Mr. President I rise today with grave concerns about the nomination of Russell Vought to be director of the Office of Management and Budget, or more popularly known as OMB.  If confirmed, this would be Mr. Vought’s second time in this post.  Based on his past performance and his radical views, I believe it would be reckless to confirm his nomination. 

Most Americans will be unfamiliar with OMB and the work that it does.  But OMB touches every major government policy and every cent of federal spending. 

OMB sits at the center of the budget process, overseeing everything from the initial development of agency budget requests all the way through executing funding appropriated by Congress. 

OMB also plays a critical role in the regulatory review process, and ensures that agencies’ reports, rules, and testimony are consistent with administrative policies.    

All of that is to say that every regulation and every investment in the American people, our infrastructure, domestic manufacturing, small businesses, healthcare systems – you name it – goes through OMB.

That role as a central clearinghouse of all Executive Branch spending and regulation comes with significant authority, and requires a high level of trust, as well fidelity to the Constitution and the law. 

Unfortunately, the Trump Administration’s OMB has already broken that trust with Congress and the American people and the Constitution.    

While not yet confirmed as OMB Director, Mr. Vought’s influence over the agency can be felt even now. Because, in part, he played a central role in developing the Trump Administration’s policy agenda in Project 2025 and also because of the way he ran the agency as director and deputy director during the first Trump Administration.

As Senator Peters – the Ranking Member of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee – pointed out during Mr. Vought’s confirmation hearing, there are numerous examples of OMB flouting the law during Mr. Vought’s previous tenure. 

The non-partisan Government Accountability Office found that OMB broke the law eight times under Mr. Vought’s leadership by directing certain federal agencies to continue to operate during the 2018-2019 shutdown.

GAO also found that under his leadership, OMB violated the law by withholding vital security assistance to Ukraine that Congress explicitly provided— putting our national security at risk.

The Trump-appointed Inspector General for the Department of Housing and Urban Development found that OMB – under Mr. Vought’s leadership – inappropriately delayed disaster relief funding for Puerto Rico following the devastation of Hurricane Maria.  With the level of natural disasters that are unfolding, no Senator – Republican or Democrat – should empower someone who delays and denies disaster relief.

This record is troubling and it has set the stage for the actions taken by the Trump Administration in its first few days in office. 

Last week, the Acting OMB Director issued a memorandum instructing federal agencies to freeze funding that had been authorized and appropriated by Congress until it could be determined that the programs align with Donald Trump’s ideological views -- views espoused in Project 2025, again, a manifesto that Mr. Vought helped write.

That means that President Trump’s OMB, just days into a new Administration, has wasted no time in usurping Congress’s Constitutional authority over government spending by withholding funding previously approved by Congress on a bipartisan basis. 

This illegal action, initiated through OMB, demonstrates just how important and powerful the OMB Director position is. 

With Mr. Vought at the helm, everyone should fear that OMB will zealously pursue a radical agenda that includes withholding funding from Americans based on their religion, their thoughts, their appearance, or political affiliation. 

In evaluating federal spending for ideological purity under federal funding freeze, the Trump Administration cast a wide net, scrutinizing funds for:

  • Grants for law enforcement;
  • Veterans care;
  • Disaster relief and mitigation;
  • And even the 988 suicide prevention lifeline, that has proven to be extremely effective in dealing with the epidemic of suicide we have seen in the nation over the past years.

Even, for a time, Medicaid funding was held up. And that funding is not just for low-income Americans. It’s one of the major sources of funding for nursing homes throughout the country who are taking care of the parents of working men and women all over this country.

To shut those funds off means literally to push those people out of those homes.

Even now, the Administration appears to be holding funds for example to fix an Interstate bridge in Rhode Island that closed due to a catastrophic engineering fault that was detected.  It seems as if the Administration is now concerned about “woke” bridges as well as other “woke” issues.

Even now that a federal court issued a temporary restraining order to block the funding freeze, I continue to hear from Rhode Island agencies and organizations that are struggling to access federal funds that have already been awarded, with no answers from the Administration on what the problem is and how they plan to fix it. 

I fear that this funding freeze is emblematic of this Administration’s, more broadly, process of putting out directives with little to no thought or coordination, without anticipating, and more importantly, without caring about, the negative impacts that reckless orders like this could have for the American people and American businesses. 

It’s important to emphasize that the Trump OMB does not have the authority to freeze funding. 

Back in 1974, Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act, which effectively makes it illegal for the President to ignore the law and not spend funds which Congress has appropriated. 

The Constitution gives Congress the ‘power of the purse’ and the Impoundment Control Act is an important tool in retaining their authority by clarifying that the President has no inherent power to reject Congress’s will when it comes to lawfully appropriated spending. 

The Impoundment Control Act has never been found unconstitutional by any court of law.  It is the law of the land.

Yet both the President and Mr. Vought have said that they believe the Impoundment Control Act to be unconstitutional and Mr. Vought has not only repeatedly refused to commit to following the law, but has publicly pushed the President to break the law and “impound.”

Neither the President, nor his unelected OMB director, can pick and choose which laws they like and which ones they’re going to follow.  And neither the President, nor his unelected OMB director, can pick and choose which components of Congressionally-passed funding laws they want to implement. 

To be clear, this isn’t just a matter of a policy disagreement over funding priorities. 

Democrats and Republicans have, and will continue to have, disagreements over where we should prioritize federal funding.  But we resolve those disagreements, in Congress, in a bipartisan manner, working together to pass appropriations laws that benefit the country.  It is this or any other Administration’s obligation to follow these laws.

This is Congress’s Constitutional role, and I would remind my Republican colleagues that we should not - we must not - cede our obligations under the constitution to any other branch of the government.

And I’ve been astounding quite frankly that so many of my Republican colleagues seem willing to let this Administration walk all over them on this issue. 

I have no doubt that these funding freezes is a test.  A test of our obligation to defend the Constitution of the United State, to play our role in the Constitutional scheme.   

Frankly, Trump and his acolytes are counting on a cowed Congressional majority and a compliant Supreme Court – stacked with justices who are willing to ignore decades of precedent – to sanction this lawbreaking. 

As Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy wrote in the Wall Street Journal last year, “Mr. Trump has previously suggested this statute [the Impoundment Control Act] is unconstitutional, and we believe the current Supreme Court would likely side with him on this question.”

I want to be very clear.  I don’t believe for a moment that Donald Trump has any idea what the Impoundment Control Act is or does.  But right-wing activists like Mr. Vought do.  They are fanning the flames in hopes of overturning the law so they can radically reshape the federal government to their worldview.  What is that worldview?

Rather than serving the American people, they seem to want to punish Americans, punish them for holding different political views, punish them for being low-income, punish them for being sick or homeless. 

In particular they want to further erode trust and belief in government so they will make the government less efficient by pushing out the people who answer the call to serve the country and their fellow citizens as federal employees.  In a recent speech, Mr. Vought put it this way:

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.  When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

Now there’s a common adage in Washington is “Show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you value.”

We haven’t seen President Trump’s budget yet, but back in 2023, Mr. Vought produced a budget plan entitled “A Commitment to End Woke and Weaponized Government,” which was designed to assist House Republicans in their new majority.  In it, Mr. Vought called for extending the Trump tax cuts for the richest Americans and paying for them by cutting domestic funding by $3.5 trillion, for example, Medicaid would be cut by $2.1 trillion, Food Stamps by $400 billion, and eliminating the Affordable Care Act tax credits would also be included in the mix.

I think it gives a pretty good indication of the where the Trump Administration’s priorities lie and it’s certainly not with average Americans. 

There’s another reason I am troubled by Mr. Vought’s nomination and that is his disdain for Congress as an institution, despite having drawn a number of paychecks as a congressional staffer. He has shown literal contempt to the Congress.

As I noted earlier, when Mr. Vought served as the Acting Director of OMB during the first Trump Administration, he was integral to the 2019 effort to withhold almost $400 million in military aid for Ukraine – an event, as my colleagues will recall, that led to Trump’s first impeachment. 

Mr. Vought’s contempt for Congress was on full display when he defied a congressional subpoena to produce documents and to testify in the impeachment inquiry.  He even went as far as to turn to Twitter to publicly call the House of Representative’s inquiry a “sham process” and to say that he had no intent to comply with the subpoena. 

Mr. Vought has also refused to cooperate with Inspectors General and has advocated that the President exercise emergency powers to circumvent congressional decisions.

This is not an individual this Congress, or any Congress, should put its faith in.  He has shown us who he is and how he views this institution and our Constitution. 

And as such, we should not confirm his nomination.