Russell Vought should be impeached
President Donald Trump knows that if Democrats manage to win back control of the House in November, his third impeachment likely will not be far behind. And yet, despite racking up a laundry list of potentially impeachable offenses primed for investigation, the president might not be the most vulnerable person in his administration. Democrats would be wise instead to set their sights not on the White House itself, but next door in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where Russell Vought has spent the last year and a half willfully breaking the law.
As head of the White House Office of Management and Budget, Vought has a hand in how practically every tiny bud on the executive branch operates. With the possible exception of deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Vought arguably has the firmest grip on the levers of power in Washington. While Trump’s focus is trained on a handful of obsessions, Vought has the knowledge and skill set to turn his Christian nationalist ideology into policy — and transform those policies into reality.
As head of the White House Office of Management and Budget, Vought has a hand in how practically every tiny bud on the executive branch operates
For years, Vought has advocated for massive, draconian cuts to federal spending, during both his previous stint atop the OMB in the waning days of the first Trump administration and as part of a pro-MAGA think tank in the interregnum period. The OMB acted as overseer for the Department of Government Efficiency project last year, providing an aegis for the quasilegal agency to initiate mass firings and unilateral spending cuts. While that effort failed to deliver on its promised savings, it gave Vought the ability to stress test his vision for a reduced role for Congress over spending.
Constitutionally, it’s Congress that controls the power of the purse. The president is required to submit a budget request to lawmakers each year, but he and all the executive departments and agencies under him rely on congressional appropriations to fund their activities. While Republicans control both the House and Senate, lawmakers yet again rejected the suggested cuts in Trump’s fiscal 2026 budget in favor of their own preferred spending levels.
Vought claims though that the figures in appropriations laws are a ceiling for how much can be spent, not an order of what must be spent. Accordingly, Trump’s OMB director has insisted that the president is allowed to hold back, or “impound,” funds that he doesn’t want to spend despite the 1974 Impoundment Control Act and Supreme Court precedent saying otherwise.
After one successful effort to get Congress to legally rescind unspent funds last year, Vought shifted tactics, using another tool at his disposal to make whatever spending reductions he sees fit. Once Congress has appropriated funds, it then falls to the OMB to apportion that money to agencies, telling them when to spend it and under what circumstances. According to a tracker from Protect Democracy, a nonprofit group dedicated to anti-authoritarianism, Vought has used the “apportionment” process to hold up millions of dollars in funds that Congress has allocated.
A recent opinion essay published in The Hill from Cerin Lindgrensavage, a counsel with Project Democracy, and David A. Super, a law professor at Georgetown Law, detailed some of these budget cuts via apportionment, why they are illegal, and the overreach they represent:
Trump proposed cutting funds for the Smithsonian by more than $60 million. Congress rejected that cut and increased Smithsonian funding to account for inflation. Vought’s office then unlawfully forbade the Smithsonian from spending any money Congress appropriated beyond the president’s budget request…
Congress has made clear that this is not allowed. For more than a decade, annual appropriations bills have required, government-wide, that no funds “may be used to increase, eliminate, or reduce funding for a program, project, or activity as proposed in the President’s budget request for a fiscal year until such proposed change is subsequently enacted in an appropriation act,” unless the administration follows congressional procedures to reprogram appropriated funds.
The two also argued that in withholding those funds, Vought and Trump have violated not just the Impoundment Control Act, which has no legal penalties, but also the Anti-Deficiency Act, which does: “When a president delays, withholds or impounds funds to impose a cut proposed rejected by Congress, he is blatantly disregarding the appropriations laws: the funds appropriated for the salary of the Office of Management and Budget officials imposing those cuts is being spent in direct violation of that legal prohibition.”
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House.
