Trump Budget Chief Pick Defends Spending Cut Plans — Using Infamous Paul Ryan Phrase

In his presidential campaign, Donald Trump went out of his way to distinguish himself from what he mocked as the hard-hearted, green-eyeshade conservatism of Republicans like former House Speaker Paul Ryan.

Yet on Wednesday, Trump’s pick to head the key Office of Management and Budget defended the administration’s fiscal plans with a statement almost word-for-word repeating one of Ryan’s most famous critiques of government spending.

In response to a question from Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) about where he would try to cut spending, OMB director nominee Russell Vought said federal benefit programs had to be looked at.

“I think we need to go after the mandatory programs that Sen. [John] Cornyn mentioned that are keeping people out of the workforce because they have become not just a social safety net, but they have become a benefit hammock, and increasingly so in the aftermath of COVID as many of these policies were impacting people’s decisions to go back into the workforce,” Vought said.

Vought’s remarks at his Senate Budget Committee confirmation hearing, unintentionally or not, directly echoed one of Ryan’s most famous formulations of his own pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps approach to government benefit programs, which he tried to cut for years as House Budget Committee chairman and later as speaker of the House.

“We are at a moment where, if government’s growth is left unchecked and unchallenged, America’s best century will be considered our past century. This is a future in which we will transform our social safety net into a hammock, which lulls able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency,” Ryan said in the televised Republican response to President Barack Obama’s 2011 State of the Union speech.

Ryan later backed away from the analogy but it came to be seen as summarizing a stingy, social Darwinist approach to policy that Trump would later dismiss as a losing strategy politically. After Ryan resigned from the House and became critical of Trump, Trump doubled down on his denunciation of Ryan, saying he was a loser, “always has been, and always will be.”

The evidence is at most mixed on whether federal benefits after the onset of COVID-19 have reduced people’s willingness to work. The labor force participation rate, the percentage of people in the overall population that are in the workforce, has fallen slightly, from 63.3% before the pandemic’s start to 62.5% in December. But the percentage of people in their prime working years, from age 25 to 54, is up, at 83.4% in December versus 83.1% just before the pandemic’s onset.

Vought previously served as director of the OMB in Trump’s first term and appeared, after his hearings at Budget and the Homeland Security committees, on his way to a likely party-line confirmation in the Senate.

Vought was also the architect behind Project 2025, a policy guide issued before the election to provide a roadmap for the incoming Trump administration. After the document became a political liability, Trump disavowed it, even though many of the White House’s initial actions appear to be consistent with it.

On Wednesday, several Democrats took issue with Vought’s refusal to say he would abide by a 1974 law that prohibits a presidential administration from refusing to spend money allocated by Congress for a specific program without Congress approving the withholding, so-called impoundment.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee that deals with annual funding of federal agencies and programs, said spending deals between Republicans and Democrats can’t happen if lawmakers are not sure if the funding levels the agreed to will actually be carried out or instead derailed by the OMB.

“As I said to you at our meeting, members of Congress on both sides must know a deal is a deal. A deal is a deal when we reach a bipartisan agreement on major legislation. Agreements cannot happen and Congress cannot function without that level of trust,” she said.

Vought said he would “faithfully uphold the law” but added that Trump ran on the idea that the 1974 Impoundment Control Act — which forbids delaying spending for more than 45 days without Congress’ stated consent — was unconstitutional, and he agreed with Trump.

“The president and his team is going to go through a review with our lawyers, if confirmed, including the Department of Justice, to explore the parameters of the law with regard to the Impoundment Control Act,” Vought said.

“The Congress makes the law, not the president. So the fact that you continue to advocate for this impoundment strategy, that is complete in violation of our Constitution and I’m deeply disturbed that you will not renounce that today,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.).

The fight may already be brewing before Vought even takes office. In his spate of executive orders that Trump signed to kick off his new term were directives to pause spending approved to carry out two of former president Joe Biden’s signature laws, a bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act. Murray said the delays violate the 1974 law.

“What the president has unveiled already are not impoundments. They are programmatic delays,” Vought said.

Budget Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said he thought it was likely Vought would be confirmed with only Republicans voting for him and without Democratic support.

But even Graham said he had some unspecified concerns with Vought’s stance on impoundment.

“I’ll speak later about the Impoundment Act at the markup. I have concerns, too. I’ll share those there,” he said.