Tag: russ vought
Russ Vought

Project 2025 Operative Wrecking Consumer Finance Protection Bureau

The new head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — a former top architect in the controversial transition plan known as Project 2025 — reportedly told its employees on February 10 to “not perform any work tasks this week,” at least temporarily shuttering an agency that has been the target of right-wing media attacks for years.

Russ Vought, who also serves as the director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote over the weekend that the CFPB “will not be taking its next draw of unappropriated funding because it is not 'reasonably necessary' to carry out its duties.”

The CFPB has saved working Americans tens of billions of dollars since it was founded in 2011, including more than $6 billion in annual overdraft fees alone from 2019-2023. Calling it “one of Wall Street’s most feared regulators,” The New York Times reported on February 9 that the bureau’s success has put it “squarely in the Trump administration’s cross hairs.”

It has clawed back $21 billion for consumers. It slashed overdraft fees, reformed the student loan servicing market, transformed mortgage lending rules and forced banks and money transmitters to compensate fraud victims.
It may no longer be able to carry out that work.

In less than 36 hours, Mr. Vought threw the agency into chaos. On Saturday, he ordered the bureau’s 1,700 employees to stop nearly all their work and announced plans to cut off the agency’s funding. Then on Sunday, he closed the bureau’s headquarters for the coming week. Workers who tried to retrieve their laptops from the office were turned away, employees said.

Now, Vought appears to be fulfilling a Project 2025 promise — and a longtime right-wing media goal — by taking an axe to the CFPB.

Vought and Project 2025 envision massive White House power grab

Prior to joining the Trump administration, Vought founded the Center for Renewing America, one of more that 100 conservative organizations on the advisory board of Project 2025. He also wrote the chapter in Project 2025’s policy book, Mandate for Leadership, on the Executive Office of the President of the United States, calling “to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”

Vought laid bare Project 2025’s broad ambitions in a secretly recorded video last year, saying that he and his collaborators had prepared “about 350 different documents that are regulations and things of that nature that are — we’re planning for the next administration.”

The Trump administration has already begun following through on Project 2025’s goals, and dismantling the CFPB is no different. Mandate for Leadership refers to the bureau as a “highly politicized, damaging, and utterly unaccountable federal agency” that is “unconstitutional,” writing that the “next conservative President should order the immediate dissolution of the agency—pull down its prior rules, regulations and guidance, return its staff to their prior agencies and its building to the General Services Administration.”

In his dual role at the top of OMB and the CFPB, Vought is well-positioned to enact this sweeping agenda, and he is already taking steps that would amount to a massive power grab for Trump’s White House.

Vought and his colleagues at the Center for Renewing America are leading supporters of a radical theory that the executive branch can unilaterally refuse to spend money allocated by Congress. Toward that end, Vought issued an OMB memo that temporarily froze all federal funding. (The memo was later retracted after widespread backlash.)

Vought outlined his extreme vision for expansive control in a recent interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

“There are no independent agencies,” Vought said, specifically mentioning the CFPB among others. “So there may be different strategies with each one of them about how you dismantle them, but as an administration, the whole notion of an independent agency should be thrown out.”

Right-wing media have long attacked the CFPB

Right-wing media figures have targeted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau since its inception in the wake of the Great Recession.

In 2015, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board attacked the CFPB for its multiyear investigation into racially discriminatory car financing practices. The Journal’s board called the effort an “outrageous regulatory campaign” and called on Congress to implement additional hurdles to the CFPB’s enforcement capacity. The CFPB ultimately clawed back tens of millions of dollars for racial minorities who had been subject to higher-than-average loan rates across several lenders.

In November 2017, Fox News anchor Dana Perino invited a guest on to criticize the CFPB without disclosing that they represented clients opposed to the bureau’s regulations. Right-wing blog The Federalistpublished an article the same day with the headline: “This Is The Perfect Time To Destroy The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.” A day later on Fox News, never-Trump conservative Jonah Goldberg referred to the CFPB as a “hate crime against the Constitution.”

More recently, right-wing media figures targeted a Biden-era initiative at the CFPB that went after predatory credit card gouging schemes and other junk fees that cost working people in the United States more than $10 billion every year.

Trump administration following through on Project 2025’s goals

“This morning he's [President Biden] talking about late fees, and he's talking about corporate America, and it's companies' fault that people are facing inflation,” Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo said. The next day she again criticized Biden’s focus on “late fees,” directing her viewers’ anger toward undocumented immigrants instead of credit card companies.

On February 5, Fox published an opinion piece calling for Trump to “delete Elizabeth Warren’s failed experiment once and for all,” claiming that “CFPB is doing more harm than good, and its dissolution is not just a policy preference but an economic necessity.”

As news of Vought’s takeover broke, several conservative outlets cheered what they saw as the demise of the CFPB. The Daily Wire framed Vought’s actions in its headline as the “Latest Trump Admin Move To Cut Government Waste.” Conspiracy theory website The Gateway Pundit celebrated: “The corrupt agency which was the ‘brainchild’ of Senator Elizabeth ‘Pocahontas’ Warren (D-MA) could be on its last legs.” The think tank Vought founded also weighed in, publishing a white paper titled: “The CFPB Should Be Shut Down.”

On Fox News, host Laura Ingraham defended the good name of several financial institutions against the intrusions of the CFPB.

“Now, to give you a sense of how partisan that place has become, in December its chief rushed to file several lawsuits against the payment platform Zelle, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo, alleging this amorphous failure to protect consumers,” Ingraham said. “It's ridiculous. And it amounts to another shakedown of business by anti-capitalist crusaders. That’s all it is.”

Ingraham was a lonely voice at Fox News celebrating the news, despite network figures campaigning against the CFPB for years. A Media Matters study found that between Vought’s appointment to head the agency on February 7 and 3 p.m ET on February 10, “network personalities mentioned the CFPB just 5 times for a total of about 40 seconds.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Russ Vought

Senate Democrats Will Filibuster Christian Nationalist Vought's Nomination

Senate Democrats are uniting to block — or at least delay — the confirmation process for Russ Vought, the self-describedChristian nationalist” architect of Project 2025, as President Donald Trump’s nominee for Director of the Office of Management and Budget. To push back against his confirmation, they plan to hold the Senate floor starting Wednesday afternoon, vowing to speak “all night.”

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI), who has urged Democrats use their power to stall Trump’s agenda, announced that “more than 35 United States senators on the Democratic side” will “take the floor for 30 hours.”

“Russ Vought is the main author of Project 2025,” Schatz said. “He’s the guy that established this federal funding freeze. He is the architect of the dismantling of our federal government, harming us with Medicaid portals shut down, with Head Start shut down, with agencies illegally stormed and the servers being seized. We’ve got to fight back and we’re united, all 47 Democrats in opposition to Russ Vought’s nomination.”

“If confirmed, Russ Vought may be the most important man that no one’s ever heard of,” declared Senator Schatz on the Senate floor Wednesday afternoon.

Vought has been getting some attention in the press.

“In times past, Vought — who famously asked ‘Is There Anything Actually Wrong With ‘Christian Nationalism?’’ in Newsweek in 2021 — would have been seen, and dismissed, as an over-the-top extremist well outside the boundaries of mainstream politics,” wrote Thomas B. Edsall in a New York Times opinion column on Tuesday. “Today, he is a lauded Trump loyalist on the verge of his second tour of duty with the president, in one of the most powerful posts in the federal government.”

“In Vought’s vision of the apocalyptic battle for the soul of America,” Edsall continued, “Democrats are ‘increasingly evil.’ The federal work force, in turn, is the enemy that must be forced into submission. ‘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,’ Vought, who is 48, declared last year. ‘We want to put them in trauma.’ ”

Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune plans to have Vought confirmed this week.

Last month during Vought’s confirmation hearing, Senate Homeland Security Committee Ranking Member Gary Peters (D-MI) told him that when he ran OMB during President Trump’s first term, “you consistently ignored laws passed by Congress that directed how taxpayer dollars should be spent.”

“In 2020, an investigation by the Government Accountability Office found that OMB, under your leadership, broke the law eight times.”

Peters said Vought “inappropriately delayed disaster relief funding for Puerto Rico following the devastation of Hurricane Maria,” and “knowingly delayed getting critical resources to communities following a disaster even after Congress passed a law specifically requiring the funds be disbursed on time.”

He also, Peters charged, “pushed for” replacing “nearly 50,000 nonpartisan, career civil servants with appointees whose only qualification was their political loyalty.”

Senate Democratic Appropriations Committee Vice Chair Patty Murray has called Vought “incredibly alarming,” and one of Trump’s “anti-abortion extremists.” She noted that Vought was “the lead author of Project 2025, which called for ripping away birth control, allowing states to nigh women, lifesaving emergency care, and effectively banning all abortion nationwide.”

“He has said he wants abolition of abortion in the United States,” Murray added. “In other words, a national abortion ban without any exceptions, even in the cases of rape or when a mother’s life is at risk.”

“Vought has called to outlaw medication abortion, block funding, for Planned Parenthood, and advocated for President Trump to appoint a new special assistant in the White House to coordinate anti-abortion policies across government.”

Watch the videos above or at this link.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Russ Vought

Project 2025 Plotter Is Behind Federal Funding Freeze

A new memo issued by the Trump administration directing the federal government to temporarily cease disbursing billions of dollars in funds appears to draw on arguments made by Russ Vought, the president’s selectee to run the Office of Management and Budget.

Vought was a primary architect of Project 2025, a sprawling effort organized by The Heritage Foundation to provide policy and staffing recommendations for President Donald Trump’s second term. In addition to that role, Vought is also the founder of the Center for Renewing America, a MAGA-aligned think tank that has spent over a year arguing that the president can unilaterally refuse to spend funds allocated by Congress, an authority known as the impoundment power that was severely curtailed by Congress in 1974.

The new Trump administration memo was issued by Matthew Vaeth, acting director of OMB pending Vought’s confirmation vote. The document calls for federal agencies to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance.”

“The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve,” the memo states.

Although the two-page memo doesn’t use the term impoundment, law professor Steve Vladeck argued that the Trump administration is claiming “the unilateral power to at least temporarily ‘impound’ tens of billions of dollars of appropriated funds—in direct conflict with Congress’s constitutional power of the purse, and in even more flagrant violation of the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.” The existence of the document was first reported by journalist Marisa Kabas and later confirmed by The Washington Post and The New York Times. (OMB issued a follow-up memo claiming the freeze does “not apply across-the-board” and withheld funds are “not an impoundment under the Impoundment Control Act.”)

Direct effects of the memo are unknown but they could be highly detrimental

“Experts said the memo as written was poised to bring a rapid halt to scores of federal functions, from assistance to homeless shelters to financial aid for college students,” the Post reported. “Health grants distributed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and state aid for disaster reconstruction, might face delays.”

The memo appears to exempt Social Security and Medicare recipients, and it says the halt “does not include assistance provided directly to individuals.” It isn’t clear whether Medicaid recipients will be affected, although some early reports indicated that payments had been disrupted.

The New York Times additionally reported that transportation funding and loans to small businesses could also be affected. In a statement to the Times, Diane Yentel, the chief executive of the National Council of Nonprofits, warned: “From pausing research on cures for childhood cancer to halting food assistance, safety from domestic violence and closing suicide hotlines, the impact of even a short pause in funding could be devastating and cost lives.”

HuffPostreported already that some payments for Head Start — which funds preschool for low-income families — are at risk of being delayed. HuffPost also reported that officials at Meals on Wheels, the food program for elderly Americans, are worried they could face funding disruptions.

Vought long pushed for a radical interpretation of the impoundment power

In June 2023, Vought posted on X (formerly Twitter), “Making Impoundment Great Again!” Days later, the Center for Renewing America’s X account wrote that “the impoundment power is our secret weapon to totally dismantle the WOKE & WEAPONIZED federal bureaucracy.” The CRA post linked to a Real Clear Politics article quoting Vought as saying, “When you think that a law is unconstitutional” — referring to the Impoundment Control Act — the response should be to “push the envelope.”

In July 2023, CRA senior fellow Jeffrey Clark — who as a DOJ attorney attempted to overturn the 2020 election by pushing a fake elector scheme at the end of Trump’s first term — appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room to argue against the Impoundment Control Act.

“So what I’m working on, essentially, are the constitutional arguments for why that was wrong and various ways in which the Impoundment Control Act is just flatly unconstitutional,” Clark said.

Vought continued to beat the drum months later.

“The loss of impoundment authority — which 200 years of presidents enjoyed — was the original sin in eliminating the ability for a branch-on-branch to control spending,” Vought said the following February on Fox Business.

In June 2024, the Center for Renewing America released a white paper arguing that the Impoundment Control Act — passed following President Richard Nixon’s refusal to spend funds for environmental, transportation, and educational priorities — is unconstitutional and a break with legal precedent. The authors of that paper later wrote articles for The Hill and right-wing blog The Federalist making similar claims.

Vought highlighted the centrality of the impoundment power to his think tank’s project. “Why did we found the Center for Renewing America?” he wrote on X. “To write papers like this.”

During Trump’s first term, he attempted to unilaterally withhold roughly $400 billion in foreign aid funding for Ukraine, leading to his first impeachment for violating the impoundment law.

During Vought’s recent confirmation hearing to serve as director of OMB during Trump’s second administration — a job he also held during Trump’s first term — Vought refused to promise to follow the Impoundment Control Act on the grounds that both he and Trump believe it is illegal.

Last August, Vought was filmed in an undercover video claiming that he and his Project 2025 collaborators had written “about 350 different documents that are regulations and things of that nature” in preparation for a possible Trump victory. He said in the video that one of his goals is to “end multiculturalism” in America.

The OMB memo has triggered a massive reaction across the political spectrum. Bannon celebrated the move on War Room, while Senate Democrats are calling for a delay to Vought’s confirmation vote following the news. A former OMB official said the memo read like a “hostage note written directly by Russ Vought.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Trump Set To Name Project 2025 Architest As Top Budget Official

Trump Set To Name Project 2025 Architest As Top Budget Official

President-elect Donald Trump is planning to appoint Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist who has plotted to remake the federal workforce in MAGA’s image, to serve as his administration’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, according to CBS News. Vought held the same position during Trump’s first term. Since leaving office he has been a leading architect of Project 2025, a sprawling plan to provide staffing and policy options to the next Republican administration.

In his role at Project 2025, Vought was instrumental in ensuring that decimating the ranks of federal civil service became a conservative priority. He wrote the second chapter in Project 2025’s policy book — Mandate for Leadership — titled: “Executive Office of the President of the United States.” In it, he argued that “a President today assumes office to find a sprawling federal bureaucracy that all too often is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences—or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction of the country.”

As part of his anti-woke crusade, Vought has repeatedly defended and promoted Christian nationalism, at one point calling for an “army” of right-wing activists with “biblical worldview” to staff the next Republican administration. He wrote an op-ed for Newsweek in 2021 with the headline “Is There Anything Actually Wrong With 'Christian Nationalism?’” More recently, Politicoreported that a document from the Center for Renewing America — a MAGA-aligned think tank Vought founded — listed “Christian nationalism” as a top priority for a second Trump term.

While at the helm of the Center for Renewing America, Vought has been outspoken in his advocacy of Schedule F — a scheme to reclassify career civil servants as political appointees. Trump attempted to implement Schedule F in the waning days of his first term, but its effects were blunted by his loss in 2020. If his incoming administration moves forward with the plan, which seems all but inevitable, as many as 50,000 career staffers could be replaced with MAGA loyalists. (Some other estimates put the number closer to 20,000.)

Vought has championed the use of congressional rules to defund and remove individual government employees for punishment and deploying “ideological purity tests” to ensure federal workers are loyal to Trump.

During a recent interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Vought argued that the “whole notion of an independent agency should be thrown out.”

Following a broad backlash to Project 2025, Vought was caught on hidden video discussing his work at the initiative and how it might play if Trump returned to the White House.

“Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies, and we are working doggedly on that,” Vought said. “Whether it’s destroying agencies’ notion of independence, that they’re independent from the president.”

In the interview, Vought claimed that he’d been working on “about 350 different documents that are regulations and things of that nature” for a future Trump administration.

“You may say, ‘OK, DHS, we want to have the largest deportation — what are your actual memos that a secretary sends out to do it?’ Like, there’s an executive order, regulations, secretarial memos,” Vought said. “Those are the types of things that need to be thought through so you’re not — you’re not having to scramble or do that later on.”

This early preparation includes creating documents to facilitate the “largest deportation in history” and to deploy the military to “maintain law and order” against civilian protesters. Vought elaborated that the mass deportations were part of a plan to “end multiculturalism” in the country.

As a hardline conservative, Vought has pushed to implement harsh austerity measures throughout the country. The Washington Post reported that Vought advocates for eliminating trillions of dollars in “anti-poverty programs such as housing, health care, and food assistance.” He has called for massive cuts to Medicaid and floated future cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

Toward that end, Vought and his colleagues at the Center for Renewing America are leading proponents of a radical interpretation of executive authority that claims the president can unilaterally refuse to spend money allocated by Congress. Known as the “impoundment” power, Vought and his fellow travelers assert that a 1974 law that mandates presidents spend money Congress has allocated — passed after President Richard Nixon refused to spend federal funds for clean water and schools — is unconstitutional.

This theory, if Trump acts on it, would centralize budgeting power within the Oval Office and tilt the balance of power between the president and Congress even further towards the executive branch.

Aside from slashing the United States’ very limited safety net, Vought’s think tank released a budget proposal for fiscal year 2023 that would unleash the FBI against Trump’s declared enemies and “thwart the increasing societal destruction caused by progressive policies at the state and local levels that have defunded police, refused to prosecute criminals, and released violent felons into communities.”

Now, as he reprises his role as the head of OMB, he will wield considerable influence within the Trump administration and will almost certainly play a central role in the likely purge of the federal workforce.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

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