President-elect Donald Trump late Friday said he will nominate Russell Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) – reprising his role as OMB director from 2019 to 2021 during the first Trump administration – and handing Vought the reins on a host of crucial issues for the Federal workforce and how Federal agencies function.
“He did an excellent job serving in this role in my First Term – We cut four Regulations for every new Regulation,” President-elect Trump said.
He praised Vought as “an aggressive cost cutter and deregulator who will help us implement our America First Agenda across all Agencies.”
“Russ knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end Weaponized Government, and he will help us return Self Governance to the People,” President-elect Trump said, adding, “We will restore fiscal sanity to our Nation, and unleash the American People to new levels of Prosperity and Ingenuity.”
In an interview on Nov. 18 with the Tucker Carlson Show, Vought said a renewed attempt to implement a new Schedule F for tens of thousands of Federal government employees deemed to be in policy-making positions is all but a certainty when the next Trump administration takes office.
Vought said the renewed effort to create Schedule F will be a “day one thing” for the new administration and “should be viewed maximally” by incoming agency chiefs.
The first Trump administration issued an executive order in 2020 to create the new Schedule F classification that would make it much easier to remove newly classified government employees from their positions – which now have civil service rule protections – and replace them with people more apt to carry out the administration’s aims.
The order was not put into action prior to the end of the first Trump administration and was canceled by President Biden in 2021.
More broadly, Vought signaled in the interview earlier this month the incoming Trump administration’s animus toward Federal agencies that have been classified as “independent” agencies of the executive branch.
“The American people currently are not in control of their government and the President hasn’t been either,” he said. “And so, we have to solve that. We have to solve the woke and the weaponized bureaucracy and have the President take control of the executive branch.”
“So my belief, for anyone who wants to listen, is that you have to – the President has to move executively as fast, and as aggressively as possible, with a radical constitutional perspective to be able to dismantle that bureaucracy and their power centers,” Vought said.
“I think there are a couple of ways to do it,” he continued. “Number one is going after the whole notion of independence. There are no independent agencies. Congress may have viewed them as such — SEC, or the FCC, CFPB, the whole alphabet soup — but that is not something that the Constitution understands.”
“So there may be different strategies with each one of them about how you dismantle them, but as an administration, the whole notion of an independent agency should be thrown out,” he said, adding, “Particularly with the Department of Justice, in which there’s literally no law – all it is is precedent from the Watergate era that the Attorney General and those lawyers don’t work for the President.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., who is ranking member of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, lashed out at the choice of Vought to lead OMB in a statement this weekend.
“Vought wants to dismantle the expert federal workforce, replacing qualified, nonpartisan federal employees with sycophants selected not for their merit but for their willingness to place party and personal loyalty over their constitutional oaths of office,” the congressman said.
“Vought’s agenda would inflict massive harm on the tens of millions of Americans who rely on federal workers to provide health care at the VA, Social Security checks to their parents, infrastructure aid to local governments, and financial assistance to small businesses,” he added.
“In his own words, Vought wants our federal workers to be ‘traumatically affected,’ no matter the costs added to our economy or the problems imposed on the American people. Pain is itself the agenda,” Rep. Raskin said while pledging resistance to Vought’s “radical agenda.”
Vought led OMB from January 2019 to January 2021. The bulk of his term was spent running the agency on an acting basis until the Senate voted in July 2020 to confirm his nomination to become permanent director.
In early 2020 with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, Vought was a central figure in the first Trump administration’s response, requesting $45 billion in emergency spending in March of that year to support the government-wide response to the COVID-19 outbreak, including updates to agency IT to support telework and improve cybersecurity.
OMB on March 17, 2020, issued a memo telling Federal agencies to “maximize telework across the nation for the Federal workforce” due to the COVID-19 coronavirus.
On the technology-related front, Vought inherited the first Trump administration’s President’s Management Agenda (PMA) published in 2018. The PMA focused on, among other priorities, advancing Federal government modernization by improving agency IT systems including through the Technology Modernization Fund, making better use of data to boost government services, and migrating the Federal workforce to higher-value tasks.
