‘Astonished and aghast’: Project 2025 co-author grilled in Senate for Trump budget post

Democrats grilled Russell Vought, who was tapped to be President-elect Trump’s next budget chief, for his ties to Project 2025 and the powers of the executive branch as senators weighed his nomination.

Vought testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on Wednesday afternoon.

He previously served as head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) under Trump during his first term and has recently garnered attention as a co-author behind a blueprint produced by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation that was often the target of Democratic attacks during the 2024 presidential election cycle.

Sen. Gary Peters (Ind.), the top Democrat on the committee, pressed Vought at the top of the hearing over previous actions under the Trump administration to freeze security assistance for Ukraine in a move he called illegal.

“The Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded that all these actions that were a violation of the Impoundment Control Act, and that your actions then forced Congress to re-appropriate the funds,” Peters added, before asking Vought, if he’s confirmed, would he “commit to follow the law and not allow OMB to withhold funding from programs that Congress has appropriated?”

Vought pushed back, saying he disagreed “with the characterization” and that, in his “time at OMB, we followed the law consistently.”

Peters then asked Vought if he thought it was “within the law” to “withhold funds that are appropriated by Congress,” to which Vought argued funds were not “inappropriately” held and that the administration was “engaged in the policy process with regard to how funding would flow to Ukraine” at the time.

The GAO said in a 2020 report that the Trump administration was found to have violated the Impoundment Control Act (ICA) when its OMB withheld military assistance to Ukraine the prior year — an effort seen at the time as a way to advance Trump’s priorities and “not a programmatic delay.”

The ICA, enacted during the Nixon administration, put guardrails on the president’s powers to cut funding approved by Congress.

The law has been cited more frequently by Republicans in recent months as conservatives have ramped up calls for its repeal. GOP critics say the measure is unconstitutional and say its rollback would help Trump pursue further cuts to government spending.

However, Democrats have criticized the push as a threat of executive overreach.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) asked Vought during the hearing if he believes the Impoundment Control Act is constitutional after also pressing the nominee on whether he would release funding to Ukraine, if confirmed.

“No, I don't believe it’s constitutional,” he said. “The president ran on that view. That's his view, and I agree.”

Blumenthal fired back that Vought was saying he was “simply going to take the law” into his own hands, while arguing prior Supreme Court cases have proved the ICA is constitutional.

“I did not say that nor did I imply that on behalf of the incoming administration,” Vought pushed back. “I said earlier to a question from Senator Peters that the incoming administration is going to have to take the president's view on this, as he stated in the campaign.”

Blumenthal said was “astonished and aghast that someone in this responsible a position would in effect, say that the president is above the law and that the United States Supreme Court is entitled to their opinion, but mine should supersede it.”

“It's just baffling that we are in this, I think, unprecedented moment in the history of this country. And I think our colleagues should be equally aghast because this issue goes beyond Republican or Democrat.”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), committee chairman, said after Blumenthal’s line of questioning that he was “sympathetic” to arguments made by the Connecticut Democrat and Peters on the “power of the purse.” But he also argued that Congress has not “done a good job with clear parameters.”

“But there's a great deal of latitude and part of this, and this is going to be as it moves forward, if we want to limit what the president does with moving money around, which I'm sympathetic to, we should have the power of the purse,” he said.

“We got to write better legislation,” Paul added, arguing that “every piece of legislation that we put out has a presidential waiver for national security.”

During the hearing, Vought was also pressed about past comments in a video uncovered by ProPublica, in which he notably said he wanted some federal workers to be put “in trauma.”

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said in the revealed remarks. “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. 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.”

Vought said on Wednesday that, in those comments, he “was referring to the bureaucracies that I believe have been weaponized,” arguing “there are portions of weaponized bureaucracies across the federal government.”

His response came during questioning by Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.), who also pressed Vought about his implementation of a measure known as “Schedule F” that can make it easier for federal employees to be fired. Project 2025 also makes the case for the measure's return.

“I guess I want to ask you then, at the end of your term as OMB director, you implemented Schedule F, and you implemented that as well at OMB. Do you remember what percentage of personnel at OMB you categorized as Schedule F?” he asked.

Vought testified that the measure was “not to fire anyone,” but “to change their classification” and that it was “implemented” at “90 percent.”

He said the move was to “ensure that the president, who has policy setting responsibility, has individuals, who are also confidential policy-making positions, are responding to his views, his agenda, and it works under the same basis that most Americans work on, which is they have to do a good job or they may not be in those positions for longer.”

Schedule F, however, would end merit-based hiring protections for any member of the civil service whose position is converted.

It would make the civil service more akin to political appointees, who can be swiftly hired and fired, raising concerns it would politicize the federal workforce.

Asked if the president-elect has had conversations about restarting Schedule F once he’s inaugurated, Vought said he doesn’t “speak to the conversations that I have with the president.”

Rebecca Beitsch contributed to this report.

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