Democratic appropriators will gain wide latitude to investigate how the administration has been spending money. They plan to regularly call in budget chief Russell Vought, who they’ve accused of defying Congress’ intentions for how money should be spent.
DeLauro and Murray want to add guardrails to funding bills to protect against the administration’s attempts to cut spending. They secured language in September’s stopgap funding law temporarily blocking Vought’s proposal to give political appointees more control over grant money.
They need to call Vought in on the regular. They need to make sure they quote his own words at him. He’s the one that needs to feel “traumatized”. He needs to spend lots and lots and lots of time in the barrel.
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” said Vought, one of the architects of Project 2025, Republicans’ radical, right-wing blueprint for overhauling the government.
“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,” he went on. “We want their funding to be shut down so that the [Environmental Protection Agency] can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.
“We want to put them in trauma.”