DeLauro Press Remarks Ahead of Senate’s Confirmation Vote on Russ Vought

WASHINGTON — Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-CT-03), Ranking Member of the House Appropriations Committee, delivered the following remarks at a press conference on the nomination of Russ Vought to be Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB):

Good afternoon. I am Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, Ranking Member of the House Appropriations Committee. 

I want to thank the Congressional Integrity Project for hosting us. I thank my colleague, Ranking Member Boyle, who leads the Budget Committee, and demands this country respect working people, and puts their priorities first. We are instinctive allies whether it is trade or whether it is the child tax credit, and I thank you for being here to discuss the imminent danger Russ Vought poses to our families, our communities, and our nation’s Constitutional order. 

And my thanks to everyone who has joined this call, for helping to share this critical information with the American people.

Our nation is facing an extraordinary crisis. Donald Trump is attempting to claim absolute power for the presidency for himself and his unaccountable billionaires. This week, another domino could fall. The U.S. Senate will vote on whether to confirm Project 2025 author Russ Vought, whose views are pro-dictator and anti-democracy, as Director of the Office of Management and Budget. 

If there is one thing to understand about Vought, it is that the chaos, and confusion, and flagrantly unconstitutional actions of the early days of this Administration, are largely of his design and doing. 

Allow me to briefly recap what has happened here, and the lies that have been told to the American public.

In the run up to the election, President Trump promised Americans that grocery prices would come down on day one. And he repeatedly disavowed and distanced himself from Project 2025, claiming to know nothing of its contents or authors.

Both, egregious lies.

The cost of living is nowhere to be found among the President’s concerns since he took office. Rather, he has set off on an agenda of vengeance and destruction, threatening the stability and legitimacy of our government. 

He pardoned hundreds of people who beat cops on January 6. 

He illegally fired over a dozen inspectors general – nonpartisan watchdogs that alert us to fraud, waste, and abuse – across the federal government.

He has allowed Elon Musk, an unelected, unaccountable billionaire with immense conflicts of interest, to illegally freeze payments, tear down our institutions, and kick out career civil servants who are loyal to the Constitution rather than Donald Trump.

In a gift to the Chinese Communist Party, Trump destroyed our capacity to deliver international aid, yielding our global influence to our adversaries. 

He declared a trade war on our neighbors, threatening to raise costs on American households and businesses and further weakening our international relationships. 

And, he stole from the American people. 

On day one, the Trump Administration took concrete steps to unlawfully steal funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and from a broad swath of federal agencies and programs funded through regular appropriations bills. 

They froze grant program funding, and shut down the payment systems for Medicaid and Head Start – hurting people who depend on those programs to see a doctor and send their child to preschool – until Democrats forcefully objected and federal courts temporarily halted their actions.

These brazen, illegal actions were explicitly prophesied in Project 2025. And Project 2025’s architects, including Russ Vought, are taking positions within the Administration to carry out their agenda of demolition. Trump’s disavowal of Project 2025 was a big lie, and the American people must hear this. 

By Vought’s design, the Administration has taken the groundless position – and demonstrated – that they believe the White House has the absolute power to determine spending, and that they can choose to simply not fund programs and services that Congress has lawfully appropriated money for.

This could not be further from the truth.

The Constitution empowers Congress, not the President, with the power of the purse.

When the President signs an appropriations bill, it becomes law, just like any other bill. And the White House is responsible for seeing that provisions of that law are carried out. 

The President is not a king who can pick and choose which laws to follow and which laws to ignore. But the President is relying on the guidance and counsel of Russ Vought to do just that.

Vought is an extremist who believes the President is all-powerful. He has a radical plan to destroy and dismantle Congress’ investments in our families’ health, safety, and prosperity – utilizing, as he wrote in Project 2025, quote, “aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch.” And the President has nominated him to lead the Office of Management and Budget – the agency tasked with administering federal funds as appropriated by Congress. 

Vought plans to abuse spending laws by operating as if the President has unchecked, unilateral power to impound – that is, to deny or steal funds provided in law for American families and businesses. 

He made this clear when he refused to commit to upholding the law in his Senate hearings.

We have the Constitution on our side. Our founding document gives Congress the power of the purse, and nowhere does it give the President any unilateral impoundment power. 

The Supreme Court and Department of Justice have resoundingly debunked Vought’s ideology that would turn Congress’ Article I power of the purse on its head, as has current Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, as then-Judge Kavanaugh for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 2013, when he opined that, quote, “even the President does not have unilateral authority to refuse to spend.” 

It really is that simple.

Throughout the 118th Congress, we beat back Republicans’ dangerous proposals to massively slash funding for the programs and services that serve the most vulnerable Americans – that ensure children and pregnant mothers have food to eat, that ensure schoolchildren have a teacher in their classroom, and that ensure lower income families are able to heat their homes in the winter.

We thwarted their attacks on the American people – so now, Republicans are attempting to reshape our government by going around Congress, and the law, altogether, and dismantling these programs and services at the source. 

And this week, the Senate will decide if the keys to OMB, the Executive Branch body that ultimately carries out appropriations throughout the executive branch, should go to Russ Vought.

For the sake of the health, safety, and freedom of the American people, and for the sake of the survival of our shared experiment in self-government, the Senate must deny Russ Vought’s nomination.

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