Russell Vought, the once and future Director of the Office of Management and Budget and primary author of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, gave a speech in 2024 laying out plans to shrink the federal government in a second Trump term by firing massive numbers of civil service workers. He famously declared that they wanted “the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. 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…we want to put them in trauma.” That dream has come true.
Thousands of federal workers have been traumatized and the Supreme Court just held that Vought and company can traumatize them as much as they choose. Little did we know that he also planned to traumatize potentially millions of poor people all over the world but he’s done that too, with the eager help of Donald Trump and the entire Republican Party establishment.
This week, on a strict party line vote, the GOP congressional majority officially rescinded the previously appropriated funding for $9 billion in foreign aid, an amount so catastrophic that the medical journal Lancet estimates that more than 14 million additional deaths could occur by 2030, including over 4.5 million in children younger than age 5. This funding for the now defunct USAID had been illegally cut previously by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the DOGE wrecking crew but the administration wanted to have the Republican Congress share the responsibility for this ruinous decision and apparently they were eager to do so. With just a couple of defectors in each house, the allegedly “pro-life” GOP happily signed on to the suffering and death of millions of people around the world. Not one Democrat voted for it.
If you haven’t heard of the process they used for this — “rescission” — it’s because it’s an arcane provision of the 1974 Impoundment Control Act (ICA) which was enacted in the wake of budgetary abuse by Richard Nixon, another imperial president, who routinely impounded funding simply because he didn’t like the laws that he himself had signed. He claimed then (as the Trump administration claims now) that the law might say that the Congress has the responsibility to appropriate funds but nothing says that the president has to spend it. This practice was taken to court repeatedly and Nixon lost each time, including one unanimous verdict by the Supreme Court.
The Congress finally decided that the only way to stop this was to formally make it illegal so they passed the ICA which established the Independent Congressional Budget Office to give unbiased, non-partisan budget analysis, defined the procedures by which the President could propose rescissions of funds and deferrals of them to a later date and provided for a process allowing the Congress to override the rescissions and deferrals. A rescission request by the president must be acted upon within 45 days or it dies and historically a lot of them never see the light of day. Congress used to fiercely protect its budgeting authority. Now they seem to be mostly interested in appearing on Fox News and groveling for Donald Trump.
Since the ICA was enacted it hasn’t been uncommon for presidents to submit rescission requests but they weren’t granted very often. In fact the last one enacted until this week was by President Bill Clinton. But, as the Huffington Post reported, this is a favorite hobby horse of OMB Director Vought so you can expect to see a lot more of it. He’s even pushing the idea of so-called “pocket rescissions” an unethical and legally dubious shortcut in which the president submits the request for a funding cut late in the year so the funding expires before the 45 days is up. Vought has been open about using it.
He’s also been open about his willingness to simply ignore the ICA altogether. In fact, he already did that once during the first Trump term when he agreed to withhold military funding for Ukraine which Trump used in his attempt to extort President Volodymyr Zelensky in that infamous “perfect phone call.” It got Trump impeached but that hasn’t stopped Vought from continuing to insist that the president has no obligation under the constitution to follow the law.
The Huffington Post says that Vought commented at a recent Christian Science Monitor breakfast with reporters that he sees no reason to even try to accomplish anything in a bipartisan manner stipulating that he’ll “only work with House and Senate Democratic appropriators ‘if they conduct themselves with decorum.'” And he knows that the zombies which makes up the GOP Congress will blindly walk off of any cliff Trump tell them to, so it’s not problem there.
The handwriting is on the wall. They passed their massive giveaway to the wealthy at the expense of working families in Trump’s One Big Boondoggle Bill on a party line vote. It adds 3 trillion to the deficit which gives the lie to Vought’s paeans to “fiscal responsibility.” He just wants to cut programs that help people because he doesn’t believe in that. (He told reporters at the Christian Science Monitor event that he’s “having fun” citing the massive cuts to the National Institute of Health.)
Donald Trump doesn’t believe in that either even as he will often try to portray himself as a leader who cares. (Why just this week he announced that he’s making Coca-Cola use only real cane sugar in their drinks!) And clearly, the GOP congress hasn’t even the slightest concern for the millions of people around the world for whom they have just signed death warrants.
The $9 billion rescission in foreign aid they just passed in both houses this week is a travesty. Every last GOP official who voted for it and every member of the Trump administration who pushed it has blood on their hands. And it’s only the beginning. The way they’re going they will soon be drowning in it.
Priorities:
Salon