On Wednesday, Russell Vought, President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to run the Office of Management and Budget, appeared before a panel of senators. When the gavel fell to end the hearing a few hours later, the most positive thing one could say about Vought’s performance was that he showed up for it at all.
Under questioning from the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Vought was polished yet evasive. He danced around queries from Democrats and played up his familiarity with the panel’s Republicans, who eagerly tossed him softball after softball. Throughout, Vought’s disregard for the confirmation process was evident in his unwillingness to engage with any substantive concerns about his plans or intentions. The hearing was a brutal display of how far the legislative branch has fallen from its place of prominence in the Constitution, as GOP senators eagerly embraced a man who would prefer to see them made obsolete.
GOP senators eagerly embraced a man who would prefer to see them made obsolete.
While the OMB is little known outside of wonky Washington circles, the agency touches on every facet of the government. It clears spending plans and sets the administration’s funding priorities; it signs off on every regulation that agencies put forward; it oversees the hiring and firing process for civil servants and political appointees alike. In the chapter he wrote of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, Vought argued that the OMB’s influence makes it an ideal nerve center for a hyperaggressive executive branch. Over 26 pages, he laid out his view of how the OMB can function to shape the federal bureaucracy to whatever ends he sees fit, including the replacement of nonpartisan career officials with political lackeys.
The committee’s Republican chair, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, welcomed Vought as a potential ally in Paul’s own long-running crusade to reduce government spending. In some areas, Vought shares that zeal. After the first Trump administration ended in 2021, Vought founded the Center for Renewing America, a pro-Trump think tank that has advocated massive cuts to spending that would leave the social safety net shredded and millions of Americans left to fend for themselves.
But from his writings and speeches as the CRA’s leader, it’s clear that Vought’s vision for America is not the one that Paul champions, one driven by Congress to pull closed the strings on the proverbial purse. Instead, Vought has made the true depths of his ideologies known: a philosophy that sees the presidency as unfettered by the other branches of government. Though Vought already served as OMB director for part of Trump’s first term, his return to the agency would see an entirely different approach to its power. And with his knowledge of how the levers of power operate in Washington, he’s taken a major role in preparing the incoming administration to greatly tighten its chokehold on the rest of government.
The misnamed Department of Government Efficiency might get more headlines in the coming weeks and months. But it is not Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy who will be tasked with implementing whatever cuts their advisory commission suggests. That task falls, constitutionally speaking, in the laps of the GOP-controlled Congress to carry out, a challenge that comes with a high degree of political difficulty even for members tucked into safe House seats.
With Vought in place, however, Congress may become a rubber stamp at most in the spending process. Vought has indicated that he intends to follow Trump’s lead in challenging, or outright ignoring, the Impoundment Control Act. That law, passed over Richard Nixon’s veto in 1974, forbids the president from unilaterally deciding whether to hold back, or impound, funds that Congress has appropriated. That’s exactly what Vought wants to do, though: potentially order billions of dollars in spending cuts to Medicaid, housing benefits, food assistance, education funding, foreign aid and whatever policies that Trump personally doesn’t want to see money go toward.
Not that Vought wanted to talk about any of that, of course. Even after telling one GOP senator that it isn’t often you have four years to think about how to do a job better next time, he was loath to share any details about what conclusions he’d reached. Questions related to his time heading his think tank were brushed aside, as were those about his plans once confirmed. “I’m here to represent the president” was a stock phrase, as were “I’m not going to speak on behalf of a specific proposal that the president has not made” and “I’m not here on behalf of my own personal views.”
Under Vought’s watch, the executive branch would be transformed fully into the sole branch of government with any real say in how the country functions. Frustrated Democrats tried to hem Vought in or get some window into his thinking as a potential adviser to the president. But Vought sat like a bespectacled sphinx, calm and unreadable, and blithely ignored their questions. He even treated the actions he took previously as OMB director as though he had suffered from a remarkably specific form of amnesia. The hearing played out as a Capitol Hill version of former Seattle Seahawks star Marshawn Lynch’s famous 2015 press conference, when he answered every question with, “I’m just here so I don’t get fined.” The closest Vought’s mask came to slipping was when freshman Democrat Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan asked him to name which agencies had been “weaponized.” It’s a phrase that Vought has helped popularize, one which implies that conservatives are victims of a vast conspiracy led by Democrats and their bureaucratic allies. He pointed to the Department of Justice and the FBI, both of which Vought and his fellow think tankers have said should be much more firmly under the president’s control and able to be directed to investigate whomever Trump wants harassed. While Vought may have paid lip service to the Constitution, the power base that he intends to build within the White House would be almost unrecognizable to the document’s authors. It is a world where the checks between government branches are entirely unbalanced, allowing the president to assert control over the other two branches at will. Under Vought’s watch, the executive branch would be transformed fully into the sole branch of government with any real say in how the country functions. Even more confounding to the country’s founders would be the willingness of senators to see their own powers and prerogatives so harshly curtailed. It’s not apparent how Paul, the committee’s chair, intends to square the circle of his own desire to see Congress reclaim its co-equal status with his willingness to return Vought to his perch at the OMB. But for Republicans, I can see how it must sound appealing to turn over the hardest, most politically volatile part of their jobs to the ultimate unelected bureaucrat. It would be fitting that in their quest to streamline the federal government, Republicans are now willing to make their own jobs redundant.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House. 
