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 budget.
Democrats tried to criticize Vought for advocating greater senior power over spending and legal service jobs, despite Republicans ‘ frequent focus on the resources and the incoming Trump name.
The Impoundment Control Act ( ICA ), a 1974 federal law that forbids the executive branch from purposefully spending less money than was authorized by Congress, was the subject of many Democrats ‘ questions on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Some credit the ICA with forcing the executive branch to spend inordinate amounts of money only because it was authorized by Congress, which is a never-ending cycle of doom.
Vought said in the reading that he and Trump believe the ICA is illegal.
” For 200 decades, leaders had the ability to spend less than an arrangement, if they could do it for less, and we have seen the degree 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 reply, saying that because this regulation had been upheld by authorities in the past, it had the precise same power as the U. S. Constitution.
” So you’re you’re going to continue to task and break the law going ahead”? Petersen claimed that it is a wicked idea to issue a law in court. Vandought merely stated that the Trump administration would investigate ways to reduce or even ban the ICA.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., claimed he was “astonished and baffled” that a person in this place may actually claim 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 ).
Because the Trump administration paused$ 200 billion in spending from Ukraine to conduct a policy review, the ICA was a significant component of House Democrats ‘ votes for Trump’s first impeachment.
Former OMB general guidance Mark Paoletta and Daniel Shapiro, former justice for Justice Clarence Thomas, cited numerous instances of executive choice in spending congressional budget, and wrote that” The ICA has caused Congress to appropriate funds to meet special interests with reckless drop and prevent the government’s training of his constitutional authority.”
The authors claimed that the ICA unlawfully invades the president’s decision-making authority by preventing him from investing money in programs in a intelligent and responsible way.
OMB is not just a finances company. Every regulation that passes through the executive branch must receive final approval from OMB through its Office of Information and Regulator Affairs ( OIR ).
Vought stated in a new interview with Tucker Carlson that OMB “has the ability to switch off the saving that’s going on at the companies.” It evaluates whether it’s good or bad, too costly, or whether it could be done in a different way.
OMB may also affect employees. When Vought led OMB in Trump’s first term, he created Schedule F, a different classification for national career civil servants who had a significant impact on actual legislation, making them effectively at-will people who could be fired by the leader.
Employing civil servants is currently extremely challenging because the president’s employment authority has been largely ceded to him. That strong has contributed to the monster that makes up the heavy state, the faceless, nameless bureaucrats who worked so hard to prevent Trump’s plan objectives in the first term.
” I come from the private sector, where I ran companies with thousands of employees. If you’re the chief executive, that means that all those who work for you actually work for you, though I don’t know how it should work. Is that also true for the government? 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 responded that the president does not currently possess that authority, and that “many laws and paradigms 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.
He claimed that the Department of Justice clearly had bureaucracies working for them during their first term. ” The length of the FBI’s investigation of a person who attends a Loudoun County school board meeting because they are concerned about the situation with their daughter, and then is charged with domestic terrorist”
Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered issues of education and culture for Breitbart News and the Washington Examiner. He is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow and holds a degree from the University of Virginia. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.
