Organizations are asked to urge Senate to oppose nomination of Russell Vought for Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).  

The deadline for organizations to sign the letter is Wednesday, December 11. 

To read or sign the letter, click here.  

Vought served as Acting Director, then later, Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), for the final two years of President Trump’s first term. While serving as Director, as stated in the letter, Vought “sought to strip protections from 88% of the agency’s workforce to serve as a model for other agencies to follow.” 

The letter states that Vought “was a key architect of ‘Schedule F,’ a plan to dismantle and undermine the nonpartisan, performance-based federal civil service.” The new administration has made a promise to reimplement Schedule F as soon as possible, authorizing agencies to “involuntarily transfer their employees into new positions stripped of due process protections, and make them fireable at will.” This would also allow any president, no matter which party, to “purge federal agencies of nonpartisan experts.”

The letter goes on to say that Vought supports the president invoking the Insurrection Act, which would allow the president to both “deploy military troops within the country in particular circumstances” and “detain and deport immigrants, as well as to target civil society protesters.” The letter adds that Vought believes the president should be allowed to “use the military to shut down demonstrations, holding up the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd in summer 2020 as a time when President Trump should have been able to deploy the armed forces. He has also worked in the past to create new, ‘legal’ justifications for authorizing military force along the southern border by recasting migration as an invasion.”  

The letter concludes with the declaration, “We believe that Vought’s record demonstrates that he is unfit to serve as OMB director.” 

If you have questions, please contact Joe Spielberger of the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), (joe.spielberger@pogo.org).