that the Trump team would look into how to pare back or even overturn the ICA.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said he was “astonished and aghast that someone in this responsible of a position would in effect say that the president is above the law.”

The primary argument against the ICA is that it unconstitutionally hampers the president’s Article II authority to use or not use funds, both from a budgetary (e.g. being able to execute a law for less money than Congress anticipated) and from a policy point-of-view (e.g. withholding military funds during international negotiations).

The ICA was a major part of House Democrats voting for Trump’s first impeachment, because the Trump administration paused $200 billion in Ukraine spending to conduct a policy review.

As was written in these pages, citing numerous examples of executive discretion in spending congressional appropriations, former OMB general counsel Mark Paoletta and Daniel Shapiro, former clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote, “The ICA is not just ahistorical and unconstitutional, it has caused Congress to appropriate funds to satisfy special interests with reckless abandon and to thwart the president’s exercise of his constitutional authority.”

“The ICA prevents the president from spending funds on programs in a thoughtful and responsible manner and unconstitutionally invades his decision-making authority,” the authors stated.

OMB is not just a budget office. Each regulation that goes through the executive branch must have final sign-off from OMB through its Office of Information and Regulator Affairs (OIRA).

In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Vought said that OMB “has the ability to turn off the spending that’s going on at the agencies … It has all the regulations coming through it to assess whether it’s good or bad, or too expensive, or it could be done a different way.”

OMB can also affect personnel. When Vought led OMB in Trump’s first turn, he implemented what is known as Schedule F, an alternate classification for federal career civil servants who have significant impact over actual policy that essentially makes them at-will employees who are able to be fired by the president.

As of right now, firing civil servants is extremely difficult because employment authority has been essentially removed from the president. That dynamic has helped feed the monstrosity that makes up the deep state — the faceless, nameless bureaucrats who worked so hard to thwart Trump’s policy goals in the first term.

“I come from the private sector, where I ran companies with thousands of employees. I suspect it should work — but correct me if I’m wrong — where, if you’re the chief executive, that means that all the people that work for you actually work for you. Is that true in government also?” Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, asked Vought.

“It is not the case currently, but it is something that as a policy objective, I think our founders would have envisioned it that,” Vought replied.

“Meaning that the President, not Congress, not the judicial branch, has total and complete discretion over who serves at his or her pleasure?” Moreno asked, but Vought said that currently the president does not have that authority, and in reality there are “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.”

The authority to fire civil servants is paramount to ending the weaponization of the federal government, Vought added in a later exchange with Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J., saying, “there are portions of weaponized bureaucracies across the federal government. That doesn’t mean there’s not amazing career civil servants.”

When asked by Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., to provide examples of what agencies had been weaponized, Vought pointed to the Department of Justice.

“The Department of Justice is clearly one that has bureaucracies within it that engaged in trying to take out their own president during the first term,” he said. “The extent to which the FBI goes and investigates someone that comes to a school board meeting in Loudoun County for being concerned about the situation with his daughter, and then gets investigated as a domestic terrorist.”

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.