In the 2024 election, Donald Trump was favored by lower-income and middle-income voters who cited their own economic hardship and expressed confidence that he would improve their lives. It was a major turnaround from the 2016 election, when Trump lost among voters earning less than $100,000.
Yet Trump’s pick to head the White House Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, has been a proponent of massive cuts in government spending to programs that help low-income Americans and their families such as Medicaid, Head Start and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
Vought, a mild-mannered conservative, was the OMB director during the first Trump administration. Since leaving office in 2021, he helped quarterback the controversial Project 2025 manifesto that called for a radical reshaping of government. His confirmation vote heads to the full Senate, likely on Thursday evening.
When he was OMB deputy director and later director during Trump’s first term, Vought crafted budgets that would have cut $1.3 trillion from Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security over 10 years starting with the fiscal year 2020 budget. The next year, he proposed cuts of $451 billion to Medicare and $920 billion to Medicaid, which covers health care for about 72 million low-income Americans.
Devastating Cuts for Working Class
“If he gets confirmed, it will be devastating,” says Angel Padilla, vice president for strategy and policy at the National Women’s Law Center. “He’s going to have one of the most powerful positions, in which they want to dismantle as much of the government as possible, and that includes programs that directly service low-income families and working families.”
Padilla noted the irony that many of these cuts impact programs that are essential to many Trump voters. “The programs that we’re talking about — Medicaid serves 72 million people every year, Head Start serves nearly a million people, and SNAP serves about 42 million people — the people that rely on these programs are Republicans, Democrats, independents.”
The states with the highest percentage of children enrolled in Head Start are deep red states like West Virginia (49%), Mississippi (54%), North Dakota (56%) and South Dakota (50%) that overwhelmingly favored Trump in the election. Similarly, several of the states with the highest percentage of SNAP recipients — West Virginia (16%), Mississippi (13%), Louisiana (18%) and Alabama (15%) — strongly supported Trump.
Among the key lawmakers to vote on Vought’s confirmation is Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, which has a poverty rate of 10.4% and where 12% of residents receive SNAP benefits.
These programs are also popular with voters in swing states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that shifted more to Trump and Republican candidates in the recent election. About 88% of voters in swing states say that increasing SNAP benefits would help working families manage the higher cost of living. And surveys show that from 76% to 83% of voters in swing states supported the federal government providing $25 billion to states for free universal pre-school. Vought has opposed the idea, writing in a 2021 op-ed that universal pre-K “is designed to get children out of the home sooner into learning environments where they will learn ruling class narratives influenced by Critical Race Theory.” Proposals to cut Head Start would burden states with responsibility for a larger share of funding for universal pre-K access, according to the Center for American Progress.
Though he hasn’t been confirmed yet, Vought is already wielding influence in the Trump White House, “building a partnership” with Elon Musk, the tech billionaire running the controversial DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) program, according to the Wall Street Journal. “They share the same passion for making the federal government more efficient and rooting out waste, corruption and fraud, so I think they are very aligned,” Wesley Denton, a longtime adviser to former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and a Vought friend, told the Journal.
Vought had not responded to a request for comment by Capital & Main before publication.
At his confirmation hearing two weeks ago, Vought was grilled by Democratic lawmakers on some of the proposals outlined in Project 2025, which focus on attacking so-called “woke” government policies. “Is providing nutrition assistance to low-income kids ‘woke and weaponized’?” asked Tim Kaine (D-Virginia). “You proposed deep cuts to Pell Grants. Is helping kids pay for college and helping their families, is that woke and weaponized?” Both times, Vought sidestepped the questions.
During his 2017 confirmation hearings, Vought was pressed on how his proposed budget cuts would affect low-income Americans. In his response, he explained that he came from a “blue-collar family… the son of an electrician and a school teacher.” “I know what they went through to balance their budget and save for the future,” he said. “But they also worked long hours to pay for the government in their lives, and I often have wondered what they would have been free to build and give without such a high burden.”
Beyond Vought’s proposals to slash social programs, the extremism of his positions on other issues has alarmed many on both the right and left. In a 2021 Newsweek opinion piece defending Christian nationalism, Vought wrote, “My own definition of ‘Christian nationalism’ would be this: 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.” Conservative writer Bill Kristol recently told the Bulwark that Vought is “friendly with some more extreme Christian nationalists who don’t even pretend to respect basic principles of tolerance and liberal democracy and equal treatment of people whatever their religious views.”
Health Care and Food Stamps on the Cutting Block
Vought has played a key role in the MAGA movement, founding a conservative think tank, the Center for Renewing America (CRA). During the February 2023 showdown over the debt limit, Vought was a pivotal figure, often advising GOP leaders on negotiations with the Biden White House and providing them with proposed spending cuts. Those recommendations included deep reductions to the budget including $2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, more than $600 billion in cuts to Affordable Care Act programs, over $400 billion in cuts to food stamps and hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to educational subsidies.
Vought’s 2023 proposal to add a work requirement to the food stamp program “ignore[s] the reality that most SNAP participants who can work already do so,” noted the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. ”SNAP is a critical support for these workers, as these jobs typically pay low wages, offer unreliable hours and don’t provide benefits such as paid sick leave, one of many reasons that these jobs also are unstable.”
Work requirements for safety net programs like SNAP and Medicaid are a “punitive solution,” found the Economic Policy Institute in a study which determined that “[m]ore stringent work requirements in the past have failed to boost work in significant ways because they don’t attack the core problems of weak economic conditions or the irregular and unpredictable scheduling practices of low-wage jobs. Instead, requirements increase administrative burdens for adults seeking needed benefits.”
For 2024, the Center for Renewing America proposed eliminating funding for key efforts like the Administration for Children and Families’ Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helped almost 6 million families pay their electric and heating bills in 2023. It also proposed completely gutting the budget for the National Institutes of Health’s child health program.
In opposing Vought’s nomination, Democratic Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine of Virginia sent a letter to Senate Budget Committee chairman Lindsey Graham, stating that Vought “was already planning on halting programs that feed hungry children, heat the homes of low-income families, support farmers, and bring relief to those suffering from natural disasters. The laws Congress passes are not suggestions, and Mr. Vought willfully ignoring them harms the constituents of every Member of the Committee.”
