[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 24 (Wednesday, February 5, 2025)]
[Senate]
[Pages S757-S760]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                      Nomination of Russell Vought

  Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, you know, we are just 17 days into the 
Trump-Vance and, yes, Elon Musk administration, and we are already 
witnessing the great betrayal of what candidate Trump promised on the 
campaign trail.
  For the last 17 days, the Trump-Musk administration has been engaged 
in a reckless abuse of power that is already harming people in 
communities throughout our country, and one of the principle architects 
of this chaos is the man who is nominated to be the head of the Office 
of Management and Budget, Russell Vought.
  But before I get into that nomination, let's just start with day one, 
day one of the Trump administration; because on day one, President 
Trump pardoned individuals convicted in a court of law of beating up 
police officers here on Capitol Hill on January 6.
  They bludgeoned them, they beat them, assaulted them. As the National 
Fraternal Order of Police said, that pardon sent a terrible message to 
law enforcement all over the country. It sent the message that 
political violence is OK as long as it is done in the name of Donald 
Trump.
  And since then, we have seen the Trump administration carry out 
retribution against FBI agents and Department of Justice officials who 
were part of the investigations and prosecutions of the people who beat 
up police officers on January 6. So if you are part of the effort to 
hold people accountable for assaulting police officers, they went after 
you. It sends a terrible message.
  And then, of course, President Trump unleashed Elon Musk on the 
American people. I have said it before and I will say it again: We are 
witnessing in real time the most corrupt bargain in American history.
  (Mr. BUDD assumed the Chair.)
  Elon Musk spent over $280 million to elect Donald Trump, and Donald 
Trump has handed the keys to the U.S. Government over to Elon Musk. 
They seized access to the Treasury's payment system. This is a $6 
trillion payment system. Elon Musk's DOGE boys have gotten access to 
Social Security numbers of the American people, bank account numbers, 
and other very sensitive personal information.
  Judges are trying to rein him in, but who knows what information they 
have already accessed and what kind of damage has already been done, 
not to mention what could still be done in the days ahead.
  And Elon Musk has gotten into the Department of Education, the State 
Department, AID, Health and Human Services, NOAA, and the National 
Institutes of Health, just to name a few. No matter what name he gives 
it, Elon Musk's takeover of these Federal Agencies has nothing to do 
with government efficiency. If it was about government efficiency, 
Trump would not have illegally fired the inspectors general whose job 
it is to provide oversight at these Agencies and blow the whistle on 
corruption.
  In fact, when you fire the inspectors general who are the watchdogs 
at these Agencies, whose job it is to look out for waste or fraud or 
abuse, when you fire them as one of your first acts, what you are doing 
is clearing the way for the kind of illegal actions we are seeing from 
Elon Musk and his team.
  So what they are really doing here is seizing control of the 
government, taking over a lot of these Agencies, in the long run, to 
empower further the very powerful and the very wealthiest in this 
country. And we will be seeing more of that in the months ahead when we 
begin to see the Trump tax plan, the trickle-down tax plan that is 
being worked on, as we speak.
  Because we know that although Candidate Trump campaigned on the idea 
that he was going to be on the lookout for working people, that he was 
going to shine a light on the forgotten Americans, everything he has 
done since then is a betrayal of that promise.
  Just down the hall here, during the inauguration, the folks who were 
sitting behind President Trump as he gave his remarks were certainly 
not the forgotten Americans. They included Elon Musk, the richest 
person in the world, and all the billionaire tech titans.
  So when President Trump in that inaugural address promised a new 
golden age for America, he was looking at the cameras, but he was 
talking to those tech titans sitting right behind him. And to provide 
that golden age for the billionaires and powerful in America, they are 
following a manual and an instruction book called Project 2025.
  Now, people might remember that during the last Presidential 
campaign, Candidate Trump was asked repeatedly about Project 2025. 
People said: Is this your plan that is being put forward?
  And his response was:

       I have nothing to do with it.

  You know why he said that on the campaign trail? Because he knew it 
was unpopular. If you look at the contents of Project 2025, the 
American people would recoil at what is in there, and Candidate Trump 
knew that. And so when he was asked, he said: I see nothing; I have 
nothing to do with that.
  So, surprise, surprise, surprise, when one of the key architects--key 
authors--of Project 2025 Russell Vought is nominated to be the head of 
the Office of Management and Budget at the White House.
  So before I speak to why it will be so dangerous to put Russell 
Vought in that critical position, I want to say a few words about what 
OMB is all about because it is not a well-known Agency. People hear 
about the Department of Justice; they hear about other important 
Federal Agencies, Department of Health and Human Services. But what is 
OMB?
  OMB is the office over at the White House. It is in the executive 
office of the President. And it is the command and control center for 
the budget of the U.S. Government. It oversees the budgets of every 
Federal Agency of the Federal Government. They feed their information, 
they feed their budget requests up to the Office of Management and 
Budget. And it is the Office of Management and Budget that makes the 
final decisions and sign-off on all of those Federal Agency budgets, 
across the government.
  So as I say, Russell Vought will be in the cockpit of this decision-
making, overseeing every Federal Agency in our government. So let's 
learn a little bit more about Russell Vought because we will be voting 
on that nomination later today.
  So what does he think about the Federal employees in all of those 
Agencies that OMB will oversee with respect to their budgets? Here is 
what he said about government employees, and I am quoting him. He wants 
them to ``be traumatically affected. 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 to put them in trauma.''
  Again, referring to hard-working Federal employees who do good work 
on behalf of the American people every day.
  ``We want to put them in trauma,'' he said.
  And if anybody doubts this quote, you just have to go online because 
it is on videotape. It is on videotape for the whole world to see.
  In fact, he didn't try and deny those words, and at the confirmation 
hearing we had at the Budget Committee that I serve on, we asked if he 
wanted to apologize for those statements, and his answer was no. He 
refused to apologize.
  That is what the person who is nominated to be the head of OMB thinks 
about the Federal employees throughout the Federal Government that are 
going to be under that OMB budget process.
  Now, at that budget hearing, the Senate Budget Committee hearing, 
there

[[Page S758]]

was another very revealing moment because I and Senator Murray asked 
whether or not he would commit to complying with American law, 
specifically whether he would comply with what is known as the 
Impoundment Control Act.
  Now, again, this is a law that many people are not familiar with, but 
it is essential to the framework of our Constitution, the 
implementation of that framework, and checks and balances within the 
government, and the power of the purse that is designated for Congress 
under article I of the Constitution.
  And what the Impoundment Control Act says is that once Congress has 
duly enacted a law, passed the House, passed the Senate, been signed 
into law by the Executive, by the President, the Presidents don't get 
to cherry-pick that law. Presidents don't get to decide, you know, I 
like that provision in the law, and so I am going to implement that, 
but I don't like that provision, so I am going to ignore it or discard 
it.
  It is not a la carte. Our laws are not a la carte. They are not for 
Presidents to decide what parts they want to follow and what parts they 
won't. This came to a head back in the 1970s when President Nixon 
started exercising what are called line-item vetoes.
  So Congress would pass a piece of legislation that would require that 
certain amounts of funds be spent on certain projects, and President 
Nixon took a pen and said: Look, I don't like that particular program. 
I am going to cross it out. And I don't like this one, I am going to 
cross it out--even though it had been part of the law passed by 
Congress and signed by the President.
  And so that was challenged, and it went to the Supreme Court, and the 
Supreme Court struck down President Nixon's action. And the Congress 
then passed the Impoundment Control Act to create a Federal statute 
essentially codifying that requirement that Presidents follow the law 
with respect to budget implementation.
  So when we asked Russ Vought at the hearing whether or not he would 
follow the Impoundment Control Act, you would think all of our 
colleagues would care about what answer he gave because, at that 
hearing, he refused to say that he would comply with the Impoundment 
Control Act. Again, you can go see the C-SPAN tape and get the 
transcript. He weaved and dodged and never said he would comply with 
the law.
  And maybe that shouldn't surprise us because he has done this before. 
You see this will be Russ Vought's second tour as the head of the 
Office of Management and Budget if he is confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
  And on his first go-round in the first Trump administration, this 
issue came up. That was when President Trump in his first term withheld 
critical funds appropriated by Congress, on a bipartisan basis, for the 
people of Ukraine, to help the people of Ukraine. That was done through 
the duly authorized processes of government.
  But President Trump wanted to hold on to those moneys. He did not 
want to obey the law. He didn't want to disperse those funds to 
Ukraine. That created a huge issue, crisis in governance. So at that 
time, I wrote to the GAO, which is the congressional watchdog. They are 
designated to look out to see whether or not these laws are actually 
implemented and followed.
  And I got back a response. I wrote them in December of 2019 about 
this withholding of funds for Ukraine, and I got back a letter on 
January 16, 2020, with their answer. And in this letter, GAO says:

       Faithful execution of the law does not permit the President 
     to substitute his own policy priorities for those Congress 
     has enacted into law.

  Pretty standard definition of what everybody would normally 
understand to be the requirements of the Constitution. And since the 
Trump administration and Russ Vought violated that, the GAO concluded--
and I will just read the operative sentence:

       Therefore, we conclude that OMB violated the Impoundment 
     Control Act. Simple declarative sentence saying that they 
     violated the law. And the person who was the head of OMB 
     when they violated that law was? Russ Vought, the person 
     who is nominated for another tour of duty as the head of 
     OMB.
  So the whole idea behind the Impoundment Control Act, as I have 
discussed, is that the President is not a king in our system. We have a 
system of checks and balances. And under article I of the Constitution, 
the first article, Congress has the power to appropriate funds and 
direct the use of those funds. And we do it through bipartisan debate 
in both Houses of Congress.
  So when Russ Vought refuses to promise he will comply with the law, 
what he is saying is: He will not respect the Constitution of the 
United States.
  And if we witness what has been happening just in the first 17 days 
of the Trump administration, we are seeing this disrespect for the law 
in action by the White House, including by OMB. And Russ Vought has not 
even gotten there yet, but his fingerprints are all over the actions 
taken to date.
  Because I think people will remember--seems like a long time ago 
now--but OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, issued a statement; 
the President issued an Executive order, and then they issued a 
statement that:

       Temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or 
     disbursement of all Federal financial assistance.

  So immediately upon them taking that action, we saw community 
organizations all over the country, all of a sudden, not able to 
receive really important resources that they use to support priorities 
in our country.
  So I began to hear, for example, from firefighters in the State of 
Maryland, volunteer firefighters. I also began to hear from those 
groups that provide assistance to victims of domestic violence, to 
organizations that help remove lead from our water so our kids don't 
get lead poisoning, initiatives to improve the health of the Chesapeake 
Bay, my State of Maryland.
  Now, at the time, it was claimed that Medicaid was exempt from this 
order, but States, at that time, were locked out of their Medicaid 
payment portals.
  So to my colleagues on the Republican side who said it is just part 
of the normal process of transition in government: This is not normal. 
And Elon Musk taking over Federal Agencies is not normal.
  So, as I said, I heard first from a lot of the volunteer fire 
departments in my State of Maryland because there is a Federal program, 
grant program, that helps them purchase equipment so that when 
firefighters go into burning buildings, they have protective equipment 
and safety equipment that lets them breathe in a room full of smoke.
  We heard immediately from a housing agency in Maryland, helps 
hundreds of families find safe, affordable places to stay. They were 
suddenly locked out of the portal for the Department of Housing and 
Urban Development.
  An organization in Prince George's County, MD, that uses Federal 
grants to help survivors of sex and labor trafficking reclaim their 
lives saw their funds in jeopardy.
  A nonprofit in Baltimore County that uses Federal funds to provide 
food, housing, and emergency assistance to families in need, they also 
saw their funding cut off.
  In Montgomery County, MD, there is a nonprofit that uses this Federal 
grant money to run programs for permanent supportive housing to take 
care of senior men with disabilities. Many of these elderly gentlemen 
have experienced extended bouts of homelessness, and they currently 
have a place to live with dignity in a small neighborhood with the care 
they need. If they lose their money, they lose their support; they will 
all end up in shelters.
  So I am pleased that the courts looked at that action that was taken 
through Executive order. They looked at that OMB memo cutting off the 
flow of funds for essential community programs, and the court said: No. 
No, no, no, you can't do this. We need time to determine what all the 
facts are here, and two courts issued temporary restraining orders on 
that action. One, a court in Rhode Island--a Federal court--and one, 
here in the District of Columbia.
  But this administration is still at it in many different ways. They 
are still issuing Executive orders when, in fact, they cannot do what 
they want to do by Executive order; they need to come to the Congress 
and go through the process for making laws. Presidents just can't issue 
EOs that are not consistent with their powers under the Constitution.

[[Page S759]]

  I spoke earlier today about what was happening over at the Agency For 
International Development, an Agency, pretty small Agency, within the 
overall budget of the United States that plays an essential role in our 
foreign policy and our national security policy. Elon Musk, you know, 
sent out a tweet saying that he was putting AID in the wood chipper.
  This is an organization that saves lives overseas, and one of the 
things they do is help other countries combat infectious diseases so we 
can stop them overseas before they come to the United States because, 
of course, infectious diseases recognize no borders.
  As part of that, they cut off funding for the PEPFAR program, which 
is a bipartisan initiative first launched by George W. Bush. It is a 
program in Africa that has saved over 25 million lives from HIV and 
AIDS. Put it in the wood chipper; that is what they want to do.
  So I am grateful that the courts have intervened and halted, at least 
for now, these illegal actions. But we should not rely on the courts of 
the United States to do work that we should be doing here. We should 
not be insisting that they have to fight all of our battles for us. We 
need to be pushing back here in the U.S. Senate. We are not a 
government for Elon Musk by Elon Musk. We are a government of the 
people, at least last I checked. The Constitution begins ``We the 
people.''
  So this is a reminder of why these nominations are so important 
because the person who we are considering for the head of OMB wants to 
ignore that law. But that is only part one of the plan outlined in 
Project 2025 to allow for the Elon Musk takeover of the Federal 
Government and allow for these other illegal actions to be taken.
  I spoke about the Impoundment Control Act, but the other part of 
Project 2025's plan is to get rid of a lot of the merit-based Federal 
workers who do the business of the U.S. Government every day in 
Agencies across the Federal Government. Whether they are food safety 
inspectors, whether they work at veterans hospitals, whether they work 
for the FAA--these are people who are doing the Nation's work on behalf 
of the American people.
  And what Project 2025 wants to do is to convert many of those merit-
based civil service positions in our government to political-cronyism 
based positions.
  So rather than have people selected into the merit civil service 
system based on their knowledge, based on their experience, based on 
what they know as opposed to who they know, Russ Vought and Project 
2025 want to convert about 50- to 60,000 merit-based civil service 
positions into political-cronyism positions.
  Now, I think it is really important that everybody understand that 
when a new President comes into office, the President, of course, has 
the prerogative and authority to bring in lots of people at the top of 
that administration. Of course, many of them are Cabinet officials or 
other officials who are subject to the advice and consent of the U.S. 
Senate, but there are tens of thousands of others who are currently 
civil servants. But when a new President comes in, they get about 4,000 
political positions--4,000 people.
  But what we are seeing here from Project 2025 and Russ Vought is what 
is called schedule F plan. So what does schedule F do? It would 
implement this idea of giving the President or claiming to, by 
Executive order, convert these 50- to 60,000 merit-based civil service 
positions into just politically based systems positions.
  So why do we have a merit-based civil service in this country? I 
think it is worth going back and looking at the history because we have 
had the merit-based system since the late 1800s, and it is that system 
that Donald Trump and Russ Vought want to tear up.
  So why did we develop the current system? It used to be that these 
Federal positions were based on the spoils system, the spoils of 
political victory. So when a new President came in, that President 
could just bring in whoever the new President wanted.
  If you wanted to be in charge of a harbor or run a post office, you 
didn't get there by knowing about ships in the case of the harbor or a 
mail system in the case of a post office. You got it by helping the 
President get elected, and then the President would say: Well, you 
helped me get elected; you are going to get this job, even if you are 
not qualified.
  So if these desks, these 100 desks in this Chamber, could talk, they 
would be screaming a warning to us about the dangers of going down the 
road that Russ Vought and Donald Trump and Elon Musk want us to go.
  Here is what Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky said during that debate 
back in the 1800s about the existing spoil system that was in effect 
then. Here is what he said:

       It is a detestable system. And if it were to be 
     perpetuated--if the offices, honors, and dignities of the 
     people were to be put up to public scramble, to be decided by 
     the result of every presidential election--our government and 
     institutions, becoming intolerable, would finally end in 
     despotism.

  That was the warning from Henry Clay about that old spoil system that 
Trump, Musk, and Vought want to go back to. Here is what Senator Daniel 
Webster of Massachusetts said back then:

       The power of giving office[s] affects all who are in and 
     all who are out. Those who are out endeavor to distinguish 
     themselves by warm personal devotion [to the President], 
     while those who are in resolve not to be outdone in 
     partisanship. A competition ensues, not of patriotic labors, 
     not of rough and severe toils for the public good, but of 
     complacence, of indiscriminate support of the Executive 
     measures, of pliant subserviency and gross adulation.

  We want our Federal employees, the rank and file folks who do the 
work of the country every day-- we don't want them to have to take a 
political loyalty test to get their job; we want them to take a test 
that shows they have the qualifications to get it.

  Here is what Senator Warner Miller of New York said:

       Worth[iness] can no longer gain an entrance to public 
     office; but that it can only come through the favor of some 
     man who has climbed up by the system until he is in a 
     position to reward his followers.

  Again, warning of the peril of politicizing the hiring of Federal 
employees that conduct the everyday work of our government.
  Finally, Senator Charles of Missouri said:

       Under such a system it cannot be otherwise but inexperience 
     and rascality. . . . You are no longer surprised at the 
     frequency of mail robberies which are perpetrated in post-
     offices. You see the smugglers in the ports lying in wait to 
     take advantage of the inexperience of new officers, or the 
     aid of dishonest ones.

  Even the great author Mark Twain got in on the action here and 
commented on that system that we had, the spoils system based on 
politics, not merit. Here is what Mark Twain said:

       We will not hire a blacksmith who never lifted a sledge. We 
     will not hire a school teacher who does not know the alphabet 
     . . . But when you come to our civil service, we serenely 
     fill great numbers of our minor public offices with 
     ignoramuses.

  So this was a big problem for the country back in the 1800s. Indeed, 
in his inaugural address in 1881, President James Garfield said:

       The civil service can never be [placed on a] satisfactory 
     [basis] until it is regulated by law. For the good of the 
     service . . . against the waste of time and obstruction to 
     the public business caused by the inordinate pressure . . . 
     and for the protection of [civil servants] against intrigue 
     and wrong.

  In other words, again, this is President Garfield warning that the 
system that had been in place was a danger to the public good.
  So President Garfield provided a warning to the country. It didn't 
come soon enough. They hadn't enacted the legislation to fix the 
problem yet. Six months after that inauguration, President Garfield was 
shot and killed, assassinated by a man who worked on the Garfield 
campaign but who was disappointed over not getting a spoils job.
  President Garfield's assassination, his death, shocked Congress into 
action. So they finally created the modern civil service process to be 
insulated from politics, at least with respect to all the jobs under 
the top political jobs, which Presidents have the right and authority 
to hire. They created through the Pendleton Act what we call the merit-
based civil service, where you have due process rights and you can't be 
fired because of your political affiliation and you don't get hired 
based on who you know; you get hired based on what you know.
  So this is the system that Russ Vought and President Trump and Elon 
Musk want to destroy through schedule F, an Executive order, schedule 
F.

[[Page S760]]

  Look, the good news is that I think at least three lawsuits have 
already been filed to try to enjoin this illegal action. But it should 
tell us a lot that the person who has been nominated to head OMB, the 
person who said that he refused to commit to complying with the law 
during his Budget Committee hearing, would be advancing schedule F.
  Why do that? Because it is all part of the plan to put in place 
lackeys who will do your bidding no matter what, who won't put the 
interests of the country first but who will answer to the political 
call--exactly what Senators back in the late 1800s warned against.
  But that is what they want to do. They want to take us back to the 
late 1800s spoils system. As I said, they not only want to bring in 
50,000 to 60,000 political cronies for these positions, one of the 
first acts President Trump took was to get rid of the inspectors 
general. So you bring in your lackeys, you get rid of the independent 
inspectors general, and that just gives Elon Musk carte blanche to do 
what he is currently doing right now.
  This has nothing to do with more government efficiency and everything 
to do with setting up the executive branch of the Federal Government to 
respond to the desires of the folks who were sitting right behind 
President Trump right down the hall at his inauguration--Elon Musk and 
the billionaire tech titans and others like them.
  One of the things that the billionaires want are even more tax cuts. 
They don't like the fact that, as very wealthy people, they have to 
make a contribution to the public good or they want to reduce the 
contribution they have to make. We know that Republicans over in the 
House of Representatives have been down in Miami with President Trump 
planning exactly what form all these tax cuts will take.
  Well, I don't think we really have to guess at it because we have 
seen this movie before in the first Trump administration. They enacted 
their trickle-down tax policy--big tax cuts for the wealthiest in 
America, tax cuts for big, very profitable corporations.
  They made a lot of promises back then as to what the result would be. 
For example, they promised that giving tax cuts to very rich people and 
these corporations would end up generating so much additional economic 
activity that we would have recovered the cost of the revenues lost by 
giving those very wealthy people a tax cut. Not even close. Not even 
close. Deficits went way up.
  As I said, I serve on the Senate Budget Committee. I asked experts 
from both parties who come testify on different issues about whether or 
not that tax cut ``paid for itself,'' and the answer is always no, 
because it didn't.
  They also promised that these tax cuts to very wealthy people would 
end up generating additional activity at the corporate level. So the 
idea was that you give a corporation a big tax cut, and that 
corporation will invest more of its savings that it has into plant and 
equipment and grow the economy.
  Well, that didn't happen either. What happened was those companies 
engaged in huge stock buybacks, which disproportionately benefited 
these huge stockholders.
  Do you know what else they promised? They promised that if you gave 
those corporations big tax cuts, they would use some of the savings to 
increase the wages for their employees. After all, profits at 
corporations are generated by the hard work of their employees. So the 
idea was, OK, you have more money, you got this big tax cut.
  At that time, President Trump and his administration promised that 
workers would see an average of a $4,000-a-year pay increase. It did 
not happen as promised.
  So here we are again, and the Musk folks are going through Federal 
Agencies. Russ Vought is working to install himself again at OMB. And 
all of this is a prelude to another round of big tax cuts. Again, these 
are going to come at the expense of everybody else in America because 
even as we gather here, we have been seeing various plans come out of 
the House of Representatives Republican caucus. They are talking about 
dramatic cuts to Medicaid, which is a program that serves tens and tens 
of millions of people, including our seniors and people with 
disabilities. They are talking about dramatic cuts to food nutrition 
programs and many, many other cuts to important investments for working 
Americans across the country--all to help pay for or offset the costs 
of those tax cuts for the wealthy.
  I think we also heard President Trump talk about all the money he is 
going to collect in tariffs. I want to say something about tariffs here 
because I support strategically targeted tariffs to protect critical 
American industries. But an across-the-board tariff on every single 
product being imported into the United States is nothing more than an 
increase in sales tax on every American. Americans pay that at the end 
of the day.
  I can tell you that Elon Musk is not going to feel the impact of an 
increase in sales tax--the tariff increase on his bottom line, but 
working Americans will feel it around their kitchen tables. We will see 
grocery prices go up. We will see other prices go up.
  In fact, if you think that this is somehow a freebie that is only 
paid by other countries, let's remember that last time, after China 
retaliated with their own tariffs, we the Congress passed a bill that 
provided $28 billion of taxpayer money to farmers who were no longer 
able to sell as much product into China because of the retaliatory 
tariffs in China. We all end up paying. The American people ended up 
paying $28 billion.
  So don't tell us there is not a cost to consumers and American 
taxpayers for all of this. There is.
  We will have a lot more to say in the coming days about some of the 
accounting tricks we are already hearing are going to be played through 
this tax cut process that will hide at least on paper the impact on the 
deficits. But right now, we are hearing about directing the 
Congressional Budget Office, which is our independent referee on budget 
issues, to assume that big tax cuts on top of the current law won't 
generate increased deficits. Of course they will. So more on that 
later.
  Mr. President, I want to end just by talking a little bit about why 
this is such an important moment. I started by talking about the first 
17 days. In that first 17 days, we have seen President Trump hand over 
to Elon Musk huge powers, and he is using that entree given by the 
President to conduct illegal operations across the Federal Government.
  Courts are very busy today. It is like Whac-A-Mole--hearing cases, 
putting TROs, temporary restraining orders, on cases. But, as I said, 
they shouldn't have to do that. The courts shouldn't have to do that. 
You would think that Members of the Senate would stand up and respect 
the Constitution of the United States and article I.
  What are my Republican colleagues going to do when we have a 
Democratic President that says: I get to cherry-pick the laws of the 
United States. I will just implement what I like and ignore what you 
passed into law.
  That is what is at stake here. That is the danger when Russ Vought, 
who is going to be in the cockpit of OMB--the command and control 
center for the budget of the U.S. Government--refuses at a Budget 
Committee hearing to say he will comply with the law. It is no wonder 
that the Republicans did not want to hold a vote on Russ Vought in 
committee in public. They wanted to have it behind closed doors here in 
the Capitol. That is why Democrats on that committee didn't show up--
because we think the public has a right to know what is at stake here, 
and that is what we are debating now here on the floor.
  I urge my colleagues to recognize that the person that Donald Trump 
has nominated for this position is somebody who said he wanted to visit 
hardships on Federal employees throughout the Federal Government and a 
person who refused to say that he would follow the law.
  Colleagues, I urge a ``no'' vote on Russ Vought to be the Director of 
the Office of Management and Budget.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.