White House Budget Office Nominee Tries to Whitewash Trump’s First Term

Donald Trump’s pick to lead the White House budget office, Russell Vought, attempted to whitewash his previous record leading the powerful agency during his Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday.

The Project 2025 co-author, who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump 1.0, downplayed the impact and intent of one of the administration’s most controversial policies, Schedule F — a tool that would enable the federal government to mass fire civil servants and demand their political loyalty. 

On the eve of the 2020 election, Trump signed an executive order intended to reclassify tens of thousands of federal employees as political appointees, stripping their federal protections and making it easier to fire them. The executive order was never implemented and was eventually rescinded by President Joe Biden.

With Trump’s imminent return to office, however, the likely reimplementation of Schedule F is one of several moves that will put countless federal jobs on the line. Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, Trump’s picks to co-lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, have also vowed to dismantle the federal bureaucracy and slash 75 percent of the federal workforce. 

During the hearing, Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J., questioned Vought about his previous attempts to implement Schedule F and his support for the policy while at OMB, in subsequent interviews, and as a co-author of Project 2025, which calls for the procedure to be reimplemented. 

“Senator, that was not to fire anyone. It was to change their classification,” said Vought. He later added, “The purpose for changing that classification is to ensure that the president, who has policy setting responsibility, has individuals who are also in confidential policy-making positions, who are responding to his views, his agenda.” 

Experts on federal labor policy aren’t buying his assurances. “That’s just bullshit,” said Elaine C. Kamarck, the director of the Center for Effective Public Management at Brookings Institution. “I mean, you’re taking away the protected status of civil servants, and that means, in practice, it’s easy to fire them.” 

David Super, a law professor at Georgetown University who specializes in administrative and constitutional law, said that Vought’s description of events “does not” line up with his understanding of the policy. “What Schedule F proposes to do is dramatically increase the number of people who would be considered subject to firing at will,” Super said, noting that there are legal barriers to mass firing these employees immediately. 

Schedule F would politicize the workforce in a way that would impact even the federal employees who don’t get fired, Super added. “What we would then see is some federal employees who value the non-partisan tradition of the civil service resigning and being replaced by political operatives, campaign workers, donors, and other supporters of the president — and other federal employees feeling obliged to follow instructions, even ones that are contrary to law,” he said. 

Vought’s comments on Wednesday are an about-face from his recent statements on federal workers and Schedule F. In a November interview with Tucker Carlson, Vought vowed to implement Schedule F on “day one,” while also calling for widespread firings.

“There certainly is going to be mass layoffs and firings, particularly at some of the agencies that we don’t even think should exist,” Vought told Carlson.

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There’s also his record in office to contend with. Vought led the budget office during the last two years of the previous Trump administration. During that time, he was clear about his desire to eliminate countless federal jobs. For example, he repeatedly pushed for budgets that slashed funding for non-defense agencies and eliminated protections for federal workers. 

Karmarck said that if anything, eliminating large swaths of the federal workforce will only make it harder for the administration to implement its policies. “This is not smart,” she said. “This is going to come back and bite them.” 

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