Welcome to Washington: Trump’s Budget Nominee — Potentially His Most Important — Appears To Be on Track for Confirmation

The most important nominee of President Trump’s second term could well be a bespectacled budget expert with decades of experience working the bowels of Washington’s policy making apparatus. This nominee — charged with crafting White House budget proposals — is already planning a major makeover of how the federal government plans its spending. Welcome to Washington, where the nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, will soon receive a confirmation vote in the Senate Budget Committee before heading to the floor for a full vote. As of Sunday, it appears that the nominee will win confirmation after he sparred with Senate Democrats at his two recent confirmation hearings. Mr. Vought is a veteran of the budget-crafting process in both the legislative and executive branches, having served as Mr. Trump’s OMB director during the second half of the first Trump term. That followed years of Mr. Vought working on Capitol Hill. He was confirmed as the OMB director in 2019 on a party line vote in the Senate — a good sign for his chances in the new Senate, where the GOP holds 53 seats. Mr. Vought is far from a household name, and likely never will be one. He won’t receive nearly as much scrutiny as some of Mr. Trump’s other nominees, such as Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who is facing a rocky road to confirmation as director of national intelligence, or Secretary Hegseth, who just became the first defense secretary ever to be confirmed following a tie vote in the Senate. If Mr. Vought’s confirmation hearings were in any way a glimpse into the future, he will be much-discussed by Washington’s chattering class as he quietly works to remake the federal government from his unassuming office just off the White House grounds. During his confirmation hearings, Mr. Vought made clear that he wanted to deploy a power not used by presidents for decades — the power of impoundment, which allows the president to impound money that has already been appropriated by Congress. After President Nixon refused to disperse some federal funds, the legislative branch passed the Impoundment Control Act, which bars the president from impounding funds without congressional approval. It is also a statute that Messrs. Trump and Vought believe is unconstitutional. “I don’t believe it’s constitutional,” Mr. Vought told Senator Blumenthal at a confirmation hearing. “The president ran on that view. It’s his view, and I agree with it.”Since leaving the White House in 2021, Mr. Vought has been leading the Center for Renewing America — a think tank that he himself founded and is aimed at crafting conservative policy solutions and executive actions. In November, the operation put out a policy paper stating that the impoundment powers are fundamental to the operations of a lively executive. “Prior to passage of the ICA, impoundment occurred routinely and frequently without protests from Congress. The current statutory restrictions only allow the President to impound funds through rescission requests that have to be approved by Congress,” the Center for Renewing America staff write. “This provision effectively gives Congress a front-end greenlight to spend as much money as it wants followed by a back-end fiscal veto over any attempt by the Executive Branch to restrain congressional profligacy.”Mr. Trump employed impoundment powers in 2019 to temporarily withhold congressionally appropriated aid to Ukraine — an action that would later lead to his first impeachment. In his second run for the White House, Mr. Trump embraced impoundment powers early on, with his rationale for using impoundment powers sounding as if it had been written by Mr. Vought himself. “For 200 years under our system of government, it was undisputed that the President had the Constitutional power to stop unnecessary spending through what is known as Impoundment,” the president said in a June 2023 video. “Very simply, this meant that if Congress provided more funding than was needed to run the government, the President could refuse to waste the extra funds, and instead return the money to the general treasury and maybe even lower your taxes.”If Mr. Vought is confirmed and the president follows through on his promise to try to impound funds — two things that seem increasingly likely — then Mr. Vought would be a central player in the court fights to come. With the six-to-three conservative majority on the high court that has already overturned Roe v. Wade, struck down Chevron deference, and affirmed wide-ranging presidential immunity in Trump v. United States, it is certainly possible that the Nine would have to revisit the issue of impoundment.

Welcome to Washington: Trump’s Budget Nominee — Potentially His Most Important — Appears To Be on Track for Confirmation

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