Project 2025 — The Heritage Foundation-backed “blueprint” for Donald Trump’s second term — wasn’t the political liability in the 2024 election that Democrats hoped it would be.
That didn’t stop Senate Democrats from hammering Russell Vought over it during Wednesday’s confirmation hearing for Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget.
As one of Project 2025’s lead authors, Vought advocated for the president to have legal counsel who was “respected yet creative and fearless” enough to challenge “legal precedents that serve to protect the status quo,” called for the president to have power over how to spend federal money (which has concerned both Democrats and Republicans, given the power of the purse falls on Congress) and argued that the president should be able to “hold career civil servants accountable for their performance.”
“It is vital that the director and his political staff, not the careerists, drive these offices in pursuit of the President’s actual priorities and not let them set their own agenda based on the wishes of the sprawling ‘good government’ management community in and outside of government,” Vought wrote.
“You are one of the architects of Project 2025, which sets forth a blueprint for implementing these unlawful and dangerous plans under this new administration,” said Sen. Gary Peters, ranking member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, as he introduced Vought.
But Vought took every opportunity to separate himself from the recommendations he had written and his previous personal policy stances.
Multiple times, he told senators that he was speaking as a nominee of President-elect Donald Trump and not on behalf of his work for his conservative think tank, the Center for Renewing America, which was an early supporter of Project 2025.
In Project 2025, Vought advocated for several White House agencies to be eliminated, including the Gender Policy Council and the Office of Domestic Climate Policy. However, when asked by Sen. Andy Kim which agencies he believed should not exist, Vought said that he hadn’t made “an announcement on behalf of the incoming administration.”
Kim also expressed concern about Vought’s comments that actions taken by the Federal Reserve be subject to White House review. Vought also wrote in Project 2025 that agency independence negatively impacts “the modern conservative” president’s ability to “limit, control, and direct the executive branch.”
“I’m not here as a think tank president,” Vought responded again. “I’m here as a nominee.”
In the transition project, Vought wrote about the importance of ensuring that programs that receive federal grants could “push back against woke policies in corporate America.”
When Sen. Maggie Hassan asked him to pledge that if confirmed, he’d ensure that agencies were not taking into consideration a grant applicant’s “political identity of views,” Vought said initially that OMB would make decisions based on “the policy grounds of the agenda of the president.”
“If the president says to you, ‘I don’t care what the law says, I don’t like California and I’m not going to give them the disaster aid they need,’ you’re going to stand up to the president and say, ‘sir, that’s not appropriate?,’” Hassan pressed.
“I don’t engage in hypotheticals, but the president would never ask me to do something along those lines,” Vought said. (Trump has floated the idea of withholding disaster aid from Democratic governors.)
He then added that “we do not look at people’s political information.”
Vought is known as a proponent of Schedule F, which would give Trump the power to fire huge swaths of the federal workforce, with the idea that the president’s employees should be loyal to the president’s agenda. Sen. Elissa Slotkin asked Vought if he’d support a proposal to put more political appointees in law enforcement.
“I’m not here on behalf of my personal views,” Vought said.
The nominee also separated himself from his think tank’s work. Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Ruben Gallego took issue with a report from the Center for Renewing America that calls for cutting disability compensation benefits for some veterans, and asked if he would push for those cuts if confirmed.
“I’m not here on behalf of what I think,” Vought told Blumenthal. “It’s a think tank that I am currently the president of. It is not the agenda of the incoming president of the United States, and so I’m here on behalf of being his nominee.”
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Oriana González is a reporter at NOTUS.