Russ Vought
speaker
409 appearances
6 recordings
5 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 18 Apr
Russ Vought’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
There is no lever, right? And so they have existed with this notion that they have this priestly ability to make decisions. And in fact, I don't actually think they're that good at it. I think people like President Trump are, in fact, better at it. And there's no reason that they should be exempt from the normal democratic process.
And if Congress wants to come along and pass rules, it says, you know, this is how we want the money supply to go. All of that is in their purview. But I think, you know, this is not some exception to the rule. Doesn't mean in any way that, you know, President Trump has any interest in doing anything in this area.
But I don't think it's the exception that proves the rule on independence being something that is important. downstream to the CDC, the NIH. I think everything that people like Bobby Kennedy have been running on and others is about, no, you're not some priestly role. You are politicians yourself. You just don't have to face voters, right? So independence is, I think, first and foremost.
Number two, bring back the notion of impoundment. And this is something that- Of what? Of impoundment, the ability to not spend money. For 200 years, presidents had the ability to not spend a congressional appropriation. That has always been the constitutional system. It had been brought, it had been a paradigm that had been brought from the UK and how we understood
The constitutional principle is certainly power of the purse means that Congress gets to set the ceiling. You can't spend without a congressional appropriation, but you weren't ever meant to be forced to spend it, and it has become a floor. So 200 years, presidents are using impoundment. They get money for something.
The president says, I don't think it's a good idea, or I certainly can do it better, or I have events that are happening overseas that cause me not to want to spend on the All manner of executive decision-making that would be a part of that.
In the 1970s, at the lowest moment of the presidency, Congress steps in, and to some extent the courts, and they pass the Impoundment Control Act, which was really the Impoundment Elimination Act. And from that moment, they had destroyed separation of powers. on spending and on fiscal issues. But it was beyond that. It wasn't just about dollars and cents. It was about control of the bureaucracy.
And I believe, as a budget guy, that was the original sin on why we can't do anything fiscally from that moment on. It's also why we get omnibus bills. Because if I only need you to get your signature and I lose all of my ability to, throughout the rest of the fiscal year, to push and pull and not spend and make different decisions, I just got to get your one signature.
So I'm going to put everything... In that one bill, thousands of pages, and I'm going to push it through at the most – the hardest time for you politically. You might have some diplomatic visit that you're going on.
And so impoundment is vitally important not just to save the country fiscally. It is vitally important to be able to wrest control of the bureaucracy because when you combine – Congress giving the agencies vast authority to interpret the laws that they passed, overly broad, make law essentially. Make law essentially that has no repercussions on the people who voted it, right?
They don't have to vote on what the right blend is for ethanol. And then you say that your funding is going for Congress and the president has no ability. Sorry, Mr. President, you don't have to – that's illegal. You can't turn off my funding. Right. Now, imperial Congress still exists, just a lot more subtle. So that's number two, bringing back impoundment.
Number three is dramatically going at restoring at-will employment as far as you can. A lot of ideas on the agenda, but...
You only want it from the standpoint of control if you want to be able to say, you're going to spend what I tell you you're going to spend. It is nothing more than an institutional desire to, to force the president to spend an X amount of money. But again, it's never just about that. It's always about where they have tried to innovate it from really the progressive era.
Like they wanted congressional government. That was the title of Woodrow Wilson's book. He wanted a system where essentially the agencies... largely worked out of the Congress or associated with Congress, not unlike what you would see in the House of Commons, right, where their cabinet lives in their House of Parliament.
And it's largely, you know, the monarch, the executive over time becomes toothless. That's essentially what they have wanted and have pursued at every turn here. And you saw that on steroids with them using the events of Watergate to promulgate new paradigms and ways of binding the constitutional system from working.
So everything post-Watergate is largely, you can just make an assumption, it's not the way it was meant to work. And so you have our guys defending post-Watergate paradigms instead of trying to think through, okay, let's go back. Let's go back to what the founders would have actually envisioned.
laws that have been passed, perhaps not challenged, laws that have been passed that give them bargaining power, that give them certain processes that have to be followed before they can be dismissed. But I think in that, and it certainly made it very, very hard to hire and fire, the current system
needs to be changed but it also can be used to deal with these same kind of actors if you're willing to do it and i don't want to get into all of the tools that are available right but they exist you know one of them is the you know the reduction force i mean you you can and vivek has talked about this i mean you can proceed on the basis of what is good for the efficiency and the effectiveness of the agency
to be able to dramatically lower at a macro level the size of the workforce. And that will give you certain legal abilities to begin to move people off of the payroll. So, there's a lot of things that are being creatively discussed in this space, but it has to be front and center. Schedule F, as President Trump has already run on, that seems to be like a day one thing.
He has already instituted in his first term. We just didn't get to get it across the finish line. Every agency has to go and categorize how many of his employees are policy employees. and therefore subject to at-will employment.
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