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office of management and budget
Progressives Slam 'Extremist' Plans of Project 2025 Architect Tapped for Key Trump Post
Russell Vought, Trump's pick to head the White House Office of Management and Budget, was questioned by members of the Senate Homeland Security Committee during a Wednesday confirmation hearing.
Jan 15, 2025
As a U.S. Senate committee held a confirmation hearing for Russell Vought—Republican President-elect Donald Trump's pick to head the White House Office of Management and Budget—progressive critics underscored what they called the extremism of the controversial nominee, who played a key role in crafting a proposed initiative to expand executive power and purge the federal civil service.
Vought—who was questioned Wednesday by members of the Senate Homeland Security Committee—served as both acting director and director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) during Trump's first term. He currently leads the think tank Center for Renewing America, whose motto is "For God. For Country. For Community."
The defender of Christian nationalism recently co-authored the policy portion of Project 2025, which includes dramatic cuts to critical public programs, abolishing or gutting essential government agencies, a national abortion ban, and a litany of additional far-right wish list items. While Trump has tried to distance himself from the deeply unpopular proposal, at least 140 people who worked in his first administration—including six former Cabinet secretaries—have been involved with Project 2025.
Tapped to oversee an agency that plays a key role in managing civil servants, Vought was secretly recorded saying he wants government officials to be "traumatically affected" by his reforms "because they are increasingly viewed as the villains."
Debra Perlin, policy director at the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility in Washington, submitted written testimony to the Senate committee in which she warned that "should he be confirmed, it is abundantly clear that Mr. Vought intends to misuse his authority as director of OMB to harm civil servants, and as a result, endanger the American public."
Perlin continued:
During his tenure as OMB acting director and then director from January 2019 to January 2021, Mr. Vought was a central figure in attempting to implement Schedule F, President Trump's executive order that would have upended the merit-based civil service system by stripping employment protections away from thousands of career civil servants had President [Joe] Biden not rescinded it. Mr. Vought has called for reinstating Schedule F and was a key architect of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's sweeping—and wildly unpopular—conservative policy plan that advocates for dismantling the civil service. If Schedule F is reinstated, it would not only harm federal employees but would also cause catastrophic harm to government services, as well as causing deep economic impacts in places with significant populations of government workers including California, Texas, Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., among others.
In addition to Mr. Vought's intention to dismantle the civil service, he has pushed extreme strategies to consolidate presidential power under the banner of "radical constitutionalism." He supports the president withholding congressionally appropriated funds in violation of the Impoundment Control Act, bypassing the advice and consent of the Senate to push recess appointments, invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy the military on the American public, and abusing emergency powers. These plans to expand presidential power are even more troubling taken with Mr. Vought's stated desire to reduce the independence of federal agencies such as the Department of Justice, in part by purging agencies of career civil servants that are seen as standing in the way of the president's agenda. Mr. Vought has called for "an army of investigators" to prosecute current and former government officials who sought to hold President Trump accountable.
"These are just some of the ways Mr. Vought intends to misuse his own authority and craft plans for the president to subvert the law and, in the process, American democracy," Perlin added.
In a statement coinciding with Wednesday's hearing, Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said: "Vought has no business going back to OMB. His extreme ideological opposition to regulations that protect consumers, workers, our environment, and public health and safety will lead to more deregulatory disasters that harm all of us."
"He wants to slash funding for critical government agencies and services, interfere with agencies that are supposed to be politically independent, exclude the benefits of regulation from cost-benefit analysis, and fire vast numbers of civil service employees simply for doing their jobs," Gilbert added. "In addition, he abused his power during his last tenure at OMB to override agency experts, repeatedly endangering public health and safety. The Senate should reject this dangerous and extreme nomination."
Congressman Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), founder of the Stop Project 2025 Task Force, said Wednesday that "we don't have to guess if Russ Vought will enact the radical vision laid out in Project 2025 if he is confirmed, because he literally wrote the playbook and his record shows that he will stop at nothing to enact it."
"He is a self-avowed Christian nationalist who plans to dismantle the civil service—replacing thousands of qualified, nonpartisan federal employees such as scientists and engineers with political lackeys who will be selected to follow partisan orders above the law or the Constitution," the lawmaker continued. "He has vowed to ignore the Constitution by seizing unlawful power for Trump to unilaterally withhold or redirect funds for entire agencies or programs that Congress appropriated."
"His aggressive plan to gut checks and balances clears the way for Trump to enact his entire Project 2025 agenda to sell out the middle class, threaten personal rights and freedoms, and impose biblical morality codes on all of us," Huffman added. "We cannot take that risk and let this authoritarian architect of Project 2025 anywhere near the federal budget or the Oval Office."
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Markey, Schumer Demand Civil Rights Protections for Federal Use of AI
"Without new protections," they warned, "today's supercharged, AI-powered algorithms risk reinforcing and magnifying the discrimination that marginalized communities already experience."
Sep 16, 2024
U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Ed Markey on Monday sent a letter urging the Biden administration to pursue additional action to protect civil rights and liberties related to federal agencies' use of artificial intelligence.
While recognizing the "strong steps" that the administration has already taken—such as President Joe Biden's October 2023 executive order—Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Markey (D-Mass.) stressed to Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Shalanda Young that "more must be done" to mitigate, prevent, and eliminate algorithmic bias and discrimination.
Specifically, the pair is pushing OMB to "require all federal agencies that use AI for consequential decisions to establish a civil rights office, if they do not already have one; ensure all civil rights offices are staffed with experts in algorithmic discrimination; and encourage federal agencies to establish additional safeguards to prevent algorithmic discrimination."
As the Biden White House explained in its 2022 Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, "Algorithmic discrimination occurs when automated systems contribute to unjustified different treatment or impacts disfavoring people based on their race, color, ethnicity, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions, gender identity, intersex status, and sexual orientation), religion, age, national origin, disability, veteran status, genetic information, or any other classification protected by law."
"Biased algorithms have increasingly been used to make or influence decisions, imposing real harm on Black, Brown, immigrant, and other marginalized communities."
The ACLU earlier this year sued Biden's National Security Agency in hopes of uncovering how it is using AI, and emphasized concerns that the NSA's use of such tools could harm civil rights and liberties.
The senators wrote Monday that "by ensuring that agencies have the resources, personnel, and policies to detect and mitigate bias, we can ensure that the AI age does not come at the expense of already marginalized and vulnerable communities."
"Without new protections," they warned, "today's supercharged, AI-powered algorithms risk reinforcing and magnifying the discrimination that marginalized communities already experience due to poorly trained and tested algorithms."
The senators highlighted how "biased algorithms have increasingly been used to make or influence decisions, imposing real harm on Black, Brown, immigrant, and other marginalized communities," citing examples from mortgage applications, hiring and employment, government benefits, and healthcare.
Earlier this year, OMB issued guidance regarding government use of AI tools, which Damon T. Hewitt, president and executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, called "a significant step to implement meaningful safeguards."
Noting that the guidance directs agencies to "cease use of any AI that the agency finds cannot adequately mitigate unlawful discrimination," the senators argued that "OMB should also work with agencies to set strict guidelines to prevent algorithmic discrimination within relevant agency jurisdiction."
The OMB, they said, should push agencies to require recipients of federal funds and contracts "to complete pre-development, pre-deployment, and ongoing impact assessments to identify, mitigate, prevent, and eliminate biased AI," as well as "to allow individuals to opt out of AI-powered algorithms used in consequential decisions and instead request human decision-makers."
The senators also urged the office to pressure U.S. agencies to "fund the development of common, accessible resources for auditing algorithms—including open-source tools—for bias, discrimination, and other harms," and to "develop guidance on best practices for mitigating the development and deployment of biased AI-powered algorithms."
"Finally, because a regulation is only as strong as its enforcement, OMB should support federal agencies that take robust enforcement against any company found to violate these rules," the senators wrote, calling on Young to convene inspectors general to coordinate on best practices.
Reporting on the letter, Axiosnoted Monday that "Schumer's bipartisan AI roadmap fell short for civil rights organizations that wanted stronger language on algorithmic bias and discrimination."
Meanwhile, Markey has been a key force behind both the Algorithmic Justice and Online Platform Transparency Act and the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act.
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How Biden Can De-Reaganify Contracting Standards
We should’ve gotten rid of these Reagan-era restrictions long ago, but doing so now is more important than ever, with massive new federal funds in the pipeline for infrastructure and climate projects.
Dec 10, 2023
Ronald Reagan left highly visible marks on our capital city. The president who believed trees cause pollution now has his name carved into an edifice housing Environmental Protection Aagency offices. The infamous buster of the air traffic controllers union has an eponymous airport.
Even more disturbing? Vestiges of the Reagan era that are nearly invisible but continue to undermine progress towards a more equitable and sustainable economy.
Case in point: an obscure Office of Management and Budget (OMB) policy dubbed the “Uniform Guidance” that sets out rules for state and local governments when they use federal funds to pay private contractors. Republican officials in the Reagan administration seized on this policy as a weapon for blocking sub-federal actions they didn’t like.
Despite zero empirical evidence that an “efficiency above all” approach would improve contracting outcomes, the Reaganites succeeded in making it difficult for states and cities to attach labor and equity standards to contracts, for fear they would lose federal funding.
What, in particular, had the Reaganites so rankled? This was the 1980s, the era of a growing global movement to divest from Apartheid South Africa. Some U.S. cities and states wanted to join universities, churches, and other investors in refusing to do business with corporations that were profiting off the racist regime.
A report by Jobs to Move America and the Center for Media and Democracy delves into this history in depth, documenting the Reagan administration’s crusade to elevate contracting “efficiency” and “fair and open competition” above other interests, from fighting Apartheid to creating family-supporting jobs for those who need them most.
Reagan-Era Rules Reinforced Historic Racial and Economic Inequities
That Reagan officials lumped these issues together should come as no surprise. The Apartheid system itself was both racist and anti-union, designed to protect the privileges of a white elite class. And while the Republicans couched their arguments in free market rhetoric, the impact of their changes to OMB regulations reinforced our own country’s deeply embedded racial and economic inequities.
Despite zero empirical evidence that an “efficiency above all” approach would improve contracting outcomes, the Reaganites succeeded in making it difficult for states and cities to attach labor and equity standards to contracts, for fear they would lose federal funding.
The revisions also explicitly banned local hire programs, despite significant research dispelling the myth that such programs are anti-competitive and demonstrating positive benefits for disadvantaged workers and local economies. The Reagan-imposed ban meant, for example, that a largely Black city with high unemployment rooted in historic racism would have little power to prevent a contractor from bringing in an all-white, non-local engineering crew for an infrastructure project in their municipality.
We should’ve gotten rid of these Reagan-era restrictions long ago, but doing so now is more important than ever, with massive new federal funds in the pipeline for infrastructure and climate projects. Public funds are precious, and we all have an interest in ensuring that the benefits of these investments are equitably shared.
Biden Administration Proposals for Undoing These 1980s Holdovers
Fortunately, Biden’s OMB is moving in this direction with recently issued proposals for updating the Uniform Guidance. In a detailed public comment letter, nearly 150 unions and other members of the Local Opportunities Coalition commend the administration for positive improvements in 11 areas. Top on their list: the welcome removal of the ban on local hire policies.
The coalition also highlights changes to allow the use of scoring mechanisms to give companies a leg up in bidding competitions if they commit to creating specific numbers and types of jobs, with minimum levels of compensation and benefits. They also note positive steps to explicitly allow hiring preferences for disadvantaged communities, the use of project labor agreements between employers and workers and other pre-hire collective bargaining agreements, bans on the use of contract funds for union-busting, and protections against employers misclassifying workers as “independent contractors” to skirt labor laws.
How the Administration Could Go Further to Ensure Public Investments Benefit Workers and Communities
The Local Opportunities Coalition also recommends a few key ways the Biden administration could strengthen their proposals. For instance, they could explicitly allow states and cities to require that contractors (and their subcontractors) pay living wages and clarify that local hire policies can apply to both infrastructure and service contracts.
In a separate comment letter, several pro-worker and Wall Street accountability groups also applauded the Biden administration’s progress while suggesting that OMB officials also make explicit that state and local officials have the flexibility to consider additional equity factors to ensure public funds actually help workers instead of lining the pockets of wealthy executives and shareholders.
Specifically, they urge support for procurement policies that give preference to companies that refrain from wasteful spending on stock buybacks, excessive CEO pay, and private equity-driven leveraged buyouts and drastic cost-cutting.
“Discouraging these practices will help ensure that corporate recipients of public funds provide high-quality services with broadly shared benefits,” notes the letter, signed by Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund, the Institute for Policy Studies, Communications Workers of America, Jobs to Move America, Take on Wall Street, and United for Respect.
The OMB is expected to finalized changes to the Uniform Guidance in early 2024.
Back in the 1980s, Reagan’s efforts to crush the anti-Apartheid divestment movement ultimately failed. With demands for sanctions mounting, Congress passed a law in 1986 that gave cover to this effective means of solidarity with the South African trade unionists and others who successfully brought down the racist regime.
By scrapping the remnants of Reagan’s ideologically driven contracting standards, the Biden administration can build on this proud history of using the public purse for the greater good.
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