Russ Vought, a hard-charging fiscal and social conservative with a passion for downsizing government, became President Donald Trump’s budget director for the second time Thursday when the Republican-controlled Senate confirmed him on a party-line vote.
While the 53-47 outcome was never in real doubt — no Republican ever voiced opposition to him — antipathy toward Vought from Democrats grew into full-throated rage in recent weeks. Democrats said Vought played a key role behind the scenes in efforts including the Trump administration’s funding freeze, penetrating the Treasury’s payment system, and steps toward dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development.
While they had no power to block Vought’s confirmation, Democrats staged an all-night protest on the Senate floor that continued Thursday up until the evening vote, using every minute of the allotted 30 hours for debate.
“His decisions will reverberate from one end of America to the other, in every city, in every town, every household, and every rural area,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a floor speech. “And of all people Donald Trump could have picked to lead White House policy, he chose the godfather of the ultra-right.”
With most Democrats seated at their desks during the vote, many tried to argue against Vought and were overruled repeatedly by freshman Sen. Ashley Moody, R-Fla. “No debate is permitted during the vote,” she said while presiding over the chamber.
An aggressive cost-cutter who is eager to slash nondefense spending, Vought has taken heat on the left for his views as a self-described Christian nationalist.
Vought defended that belief in a 2021 Newsweek column, where he defined Christian nationalism as “an orientation for engaging in the public square that recognizes America as a Christian nation, where our rights and duties are understood to come from God and where our primary responsibilities as citizens are for building and preserving the strength, prosperity and health of our own country.”
While the belief system respects the separation of church and state, Vought wrote, it does not tolerate “the separation of Christianity from its influence on government and society.”
Republicans have applauded Vought for his dedication to cutting costs and scaling back government. Trump, in nominating him in November, wrote on his Truth Social site that Vought “knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end Weaponized Government, and he will help us return Self Governance to the People.”
Vought served as director of the Office of Management and Budget in Trump’s first term and began laying the groundwork for a second term by founding the Center for Renewing America, a think tank populated by former administration officials.
In a fiscal 2023 budget blueprint issued by the center, Vought proposed cutting nondefense discretionary programs by $3.5 trillion over a decade, trimming Medicaid by more than $2 trillion and repealing the 2010 health care law’s insurance subsidies, among other reductions.
In a statement after the vote Thursday, Senate Budget Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., called Vought “highly qualified,” having served in the same capacity during the first Trump administration.
“I believe he is the right man at the right time to get our fiscal house in order,” Graham said.
‘Put them in trauma’
In recent weeks, Democrats seized on a speech Vought made in which he promised to put federal bureaucrats “in trauma.”
“We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so,” he said in speech obtained by ProPublica. “We want to put them in trauma.”
Vought became a target from the moment he was nominated months ago. Democrats never forgave him for holding up aid to Ukraine during Trump’s first term. Their antagonism only grew during last year’s campaign, when Vought helped author Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s political playbook for how Republicans should overhaul the government if they take power.
At confirmation hearings earlier this year, Democrats slammed Trump and Vought for their view that a president has the constitutional authority to spend less than Congress has appropriated in some cases, which they said ignores the 1974 law enacted in part to prevent that. They grilled Vought after Trump issued executive orders freezing funding on foreign aid and clean energy investments.
Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore, ranking Democrat on the Budget Committee, questioned whether the pauses in funding are illegal impoundments.
Vought said the executive orders do not meet the definition. Vought said the executive orders “were pauses to ensure that the funding that is in place is consistent and moves in a direction along the lines of what the president ran on, unleashing American energy away from the Green New Deal,” a reference to Democrats’ ambitious and costly push to wean the U.S. away from fossil fuels.
Both the Budget Committee and the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee approved Vought’s nomination on party-line votes earlier this year.
Before going to work for OMB, Vought was a vice president at Heritage Action, the political arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank. Earlier, he had served as policy director for the House Republican Conference under then-Indiana Rep. and later Vice President Mike Pence. Vought also worked as executive director of the conservative Republican Study Committee, the largest bloc of House conservatives, and as an aide to former Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas.
Paul M. Krawzak contributed to this report.
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