Democratic senators held an all-night session to protest the pending confirmation of Russell Vought to lead the office of management and budget (OMB), expressing their deep concerns in speeches through the night that a key architect of Project 2025 intends to work with Donald Trump to dismantle the federal government.
“We’re going to have more than 35 United States senators on the Democratic side, opposing Russ Vought’s nomination,”the senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii said in a video posted on X before he spoke on the floor on Wednesday afternoon. Schatz said Democrats would take to the floor for 30 hours – the time allowed for debate on Vought’s nomination.
“He is the architect of the dismantling of our federal government,” Schatz added, noting that all 47 Democrats are united in opposition to Vought’s nomination.
Democrats on the Senate budget committee previously attempted to slow Vought’s confirmation process by boycotting the 30 January vote to advance his nomination after the OMB ordered a freeze on federal grant funding last week. Senate Democrats called him a threat to democracy and “clearly unfit for office”, but senators voted along party lines to advance his nomination. The full Senate is scheduled to vote on his confirmation at 7pm.
During Trump’s second week in office, Vought drew outrage after the acting director of the OMB issued a memo to freeze funding for federal grants. Although the memo was quickly rescinded, programs that run on federal funding, including the Head Start program, which offers preschool for the children of low-income families, have continued to report funding delays and lockouts. The move to pause payments on federally funded programs across the country generated panic and chaos as workers scrambled to understand their impact.
And while Vought was not yet in office when the memo was issued, it aligned neatly with his vision for commandeering the government’s purse strings to implement Trump’s agenda.
Vought previously served as the head of OMB during Trump’s first term, from July 2020 until Trump left office in January 2021. Vought then founded a thinktank and dedicated himself to planning for a second Trump presidency, in which he envisioned using the OMB to dramatically consolidate the power of the executive branch.
A 21 November 2024 memo released by Vought’s thinktank made the case for expanding the president’s ability to restrict congressionally appropriated funding as a tool for Trump to “roll back the woke and weaponized bureaucracy targeting the American people”. Experts say such efforts could violate the Impoundment Control Act, which limits the president’s ability to withhold congressionally approved federal funding.
During her first press briefing, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, appeared to connect Vought to the OMB memo pausing federal grant funding, telling reporters that she had spoken “with the incoming director of OMB this morning, and he told me to tell all of you that the line to his office is open for other federal government agencies across the board”.
Democratic senators lobbied against Vought’s appointment in the wake of the federal grant funding pause, urging a delay on the pivotal confirmation vote.
“Vought is the chief architect of Project 2025 – which left its digital fingerprints all over the illegal OMB guidance that was issued,” said the Washington senator Patty Murray, the Democratic vice-chair of the Senate appropriations committee during a press conference on the freeze of federal grant funding. “Every lawmaker who doesn’t want to see funds that they worked to secure for their state – funds they know families are counting on – ripped away must vote ‘no’.”
Article by:Source: Alice Herman and Kira Lerner in Washington
