Vought grilled over DOGE, spending cuts in House hearing

The Hill

2 days ago

Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought was grilled by both sides of the aisle over the administration's sweeping cost-cutting plans as he testified before House appropriators Wednesday afternoon.
Vought faced a wide-ranging list of questions during a budget hearing, as lawmakers pressed him over President Trump's latest spending cut requests, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), along with a major tax package of the president's priorities making its way through Congress.
One area of bipartisan interest was leadership at DOGE, an effort Trump previously tapped tech billionaire Elon Musk for.
Vought said the administration was 'in the midst of, with the last week or so, of establishing the leadership on an ongoing basis' following the exit of Musk. Other top officials at the department have also departed in recent days, including Steve Davids, whom Vought noted previously led the effort.
He added that he partly thinks 'the vision for DOGE' is that it 'go and be far more institutionalized' at actual agencies and working 'almost as in-house consultants as a part of the agency's leadership.
The OMB chief also faced questions over the president's budget request for fiscal 2026, which lawmakers have noted is incomplete.
'Where's the budget?' Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.), a spending cardinal asked him.
'We believe you have the budget,' Vought responded, after the White House released a 1,000-page budget document last Friday detailing more of its demands.
'We have a skinny budget,' Womack said.
'You have the skinny budget, discretionary budget in full,' the OMB director replied, which he said allows the House' funding 'to get the appropriations process moving forward.'
Vought added that the administration has been focused at the same time on getting the president's tax plan to his desk, after it recently passed the House and faces changes in the Senate.
He also faced heat from Democrats over other components of that plan, including reforms to Medicaid that Republicans have attached to the proposed tax cuts as an effort to save hundreds of billions of federal dollars over the next decade.
'The bill that you just said the White House supports is going to add, depending [on] who you talk to, 2.4 trillion to $5 trillion to the national debt,' Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) said. 'It's going to make somewhere between 11 and 16 million people lose their health care.
'I know you said on a Sunday morning show, no one will lose coverage as a result of this bill is that still your standing?' the lawmaker asked.
Vought responded that the bill does 'not lead to less coverage for Medicaid beneficiaries.' They both went back and forth over the bill's impact on the program before Pocan needled Vought on the fiscal impact of the bill.
The budget chief said, 'the bill will not increase the debt,' however, federal budget analysts estimate it would add more than $2 trillion to the nation's deficits in roughly a decade.
Another notable moment from the hearing came when Vought was questioned by a Republican about proposed cuts to the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) pursued as part of the Trump administration's latest rescissions request.
He defended the reductions as targeting items like 'teaching young children how to make environmentally friendly reproductive health decisions' and efforts he claimed were aimed at strengthening 'the resilience of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer global movements.'
Rep. Mark Alford (R-Mo.) raised the question of PEPFAR cuts, later pressed Vought about whether prevention efforts would be impacted by the proposed reductions.
'Aside from the crazy woke programs, which I agree should be stripped,' Alford asked, 'is there any other prevention program, not treatment, but prevention program listed in this rescission package which is not of a woke nature?'
Vought said in response that the administration seeks to scale 'down the program as it pertains to the types of organizations that are providing the examples of the waste, fraud and abuse.' But, he added, 'the prevention itself is where an analytical look needs to be done.'
'There's life saving treatment after you already have HIV, but there are prevention programs that PEPFAR does, which are not of the woke nature, which can prevent someone from getting HIV,' Alford countered. 'Are those programs going to survive?'
'It is something that our budget will be very trim on because we believe that many of these nonprofits are not geared toward the viewpoints of the administration, and we're $37 trillion in debt,' Vought said. 'So, at some point, the continent of Africa needs to absorb more of the burden of providing this healthcare.'
Rep. Rosa DeLauro (Conn.), top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, additionally grilled the budget chief at one point over the administration's takedown of a public website that showed how funding is apportioned to federal agencies.
'Your predecessor did comply with the law for over two years, and you followed this law for two months. What happened?' DeLauro asked Vought. 'Why did the website come down? Why do we not know what is happening? Why are we going back to those days of secret decisions being made by you and whomever else in terms of the spending of the dollars that we constitutionally enacted?'
Vought responded that the administration 'had constitutional concerns with the provision' and 'it's something that degraded our ability to manage taxpayer resources.'
DeLauro told the OMB director shortly after that she thought the 'level of your honesty on your claims [really] shines through on this topic' and accused him of making 'up constitutional issues.'
'We have no way of knowing if you are carrying out what we have lawfully required the executive branch to do,' the Connecticut Democrat said. 'That is our responsibility, and your responsibility is to carry out what it is that we have appropriated here.'
'You just can't pick and choose whatever the hell you want,' she added.