The US Senate has voted on party lines to confirm Russell Vought, a key architect of Project 2025, to lead the office of management and budget despite intense opposition from Democrats.
In an 53-47 vote, the full Senate approved Vought’s confirmation, which came after Democratic senators held an all-night session express their deep concerns that he intends to work with Donald Trump to dismantle the federal government.
“He is the architect of the dismantling of our federal government,” the senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii said on Wednesday in a video announcing the all-night debate, which was intended to show the Democratic base that the party is putting up a fight against Trump’s nominees. All 47 Democrats were united in opposition to Vought’s nomination.
During the marathon 30-hour session, the Wisconsin senator Tammy Baldwin said that Vought “has openly called for the president to defy Congress and take control of federal funding decisions that are constitutionally vested in the legislative branch”.
“At stake is our very notion of self-government, a notion that Mr Vought appears to disdain,” the New Hampshire senator Maggie Hassan said.
Democrats on the Senate budget committee previously attempted to slow Vought’s confirmation process by boycotting the 30 January vote to advance his nomination after the OMB ordered a freeze on federal grant funding last week. Senate Democrats called him a threat to democracy and “clearly unfit for office”, but senators voted along party lines to advance his nomination.
During Trump’s second week in office, Vought drew outrage after the acting director of the OMB issued a memo to freeze funding for federal grants. Although the memo was quickly rescinded, programs that run on federal funding, including the Head Start program, which offers preschool for the children of low-income families, have continued to report funding delays and lockouts. The move to pause payments on federally funded programs across the country generated panic and chaos as workers scrambled to understand their impact.
And while Vought was not yet in office when the memo was issued, it aligned neatly with his vision for commandeering the government’s purse strings to implement Trump’s agenda.
Vought previously served as the head of OMB during Trump’s first term, from July 2020 until Trump left office in January 2021. Vought then founded a thinktank and dedicated himself to planning for a second Trump presidency, in which he envisioned using the OMB to dramatically consolidate the power of the executive branch.
A 21 November 2024 memo released by Vought’s thinktank made the case for expanding the president’s ability to restrict congressionally appropriated funding as a tool for Trump to “roll back the woke and weaponized bureaucracy targeting the American people”. Experts say such efforts could violate the Impoundment Control Act, which limits the president’s ability to withhold congressionally approved federal funding.
During her first press briefing, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, appeared to connect Vought to the OMB memo pausing federal grant funding, telling reporters that she had spoken “with the incoming director of OMB this morning, and he told me to tell all of you that the line to his office is open for other federal government agencies across the board”.
