Tag: project 2025
Russ Vought

Senate Democrats Will Filibuster Christian Nationalist Vought's Nomination

Senate Democrats are uniting to block — or at least delay — the confirmation process for Russ Vought, the self-describedChristian nationalist” architect of Project 2025, as President Donald Trump’s nominee for Director of the Office of Management and Budget. To push back against his confirmation, they plan to hold the Senate floor starting Wednesday afternoon, vowing to speak “all night.”

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI), who has urged Democrats use their power to stall Trump’s agenda, announced that “more than 35 United States senators on the Democratic side” will “take the floor for 30 hours.”

“Russ Vought is the main author of Project 2025,” Schatz said. “He’s the guy that established this federal funding freeze. He is the architect of the dismantling of our federal government, harming us with Medicaid portals shut down, with Head Start shut down, with agencies illegally stormed and the servers being seized. We’ve got to fight back and we’re united, all 47 Democrats in opposition to Russ Vought’s nomination.”

“If confirmed, Russ Vought may be the most important man that no one’s ever heard of,” declared Senator Schatz on the Senate floor Wednesday afternoon.

Vought has been getting some attention in the press.

“In times past, Vought — who famously asked ‘Is There Anything Actually Wrong With ‘Christian Nationalism?’’ in Newsweek in 2021 — would have been seen, and dismissed, as an over-the-top extremist well outside the boundaries of mainstream politics,” wrote Thomas B. Edsall in a New York Times opinion column on Tuesday. “Today, he is a lauded Trump loyalist on the verge of his second tour of duty with the president, in one of the most powerful posts in the federal government.”

“In Vought’s vision of the apocalyptic battle for the soul of America,” Edsall continued, “Democrats are ‘increasingly evil.’ The federal work force, in turn, is the enemy that must be forced into submission. ‘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,’ Vought, who is 48, declared last year. ‘We want to put them in trauma.’ ”

Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune plans to have Vought confirmed this week.

Last month during Vought’s confirmation hearing, Senate Homeland Security Committee Ranking Member Gary Peters (D-MI) told him that when he ran OMB during President Trump’s first term, “you consistently ignored laws passed by Congress that directed how taxpayer dollars should be spent.”

“In 2020, an investigation by the Government Accountability Office found that OMB, under your leadership, broke the law eight times.”

Peters said Vought “inappropriately delayed disaster relief funding for Puerto Rico following the devastation of Hurricane Maria,” and “knowingly delayed getting critical resources to communities following a disaster even after Congress passed a law specifically requiring the funds be disbursed on time.”

He also, Peters charged, “pushed for” replacing “nearly 50,000 nonpartisan, career civil servants with appointees whose only qualification was their political loyalty.”

Senate Democratic Appropriations Committee Vice Chair Patty Murray has called Vought “incredibly alarming,” and one of Trump’s “anti-abortion extremists.” She noted that Vought was “the lead author of Project 2025, which called for ripping away birth control, allowing states to nigh women, lifesaving emergency care, and effectively banning all abortion nationwide.”

“He has said he wants abolition of abortion in the United States,” Murray added. “In other words, a national abortion ban without any exceptions, even in the cases of rape or when a mother’s life is at risk.”

“Vought has called to outlaw medication abortion, block funding, for Planned Parenthood, and advocated for President Trump to appoint a new special assistant in the White House to coordinate anti-abortion policies across government.”

Watch the videos above or at this link.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Mike Johnson

Narrower GOP Majority Will Be Hell For Weakened Speaker Johnson

Democrats gained seats in the House of Representatives, narrowing an already small Republican majority for 2025. With a larger majority in the current Congress, Republican infighting left the chamber unable to pass legislation for much of the past two years.

California Republican Rep. John Duarte conceded on December 3 after the final count in the 13th District found Democratic challenger Adam Gray won by 187 votes, ending the final uncalled House race of the November 2024 election. With Gray’s win, Republicans have just a 220-215 majority for 2025, two seats closer than their 222-213 margin after the 2022 midterms and just three seats away from losing control.

With President-elect Donald Trump taking office on January 20 and a 53-47 Republican majority in the U.S. Senate starting in January, GOP leaders hope to pass an array of conservative policy changes in 2025.

But a series of resignations could temporarily leave the GOP with no margin for error until special elections are held in the new year.

Trump’s aborted pick for attorney general, Florida Republican Matt Gaetz, resigned his House seat on November 13 amid an ethics committee investigation into his alleged sexual misconduct. He has said he will not return to Congress in 2025.

Florida Rep. Michael Waltz is set to resign January 20 to become Trump’s national security adviser and New York Rep. Elise Stefanik is leaving to be Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations.

With just a 217-215 majority, even a single defection would leave the GOP unable to pass legislation.

Since the 2022 elections, the Republican majority in the House has repeatedly made headlines for being disarray.

In January 2023, Republicans were unable to muster the required majority to elect California Rep. Kevin McCarthy as House speaker for days, requiring 15 ballots.

The caucus’ planned “first two weeks” agenda stalled, and Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) was only able to bring up about half of the 11 bills he promised would be “ready-to-go” in that time.

McCarthy’s tenure ended in October 2023, when right-wing members of the GOP successfully moved to remove him from the speakership. The party again deadlocked on a replacement, this time for three weeks. The party eventually settled on Louisiana Republican Mike Johnson.

Johnson’s tenure has thus far been no smoother. After passing almost no legislation in 2023, House Republicans repeatedly had to cancel announced votes because they could not garner a majority to agree on rules for debate or on the bills.

Despite Johnson’s promise to delay any recess until all 12 annual appropriations bills have passed, several have not passed the House as of early December.

Reprinted with permission from Michigan Independent.

Why Trump's Massive Tax Gift To The Rich Makes Some Republicans Nervous

Why Trump's Massive Tax Gift To The Rich Makes Some Republicans Nervous

Despite Republicans keeping the House of Representatives and flipping control of the Senate, some are acknowledging that extending President-elect Donald Trump's tax cuts in 2025 will be a tall order.

In a recent Politico article, several Republican members of Congress expressed worry that renewing the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TJCA) of 2017 could be difficult given its $4.6 trillion price tag. While the initial legislation came with an estimated cost of $1.5 trillion over 10 years, Politico reported that extending the approximately 40 provisions in the law would come in at a cost of $4 trillion over that same time period, with another $600 billion in interest.

The bulk of those tax cuts overwhelmingly benefit the rich. According to CNN, an analysis from July found that if the TJCA was extended next year, the richest five percent of taxpayers would reap almost half the benefits. Those making $450,000 and up would see their incomes increase by 3.2 percent, while the richest one percent — who make $1 million a year or more – would get an average tax cut of nearly $70,000. And the top 0.1 percent richest Americans would see a whopping $280,000 average reduction in their own taxes.

Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL), who sits on the House Ways and Means Committee (which oversees tax-related matters) was skeptical that the GOP would be able to easily pass the new tax cuts without a big fight even among members of his own party.

"That’s going to be the biggest challenge for the [House Republican] conference," he said.

Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-TX), who chairs the House Budget Committee, is also wary of any new tax cuts that will add to the federal deficit. In order to make the new round of tax cuts deficit-neutral, Arrington is pondering pairing them with cuts to Medicaid (the health insurance program for the poorest Americans), repealing green energy tax breaks and increasing taxes on corporate profits booked overseas that get repatriated. But House Ways and Means chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) told Politico he was less concerned about paying for a new round of tax cuts.

"“Look at history — were the Bush tax cuts paid for?” He said.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Trump Set To Name Project 2025 Architest As Top Budget Official

Trump Set To Name Project 2025 Architest As Top Budget Official

President-elect Donald Trump is planning to appoint Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist who has plotted to remake the federal workforce in MAGA’s image, to serve as his administration’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, according to CBS News. Vought held the same position during Trump’s first term. Since leaving office he has been a leading architect of Project 2025, a sprawling plan to provide staffing and policy options to the next Republican administration.

In his role at Project 2025, Vought was instrumental in ensuring that decimating the ranks of federal civil service became a conservative priority. He wrote the second chapter in Project 2025’s policy book — Mandate for Leadership — titled: “Executive Office of the President of the United States.” In it, he argued that “a President today assumes office to find a sprawling federal bureaucracy that all too often is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences—or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction of the country.”

As part of his anti-woke crusade, Vought has repeatedly defended and promoted Christian nationalism, at one point calling for an “army” of right-wing activists with “biblical worldview” to staff the next Republican administration. He wrote an op-ed for Newsweek in 2021 with the headline “Is There Anything Actually Wrong With 'Christian Nationalism?’” More recently, Politicoreported that a document from the Center for Renewing America — a MAGA-aligned think tank Vought founded — listed “Christian nationalism” as a top priority for a second Trump term.

While at the helm of the Center for Renewing America, Vought has been outspoken in his advocacy of Schedule F — a scheme to reclassify career civil servants as political appointees. Trump attempted to implement Schedule F in the waning days of his first term, but its effects were blunted by his loss in 2020. If his incoming administration moves forward with the plan, which seems all but inevitable, as many as 50,000 career staffers could be replaced with MAGA loyalists. (Some other estimates put the number closer to 20,000.)

Vought has championed the use of congressional rules to defund and remove individual government employees for punishment and deploying “ideological purity tests” to ensure federal workers are loyal to Trump.

During a recent interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Vought argued that the “whole notion of an independent agency should be thrown out.”

Following a broad backlash to Project 2025, Vought was caught on hidden video discussing his work at the initiative and how it might play if Trump returned to the White House.

“Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies, and we are working doggedly on that,” Vought said. “Whether it’s destroying agencies’ notion of independence, that they’re independent from the president.”

In the interview, Vought claimed that he’d been working on “about 350 different documents that are regulations and things of that nature” for a future Trump administration.

“You may say, ‘OK, DHS, we want to have the largest deportation — what are your actual memos that a secretary sends out to do it?’ Like, there’s an executive order, regulations, secretarial memos,” Vought said. “Those are the types of things that need to be thought through so you’re not — you’re not having to scramble or do that later on.”

This early preparation includes creating documents to facilitate the “largest deportation in history” and to deploy the military to “maintain law and order” against civilian protesters. Vought elaborated that the mass deportations were part of a plan to “end multiculturalism” in the country.

As a hardline conservative, Vought has pushed to implement harsh austerity measures throughout the country. The Washington Post reported that Vought advocates for eliminating trillions of dollars in “anti-poverty programs such as housing, health care, and food assistance.” He has called for massive cuts to Medicaid and floated future cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

Toward that end, Vought and his colleagues at the Center for Renewing America are leading proponents of a radical interpretation of executive authority that claims the president can unilaterally refuse to spend money allocated by Congress. Known as the “impoundment” power, Vought and his fellow travelers assert that a 1974 law that mandates presidents spend money Congress has allocated — passed after President Richard Nixon refused to spend federal funds for clean water and schools — is unconstitutional.

This theory, if Trump acts on it, would centralize budgeting power within the Oval Office and tilt the balance of power between the president and Congress even further towards the executive branch.

Aside from slashing the United States’ very limited safety net, Vought’s think tank released a budget proposal for fiscal year 2023 that would unleash the FBI against Trump’s declared enemies and “thwart the increasing societal destruction caused by progressive policies at the state and local levels that have defunded police, refused to prosecute criminals, and released violent felons into communities.”

Now, as he reprises his role as the head of OMB, he will wield considerable influence within the Trump administration and will almost certainly play a central role in the likely purge of the federal workforce.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

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