Russell Vought Confirmed as Director of White House Budget Office

The Senate on Thursday confirmed Russell Vought as the next director of the powerful White House budget office, installing a conservative fiscal hawk who has promised to pursue sweeping spending cuts and empower President Donald Trump to conform the budget to his political views.

Republicans marshaled a 53-47 vote in support of Vought, who immediately inherits the exceedingly complicated tasks of staving off a government shutdown and preventing a catastrophic debt default -- with a political clash over the two critical fiscal deadlines just weeks away.

For Vought, 48, it is his second time serving as Trump's director of the Office of Management and Budget. He departed that post at the end of the president's first term, later founding a conservative Christian group, the Center for Renewing America, while helping to craft Project 2025, a controversial policy blueprint that has informed Trump's return to the White House.

In a chapter on the executive branch, Vought described OMB as the "air-traffic control system" of government, tasked to "ensure that all policy initiatives are flying in sync" and "ground planes that are flying off course."

In recent years, Vought has proposed vast changes to the federal workforce, including making it easier to fire employees. He has also supported steep cuts to government programs, especially those that provide education, health and nutrition assistance to the poor, arguing the nation cannot afford more debt. He has embraced the idea that the president should have a vast, unilateral ability to cancel federal spending, even if Congress enacts laws appropriating the funds.

Vought's views on that authority, known as impoundment, threaten to exacerbate a high-stakes legal battle over the power of the purse, which the Constitution chiefly affords to the legislative branch. The issue exploded into public view a week after Trump's inauguration when the White House moved to halt all federal spending pending review -- until a court blocked the policy and the administration chose to rescind it.

But Vought has offered scant details about how the administration might actually approach the matter. The uncertainty has troubled some constitutional scholars and budget experts, who say the White House could upset the nation's delicate system of checks and balances, while outraging Democrats, who mounted an overnight protest of Vought's confirmation. While they slowed debate into Thursday, they failed to sway the Senate, where the GOP maintains a slim majority and supports Trump's fiscal agenda.

"You are consigning yourself to irrelevance," Sen. Chris Coons (D-Delaware) warned lawmakers in a floor speech, describing Trump's recent actions to shutter agencies and halt spending as a "rehearsal" for more to come.

Vought's confirmation capped off another frenetic day in Washington, where Trump and his deputies -- led by the tech mogul Elon Musk -- continued to plow ahead with their vast and controversial campaign to reconfigure the American government. As the leader of the U.S. DOGE Service, a cost-cutting effort, Musk has looked to dismantle entire federal agencies, promising he can reduce the deficit by USD 1 trillion next fiscal year.

Some of that work also falls to Vought, whose earliest responsibilities as new OMB director include crafting the president's budget blueprint for next fiscal year. He must also work with Congress to extend government funding, with a current agreement set to expire in mid-March, while assisting in administration efforts to lift the debt ceiling, which permits Washington to borrow more money to cover previously authorized spending and pay interest on existing debt.

"With the federal government running a USD 2 trillion annual deficit, and a national debt approaching USD 37 trillion, a fiscally sound budget is more important than ever, and I'm counting on Mr. Vought to help the president chart a new fiscal path," Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said Thursday. "That will not be an easy job."

Entering those debates, Vought has echoed the president's vision for spending cuts at virtually every agency and program excluding defense. On Capitol Hill, he told appropriators last month that Trump's advisers "haven't set a fiscal goal yet for this administration" but noted that the aim is to "get back to historical levels of outlays," suggesting a substantial reduction in spending on the horizon.

"We haven't seen progress in the area of dealing with our fiscal situation, and that has to change, or that's going to have a profound impact on the next generation," Vought told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

In pursuit of those savings, the OMB chief reaffirmed to lawmakers last month that the administration would try to slash federal anti-poverty programs, including Medicaid, partly by imposing work requirements for benefit recipients. He described those initiatives generally as a "benefit hammock," after Congress expanded them with few new requirements at the height of the pandemic, adding during his testimony, "You can get sizable levels of savings and reforms."

Vought repeatedly stressed during his confirmation process that he would also look to fulfill Trump's campaign pledge to impound federal funds, a move that would allow the president to reduce or eliminate entire categories of spending without congressional approval. The OMB chief said he agreed with Trump that existing restrictions on impoundment are "unconstitutional."

"The president and his team is going to go through a review with our lawyers, if confirmed ... to explore the parameters of the law," Vought told the Senate Budget Committee, adding that Trump "hasn't developed a strategy he's announced."

The issue similarly arose at the end of Vought's first stint as OMB director, after agency officials raised alarm that the administration had illegally held up the delivery of aid to Ukraine. Many Democrats saw renewed evidence of Trump's willingness to circumvent Congress in his initial executive orders targeting federal spending just days after he returned to the White House.

Foreshadowing the fight to come, a 13-slide presentation has already circulated throughout OMB and other federal agencies in recent weeks, signaling that the new administration could look to trigger a court case testing the limits of its spending powers -- though a spokeswoman for the White House insisted the president's appointees did not write it.

A handful of career employees at OMB have resigned their posts in anticipation of Vought's arrival, underscoring his tense relationship with the broader federal workforce -- a collection of millions of employees that Vought reportedly once said he hoped to put "in trauma."