Senate Gop Forges Ahead With Trump’s Budget Pick Amid Funding Freeze Uproar

President Donald Trump’s pick for White House budget chief is expected to easily clear another key hurdle Thursday on his way to confirmation — despite the storm over the administration’s move to freeze congressionally approved spending.

GOP members of the Senate Budget Committee said Wednesday they are prepared to vote in favor of sending Russ Vought’s nomination to the Senate floor, as the former Trump budget director seeks a second stint atop the Office of Management and Budget.

The OMB ordered a sweeping freeze of federal assistance this week, followed by the whiplash of rescinding a key memo ordering that freeze. It caught even the most senior members of Trump’s party off guard, then sent them scrambling for answers.

Still, many Republicans on Capitol Hill say they have no further questions for Vought, or concerns about how this latest episode could be a preview of how he’ll push his record of withholding funding during the last Trump administration to the next level this time around.

“Absolutely support him 100 percent,” Sen. Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, a member of the budget panel, said in an interview Wednesday afternoon.

“I’m good with Russ Vought,” Sen. John Neely Kennedy, a Louisianan who is also a member of the budget committee, told reporters Wednesday.

“Hey, Russ Vought’s going to be great in that position,” said another budget committee member, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. “Of many really good nominations, that’s one of the top ones.”

It's just the latest sign of the GOP’s determination to empower Trump and his Cabinet appointees — even when they threaten to directly interfere with their constitutionally mandated decision-making powers over congressional spending.

Democrats were already inclined to oppose Vought’s confirmation; the nominee was voted out of the Senate Homeland and Governmental Affairs Committee earlier this month in a party-line vote. But the events of this past week have made the upcoming confirmation vote inside the Budget Committee a politically higher stakes affair.

“We know what Trump and Vought are up to. This is their blueprint. This is what they want to do, and they are going to keep at it,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. “But I want to assure the American people, we are going to keep fighting and fighting and fighting until this cruel, evil program that causes such chaos from one end of America to the other is dead.”

Democratic senators asked Senate Budget Chair Lindsey Graham to postpone his Thursday markup on Vought’s nomination until lawmakers could get answers from the White House about the OMB funding order they said would usurp Congress’s Article 1 authority to oversee the appropriations process. A formal request came from the panel’s ranking member, Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley, who cited “extraordinary circumstances.”

Merkley noted that Vought has a history of holding back federal dollars approved by Congress, including the freezing of Ukraine aid during Trump’s first presidency that fueled his impeachment in 2019.

“Anyone who doesn't care what the law is, and doesn’t care what the Constitution is, should never serve in the Cabinet,” Merkley said in a brief interview on Wednesday.

Vought's confirmation would bring further skill to the White House's goal of hand-picking which federal programs to fund and which to cut off — regardless of what funding Congress has passed into law. And Merkley said he is concerned Vought might already be doing that work at the White House budget office, despite the fact that the Senate has yet to confirm him.

“Has he essentially been playing the role of director without actually being confirmed? And that raises lots of troubling questions,” Merkley said.

Vought told lawmakers explicitly during two separate hearings that both he and the president disagree with the Impoundment Control Act enacted more than 50 years ago to insulate the congressional appropriations process from intervention from the Executive Branch. It requires the president to ask Congress to rescind spending, rather than the executive branch not dispersing funding appropriated by law and approved by Congress. And ultimately, Congress has the final say.

“The president ran on the notion that the Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional. I agree with that,” Vought told lawmakers in his confirmation hearing last week before the Budget Committee.

Under the leadership of an acting director, OMB has driven widespread confusion this week as it issued a sweeping freeze of federal assistance on Monday night, updated the guidance Tuesday morning and then rescinded the original memo on Wednesday. A federal judge had already put a temporary block on OMB’s actions Tuesday night.

Some Republican senators argue that Vought’s skill-set is urgently needed as the budget office works to execute on Trump’s executive orders targeting foreign aid and funding under Democrats’ climate and spending law known as the Inflation Reduction Act, as well as the bipartisan infrastructure law enacted in 2021.

“President Trump needs someone of his expertise to figure out how to dramatically reduce spending to a pre-pandemic level and just implement all the things that President Trump wants to do,” Johnson said Wednesday. “I mean, people don't realize that OMB director’s a really key role, and you need somebody with a great deal of experience.”

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee, which has shared jurisdiction over the OMB nominee, advanced Vought along party lines the same day Trump was sworn into office. The chair of that panel, Sen. Rand Paul, said during Vought’s first confirmation hearing that “the power of the purse is Congress” and that “I think if we appropriate something for a cause, that’s where it’s supposed to go.”

But Paul, a Kentucky Republican, is also anxious to confirm Vought, even after the White House’s latest moves to freeze funding this week.

“The sooner, the better,” Paul said in a brief interview on Wednesday. “He needs to be confirmed.”