omb bak
1/22
used to block legis in B2 admin
note rev door omb, dod, nasa
capt 419
see OIRA graham tozzi
htmlchopping block
see nancy beck acc OIRAhttps://www.ewg.org/planet-trump/2017/05/scariest-trump-appointee-you-ve-never-heard
==
promoted primary 5/18
aha-let: omb always a gop tool, so not surprising when mick/djt used in ukraine
---
no lnx in orig
The Technocrat Engineering a Vast Expansion of Trump's Power
How Russell Vought, an author of Project 2025, is using a once low-profile budget office to decimate federal agencies, fire vast numbers of workers, and test the rule of law.
By Andy Kroll
October 17, 2025
:{“He has centralized decision-making power to an extent that he is the Commander-in-Chief,” a senior official said of Vought.
This article is a collaboration between The New Yorker and ProPublica.*
On the afternoon of February 12th, Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, summoned a small group of career staffers to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for a meeting about foreign aid. A storm had dumped nearly six inches of snow on Washington, D.C. The rest of the federal government was running on a two-hour delay, but Vought had offered his team no such reprieve. As they filed into a second-floor conference room decorated with photos of past O.M.B. directors, Vought took his seat at the center of a worn wooden table and laid his briefing materials out before him.
Vought, a bookish technocrat with an encyclopedic knowledge of the inner workings of the U.S. government, cuts an unusual figure in Trump’s inner circle of Fox News hosts and right-wing influencers. He speaks in a flat, nasally monotone and, with his tortoiseshell glasses, standard-issue blue suits, and corona of close-cropped hair, most resembles what he claims to despise: a federal bureaucrat. The Office of Management and Budget, like Vought himself, is little known outside the Beltway and poorly understood even among political insiders. What it lacks in cachet, however, it makes up for in the vast influence it wields across the government. Samuel Bagenstos, an O.M.B. general counsel during the Biden Administration, told me, “Every goddam thing in the executive branch goes through O.M.B.”
The O.M.B. reviews all significant regulations proposed by individual agencies. It vets executive orders before the President signs them. It issues workforce policies for more than two million federal employees. Most notably, every penny appropriated by Congress is dispensed by the O.M.B., making the agency a potential choke point in a federal bureaucracy that currently spends about seven trillion dollars a year. Shalanda Young, Vought’s predecessor, told me, “If you’re O.K. with your name not being in the spotlight and just getting stuff done,” then directing the O.M.B. “can be one of the most powerful jobs in D.C.”
During Donald Trump’s first term, Vought (whose name is pronounced “vote”) did more than perhaps anyone else to turn the President’s demands and personal grievances into government action. In 2019, after Congress refused to fund Trump’s border wall, Vought, then the acting director of the O.M.B., redirected billions of dollars in Department of Defense money to build it. Later that year, after the Trump White House pressured Ukraine’s government to investigate Joe Biden, who was running for President, Vought froze two hundred and fourteen million dollars in security assistance for Ukraine. “The President loved Russ because he could count on him,” Mark Paoletta, who has served as the O.M.B. general counsel in both Trump Administrations, said at a conservative policy summit in 2022, according to a recording I obtained. “He wasn’t a showboat, and he was committed to doing what the President wanted to do.”
After the pro-Trump riots at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, many Republicans, including top Administration officials, disavowed the President. Vought remained loyal. He echoed Trump’s baseless claims about election fraud and publicly defended people who were arrested for their participation in the melee. During the Biden years, Vought labored to translate the lessons of Trump’s tumultuous first term into a more effective second Presidency. He chaired the transition portion of Project 2025, a joint effort by a coalition of conservative groups to develop a road map for the next Republican Administration, helping to draft some three hundred and fifty executive orders, regulations, and other plans to more fully empower the President. “Despite his best thinking and the aggressive things they tried in Trump One, nothing really stuck,” a former O.M.B. branch chief who served under Vought during the first Trump Administration told me. “Most Administrations don’t get a four-year pause or have the chance to think about ‘Why isn’t this working?’ ” The former branch chief added, “Now he gets to come back and steamroll everyone.”
At the meeting in February, according to people familiar with the events, Vought’s directive was simple: slash foreign assistance to the greatest extent possible. The U.S. government shouldn’t support overseas anti-malaria initiatives, he argued, because buying mosquito nets doesn’t make Americans safer or more prosperous. He questioned why the U.S. funded an international vaccine alliance, given the anti-vaccine views of Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The conversation turned to the United States Institute of Peace, a government-funded nonprofit created under Ronald Reagan, which worked to prevent conflicts overseas; Vought asked what options existed to eliminate it. When he was told that the U.S.I.P. was funded by Congress and legally independent, he replied, “We’ll see what we can do.” (A few days later, Trump signed an executive order that directed the O.M.B. to dismantle the organization.)
The O.M.B. staffers had tried to anticipate Vought’s desired outcome for more than seven billion dollars that the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development spent each year on humanitarian assistance, including disaster relief and support for refugees and conflict victims. During the campaign, Trump had vowed to defund agencies that give money to people “who have no respect for us at all,” and Project 2025 had accused U.S.A.I.D. of pursuing a “divisive political and cultural agenda.” The staffers proposed a cut of fifty per cent.
Vought was unsatisfied. What would be the consequences, he asked, of a much larger reduction? A career official answered: less humanitarian aid would mean more people would die. “You could say that about any of these cuts,” Vought replied. A person familiar with the meeting described his reaction as “blasé.” Vought reiterated that he wanted spending on foreign aid to be as close to zero as possible, on the fastest timeline possible. Several analysts left the meeting rattled. Word of what had happened spread quickly among the O.M.B. staff. Another person familiar with the meeting later told me, “It was the day that broke me.”
What Vought has done in the nine months since Trump took office goes much further than slashing foreign aid. Relying on an expansive theory of Presidential power and a willingness to test the rule of law, he has frozen vast sums of federal spending, terminated tens of thousands of federal workers, and, in a few cases, brought entire agencies to a standstill. In early October, after Senate Democrats refused to vote for a budget resolution without additional health-care protections, effectively shutting down the government, Vought became the face of the White House’s response. On the second day of the closure, Trump shared an A.I.-generated video that depicted his budget director—who, by then, had threatened mass firings across the federal workforce and paused or cancelled twenty-six billion dollars in funding for infrastructure and clean-energy projects in blue states—as the Grim Reaper of Washington, D.C. “We work for the President of the United States,” a senior agency official who regularly deals with the O.M.B. told me. But right now “it feels like we work for Russ Vought. He has centralized decision-making power to an extent that he is the Commander-in-Chief.”
At the start of Trump’s second term, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which promised to slash spending and root out waste, dominated the headlines. A gaggle of tech bros, with little government experience, appeared to be marching into federal buildings and, with the President’s blessing, purging people and programs seen as “woke” or anti-Trump. The sight of Musk swinging a chainsaw onstage at a conservative conference captured the pell-mell approach, not to mention the brutality, of the billionaire’s plan to bring the federal government to heel.
But, according to court records, interviews, and other accounts from people close to Vought, DOGE’s efforts were guided, more than was previously known, by the O.M.B. director. Musk bragged about “feeding U.S.A.I.D. into the wood chipper,” but the details of the agency’s downsizing were ironed out by Vought’s office. When DOGE took aim at obscure quasi-government nonprofits, such as the United States Institute of Peace, O.M.B. veterans saw Vought’s influence at work. “I can’t imagine that the DOGE team knew to target all these little parts of the government without Russ pointing them there,” the former O.M.B. branch chief told me. Vought also orchestrated DOGE’s hostile takeover of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, crippling a regulator that Republicans had hoped to shutter during Trump’s first term. “DOGE is underneath the O.M.B.,” Michelle Martin, an official with Citizens for Renewing America, a grassroots group founded by Vought, said in May, according to a video of her remarks. “Honestly, a lot of what Elon began pinpointing . . . was at the direction of Russ.”
Vought, who declined to be interviewed for this story, voiced concerns about some of DOGE’s tactics—cancelling budget items that the O.M.B. had wanted to keep, for instance—but he mostly saw the department as a useful battering ram. An Administration official who has worked with Vought and Musk told me that DOGE showed Vought it was possible to ignore legal challenges and take dramatic action. “He has the benefit of Elon softening everyone up,” the official told me. “Elon terrified the shit out of people. He broke the status quo.”
Vought is a stated opponent of the status quo. One of the few prominent conservatives to embrace the label of “Christian nationalist,” he once told an audience that “the phrasing is too accurate to run away from the term. . . . I’m a Christian. I am a nationalist. We were meant to be a Christian nation.” American democracy, he has said, has been hijacked by rogue judges who make law from the bench and by a permanent class of government bureaucrats who want to advance “woke” policies designed to divide Americans and silence political opponents. “The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country, in which our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus,” Vought said in 2024, during a conference hosted by the Center for Renewing America, a nonprofit think tank that he also founded. “And they have aimed it at us.”
{The central struggle of our time, he says, pits the defenders of this “post-constitutional” order—what he calls the “cartel” or the “regime,” which in his telling includes Democrats and Republicans—against a group of “radical constitutionalists” fighting to destroy the deep state and return power to the Presidency and, ultimately, the people. Vought counts himself as a member of the latter group, which, in his view, also includes right-wing stalwarts such as the political strategist Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said in a private speech in 2023. “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.”}:
The ultimate radical constitutionalist, Vought says, is Donald Trump. In Vought’s view, Trump, the subject of four indictments during his time out of office, is a singular figure in the history of the American republic, a once persecuted leader who returns to power to defeat the deep state. “We have in Donald Trump a man who is so uniquely positioned to serve this role, a man whose own interests perfectly align with the interests of the country,” Vought said in his 2024 speech. “He has seen what it has done to him, and he has seen what they are trying to do to the country. That is nothing more than a gift of God.” As Bannon put it, sitting onstage with Vought at a closed-door conference in 2023, Trump is “a very imperfect instrument, right? But he’s an instrument of the Lord.”
In Vought’s vision for the U.S. government, an all-powerful executive branch would be able to fire workers, cancel programs, shutter agencies, and undo regulations that govern air and water quality, financial markets, workplace protections, and civil rights. The Department of Justice, meanwhile, would shed its historical independence and operate at the direction of the White House. All of this puts Vought at the center of what Steve Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown, described to me as the Trump Administration’s “complete disregard” for the law. “The President has no authority to not spend money Congress has appropriated—that’s not a debate,” he told me. “The President has no authority to fire civil servants who are protected by statute—that’s not a debate.” He added, “We are seeing exertions of executive power the likes of which we have never seen in this country.”
Vought, who is forty-nine, has spent his entire adult life in Washington. He met his wife, Mary, on Capitol Hill, where they both eventually worked for Mike Pence, at the time a Republican congressman from Indiana. (The Voughts divorced in 2023.) Yet, after nearly thirty years in the nation’s capital, he still views himself as an outsider. He once described his upbringing, in Trumbull, Connecticut, as “blue collar” and his parents as part of America’s “forgotten men and women.”
Vought’s father, Thurlow, served in the Marines and worked as an electrician. His mother, Margaret, spent more than twenty years as a schoolteacher and administrator. Before they married each other, Vought’s parents had both been widowed in their thirties and left to raise families on their own; Russ was their only child together. In 1981, when Russ was four, one of Thurlow’s daughters died in a car crash. Not long after the accident, Thurlow had a religious awakening. “That completely changed the direction of our immediate family,” one of Vought’s half sisters later wrote on social media.
Vought’s mother helped launch a Christian school, where the curriculum relied heavily on the Bible. One history book the school considered using included the instruction to “Defend the statement that all governmental power and authority come from God.” America was built on Judeo-Christian values, she told a local newspaper, and if the American people gave up on those values “then they’re going to have to pay the price based on sin, sickness, disease and anarchy.”
Vought attended a private Christian high school, then went to Illinois to study at Wheaton College, which is known as the “evangelical Harvard.” He moved to Washington after graduation and, in 1999, landed a job in the office of Phil Gramm, a Republican senator from Texas. Vought, who started in the mailroom, would later say that working for Gramm laid the “conservative foundation” for the rest of his life.
Gramm was an uncompromising budget hawk. He was famous for the “Dickey Flatt test,” named after a printer Gramm knew in Texas. For every dollar of federal spending, Gramm said, lawmakers must ask themselves: Did it improve the lives of people like Dickey Flatt? (In Gramm’s estimation, the answer was often no; every year, he introduced legislation designed to ruthlessly slash the budget.) Years later, when Vought testified before Congress, he said that people like his parents “have always been my test for federal spending. Did a particular program or spending increase help the nameless wagon pullers across our country, working hard at their job, trying to provide for their family and future?”
Under Gramm’s tutelage, Vought developed a reputation as a master of the arcane rules that can get legislation passed or killed. He climbed the ranks of the Republican Party, going on to advise Pence, who was then the leader of the House Republican Conference. But the closer Vought got to the center of congressional power, the more disillusioned he became. In the late two-thousands, when Republican lawmakers, who professed to care about deficits and balanced budgets, voted in favor of bills loaded with corporate giveaways and pork-barrel spending, Vought felt that they were abandoning their principles and duping their constituents. He later recalled of this time, “I would say, ‘If there’s an opinion in this leadership room, I’m telling you it’s ninety-five per cent wrong.’ ” A former Capitol Hill colleague of Vought’s told me, “I think he thought the Republican leadership was a bigger impediment to conservative causes than Democrats were.”
In 2010, Vought quit working for House Republicans and helped launch Heritage Action for America, an offshoot of the influential conservative think tank Heritage Foundation. The foundation was known for dense policy papers and its voluminous “Mandate for Leadership” governing guide. Heritage Action had a different purpose—to strong-arm Republicans in Congress into acting more conservatively.
Vought was instrumental in turning Heritage Action into the interest group that congressional Republicans feared most. He picked fights with Party leaders over agriculture subsidies and greenhouse-gas regulations, and published a scorecard that rated how lawmakers voted on key bills. In Heritage Action’s first year, according to a person familiar with Vought’s work there, he came up with an idea for a mailer that attacked Bob Corker, a Republican senator from Tennessee, for his vote to approve a nuclear-weapons treaty with Russia. The mailer featured a photograph of Corker alongside images of Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, and the Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Heritage Action’s tactics so infuriated the Republican leadership that Senator Mitch McConnell called on Heritage donors to stop funding the group. (McConnell did not respond to a request for comment.)
In 2013, Heritage Action announced a campaign to defund the Affordable Care Act. Vought and his colleagues toured the country, whipping up the grass roots, and poured millions of dollars into advertisements and lobbying. They wanted Republicans in the House and the Senate to insist that any spending bill passed to avert a shutdown must also defund Obamacare. The Republican lawmakers who embraced the strategy came to be known as the “suicide caucus,” and their protest led to a sixteen-day government shutdown. In the end, Republican leaders cut a deal to reopen the government, leaving Obamacare intact.
Heritage Action saw the 2016 Presidential election as an opportunity to put a true conservative back in the White House. The group’s C.E.O., Michael Needham, openly supported Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, who, three years earlier, had helped orchestrate the shutdown. Trump, at least initially, was treated with disdain. During an appearance on Fox News in 2015, Needham called him a “clown” who “needs to be out of the race.”
Vought and Trump couldn’t have been more different: one was a deacon at his Baptist church; the other was a twice-divorced philanderer who had been caught on camera bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy.” But, after Trump won the election, Vought was offered a job as a senior adviser at the O.M.B., where he’d dreamed of working since his days in Phil Gramm’s office. Years later, Vought would say that, at the time, he had no ambition of one day running the agency. He had planned to help with the transition and some of the O.M.B.’s early efforts, then go to seminary to become a pastor. But, he later said in a podcast interview, “God had other plans.”
In March, 2017, Trump signed an executive order that called for a top-to-bottom reorganization of the federal government. Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman, served as Trump’s first budget director, but, inside the O.M.B., Vought took the lead. According to a former senior staffer at the agency, Vought initially pushed for the President’s plan to eliminate U.S.A.I.D. and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He also wanted to fold the Department of Health and Human Services, along with food-stamps programs, into a new Department of Health and Public Welfare. “They wanted to call it that because they think it sounds bad,” a former O.M.B. analyst told me. In one meeting, according to a person in the room, Vought asked, “Why do we do economic assistance abroad at all?” The former O.M.B. analyst said, “There were very few, if any, debates where Russ wouldn’t take the most extreme option available to him, the most conservative, the most budget-cutting.”
Trump’s Cabinet secretaries resisted wholesale cuts. The former senior staffer recalled, “The general counsels at these agencies are calling the White House counsel and saying, ‘We’re not trying to introduce legislation to delete ourselves, are we?’ ” Few of the recommendations in Vought’s final reorganization plan, which was released in 2018, were implemented. But the document now reads like a guide to the second Trump Administration. “I didn’t realize it then,” the former O.M.B. senior staffer told me, “but I was writing the first draft of Project 2025.”
Vought increasingly clashed with the O.M.B.’s staff over proposed cuts to popular programs. Meals on Wheels, the food-delivery program, was a topic of intense debate. Even after O.M.B. staff explained how the program, which received more than nine hundred million dollars in funding from Congress, acted as a lifeline for homebound seniors, Vought and Mulvaney pushed for major cuts that would have hobbled its operations, according to the former O.M.B. senior staffer. The staffer added that it was often hard to reconcile Vought’s deeply held Christian faith—he hosted a prayer session for select colleagues—with his eagerness to cut programs that helped the vulnerable. “It always struck me as a strange thing,” the person said. “There’s compassion, but it only extends to certain people.”
In 2018, Mark Paoletta, a former attorney in the George H. W. Bush White House, joined the O.M.B. as general counsel. Paoletta was best known for publicly defending Clarence Thomas, who, during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing, in 1991, was accused of sexual harassment by his former colleague Anita Hill. Paoletta had worked on Capitol Hill, then entered private practice, where he advised politicians under scrutiny by Congress. Paoletta and Vought quickly forged an alliance. The former O.M.B. branch chief told me that the office’s culture changed after Paoletta arrived. “There was a shift that we were all deep state,” he said. “They thought we were pushing back because we had our own leftist-leaning agenda.” (Paoletta declined to comment.)
It was Vought’s idea to use an obscure budgetary maneuver called a rescission to claw back funds that Congress had already appropriated, according to Paoletta’s remarks at the conservative policy summit. In 2018, at Vought’s urging, Trump sent Congress the largest rescission request in decades, asking lawmakers to roll back more than fifteen billion dollars, including money for U.S.A.I.D.’s Ebola response, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and an Energy Department loan program for auto manufacturing. O.M.B. employees “looked at us like we were crazy,” Paoletta said. “They just thought it was something they didn’t do.” Once again, Vought’s own party thwarted him: the measure failed by a single vote in the Republican-held Senate.
Vought also encountered resistance inside the White House. When Congress refused to give Trump billions in funding to construct new border fencing, Vought and Paoletta devised a novel strategy. Trump could declare a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border, giving him the authority to seize money from other parts of the government. According to Paoletta, John Kelly, the President’s chief of staff, kept the plan from Trump. Paoletta said that Kelly’s message to the O.M.B. was “We don’t want to tell the President he has that authority, because God knows what he’ll do.”
Eventually, Trump badgered Mulvaney, the O.M.B. director, to find him the money for his wall. Mulvaney told the President that he’d been trying to meet with him about the issue, but that Kelly had blocked him. Within days, Trump replaced Kelly with Mulvaney. Vought took over as the acting director of the O.M.B., and money from the Defense Department was tapped to fund the wall. (Kelly did not respond to requests for comment.)
Under Vought, the O.M.B. produced budgets that called for more cuts than any in modern history. Congress all but ignored them. A former staffer in the O.M.B.’s legislative-affairs office recalled that Republicans didn’t believe Trump cared about the sweeping reductions included in his own annual budgets. “They kept saying, ‘The President’s not really pushing this or that cut—that’s a Russ Vought thing, isn’t it?’ ” the legislative-affairs staffer said.
In July, 2019, Trump asked the O.M.B. to freeze hundreds of millions of dollars in security assistance to the government of Ukraine. The request coincided with a phone call Trump had with President Volodymyr Zelensky in which Trump pressured him to investigate Biden and Biden’s son Hunter, who had served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. The money for Ukraine had already been approved by Congress, but Vought agreed to hold back the funds. Paoletta signed off on a memo authorizing the freeze. Under the law, the move was known as an impoundment. (The Government Accountability Office, an independent nonpartisan agency, later deemed it illegal.)
Any fan of “Schoolhouse Rock!” knows that the first job assigned to Congress in the Constitution is the power of the purse. The President, meanwhile, must “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” according to Article II of the Constitution. Most legal scholars interpret this to mean that the President’s duty is to spend the money Congress appropriates, and that the President does not have the power to withhold funds. In 1969, William Rehnquist, the conservative future Supreme Court Chief Justice, wrote that the impoundment power was “supported by neither reason nor precedent.”
The question of impoundment’s legality came to a head in the nineteen-seventies, when President Richard Nixon withheld billions in congressionally approved funds for environmental-cleanup efforts. Courts undid Nixon’s actions, and Congress eventually passed the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which outlawed the maneuver, leaving only narrow exceptions—rescissions—that required congressional sign-off. (Democrats are calling for restrictions on the rescission process as part of the current shutdown negotiations.) Over the years, the Impoundment Control Act would come to be viewed as sacrosanct at the O.M.B. That didn’t stop Vought. “I had been personally told, ‘Look, I want the money cut off until we can figure out where it’s going,’ ” Vought later said of the Ukraine funding in an interview with the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson. “It was like all hell broke loose within the bureaucracy.”
The impoundment triggered congressional investigations and, ultimately, Trump’s first impeachment. (Ukraine eventually received the money.) Vought refused to coöperate with investigators, calling the probe a “sham process that is designed to relitigate the last election.” One of the impeachment articles named Vought, saying that the President had pressured him and others not to respond to subpoenas. Trump, for his part, continued to express support for impoundment, calling it the “secret weapon” that could tame the “bloated federal bureaucracy.”
In early 2021, on one of the final days of Trump’s first term, Vought visited him in the Oval Office. Both men felt a sense of unfinished business, Vought would later recall. Only a few months earlier, when Vought was sworn in as the O.M.B. director, Trump had told him that, after three and a half years as President, he had finally got the hang of the job. “Russ, we’ve got to get another term,” Trump said. “We finally figured out how to do this.”
Vought, frustrated by what he saw as years of obstruction by civil servants, had recently pushed through a new policy to vastly expand the number of at-will employees in the government, making them easier to fire. But the COVID-19 pandemic had dashed any chance of leaving the government smaller than he’d found it. Trump had signed trillion-dollar stimulus bills to prop up the American economy; by the time he left office, the national debt had swelled by $7.8 trillion. After the violence on January 6th, a second Trump term looked less likely than ever. Vought, however, had not given up hope.
In the Oval Office, he told Trump that he would soon launch a new political operation that would keep the MAGA movement alive while attacking the policies of the incoming Biden Administration. Trump blessed the venture, with one request. That summer, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, national protests had forced a racial reckoning in the country. Trump wanted Vought, who as O.M.B. director had scrubbed training materials for federal employees of any references to “white privilege” and “systemic racism,” to find a way for conservatives to push back against the Black Lives Matter movement. “This was an assignment I was given from President Trump,” Vought later recalled. “I’m the budget guy. If I can talk about race, you can talk about race.”
A few days after Trump left office, Vought announced the launch of the Center for Renewing America, a MAGA think tank that aspired to act as an incubator for future Republican Administrations. Its activist arm, Citizens for Renewing America, would mobilize grassroots supporters to pressure elected officials to embrace the think tank’s agenda. The overarching goal, Vought wrote in an op-ed for the Federalist, was to “restore an old consensus in America that has been forgotten, that we are a people For God, For Country, and For Community.”
At the Center for Renewing America, Vought surrounded himself with other radical constitutionalists from the first Trump Administration. He brought on Jeffrey Clark, the Justice Department official who had tried to use his agency to help Trump overturn the 2020 election. (A D.C. disciplinary board recently recommended that Clark, who now works at the O.M.B., lose his law license as punishment for those efforts, an outcome that Clark is appealing and that his lawyer called a “travesty of justice.”) Kash Patel, Trump’s current F.B.I. director, and Ken Cuccinelli, a top immigration official in the first Trump Administration, joined as senior fellows. Working at the center, Cuccinelli explained at the conservative policy summit, allowed him to “stake out the outer boundary of reasonable constitutional law.”
The Center for Renewing America’s ideas included how the President could invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy military troops to American cities to put down protests; how the White House could freeze billions in federal funding without waiting for a vote in Congress; and how agency leaders could defy government unions and fire workers en masse. The think tank also set out to create shadow versions of the O.M.B. and of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to anticipate legal challenges and counter internal pushback. In his 2024 address, Vought explained, “I don’t want President Trump having to lose a moment of time having fights in the Oval Office about whether something is legal or doable or moral.”
Vought and his colleagues at the center also worked closely with the House Freedom Caucus to urge other congressional Republicans to use government shutdowns as a way of forcing through major policy changes. One of their first targets was critical race theory, a once obscure academic concept that had become a flashpoint during the 2020 racial-justice protests. According to previously unreported recordings of briefings held by Citizens for Renewing America, Vought said that he had pressured members of the Freedom Caucus to yoke a ban on critical race theory to must-pass bills on raising the debt limit and funding the government. “We have to have a Speaker that goes into these funding fights with a love for the shutdowns,” Vought said during a November, 2022, briefing call, “because they create an opportunity to save the country.”
But Republicans never shut down the government during the Biden Presidency, and Vought grew increasingly frustrated with them for not using more aggressive tactics. On one briefing call, he praised Cori Bush, a progressive Democrat from Missouri, after she camped out for several days on the Capitol steps to protest the end of a pandemic-era moratorium on evictions. Vought called her politics “very, very bad,” but he admired her methods: “We need this from Republicans.”
The centerpiece of Vought’s work during the Biden years was his campaign to popularize the concept of “woke and weaponized” government. The tagline brought together two of Vought’s rallying cries: “woke” policies, like diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and transgender rights, and a “weaponized” F.B.I. and Justice Department that had allegedly been wielded against the Democrats’ political enemies, including, most notably, Trump. When the Center for Renewing America released a federal budget blueprint in late 2022, calling for nearly nine trillion dollars in cuts in the course of ten years, the word “woke” appeared seventy-seven times across a hundred and three pages.
Jessica Riedl, a budget expert who works for the conservative Manhattan Institute, told me that it was “just silly” to claim, as the Center for Renewing America’s budget did, that Veterans Affairs, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and farm subsidies required enormous cuts for being too woke. “It’s a way to dress up spending cuts that aren’t popular on their own merits,” Riedl said. Vought described his framing as an attempt to “change paradigms.” “We have to be able to defund agencies,” he said in the private speech in 2023. “That is why these things have to be indelibly linked, and that is why we are focussing so much on ‘woke and weaponized.’ ”
Any hope that Vought had of implementing his ideas in a second Trump Administration nearly ran aground last summer. He had written a chapter of Project 2025’s eight-hundred-and-eighty-seven-page report, arguing for an expansion of executive power that would put the Justice Department and other traditionally independent agencies fully under Presidential control. Center for Renewing America fellows had written two more chapters in the report. But, as Election Day neared, Project 2025 became a liability for the Trump campaign. Polls showed that a majority of Americans opposed its most aggressive proposals, including removing the abortion drug mifepristone from the market, eliminating the Department of Education, and implementing Vought’s plan to more easily fire nonpolitical federal workers. As criticism of Project 2025 grew, Trump insisted that he knew “nothing” about it, while also claiming that “some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”
The month before the election, Politico reported that Donald Trump, Jr., had compiled a list of people who would not be allowed to serve in a second Trump Administration, including a number of leading contributors to Project 2025. But, according to a former Trump campaign official with close ties to the White House, Vought deftly navigated the controversy. “Russ is a consummate team player,” the official told me. “He was the one person at Project 2025 that we could have a conversation with during the course of the campaign.”
A week after Trump’s victory, the President-elect announced his plans for the Department of Government Efficiency. “It will become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time,” Trump said in a statement. He tapped two of his biggest backers to run it: Elon Musk, who had donated nearly three hundred million dollars to help elect Trump and other Republicans, and the biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who briefly ran for President on an anti-woke platform. Two days after the announcement, Vought met with Musk and Ramaswamy at Mar-a-Lago. Vought and Musk “hit it off,” according to the Times; both were “on the same wavelength in terms of taking the most extreme action possible.” Soon after the meeting, Trump nominated Vought to run the O.M.B.
One of DOGE’s first targets was the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The C.F.P.B. had first been proposed by Senator Elizabeth Warren, who, as a law professor, argued for the creation of a regulator that could protect Americans from predatory mortgages and hidden fees. Created by law in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the bureau developed a reputation as an aggressive enforcer of fair-lending and consumer-protection laws. The bureau’s work has led to nearly twenty billion dollars in direct relief to consumers and five billion dollars in civil penalties for alleged wrongdoing. For Vought, the bureau embodied the gross regulatory overreach that he loathed; outside of government, the agency’s biggest foes, Wall Street and Silicon Valley, were major funders of Trump’s second campaign.
On February 7th, Trump named Vought the bureau’s acting director, a role he would perform on top of his duties at the O.M.B. That morning, a small team of DOGE staffers arrived at the C.F.P.B.’s headquarters. According to previously unreported e-mails and depositions, the members of DOGE took orders from Vought as they disabled the C.F.P.B.’s website and decided which of the agency’s employees to fire. Musk weighed in on X: “CFPB RIP.”
Trump had targeted the C.F.P.B. during his first term. “There were days in Trump One where it felt like we were getting punched in the face,” one longtime employee told me. Over time, however, the President seemed to lose interest, and the C.F.P.B.’s last director under Trump, a political appointee named Kathy Kraninger, supported the bureau’s mission. In 2020, under Kraninger, the C.F.P.B. filed the second-highest number of enforcement actions in its nearly ten-year existence.
Current and former C.F.P.B. staff told me that they assumed a second Trump Administration would look like the first one. “Generally, we thought there would be a conservative agenda we’d be handed, and we’d figure out how to enact it,” the veteran employee said. Soon after taking over, Vought informed Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, which funds the C.F.P.B., that the agency would not need any more money. He barred C.F.P.B. employees from doing most types of work and told them not to go to the office. When confusion arose over what duties, if any, remained for the staff to do, Vought clarified the matter in a February 10th e-mail, telling employees to “stand down from performing any work task.”
In the following weeks, Vought and Paoletta stopped oversight activities, quashed ongoing investigations, and froze active enforcement cases, which included matters involving some of the largest banks in the nation, such as JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Capital One. Rohit Chopra, the bureau’s director under Biden, said that Vought’s actions had put the C.F.P.B. “in a coma.” The bureau’s top enforcement officer resigned in June, writing in a letter to colleagues that the C.F.P.B.’s leadership “has no intention to enforce the law in any meaningful way.”
The final blow came when Vought announced a plan to lay off more than eighty per cent of the C.F.P.B.’s employees. A federal appeals court ruled in August that the mass-firing plan could proceed. It took Vought four months to accomplish what the previous Trump Administration had been unable to do in four years.
The unwinding of the C.F.P.B., however, was quickly overshadowed by another Vought victory. That same month, he completed his assault on foreign aid. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who had been running what was left of U.S.A.I.D., announced that, with Trump’s approval, he had empowered Vought to officially eliminate the agency. “Russ is now at the helm to oversee the closeout of an agency that long ago went off the rails,” Rubio announced. “Congrats, Russ.”
Four months before the 2024 election, the Center for Renewing America had welcomed a small group of congressional staffers to its headquarters, a few blocks from the Capitol. Some of them worked for the House and Senate Budget Committees, which every year help set spending levels for the federal government. The purpose of the meeting was to brief the staffers on the center’s latest policy fight—an attempt to build the case for the use of impoundment.
At the briefing, Paoletta argued that the Impoundment Control Act was unconstitutional. Spending laws passed by Congress were a ceiling, not a floor, Paoletta argued, according to a person in the room. In that view—which most legal experts dismiss as a fringe position—the White House is not permitted to spend more than a law calls for, but it has the power to spend far less. “Congress passes statutes episodically, and often with conflicting purposes and demands,” Paoletta later wrote in an essay for the Center for Renewing America. “It is left to the President and his subordinates to harmonize their execution in a coherent manner.”
According to Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee, the Trump Administration has since frozen or cancelled more than four hundred and ten billion dollars in funding on everything from energy subsidies for low-income households and Head Start after-school programs to President George W. Bush’s H.I.V.-reduction initiative, PEPFAR, and artists’ grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Vought directed the National Institutes of Health to withhold—illegally, according to the Government Accountability Office—an estimated fifteen billion dollars in grants for outside research projects. The N.I.H. also moved to cap funding for so-called indirect costs, which research universities rely on to pay for their buildings, utilities, and administrative staff. Scientists I interviewed said that these cuts would inevitably lead to less medical research, including into a drug that Vought’s ex-wife credited with improving the life of their eleven-year-old daughter, who was born with cystic fibrosis. A scientist who receives government funding to study cystic-fibrosis treatment told me that, without sufficient money for indirect costs, “we probably won’t be able to do the research and will have to relinquish the grants.”
The O.M.B. claims that it is vetting federal spending to insure that the money does not fund “woke” programs. “We can confirm that President Trump and Director Vought are carefully scrutinizing spending that has previously run on autopilot or worse—toward transing our kids, the Green New Scam, and funding our own country’s invasion—just as the president promised,” an O.M.B. spokesperson told the Times in August. But blocking funds is also a way to pressure officials and agencies to comply with the Administration’s demands. “O.M.B. is like a giant funnel that everything has to go through in order to happen,” Lester Cash, a former O.M.B. employee, told me. “You can get agencies to agree to things just to get the funnel to open back up.”
In March, the O.M.B. took down a legally mandated public website that made it possible to track the funding freezes. The move elicited a rare show of bipartisanship. In a letter to Vought, the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees urged him to “restore public access to apportionment data in accordance with statute.” Vought said the information listed on the site was “predecisional” and a risk to national security. The O.M.B. restored the site only when a judge ruled that taking it down was illegal, saying that the government’s position relied “on an extravagant and unsupported theory of presidential power.”
The O.M.B.’s funding freezes have wreaked havoc. On June 30th, the Department of Education told state agencies that congressional appropriations for after-school activities and English-as-a-second-language instruction would not arrive the next day, as planned. The unexpected shortfall affected thousands of school districts, which served millions of students, in all fifty states. The Administration only backed down after both Democrats and Republicans criticized the move. “When something’s been appropriated, signed into law, and people are writing contracts based on the commitment of the federal government, and then they don’t know if they’re going to get it or not, it creates such chaos,” Don Bacon, a Republican House member from Nebraska, told me. “I’m not sure what the O.M.B. director thought he was doing.” (A spokesperson for Vought at the O.M.B. would not comment on the record in response to a detailed list of questions.)
In June, Trump sent a rescission request to Congress, seeking to cancel roughly nine billion dollars in funding for foreign aid and for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports NPR, PBS, and other public radio and TV stations nationwide. The programs were viewed, the senior agency official told me, as “soft targets,” a test to see if Vought could persuade Republicans to put aside their concerns about undermining Congress’s power of the purse. Unlike in Trump’s first term, Vought’s rescission plan succeeded. The measure, which faced opposition from Democrats and a few Republicans, passed after Vice-President J. D. Vance cast two tie-breaking procedural votes. Jeff Merkley, the top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, told me, “You’ve basically said to Congress, ‘Hey, compromise all you want, but we’re going to undo that in the way we want as soon as you’ve signed the bill.’ ”
On the Friday before Labor Day, Vought made his most audacious move yet. The White House sent Congress a new rescissions package, targeting nearly five billion dollars in foreign aid. But this time Vought informed lawmakers that he didn’t need their approval. He asserted that the President could make the request, putting a temporary freeze on the funds, then simply wait for the fiscal year to expire, on September 30th, at which point the money would be cancelled out. Vought called it a “pocket rescission,” but it was impoundment by another name. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, said it was a “clear violation of the law.”
The Government Accountability Office can sue the O.M.B. over an impoundment or pocket rescission to get the money released. In April, Gene Dodaro, who leads the Government Accountability Office, testified that his office had opened thirty-nine investigations into potential violations of the Impoundment Control Act by the Trump Administration. The O.M.B. has responded by attacking Dodaro’s agency. In one letter, Paoletta said that the O.M.B. would coöperate with the Government Accountability Office only if its demands didn’t get in the way of Trump’s agenda. In another letter, Paoletta told the Department of Transportation to ignore a Government Accountability Office ruling that found that the O.M.B. had illegally impounded money for electric-car development. Vought, for his part, has flatly declared that the Government Accountability Office “shouldn’t exist.”
Vought’s actions could provoke a challenge to the Impoundment Control Act in the Supreme Court. In the meantime, a number of current and former government employees told me that they worried about the long-term consequences of what he has already done: the terminating of vital research projects that could have led to life-saving breakthroughs; the nation’s lost standing as an international leader; the uncertainty cast over the fundamental workings of government. “They’ve given up on the idea that they need to persuade anybody,” Bagenstos, the former general counsel at the O.M.B., said of Vought and Paoletta. They’re “just going to use brute force and dominance.” As the former O.M.B. analyst told me, “They’ve dropped a grenade into the system.”
The government shutdown has illustrated, in the starkest terms, Vought’s expansive theory of executive power and his willingness to ignore Congress. On October 2nd, Trump posted on Truth Social that he would meet with Vought to decide which “Democrat Agencies” to cut on a temporary or permanent basis. A few days later, the O.M.B. released a memo claiming that, seemingly in defiance of a 2019 law, furloughed federal employees were not guaranteed back pay following a shutdown. Then, on October 10th, Vought announced that his campaign of mass firings across the bureaucracy had begun. So far, more than four thousand employees have been laid off, disrupting government services devoted to, among other things, cybersecurity efforts, special-education programs, substance-abuse treatment, and loans for small businesses. A federal judge put a temporary stop to the cuts, but that same day Vought predicted that the total number of firings would be “north of ten thousand.” As one official texted me, “Trauma achieved.” ♦
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.*}:
Published in the print edition of the October 27, 2025, issue, with the headline “The Shutdown Artist.”
*The New Yorker
Andy Kroll, an investigative reporter at ProPublica, is the author of the book “A Death on W Street.”
VOUGHT WANTS TO WEAPNIZE OMG TO DO BANNON DISMANTLE ADMIN STATE
https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/center-renewing-america-preparing-next-republican-administration-govern
over the last several years, the United States has seen a dramatic rise in Christian nationalism, a loosely defined ideology that fuses patriarchy, xenophobia, and pretextual economic populism with an overtly biblical foundation and a deep distrust of democracy. This phenomenon has manifested in many ways, but one of the organizations driving the trend is a far-right think tank called the Center for Renewing America.
Several former Trump administration officials are associated with the group, including its president, Russ Vought, who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump. Vought led the administration’s efforts to demonize critical race theory, including removing anti-racism training from federal agencies. He is a regular guest on Steve Bannon’s podcast War Room: Pandemic and on Fox News. His organization is one of several far-right groups under the umbrella of the Conservative Partnership Institute, whose top officials include former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows and right-wing legal activist Cleta Mitchell.Both Meadows and Mitchell were intimately involved in Trump’s attempted insurrection, as were at least 18 other people associated with CPI, including CRA senior fellow Kash Patel, former Trump Pentagon official.
Perhaps the most significant of Trump’s top coup allies is CRA senior fellow Jeffrey Clark,a former environmental lawyer at the Department of Justice who was hired by the think tank in June. About three weeks later, Clark was targeted in a raid by federal law enforcement. Little is publicly known about the investigation into Clark, but it may revolve around his proposal “to send a letter to state officials in Georgia falsely stating that the department had evidence that could lead Georgia to rescind its certification of Mr. Biden’s victory in that key swing state,” according to The New York Times.
CRA works on an array of disparate, seemingly unrelated issues. In addition to CRA-linked individuals’ considerable efforts to justify the January 6 insurrection, the organization has sown doubt about future “election integrity.” Vought has remained at the heart of the anti-critical race theory push even after he left OMB. He is virulently anti-trans, calling trans identity a “contagion” in a 2021 podcast, and CRA has supported anti-trans legislation and opposed laws that would ban discrimination based on sexual and gender identity. Senior fellow and immigration restrictionistKen Cuccinelli and Vought successfully lobbied counties in Texas to declare that they were under “invasion” by migrants. CRA is also an active participant in the conservative legal community, as exemplified by its **senior fellow**Mark Paoletta,who prepared Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas for their confirmation hearings. Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Vought celebrated Paoletta’s central role in the court’s rightward shift.
What unites these issues is what Vought refers to as a “biblical worldview,” a concept that has long been prevalent on the religious right and refers to an all-encompassing ideology derived from a conservative interpretation of the Bible. Although Vought eschews the aesthetics of some of the street-fighting Christian fascists who terrorized Pride events in June, he overtly believes the United States should be a Christian nation. CRA’s mission is to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God.” Vought is signatory to a national conservative statement affirming that “the Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities.” Most revealingly, in 2021 Vought wrote an opinion piece for Newsweek with the headline: “Is There Anything Actually Wrong With 'Christian Nationalism?'
Vought argues that, no, there’s nothing wrong with Christian nationalism, so long as it’s defined in a circumscribed, non-threatening way.
“Once stripped of its superimposed liberal scar tissue, ‘Christian nationalism’ is actually a rather benign and useful description for those who believe in both preserving our country's Judeo-Christian heritage and making public policy decisions that are best for this country,” Vought writes.
This is a fig leaf. Christian nationalism as it actually operates — sometimes taking the modifier “white” at the beginning — endorses the racist “great replacement theory,” which posits that global elites are fueling non-white immigration to the United States to “replace” white people. The conspiracy theory holds that this upending of power relations will be done through demographic changes, and at the ballot box — which helps to explain CRA’s obsession with “secure borders” and “election integrity.”
For Vought, CRA’s issues of focus are not discrete policy battles. As he made clear recently on a right-wing podcast, he believes the country is in a Manichean war between the forces of good and evil. The battleground is so-called cultural issues, which, properly understood, are liberation movements to end racist and patriarchal oppression, but for Vought they must be opposed at every step of the way.
“These are the issues that if we don’t fight on we lose our civilization,” Vought said. “Critical race theory has to be front and center. Transgender contagion in our schools, impacting our daughters across the country, needs to be a front and center issue."
moment of truth pod]
vought wants to create an “army” of activists ready and waiting to serve in government who can be trusted to carry out a Christian nationalist agenda. And as former director of OMB, Vought has a unique insight into how to implement a whole-of-government approach to enacting a presidential directive, which is what he did with Trump’s initiative against so-called “critical race theory.”
“When the president says, ‘I want to not fund critical race theory through the federal government,’ that’s involving all of the agencies, and we have to then make sure that the president’s agenda is executed,” Vought said in the same interview [aud]
more broadly, Vought lamented that not enough religious right activists “operate on the basis of worldview.” As a result, less dogmatic “elite Christians” have adopted ideologies that “lack clarity at best” and are “damaging at worst.” Vought wants hardliners in the church and in the public sphere. In the context of running the government, that means replacing career staff with “ideologically committed individuals up and down the agencies.”
That idea aligns with the upcoming plans from the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, who, along with Vought and CRA, spearheaded the broader backlash against critical race theory. As Rufo said in a recent interview:
As we approach 2024, I will be publishing a policy paper on “eliminating left-wing ideologies in the federal government,” using the power of the presidency to fundamentally reshape the bureaucracy with a six-part program targeting budget, content, personnel, grantmaking, and oversight. The idea is to centralize ideological control over the federal agencies in the White House and create a team at the Office of Management and Budget to enforce it. We could easily wipe out a significant portion of the infrastructure for the left-wing ideologies within the federal bureaucracy and within the network of federal grantees and contractors, which would shift American politics in the right direction.
These plans are not theoretical. CRA is one of many hard-right organizations involved in the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project, a coalition of zealots determined to avoid some of the shortcomings and incompetencies of the Trump administration. (Vought is a former vice president of the organization’s grassroot and advocacy arm, Heritage Action for America.)
Vought has made no secret of what he would do if given the opportunity to serve as a Cabinet-level appointee in a Republican administration. He would attempt to eliminate or drastically curtail the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and others.
“We got to get after these agencies we talked about before, the administrative state, big money, EPA, CDC, [and] NIH that's weaponized against the American people and we need to put them on the chopping block before we get to some other things down the road,” Vought said on Steve Bannon’s War Room.
A subsequent Supreme Court decision that drastically limited the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon emissions would likely serve as a template for Vought to dismantle broad swaths of the executive branch’s regulatory authority.
Vought’s antagonism toward the regulatory state extends to aspects of federal law enforcement, but only when those agencies are investigating conservatives for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk asked Vought about the Department of Justice’s supposed persecution of conservatives, including his colleague Jeffrey Clark, and how he thought it should be addressed. The long-term plan is to structurally change it,” Vought said. “We've got to deconstruct the state that is weaponized against the American people.”
Like other organizations that have sprung up to harness Trumpism in the last several years, CRA’s broad influence remains limited. But its success in promoting the backlash against critical race theory shows it shouldn’t be underestimated, even though that topic may not have had the electoral influence Vought and others have claimed. What’s undeniable is that Vought and his fellow travelers have sweeping ambitions and the zeal of a true believer. They are telling us exactly what they are going to do if they return to power at the federal level, and it is a chilling vision of theocracy and repression.
vid Citation From the June 27, 2022, edition of Real America's Voice's The Charlie Kirk Show
Christian nationalist Russ Vought recently appeared on Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk’s radio show to discuss plans to purge at least 10% of federal career staffers under a new Trump administration. Vought described that portion of the federal workforce as “the roots of the problem” that prevented former President Donald Trump from fully implementing his agenda. During the interview, Kirk suggested that the next Republican administration subject civil servants to “ideological purity tests.”
Vought ran the powerful Office of Management and Budget under Trump and now heads up a right-wing think tank called the Center for Renewing America, whose mission is to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God.” While at OMB, Vought helped develop a policy called “Schedule F” as a tool that would allow a new conservative administration to circumvent job protections typically enjoyed by federal workers who aren’t politically appointed.
Speaking on the September 23 edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, Vought claimed to have reclassified 90% of the workers in his own office under that job category
CitationFrom the September 23, 2022 edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble
“Schedule F is an authority that we discovered and developed at the end of the Trump administration to give the president the ability to reclassify career civil servants, who normally have permanency within the bureaucracy, to turn them into essentially at-will employees,” Vought told Kirk.
When asked by Kirk how many career employees he’d like to potentially sack using this authority, Vought set the floor at 10% of current workers, but suggested that he considers as much as 80% of the federal workforce to be ideological opponents.
“I would say that within my agency, we had, you know, 80% of it was left-leaning,” Vought said. “Their paradigms were all rooted in this permanent class, ruling class that defines the milieu of Washington, D.C.”
“And you can reason and work with that crowd, but there is about a 10% of activists that are animated by the wokeism, the anti-racist movement, to be able to come into these agencies and they're just activists,” Vought added.
Vought then told Kirk that someone in the human resources department at OMB described themselves and their colleagues as “committed anti-racists.”
Kirk responded by calling that person the leader of “a sleeper cell of a woke communist ideology who's just right there within our federal government.”
“You're going to have to figure out how to solve that, I don’t know,” Kirk continued. “But ideological purity tests are an interesting approach, but let's break up the federal government first and then we'll go from there.”
In July, Axios reported on discussions Trump allies were having about staffing their next administration, with the Schedule F being central to the framework. Vought reportedly has been a leader in these efforts: As Media Matters reported a week prior to Axios’ story, Vought stated publicly that he wants to build an “army” of hard-right activists with “Biblical worldview” to run the federal agencies that he can’t outright destroy. He’s been very clear that the goal is to get “ideologically committed individuals up and down the agencies,” and he’s been similarly clear that Schedule F is the way to do it.
Right-wing propagandist Christopher Rufo – known for launching bad-faith attacks on critical race theory and targeting children’s hospitals that provide care to trans youth – has pushed for a similar course of action.
“The idea is to centralize ideological control over the federal agencies in the White House and create a team at the Office of Management and Budget to enforce it,” Rufo said in an interview with conservative website IM-1776 in July.
In furtherance of those shared goals, Vought has attempted to turn the Center for Renewing America into a shadow government-in-waiting for Trump or another conservative president. In June, Vought brought on Jeffrey Clark, a former Department of Justice environmental lawyer and Trump’s top coup architect, as senior fellow at CRA. Kash Patel, another key figure in Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 election, is a CRA senior fellow as well.
In the recent interview with Kirk, Vought expressed a common regret among former Trump officials that the administration wasted precious time in its first years adjusting to the steep learning curve of running the government.
“My hope is that we don’t have to do that again because we're laying the groundwork now,” Vought said, later adding, “We want to make sure that can never happen again and make sure that from day one, we can ensure that the agenda is being done.”
https://apps.publicintegrity.org/united-states-of-petroleum/century-of-influence/
no lnx many ? 1 graf
A CENTURY OF INFLUENCE
The unlikely partnership between Big Oil and the White House
How the industry stalled action on climate change from the inside and sold America on fossil fuels
Illustration by Robert Fresson
by Jie Jenny Zou
Chris Young, Rachel Leven contributed reporting
December 12, 2017
A version of this article was co-published with Guardian US.
When Rick Perry [2 22 early trump coup "aggressive stratrgy"] was interrupted by climate-change protesters during his address to the National Petroleum Council in late September, the energy secretary was ready with a retort.
“You want to talk about something that saves lives? It’s the access to energy around the globe,” Perry said, countering a woman worried about deadly hurricanes and a man whose hometown is being submerged by the rising Philippine Sea. “I am proud to be a part of this industry. I am proud to be an American."
It was an opportunity for the former Texas governor to champion an industry he’d long embraced by showing fealty to the petroleum council, an arcane federal advisory committee dominated by energy executives. Picking up on Perry’s message was Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who has pledged to fast-track drilling and open more areas to fossil-fuel development.
The two took turns reassuring the council’s nearly 200 members during a meeting at the opulent Hay-Adams hotel in Washington, D.C., that the White House would be a friend, not foe, to Big Oil. “We’re now in the business of being partners, rather than adversaries,” Zinke said. “If I were in the industry, I’d be pretty happy.”
It wasn’t the first time that global warming had been cast aside by the Energy Department’s petroleum council, successor to a wartime body created by President Harry Truman. In 1972, the council buried the industry’s own climate research with the help oftop executives at the American Petroleum Institute (API), a longtime ally that once shared a building with the council.
API has gone far beyond the lobbying typical of trade associations, helping spawn permanent substructures within the executive branch that ensure its voice is heard. These government entities, which include the petroleum council and an obscure but powerful White House office, have for decades worked in tandem with API to fortify the oil and gas industry, its critics say, often at the public’s expense.
Excerpt from a transcript of API’s 1959 “Energy and Man” symposium at Columbia University in New York. The Hagley Museum]
API’s history on climate issues goes back farther than most realize. As early as 1959, it grappled with global warming, hosting a conference where the looming, manmade catastrophe was discussed. As the environmental movement was blossoming, API — with the government’s support — was working behind the scenes to undermine it by distorting projections of regulatory costs. An enduring false narrative was constructed: the economy or the environment.
For nearly a century, API has enjoyed special access to the executive branch,furtively shaping policy from the inside. Now, under Donald Trump, the industry smells victory on multiple fronts with a White House that openly detests regulation as much as it does. Days before Trump’s inauguration, API President Jack Gerard heralded the “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to reshape energy policy.
Fifty-two environmental rules have since been overturned or are in the process of being rolled back. API has publicly supported at least 23 of these actions. In May, the institute also sent a25-page wish list to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Among the items it wants reconsidered: tougher standards forozone— the main ingredient in smog — andregulation of methane, a greenhouse gas that is far more potent than carbon dioxide.
API officials did not respond to interview requests from the Center for Public Integrity. On its website, the institute says, "We negotiate with regulatory agencies, represent the industry in legal proceedings, participate in coalitions and work in partnership with other associations to achieve our members’ public policy goals."
Neomi Rao at a congressional hearing for her 2017 appointment to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a division of the White House Office of Management and Budget. U.S. Senate]
‘Regulate the regulators’
“I asked my staff for a joke, but it’s still going through cost-benefit analysis,” Neomi Rao said from a podium in October, drawing hearty laughs from a mostly male crowd of lobbyists, lawyers and policy analysts at the Heritage Foundation — a libertarian think tank based in Washington.
It was a tongue-in-cheek nod to the little-known agency Rao has led since July — the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs,which she called a “small but mighty” division of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Her staff of roughly 50reviews the costs and benefits of all major federal rules, providing the stamp of approval needed to turn proposals into regulations — or spiking them.
“If you are a very pro-regulatory administration, then you are not going to appreciate the work that OIRA does,” Rao warned the audience, likening her office to a “roadblock” against burdensome policies that hurt the economy.“The pace and scope of deregulation that’s occurred is truly unprecedented, and we’re just getting started.”
“The pace and scope of deregulation that’s occurred is truly unprecedented, and we’re just getting started.”
Rao — a constitutional scholar who clerked for conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and often shared pizza with the late Antonin Scalia — has embraced her role as “regulatory czar,” pledging to surpass a Trump executive order to eliminate two existing regulations for each one created. Though she is an ardent supporter of leaner and more restrained government, she plans to staff up OIRA and broaden its powers.
How, exactly, she’ll do this is a mystery — much like the inner workings of OIRA itself.The agency has routinely come up short of basic transparency guidelines recommended by the Government Accountability Office, garnering a reputation on Capitol Hill as a black box that heavily edits or kills regulations with little explanation in Republican and Democratic administrations alike. Cass Sunstein, who led the office during the Obama administration, has since defended the practice of derailing particular rules by putting them on a “shit list.”
While OIRA has resisted public scrutiny, it has held its doors open for industry. Since April 2014, 35 of OIRA’s 712 meetings on proposed EPA regulations have been with API representatives — including a 2015 conference call with institute President Gerard over ozone. The institute, along with the American Chemistry Council and ExxonMobil, ranked among the top 10 groups that met with OIRA from 2001 to 2011. Such encounters carry weight: A 2015 study by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers found the agency was more likely to edit rules when lobbied by industry than by public-interest groups. Rao’s office did not respond to requests for comment, but OIRA notes on its website that it will meet with “any party interested in discussing issues on a rule under review.” [NON-DENIAL DENIAL? I TALK TO TRUMP ALL THE TIME]
The office’s bias toward industry can be traced to its founding. Though OIRA was created in 1980, its roots date to the EPA’s formation in 1970. As a counterweight, President Richard Nixon established the National Industrial Pollution Control Council, an advisory committee within the Commerce Department made up entirely of industry executives.
Frank N. Ikard, former API president]
“Virtually no major move is made in environmental policy without drawing on your advice and criticism,” Secretary of Commerce (and, later, Nixon campaign adviser and Watergate figure) Maurice Stans told the committee in 1971. Members regularly reviewed and commented on draft regulations before they were released to the public, weighing in on matters such as leaded gasoline and the Clean Air Act.
Stans took special interest in the pollution committee’s oil and gas subgroup led by Standard Oil Chairman J.K. Jamieson, who regularly invited API President Frank Ikard and API public-affairs executive P.M. Gammelgard to its meetings. Staff from the National Petroleum Council were also on hand. Together the men coordinated a public-relations effort emphasizing the enormous costs the oil industry claimed it was absorbing to improve the environment.
[Excerpt from the National Petroleum Council’s 1971 summary report to the White House National Archives and Records Administration]
In February 1971, the pollution committee advised Nixon aides to prioritize costs. The White House budget office obliged that October by creating a new program called “Quality of Life Review,” which would assess major environmental, health and safety regulations. Tapped to lead the agency was bureaucrat Jim Tozzi, who had shown a passion for deregulation at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Jim Tozzi describes himself as the father of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs
Administrative Conference of the United States]
“Quality of Life” became all about reining in the EPA, Tozzi explained during an interview with the Center for Public Integrity. Occupying a floor of the Executive Office Building next to the White House, his office quickly went to work on the EPA’s proposed Clean Air Act guidelines. “I was like a little despot,” Tozzi said. “Somebody needed to regulate the regulators.”
Under Jimmy Carter, the “Quality of Life” program became OIRA in 1980, with Tozzi as deputy administrator. In 1983, Tozzi left the agency to join a law firm headed by William Ruckelshaus — the EPA’s first administrator, a Nixon appointee and an early champion of cost-benefit analysis. Tozzi now runs the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness, a think tank he founded and staffed with former OIRA employees that assesses regulations.
Tozzi said his plan for policing the EPA — and every other federal agency — has survived nine consecutive administrations and looks bright under Rao. “The Trump administration,” he said admiringly, “has gotten the number of regulations going out to a trickle.”
task force head Joe Kelliher ask lobby Dana Contratto wish list il duce 17 API fill in the bl exec order becomes 13211 verbatimfed rel dir James Ford, dereg , no jud review p 17 !! [ = Halib Loophole?] 3/1 IF Engelhardt and fred palmer eo and VP peabody met lundquist, sec of eng S Abraham, b2 eco advisor Larry Lindsey; stock offer IPO coming; 3/16 task rept hype coal 3/21 321 IPO got 420$mil, 60 over predicted
https://www.opensecrets.org/revolving/indus.php?id=10910
[[dANA CHARLES CONTRATTO Dana Charles Contratto passed away of natural causes at his home on Long Beach Island, NJ on July 7, 2014. His three sons, Justin, Jordan and Travis, his grandson, Elias and Daune, his beloved wife of 41 years were all with him. Dana was born on June 21, 1947 in Peoria, Illinois to Jay and Dye Contratto. Dana grew up in Aurora, IL., with his kid sister, Lisa. As a youth he was a member of the Pike Street Pirates. A feared street-gang known for smoking cigarettes in tree houses and careening around the neighborhood cul-de-sacs on their bikes. Dana graduated from Aurora High School and went on to receive a B.S. from the University of Southern Illinois. In 1973 he received his J.D. from Washington University in St. Louis. While in law school he was editor-in-chief of the Urban Law Annual. Following law school, Dana moved to Washington D.C. with his wife, Daune. He clerked for Judge Edward Tamm the chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals District of Columbia Circuit. In 1976 Dana entered private practice with Morgan, Lewis andBockius, then later withJones Day before leaving to become a founding partner withCrowell and Moring, LLPwhere he headed the firm's Energy Group and International Dispute Resolution.
During his 40-year legal career Dana had a diverse and expansive practice.He worked extensively as a lobbyist, lawyer and legal counsel around the globe and was widely respected by all in his field. More importantly, he was a dedicated father who never missed a game and an avid - and successful - fisherman. He is survived by his loving wife, Daune McDevitt, his three children Justin (Polixene) , Jordan and Travis (listed in order of height) his father, W.R. "Dye" Contratto, his sister, Lisa Dickinson, and his grandson, Elias Contratto. Notorious outlaw and straight-talker Dana Contratto has left us in peace. We will never quite be able to fill the void....]]
:{
}:
executive Order (E.O.) 13211 - Actions Concerning Regulations That Significantly Affect Energy Supply, Distribution, or Use - was issued by President George W. Bush in 2001. It applies to any significant energy action as defined by the E.O. A significant energy action is one that promulgates, or is expected to lead to the promulgation of, a final rule that is:
- a significant regulatory action under E.O. 12866 and
- likely to have a significant adverse effect on the supply, distribution or use of energy or is designated by the Administrator of OMB/OIRA as a significant energy action.
For significant energy actions, the federal agency must prepare a Statement of Energy Effects and submit the Statement to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The Statement, or a summary, must be included in the proposed and final rulemaking notices published by the agency. A Statement of Energy Effects includes information on any adverse effects on energy supply, distribution, or use, and reasonable alternatives to the action along with the expected effects of such alternatives on energy supply, distribution, or use.
vs biden:https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55829189
https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/is-the-republican-party-over/
...[rats from ship egs]
And yet another story from the day: a third career prosecutor from the Department of Justice resigned after publicly attacking Attorney General William Barr for abusing his power to get Trump reelected."After 36 years, I'm fleeing what was the U.S. Department of Justice," Phillip Halpern wrote. "[T]he department's past leaders were dedicated to the rule of law and the guiding principle that justice is blind. That is a bygone era, but it should not be forgotten." Noting that "Barr has never actually investigated, charged or tried a case," Halpern expressed deep concern over Barr's "slavish obedience to Donald Trump's will." "This career bureaucrat seems determined to turn our democracy into an autocracy," he warned.
Georgetown Law Professor Paul Butler, who worked as a federal prosecutor under Barr when he was George H. W. Bush's Attorney General, told Katie Benner of the New York Times that such criticism is "unprecedented," and reflects Trump's pressure on the AG. "I have never seen sitting prosecutors go on the record with concerns about the attorney general," he said.
And yet, Barr's willingness to bend the Justice Department to Trump's personal will may, in the end, not be enough to keep Trump's favor. Angry that Barr did not produce a report attacking the Russia investigation before the election, Trump just yesterday said he wasn't happy with Barr's performance, and might not keep him on as AG if he wins a second term.
There are signs people in the administration are preparing for Trump to lose the election. His cabinet is rushing to change regulations to lock in Trump's goal of giving more scope to businessmen to act as they see fit. Normally, changes in regulations require setting aside time for public comment on the changes, but the administration is shortening or eliminating those periods over changes in, for example, rules allowing railroads to move highly flammable liquefied natural gas on freight trains, what constitutes "contract" work, how much pollution factories can emit, and who can immigrate to America.
Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, said in a statement: "President Trump has worked quickly from the beginning of his term to grow the economy byremoving the mountain of Obama-Biden job-killing regulations," and that the current push simply continues that effort. But no one is missing the quiet distancing going on in Washington as Republican lawmakers are shifting away from public support for the president.
Meanwhile, at his rally tonight in Georgia, Trump told the crowd "You should… lock up the Bidens, lock up Hillary." The crowd then began to chant "Lock them up." But one thing about a bully: when people finally start to turn on him, there is a stampede for the exits.
Tonight, at his Georgia rally, Trump outlined all the ways in which he was being unfairly treated, then mused: "Could you imagine if I lose?… I'm not going to feel so good. Maybe I'll have to leave the country, I don't know."
https://www.ecowatch.com/trump-epa-2647067465.html
toxic 10 epa rollbacks ewg
From the beginning, the Trump administration has aggressively slashed environmental regulations. A New York Times analysis identified 100 environmental protections that have been reversed or are in the process of getting rolled back. The administration's record on chemical safety has been especially hazardous for the health of Americans, especially children.
One year into President Trump's term, EWG detailed how the Trump administration has stacked the Environmental Protection Agency with industry lawyers and lobbyists, undermined worker safety and cooked the books on chemical safety assessments. Midway through his second year, we reported how the EPA reversed a ban on a brain-damaging pesticide, delayed chemical bans and killed a rule to protect kids from toxic PCBs in schools. Last year, we reported that the EPA had rescinded safety rules at chemical plants, rubber-stamped untested new chemicals and silenced researchers.
As Trump's first term nears its end, things are even worse. Here are 10 more ways the Trump administration has continued to make life more toxic for Americans.
1. Failed to Aggressively Regulate Toxic ‘Forever Chemicals’
The toxic fluorinated chemicals known as PFAS contaminate more than 2,200 sites across the nation. Because they never break down in the environment, PFAS are often called "forever chemicals." They build up in our bodies and are linked to cancer, reproductive and developmental harms and reduced effectiveness of vaccines. Even though the EPA has known about the risks from PFAS chemicals since at least 1998, they remain virtually unregulated.
In February 2019, the EPA released a toothless PFAS "action plan" that lacked deadlines for action and failed to address the use of PFAS in everyday products, contamination from PFAS air emissions or disposal of PFAS waste, among other concerns. A year and a half later, key goals from the plan, including regulating PFAS under the Superfund law and setting drinking water standards, remain unfulfilled.
When Congress stepped in and sought to designate PFOA and PFOS – the two most notorious and well-studied PFAS – as "hazardous substances" and to set deadlines for agency action, Trump threatened a veto. Trump's EPA also weakened a rule designed to regulate PFAS in consumer products.
2. Allowed a Rocket Fuel Chemical to Stay in Drinking Water
Perchlorate is a component of rocket fuel that also frequently contaminates drinking water sources. Perchlorate can interfere with thyroid function, which can also harm childhood brain development.
Almost a decade ago, the EPA determined that these harms warranted regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act. The agency then dragged its feet for years. In 2016, the Natural Resources Defense Council sued to force the EPA to finally set a legal limit for perchlorate in drinking water. In a court-approved consent decree, the EPA agreed to propose a standard by October 2018 and finalize it by 2019. However, the EPA sought extensions and failed to meet these deadlines.
The EPA finally proposed a drinking water standard in June 2019 but also suggested that it might not regulate perchlorate after all. A year later,the EPA withdrew its decision to regulate perchlorate in drinking water.
3. Allowed Scores of New Chemicals, Including New Toxic PFAS, Onto the Market Without Adequate Oversight
In 2016, Congress substantially changed the way new chemicals are approved under the Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA.
Under the old law, chemicals were frequently approved by default, often without any health and safety information. As a result, unsafe chemicals were allowed to be used for years or decades before the health and environmental hazards came to light. Inadequate oversight of new chemicals can also lead to regrettable substitution – when chemicals are finally found to be unsafe, they are often replaced by unstudied chemicals that may be just as or even more toxic.
The 2016 update was supposed to fix the new chemicals program by requiring the EPA to make an affirmative safety finding on new chemicals and restrict use if industry failed to provide sufficient safety data. Nonetheless, the Trump EPA has approved scores of new chemicals in a process that lacks transparency and contravenes the 2016 law.The EPA has also ignored known health concerns, limited its consideration of worker risks and denied requests for public files in the new chemicals program.
The EPA has also exploited loopholes in the new law to quickly approve new chemicals, including toxic PFAS. A recent investigation found that the EPA has been quietly approving new PFAS chemicals, through a provision known as the low volume exemption in the new chemicals program. As a result, the EPA is greenlighting new PFAS chemicals on an expedited basis, without public scrutiny. One PFAS, used in ski wax, was approved despite a finding that the chemical could "waterproof the lungs," resulting in severe health impacts.
Since the law was updated in 2016, the EPA has reviewed more than 3,000 new chemicals submissions. More than 1,000 of these chemicals have been approved through the low volume exemption, and since 2016, manufacturers have begun producing at least 900 new chemicals, many without adequate safety data. Environmental groups have sued the EPA over its failures to protect the public and the environment from risks from new chemicals.
4. Failed to Protect Workers From a Deadly Paint-Stripping Chemical
Methylene chloride is a highly toxic chemical used in paint strippers that is responsible for more than 60 deaths since 1980. In the final days of the Obama administration, the EPA proposed a ban on "methylene chloride for consumer and most types of commercial paint and coating removal."
After significant pressure from families who lost loved ones due to methylene chloride exposure, the Trump EPA eventually issued a final rule in 2019. However, the EPA narrowed the rule so that it would apply only to consumeruses of methylene chloride, not commercial uses. That means workers are not protected, even though a Center for Public Integrity investigation found that most deaths from methylene chloride take place at work.
A separate EPA evaluation of methylene chloride found that manufacturing, disposal and several other uses of methylene chloride pose no "unreasonable risk." Environmental groups have filed lawsuits challenging the rule and the recent evaluation.
5. Cooked the Books on the “Civil Action” Chemical
Trichloroethylene is a chemical solvent made infamous by the book and movie 
." The EPA considers it to be a known carcinogen, and it is one of the primary contaminants that sickened scores of veterans who served at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina.
As with methylene chloride, in the final days of the Obama administration, the EPA proposed banning three uses of TCE: spot cleaning, aerosol degreasing and vapor degreasing. In December 2017, the Trump EPA shelved these proposed bans, claiming that it would study those uses in a separate ongoing risk evaluation of TCE.
However, the EPA dramatically rewrote the accepted science on TCE in the draft risk evaluation released in February. As EWG warned in 2018, the solvents industry aggressively lobbied the EPA to ignore a key 2003 study finding that TCE causes heart deformities in developing fetuses. TCE's connection with fetal heart defects was an important basis for the Obama EPA's decision to ban three uses of TCE. An independent review of the EPA's science found that "prenatal exposure to TCE can cause human cardiac defects" and that the study "remains a valid choice" for assessing risk.
The lobbyists succeeded. The EPA's draft risk evaluation questioned the study's design and minimized its significance. An investigation by Reveal News compared the draft risk evaluation with a leaked earlier draft. It found that the earlier draft had relied extensively on the 2003 study and used it as a benchmark for the risk calculations. Reveal also reported that then-EPA chemicals safety chief Nancy Beck – "the scariest Trump appointee you've never heard of"
:{
}:
https://www.ewg.org/planet-trump/2017/05/scariest-trump-appointee-you-ve-never-heard
– ordered that the risk evaluation be rewritten to downplay the risks of TCE. With the EPA giving significantly less weight to risks from fetal heart deformities, it's unlikely the agency will finalize the proposed bans.
6. Pressured EPA Scientists to Drop Evaluations of Toxic Chemicals – Including Formaldehyde
The Trump EPA is undermining the work of independent scientists within the Integrated Risk Information System program, known as IRIS. The program's work is supposed to be impartial and non-political. Its scientific assessments are intended to support the work of other EPA program offices and regional offices. IRIS is a frequent target of chemical industry attacks because its independent safety assessments often don't align with industry objectives.
In 2018, the Trump EPA tried to defund the IRIS program. EPA leadership also pressured IRIS to drop critical health assessments. In March 2019, a Government Accountability Office report disclosed that EPA leadership directed agency offices to limit the number of chemicals they wanted IRIS to review, and cut in half the number of IRIS's ongoing or upcoming assessments.
One of the halted assessments was IRIS's decades-long review of formaldehyde, a widely used chemical and known human carcinogen. This is surprising because former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt indicated to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in January 2018 that the report was complete and ready for release. However, answering questions for the record following a 2019 Senate hearing, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said formaldehyde was "not a top priority."
Instead of releasing the IRIS study on formaldehyde to the public, the EPA has instead decided that the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention – under the leadership of Nancy Beck – should conduct its own assessment of formaldehyde. As with TCE, this action will give the agency an opportunity to distort the science and minimize risks. Because these reviews take years, it will also significantly delay any EPA regulatory action on formaldehyde.
7. Rolled Back Clean Water Protections
Industrial chemical pollutants are often discharged into drinking water supplies. But the Trump administration has made it a priority to roll back theClean Water Rule, which more clearly defined which kinds of bodies of water are subject to the Clean Water Act. EWG's analysis found that the Clean Water Rule, if implemented as proposed by the Obama administration, would have protected drinking water sources for more than 117 million Americans.
The EPA's own science advisors have opposed the rollback of the Clean Water Rule, but the Trump administration repealed it in 2019, proposed its own rule in January and finalized it in April. The new rule covers far fewer bodies of water and would leave 234,000 miles of small streams unprotected. EWG estimates that at least 72 million Americans draw at least half their drinking water from small streams.
Because of the repeal, those bodies of water will no longer be subject to pollution limits. Protection for small and seasonal streams and wetlands is important because they often flow into larger bodies of water, including sources of drinking water. Polluted drinking water sources strain municipal water utilities tasked with filtering out contaminants regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act, and risk exposing the public to more contaminants that aren't regulated under the act.
8. Cooked the Books on Asbestos
Asbestos is a highly toxic, naturally occurring chemical linked to a particularly deadly form of cancer called mesothelioma.An estimated 40,000 Americans die every year from asbestos-related diseases. Although the toxicity of asbestos is well understood, the EPA has never actually banned most uses. The EPA attempted a ban in 1989, but most of the rule was overturned by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1991.
After Congress reformed TSCA in 2016, the EPA announced that asbestos would be one of the first 10 chemicals reviewed under the new law. Many hoped that this time, the EPA would finally ban asbestos.
Instead, when the EPA released its draft risk evaluation in May, it found that several uses of asbestos, including import of asbestos and asbestos-containing products and distribution of asbestos-containing products, did not pose an unreasonable risk. The EPA made its risk determinations by ignoring exposure from "legacy" uses of asbestos, such as old insulation and building tiles. Although in November the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the EPA to fix this error, it has yet to do so.
Instead of banning asbestos, in April 2019 the EPA published a rule requiring notice and approval before manufacturers could resume using it in some applications the agency considered abandoned. However, leaked documents show that more than a dozen EPA staffers urged an outright ban on asbestos instead.
9. Proposed a Loophole for Toxic Air Pollution
In July 2019, the Trump EPA proposed to reverse a longstanding policy requiring large power plants, refineries and other industrial polluters to always meet certain strict controls, even after reducing emissions. The new rule creates a loophole in the Clean Air Act regulations that would allow large industrial facilities to reclassify themselves, from "major sources" of air pollution to "area sources."
That change would allow them to opt out of strict pollution control standards, called "maximum achievable control technology," and substantially increase their emissions of dangerous air pollutants. EPA's own data shows that more than 3,900 large facilities that :{emit pollutants like mercury and :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{benzene:(style="background-color:#ffcc66;"):}: could take advantage of this loophole. The Environmental Defense Fund estimates the loophole could increase toxic air emissions by as much as 480 percent, or almost 50 million pounds per year.
This rollback is especially alarming in the midst of the global coronavirus pandemic. Studies have found that people who live in areas with high levels of air pollution are at greater risk for severe cases of COVID-19.
10. Continuing Its Quest to Censor Science
In 2018, the EPA proposed a disastrous rule significantly limiting the kinds of science the agency can rely on to justify environmental regulations. The rule would have prohibited the agency from using studies that don't make their underlying data publicly available or whose results can't be replicated. That change would prevent the EPA from including in its future risk assessments most human health studies, because personal medical data must remain confidential. The rule would undermine studies that are foundational to clean air regulations.
The proposal sparked enormous opposition from scientists, academics and environmental health advocates. More than 600,000 public comments were submitted to the agency, the vast majority in opposition. In September 2019, the EPA dropped the proposal from its regulatory agenda.
But the Trump EPA is at it again. In March, the agency issued a supplemental proposal that is actually worse than the original proposal. The 2018 proposal applied to all "dose response" studies, but the new proposal applies to all studies. The new proposal also applies retroactively, which means the EPA could use it to gut existing regulations.
As these actions – and dozens of others – show, the Trump EPA has aggressively worked to erode and eliminate vital environmental and public health protections. The public needs an EPA that will prioritize people and planet over polluters and profit.
===
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wa exmr
demint endorse; l: Derek Kan, the executive associate director of the Office of Management and Budget, has been nominated as the agency’s deputy director. He will be under Russ Vought, who moved up from deputy to director. For the past few months, Kan, a recent undersecretary for policy at the Transportation Department, has been overseeing the distribution of coronavirus funds and other key budget items. He has a reputation for bipartisanship, has worked for several GOP leaders, and has a high-tech background. Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, praised Kan as “smart, competent, politically savvy, a serious economic thinker who should have been running things over at the White House several years ago.” …
https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/trumps-epa-moves-jettison-any-regulation-of-a-chemical-linked-to-child-brain-damage-report/
no lnx
trump’s EPA moves jettison any regulation of a chemical linked to child brain damage: report
[ June 3, 2019: Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler speaks at the National Press Club.
Written by Julia Conley / Common Dreams May 15, 2020
Environmental campaigners vowed to fight President Donald Trump’s EPA Thursday after the agency said it would propose that the rocket-fuel chemical perchlorate does not need to be regulated, despite its links to cognitive damage in fetal and child development.
According to the New York Times, theEPA plans to tell the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that it is “not in the public interest” to regulate the chemical at all, a year after the agency recommended the allowable amount in drinking water be limited to 56 parts per billion (ppb).
The 2019 proposal was already 10 to 50 times higher than what water safety experts recommend, the Times reported.
The new recommendation defies a court order, the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) said, which was issued in 2018 after the group sued over the Obama administration’s inaction on regulating perchlorate....
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Midnight revelation: The OMB has been withholding emails that explicitly show Trump’s motives on Ukraine
Mark Sumner / Daily KosFebruary 2, 2020
A midnight court filing on Friday night revealed that the White House is refusing to release at least two dozen emails directly related to Donald Trump’s withholding of military assistance from…
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/trump-continues-his-attack-on-working-people-by-moving-to-redefine-poverty-and-slash-social-programs-for-millions
Julia Conley / Common Dreams May 8, 2019
The Trump administration on Monday moved to change the definition of “poverty” in the United States in a proposal which combines the president’s attempts to portray the U.S. economy as…
The Trump administration on Monday moved to change the definition of “poverty” in the United States in a proposal which combines the president’s attempts to portray the U.S. economy as strong with his repeated attacks on the working poor and their access to government services.
In a regulatory filing, President Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) wrote that it may change how inflation is calculated in order to reduce the number of Americans who are living below the federally-recognized poverty line and are therefore eligible for certain government support services and social programs.
As Melissa Boteach, who oversees income security programs at the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), wrote on Twitter, the change “seems technical, but it’s actually a big attack on working people.”
Melissa Boteach
@mboteach
- May 6, 2019
Replying to @mboteach
Remember last year when the Trump admin declared that “our War on Poverty is largely over and a success”? https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Expanding-Work-Requirements-in-Non-Cash-Welfare-Programs.pdf ….
Now he’s acting on this bogus notion, trying to slowly define people out of poverty by decree. 2/
Melissa Boteach
@mboteach
Seems technical, but it’s actually a big attack on working people. In short, Trump wants to weaken how our poverty definition keeps pace with cost of living. So each year, as costs go up, many working people w/low pay would gradually be stripped of WIC, Medicaid & other basics 3/
15
5:27 PM - May 6, 2019 · Washington, DC
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Under the administration’s proposal, which was first reported by Bloomberg News, the government would shift to a system known as “Chained CPI,” which assumes consumers will change what they buy as items grow more expensive through inflation, suggesting that they are not struggling to afford necessities.
The definitional change would result in a slower inflation rate, which is used to determine how many Americans are eligible for programs like Medicaid, SNAP benefits, and other federal assistance.
As of 2018, a family of four making $25,900 per year was considered to be living in poverty, based on the necessities they could afford with the current inflation rate.
Under the new system, OMB officials wrote in the proposal, “changes to the poverty thresholds, including how they are updated for inflation over time, may affect eligibility for programs that use the poverty guidelines.”
Boteach wrote that the proposal demonstrates “how out of touch Trump is with lives of working-class people,” noting that even the current poverty line does little to reflect the amount of money an American family actually needs to live comfortably in the wealthiest country on the planet.
In fact, wrote Boteach, the new standards will make the government’s understanding of poverty and inequality even less accurate.
Melissa Boteach
@mboteach
- May 6, 2019
Replying to @mboteach
Seems technical, but it’s actually a big attack on working people. In short, Trump wants to weaken how our poverty definition keeps pace with cost of living. So each year, as costs go up, many working people w/low pay would gradually be stripped of WIC, Medicaid & other basics 3/
Melissa Boteach
@mboteach
This proposal shows how out of touch Trump is with lives of working-class ppl. “Americans on average report that it would take more than $55,000 in annual income to be considered out of poverty.” That’s more than TWICE our current threshold https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/poverty/reports/2014/01/07/81702/50-years-after-lbjs-war-on-poverty/ …
4/
12
5:29 PM - May 6, 2019 · Washington, DC
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50 Years After LBJ’s War on Poverty - Center for American Progress
A major new study of public attitudes about poverty, work, and economic opportunity reveals that many Americans remain in economic hardship and desire new efforts to provide low-income families with...
americanprogress.org
15 people are talking about this
Melissa Boteach
@mboteach
- May 6, 2019
Replying to @mboteach
Sadly, even w/low unemployment, poverty & hardship are still a mainstay in American life. And guess what? Unilaterally redefining it doesn’t do a damn thing to help someone secure a better job, put food on the table, or pay critical health care bills.6/ https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/poverty/reports/2018/03/07/447412/ensuring-basic-living-standards/ …
View image on Twitter
Melissa Boteach
@mboteach
This is a cynical attempt to squeeze working-class people. Their incomes will STILL be too low to make ends meet, but Trump’s decree would make it harder for them to qualify for help. 7/
9
5:40 PM - May 6, 2019 · Washington, DC
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Some critics on social media denounced the proposal as Trump’s latest “cruel” measure aimed at weakening the systems meant to support the poorest Americans and struggling working class families.
David Roberts
?
@drvox
Trump is going to change how poverty is measured, with the intent of rendering a bunch of people ineligible for social assistance. His base will support this arbitrary cruelty b/c even though it hurts them, it also hurts brown people. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-06/trump-poverty-line-inflation …
133
12:15 PM - May 6, 2019
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Trump May Redefine Poverty, Cutting Americans From Welfare Rolls
The Trump administration may alter the way it determines the national poverty threshold, putting Americans living on the margins at risk of losing access to welfare programs.
bloomberg.com
79 people are talking about this
Democratic Coalition
?
@TheDemCoalition
This appears to be the latest cruel and incompetent effort by the Trump administration to make it harder to access welfare programs.#ShitholePresidenthttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-06/trump-poverty-line-inflation …
243
12:53 PM - May 6, 2019
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Trump May Redefine Poverty, Cutting Americans From Welfare Rolls
The Trump administration may alter the way it determines the national poverty threshold, putting Americans living on the margins at risk of losing access to welfare programs.
bloomberg.com
358 people are talking about this
Paul Krugman
?
@paulkrugman
For the moment, Republicans have mostly stopped pretending to care about deficits. But they're still eager to cut aid to the poor 1/ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-06/trump-poverty-line-inflation …
1,691
5:32 AM - May 7, 2019
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Trump May Redefine Poverty, Cutting Americans From Welfare Rolls
The Trump administration may alter the way it determines the national poverty threshold, putting Americans living on the margins at risk of losing access to welfare programs.
bloomberg.com
862 people are talking about this
The OMB’s proposal follows multiple attacks on social welfare programs by the Trump administration as it attempts to keep families from accessing SNAP benefits, commonly known as food stamps, and Medicaid. The administration and the Republican Party have pushed in 2018 to require people who use food stamps to work at least 20 hours per week, a move which would push at least one million Americans out of the program.
The federal budget proposal unveiled in March also included more than $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, threatening the healthcare of tens of millions of Americans.
The administration has spent much of the last two years insisting that the American economy is thriving—frequently pointing to the GDP, the stock market, and low unemployment rates as evidence.
But studies have shown that low unemployment numbers offer a misleading picture of how American families are actually coping in the economy, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) does not count “600,000 ‘discouraged workers’ who say they are no longer looking because they don’t think they can find a job,” according to Quartz.
Critics have pointed out that 40 percent of families are unable to save enough moneyto pay for a $400 emergency; 137 million American households struggle to pay healthcare costs; and nearly 80 percent of workers live paycheck-to-paycheck—regardless of the GDP or the stock market.
The OMB’s proposal, wrote Georgetown University and public policy researcher Joan Alker, is “a novel way to take healthcare, etc., away from people AND make it look like there are fewer poor people.”...
==
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/25042019/trump-omb-secret-science-policy-memo-pollution-health-studies-heritage-foundation-vought
Donald Trump's administration has launched yet another attempt to control the use of science in federal policymaking—this time with a memorandum to government agencies from the White House budget office.
Thememo, quietly released on Wednesday, appears aimed at putting into effect some long-sought goals of industry foes of environmental regulations.
Described as "guidance" for executive branch agencies, it offers numerous new avenues for regulated industries to challenge the science used in policymaking. The memo was signed by Russell Vought, a former top official at the political arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation who is now acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
Observers say the OMB is seeking to implement by fiat restrictions on environmental and health science that have failed to garner support in Congress and have foundered in a formal rulemaking process begun last year by the Environmental Protection Agency.
"There's been no consultation with the scientific community, no opportunity to comment, no analysis on the costs or impacts," said Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Vought's memo, titled "Improving Implementation of the Information Quality Act," sets out new guidance for all federal agencies on identifying and using "influential scientific, financial, or statistical information."
It says that such data should be held to higher standards than other information, with a more in-depth peer review required. That review should evaluate "the objectivity of the underlying data and the sensitivity of the agency's conclusions to analytic assumptions," with additional peer review required in some circumstances.
Data of this kind, such as health surveys, are often used to support controls on pollutants, including those like smog and soot that come from burning fossil fuels. The guidance could also affect how limits on greenhouse gas emissions are devised.
Vought writes that influential analysis must be disseminated to the public "with sufficient descriptions of data and methods to allow them to be reproduced by qualified third parties who may want to test the sensitivity of agency analyses."
Echoes of EPA's 'Secret Science' Effort
The OMB memo appears aimed at achieving the same goals as EPA's proposal last year, the so-called "Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science" rule, which sought to prevent the EPA from relying on public health studies where the raw data had not been made public due to confidentiality concerns. It mirrored legislation sponsored by former Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), then chairman of the House Science Committee, that was passed by the House of Representatives three times but never been taken up by the Senate.
Under the guise of transparency, the EPA rule would have excluded from environmental policymaking some of the seminal studies linking air pollution to increased mortality.
The EPA received more than 500,000 public comments on the transparency proposal, including an extraordinary outpouring of opposition from the scientific community—including the presidents of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine; the leaders of physicians' groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics; health organizations like the American Lung Association; and the editors of major scientific journals.
No further public action has occurred on the rule since the comment period closed last August. An EPA spokesperson said in an email that the agency "is considering the new OMB memorandum as we move forward with the 'Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science' rulemaking."
'It's About Delay'
It is not clear exactly what impact the OMB guidance will have—in part because this kind of guidance doesn't have the force and effect of law. (In other words, the requirements and deadlines of environmental statutes would weigh more heavily before a judge.) Also, Vought does not specify what the EPA or other agencies are to do about influential scientific studies that do not meet the new requirements. But Rosenberg said it appears to offer the regulated industry new avenues to challenge actions that rely on science.
"It's about delay," said Rosenberg. "Every piece of this allows industry to make a claim that will delay the process of regulations.
"It essentially says that anyone—mostly industry—can challenge the data or technical information, and the agency then has to develop a response to every challenge, and then the person who challenged the data can appeal, and you have to go through this cycle again, apparently endlessly."
Vought, known as a conservative firebrand who served as an aide to Vice President Mike Pence when Pence was a member of Congress, played a key role in the budget controversies that engulfed the White House early this year. He reportedly designed Trump's initial proposal for border wall funding and led the decision to continue processing tax refunds during the government shutdown.
Vought's memo on information quality portrays the new guidance as a good government measure. "Prudent decision making depends on reliable, high-quality information," Vought wrote. "Congress has long recognized that federal agencies should make decisions using the best data reasonably available, and Congress has entrusted OMB with the statutory role of ensuring that federal agencies collect, use, and disseminate information that is fit for its intended purpose."
Published Under:
omg change how rules ar made
swamp thing, inside the wire
https://www.ecowatch.com/epa-nancy-beck-chemical-safety-2389388927.html
By Melanie Benesh
The Trump administration just appointed a chemical industry bigwig to a high-level chemical safety position at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as deputy assistant administrator of the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention.
You read that right. Nancy Beck is coming to the EPA straight from the American Chemistry Council (ACC), the powerful lobby whose members include Dow Chemical, DuPont, Monsanto, ExxonMobil Chemical, Chevron Phillips Chemical and Bayer.Now she'll be making decisions as the deputy assistant administrator of the EPA department whose stated mission is to "protect you, your family, and the environment from potential risks from pesticides and toxic chemicals."
Here's three things to know about Nancy Beck:
1. She has helped craft the chemical industry's political agenda for years.
==
==
Marcus Peacock worked as a senior adviser to Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney for 2 1/2 months after Trump took office. Peacock, who had worked in George W. Bush’s administration as a senior official in both the OMB and the Environmental Protection Agency, helped guide Mulvaney through the Senate confirmation process and was instrumental in crafting the Trump administration’s executive order cutting two existing regulations for every new regulation.
Marcus Peacock
A month before he left the Trump administration, Peacock requested an ethics waiver, arguing that he had “limited participation or influence on policies and decisions that would raise the types of concerns” the pledge seeks to avoid, according to a memo he sent to White House attorneys. Because his work on the executive order dealt with “process questions,” Peacock argued, it was not a specific policy action.
On April 6, 2017, two days before Peacock resigned, he received a special waiver. James Schultz, a senior associate counsel in the White House, concluded that Peacock had not “focused on specific regulations or policies.” Peacock left to become the executive vice president, the No. 2 position, at the Business Roundtable, a lobbying group for chief executives at U.S. companies.
The waiver reduced Peacock’s lobbying ban from five years to just six months. According to Senate lobbying records, Peacock is working with colleagues on federal budget process reforms, workforce development and immigration, international trade and changes to the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street overhaul, among other things.
In response to questions, the Business Roundtable noted that Peacock served at OMB for just 77 days and that he voluntarily agreed not to have any lobbying contact with OMB for six months, “more than twice the amount of time he actually worked there.”
Peacock’s waiver has drawn the attention of officials with the Office of Government Ethics, who are reviewing waivers granted by the Trump administration. But the Business Roundtable says it has not been asked about Peacock’s waiver or lobbying.
...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/cdc-gets-list-of-forbidden-words-fetus-transgender-diversity/2017/12/15/
We’re fully into Orwellian territory now. The Washington Post’s Lena H. Sun and Juliet Eilperin reportedFriday evening that a group of CDC employees were told not to use seven words in official budget documents: “vulnerable,” “fetus,” “transgender,” “entitlement,” “diversity,”“evidence-based,” and “science-based.”
Twenty-four hours later, Sun and Eilperin followed up by reporting that another HHS agency received similar guidance about avoiding “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” and “diversity,” as well as instructions to use “Obamacare” instead of “Affordable Care Act.” Another linguistic substitution is visible at the State Department, where some documents now refer to “sexual risk avoidance” rather than “sex education.”
In a post at the Union of Concerned Scientists blog on Saturday morning, Michael Halpern wrote:
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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/hurricane-harvey-trumps-weather-cuts-are-now-eye-storm
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9/1/17
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As Hurricane Harvey churned toward the Texas Gulf Coast last week, meteorologists, climate scientists and lay weather nerds on Twitter marveled at the crisp, detailed images of the storm sent to earth by a brand-new satellite. The nation’s first Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, GOES-16, had been launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida 11 days after the November election, and has since transmitted high-resolution pictures of smoke from Canadian wildfires, of the August 21 North American eclipse and of a major fog event that spread out over the Midwest and Eastern U.S. But it’s been the images of hurricanes — Hilary, Gert and now Harvey — that have most mesmerized and thrilled weather forecasters, who for the first time have been able to see the storms develop from tropical wave to threatening hurricane almost in real time.
GOES-16scans the earth every 15 minutes and tracks active storms at intervals as short as 30 seconds. It tracked Harvey as far back as August 17, when it was a tropical storm with 40 mile-per-hour winds approaching St. Lucia Island in the Caribbean.
“This new satellite will save lives,” said Todd McNamara of the U.S. Air Force 45th Weather Squadron, in a
released last year.
If President Trump’s budget blueprint for fiscal year 2018 passes muster in Congress, however, the agency behind GOES-16, the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service, could be facing lean times. Weather satellites take years to design and build, weeks to successfully launch (GOES-16 was delayed when Hurricane Matthew skimmed the Florida coast last year), and a well-funded staff of scientists to interpret and distribute data. The satellite agency, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), already gets less than it asks for every fiscal year. Trump has proposed cutting its roughly $2 billion budget by 18 percent.
A proposed budget in the U.S. House of Representatives would cut the satellite program even more steeply, by 23 percent, although the Senate budget only asks for a six percent reduction. The White House Office of Management and Budget insists the funding is enough to maintain the “current generation” of satellites. But the lack of commitment to the program reflects the administration’s ongoing hostility toward any science and research that might advance our knowledge of the earth’s climate — even when that research clearly saves lives. Here are four other ways that Trump’s priorities could make managing future disasters more difficult — and dangerous — in the U.S.
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http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/16/515578360/senate-narrowly-confirms-mulvaney-as-trumps-nominee-for-omb-director
Rep. Mick Mulvaney, President Trump's pick to lead the White House's Office of Management and Budget, won a close confirmation vote in the full Senate on Thursday, two weeks after the Senate Budget Committee advanced the South Carolina Republican's nomination by a 12-11 vote.
In a back-and-forth voice vote, the tally was 50-47 when Sen. Mitch McConnell's name was called. His "aye" vote sealed the nomination with 51 senators in favor. As the votes rolled in, groups of Democrats and Republicans huddled on the Senate floor, locked in conversation.
Immediately after the vote, McConnell took the floor to begin consideration of another Trump nomination — that of Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt for the post of U.S. EPA administrator.
Democrats who opposed Mulvaney's nomination spoke of his view that Social Security and Medicare must be overhauled — a move that, as NPR's Scott Horsley reported last month, Trump promised not to undertake.
At least one Republican — Sen. John McCain of Arizona — had said he would vote against Mulvaney's confirmation, in a move McCain said was based on the congressman's position on defense spending. In the past, McCain also faulted Mulvaney for his role in the 2013 government shutdown.
Mulvaney "is a prominent member of the House Freedom Caucus, a group of around 40 conservatives that grew out of the Tea Party movement," as we reported when his nomination was announced.
In the House, Mulvaney played a prominent role in the shutdown of the federal government over a budget impasse in late 2013. He had advocated for a similar shutdown back in 2011.
Mulvaney's confirmation follows a setback for Trump: On Wednesday, his labor secretary nominee, fast-food executive Andrew Puzder, withdrew his name from consideration after failing to get enough support from Republicans.
==
trumpistas:
| Management and Budget | John Baker | Confidential Assistant | GS-13 | 1/23/17 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Management and Budget | Kerrie Carr | Confidential Assistant | GS-11 | 1/23/17 |
| Management and Budget | Charles Dankert | Advisor | GS-13 | 1/23/17 |
| Management and Budget | Emma Doyle | Senior Advisor | GS-15 | 1/20/17 |
| Management and Budget | Jeffrey Freeland | Senior Advisor | SES | 1/20/17 |
| Management and Budget | John Gray | Advisor | GS-15 | 1/23/17 |
| Management and Budget | Daniel Hanlon | Senior Advisor | GS-13 | 1/20/17 |
| Management and Budget | James Herz | Advior | GS-15 | 1/20/17 |
| Management and Budget | Brenton McNeely | Senior Advisor | SES | 1/20/17 |
| Management and Budget | Marcus Peacock | Advisor | GS-15 | 1/20/17 |
| Management and Budget | Douglas Sellers | Confidential Assistant | GS-11 | 1/23/17 |
| Management and Budget | Russell Vought | Advisor | SES | 1/20/17 |
| Management and Budget | Michael Williams | Advisor | GS-15 | 1/20/17 |
| Management and Budget | Ron Wilson | Advisor | GS-13 | 1/20/17 |
| NASA | Gregory Autry† | White House Liaison | White House Liaison | White House Liaison |
==
still at it?
http://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/06/28/15000/how-politics-derailed-epa-science-arsenic-endangering-public-health
OMB 300 missing studies arsenic scam epa
==
==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Management_and_Budget
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is the largest office within the Executive Officeof the President of the United States (EOP).The main function of OMB is to produce the President's Budget.[2] OMB also measures the quality of agency programs, policies, and procedures and to see if they comply with the president's policies.
The current OMB Director is Shaun Donovan, who was nominated by the president following the nomination of Sylvia Mathews Burwell to become the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services. Donovan was confirmed by the Senate in a 75–22 vote.[3]
Contents
- :{1:(style="display:table-cell"):}::{History:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{2:(style="display:table-cell"):}::{Purpose:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{3:(style="display:table-cell"):}::{Structure:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{4:(style="display:table-cell"):}::{Key staff:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{5:(style="display:table-cell"):}::{List of directors:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{6:(style="display:table-cell"):}::{See also:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{7:(style="display:table-cell"):}::{References:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{8:(style="display:table-cell"):}::{External links:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
History
The Bureau of the Budget, OMB's predecessor, was established in 1921 as a part of the Department of the Treasury by the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, which was signed into law by president Warren G. Harding. The Bureau of the Budget was moved to the Executive Office of the President in 1939, and reorganized into the Office of Management and Budget in 1970 during the Nixon administration.[4] The first OMB included Roy Ash (head), Paul O'Neill (assistant director), Fred Malek (deputy director) and Frank Zarb (associate director) and two dozen others.
In the 1990s, OMB was reorganized to remove the distinction between management staff and budgetary staff by combining the dual roles into each given program examiner within the Resource Management Offices.[5]
Purpose
OMB's predominant purpose is to assist the president in overseeing the preparation of the federal budget and to supervise its administration in executive branch agencies. In helping to formulate the president's spending plans, OMB evaluates the effectiveness of agency programs, policies, and procedures, assesses competing funding demands among agencies, and sets funding priorities. OMB ensures that agency reports, rules, testimony, and proposed legislation are consistent with the president's budget and with administration policies.
In addition, OMB oversees and coordinates the administration's procurement, financial management, information, and regulatory policies. In each of these areas, OMB's role is to help improve administrative management, to develop better performance measures and coordinating mechanisms, and to reduce any unnecessary burdens on the public.
OMB's critical missions are:[6]
- Budget development and execution is a prominent government-wide process managed from the Executive Office of the President (EOP) and a device by which a president implements his policies, priorities, and actions in everything from the Department of Defense to NASA.
- OMB manages other agencies' financials, paperwork, and IT.
Structure
Overview
The Office contains a significant number of career appointed staff; OMB staff provide important continuity regardless of which party occupies the White House. Six positions within OMB – the Director, the Deputy Director, the Deputy Director for Management, and the administrators of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, and the Office of Federal Financial Management are presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed positions.
==
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/U.S._Office_of_Management_and_Budget
The U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is headed by Director Sylvia Mathews Burwell, formerly president of the **Walmart**Foundation and, previously, President of the Global Development Program at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.[1][2]
Contents
- 1 Mission
- 2 On Global Warming
- 3 Lobbied by the Nuclear Industry for Loan Guarantees
- 4 Personnel
- 5 Contact Information
- 6 Resources and Articles
Mission
According to the Office's web site, the OMB's "predominant mission is to assist the President in overseeing the preparation of the federal budget and to supervise its administration in Executive Branch agencies. In helping to formulate the President's spending plans, OMB evaluates the effectiveness of agency programs, policies, and procedures, assesses competing funding demands among agencies, and sets funding priorities. OMB ensures that agency reports, rules, testimony, and proposed legislation are consistent with the President's Budget and with Administration policies.
"In addition, OMB oversees and coordinates the Administration's procurement, financial management, information, and regulatory policies. In each of these areas, OMB's role is to help improve administrative management, to develop better performance measures and coordinating mechanisms, and to reduce any unnecessary burdens on the public."[3]
On Global Warming
U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's office was behind a push to censor congressional testimony that global warming poses a danger to the public, according to Jason Burnett, a former associate deputy administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The vice president and the White House Office of Management and Budget heavily edited testimony last year by the director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). "I read the testimony, checked with EPA scientists, and came to the conclusion that the draft testimony was fundamentally accurate as written," Burnett stated in a letter to Barbara Boxer, who chairs the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.[4]
Lobbied by the Nuclear Industry for Loan Guarantees
In May 2007, The Hill reported that the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), along with "top banking institutions" are lobbying the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) for "more comprehensive" federal loan guarantees for new nuclear power plants. "Since the April meeting" with OMB, the DoE "has proposed that the federal government cover 90 percent of loan guarantees, higher than its original guidelines of 80 percent."[5]
NEI's "New Plant Finance Task Force" is telling federal agencies that without total or near-total federal loan guarantees, which "act as default protection for private lenders," nuclear power companies will "have difficulty in financing new plants, which can cost as much as $4 billion." NEI's Richard Myers said that even increasing the loan guarantees to 90% of plant costs "will probably not be workable." A DoE spokesperson said the agency was not supporting a greater than 90% guarantee because the agency must protect "the taxpayer dollar from the potential financial risks of these projects."[5]
Personnel
- Howard Shelanski, Administrator, Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA)[6]
Contact Information
Website: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/
Resources and Articles
Related SourceWatch Articles
- Cass Sunstein
- Bush administration
- Congressional Budget Office
- Congressional Research Service
- David Safavian
- How a bill becomes a law
- Joshua B. Bolten, former Director
- Paul A. Denett
- Nuclear Energy Institute
- Robert A. Burton
- U.S. budget deficit
- U.S. Department of Defense
- U.S. Department of Energy
- U.S. Department of Justice
- U.S. Department of State
- U.S. economy
- U.S. National Debt
- U.S. tax cuts
External Links
- Kevin Bogardus, "Nuclear power, banks link up in bid to get better financing," The Hill, May 24, 2007.
- Ben Lando, "Analysis: Nuclear Loan Backing Cloudy," UPI, May 25, 2007.
External Resources
External Articles
References
- :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ U.S. Office of Management and Budget, OMB Leadership, governmental agency website, accessed June 2013.
- :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Walmart, Walmart Foundation Names New President, corporate press release, October 14, 2011, accessed April 4, 2012.
- :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ U.S. White House, Role, governmental agency website, accessed ~2006.
- :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Stephen Power, "Cheney Sought to Alter Climate Discussion," The Wall Street Journal, July 8, 2008.
- ↑ ^Jump ^up to:5.0 5.1 Kevin Bogardus, "Nuclear power, banks link up in bid to get better financing," The Hill, May 24, 2007.
- :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Sidney Shapiro, What to Listen for at Confirmation Hearing for White House Regulatory Czar, Huffington Post, June 11, 2013.
==
http://www.sciencecorruption.com/ATN167/00244.html
The creation of the EOP Group lobbyfirm:
[In White House-speak EOP = Executive Office of the President]
Michael O'Bannon and Ernest Robson initially joined Tozzi's lobby shop (MBS), but they left in 1992. Later they joined with Joseph Hezir, David Gibbons and Assistant Secretary of Energy, Jan Mares, to open the EOP Group — the only lobby firm besides Tozzi's to specialize in lobbying the OMB.
- Michael O'Bannon - from Dept of Interior and OIRA (joined Tozzi in MBS, then left to manage the EOP Group)
- Ernest Robins - OIRA (joined Tozzi's MBS and then the EOP Group)
- Joseph Hezir - OMB/OIRA (joined EOP Group)
- David Gibbons - OIRA (joined EOP Group)
- Jan Mares - Assistant Secretary of Energy, - (brought in later to front the EOP Group)
- Jonathon Gledhill - OMB & OIRA (later joined EOP Group)
Leading environmental organizations are pressing the White House not to bow to industry pressure to abandon the government's main method for measuring the future costs of global warming pollution and the benefits of new pollution controls.
At issue is an economic calculation known as the "social cost of carbon," or SCC, which estimates the cost in dollars that society will ultimately pay for the harm caused by each ton of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere.
That price tag helps policymakers decide how much economic sense it makes to impose costly emissions controls.
Oil, gas and other industry groups recently petitioned the White House Office of Management and Budget to prohibit the use of the cost-benefit tool, arguing that it was imprecise and needed additional peer review.
In a filing on Wednesday, the method's defenders countered that while the estimates could be improved over time, they are "an important, if conservative estimate of the costs of climate change and the benefits of reducing carbon pollution."
The SCC estimate has been used in more than 40 regulatory actions, ranging from efficiency standards for appliances to proposed emissions standards for coal-fired power plants.
Similar approaches are used by other governments and international institutions. The cost calculations are based on widely used peer-reviewed climate and economic models.
"Without an SCC estimate, regulators would by default be using a value of zero for the benefits of reducing carbon pollution, implying that carbon pollution has no costs," a joint submission by experts from four organizations said. "That, sadly, is not the case, as evidenced by the large body of research outlining the sobering health, environmental, and economic impacts of rising temperatures, extreme weather, intensifying smog, and other climate impacts."
The document was sent to OMB by the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law.
A central estimate used by the Obama administration is that a ton of carbon dioxide carries a price tag to society of about $37. That means it would be worthwhile to spend $37 a ton today to control carbon pollution in order to prevent the damages the emissions would cause in the future....
http://insideclimatenews.org/content/obama-urged-not-abandon-social-cost-carbon-tool
http://www.amazon.com/Who-Will-Tell-The-People/dp/0671867407#reader_0671867407
Who Will Tell The People? : The Betrayal Of A…
ch 6 on gray and RR OMB
Death by Delay: Obama Team Stalls on Chemical Regulation
by Rebekah Wilce — March 26, 2012 - 8:29am
- Topics: Environment, Health, U.S. Government
- Projects: Food Rights Network
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has drafted a "chemicals of concern" list to restrict the use of certain chemicals and alert the public to their possible dangers. But the list remains secret and dormant because it's stuck at the Obama administration's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) for review.
OIRA is a division of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB). According to Katie Greenhaw, Regulatory Policy Analyst at the government watch-dog group OMB Watch, OIRA has 90 - 120 days to review rules from a regulatory agency, before releasing the rule back to the agency to open it up for public comment. Rules then go back to OIRA for additional review before being published as final rules. This rule has been stuck at OIRA for almost two years. That means the public hasn't even laid eyes on it.
Secret List
The EPA has hinted that its list of chemicals that may cause "unreasonable risk of injury to human health or the environment" may include "a category of eight phthalates, a category of polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), and bisphenol A (BPA)."
OMB's Regulatory 'Hit List'
by CPR Member Scholar Amy Sinden
The Issue OMB's annual report to Congress on the costs and benefits of regulation create the false impression that cost-benefit analysis can meaningfully sort those regulations that are good for society from those that are bad. OMB has capitalized on this misimpression by using the annual report process to create a "hit list" of purportedly "bad" regulations targeted for elimination or reform - a hit list that is little more than a backdoor channel for industry lobbyists to create a wish-list of regulations for the chopping block. |
http://www.progressivereform.org/perspOMB.cfm
Background
Each year, the White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issues a Report to Congress on the Costs and Benefits of Federal Regulation. This report purports to provide an overall accounting of the aggregate costs and benefits of federal regulations issued during the previous ten-year period. While OMB always finds that, in the aggregate, the benefits of federal regulations far outweigh their costs, behind this seemingly sunny assessment is a biased and ideologically driven attempt to discredit and dismantle important environmental health and safety protections. In attaching precise numbers to the costs and benefits of regulations, the OMB reports create a false impression that such values can be meaningfully measured in monetary terms and that cost-benefit analysis can be used to scientifically assess the efficacy and desirability of particular regulations. This sets the stage for the creation of OMB's regulatory "hit list" - an industry wish-list of federal regulations targeted for elimination or reform in the guise of promoting neutral-sounding principles like "economic efficiency."
OMB's 2005 report, for example, pegs the aggregate costs of federal regulations issued during the previous ten years at $34.8 to $39.4 billion and the aggregate benefits at $68.1 to $259.6 billion. Lest we too hastily conclude that federal regulation offers a good bargain, however, the report immediately cautions that "[a] substantial portion of both benefits and costs is attributable to a handful of Environmental Protection Agency clean air rules that reduce public exposure to fine particulate matter." Thus, when it comes to individual rules outside the EPA's regulation of fine particulate matter, OMB's accounting shows many of these provisions delivering far fewer dollars in benefits than they impose in costs. Often these disparate numbers simply reflect the fact that the benefits of regulation - things like health, safety, clean air and water, or functioning ecosystems - are far more difficult to measure in monetary terms than are the costs. The OMB reports, however, suggest that such regulations are "economically inefficient" and therefore undesirable.
Indeed, in several of its most recent reports, OMB has compiled a "hit list" of purportedly inefficient regulations that, in OMB's view, should be considered for elimination or modification. While OMB has never explained why particular rules were targeted for this list, contemporaneous press accounts indicated that the "hit list" process was initiated through a series of meetings with industry lobbyists convened at the behest of OMB. The purpose of these meetings was to identify and rank regulations that business groups found "overly burdensome."
In 2001, for example - the first year that OMB compiled the "hit list" - it received nominations covering 71 federal regulations. Forty-four of these nominations were submitted by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, a conservative think tank funded by many of the same industries that are directly regulated by the targeted rules. Of the 71 submissions, OMB ranked 23 as "high priority" on the basis of brief, skeletal statements (often no more than a page) submitted by Mercatus and other industry groups. Thirteen of the 23 rules on the "hit list" were environmental regulations, including such important promulgations as the Forest Service's roadless area conservation rule and EPA's rule strengthening the standard for arsenic in drinking water. EPA's rule regulating water pollution from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) also made it onto the list, just one month after representatives of the agriculture industry met with top-level OMB officials. Despite repeated requests from the Center for Progressive Reform and OMB Watch, however, OMB has never disclosed the criteria by which it selects rules for inclusion on the "hit list."
What People Are Fighting About
Those who favor the use of cost-benefit analysis in evaluating regulatory programs argue that it is a neutral standard that will enhance economic efficiency and cut government waste. In fact, however, cost-benefit analysis has a long pedigree as a tool for the promotion of an extremist, anti-regulatory agenda. President Reagan, who first came into office in 1981 with the avowed mission of dismantling the regulatory state, charged the OMB with the task of subjecting federal regulations to cost-benefit scrutiny. OMB soon became the institutional home of the most ardent anti-regulators in the administration. By demanding that agencies prepare detailed and comprehensive cost-benefit analyses for major regulations and frequently sending rules back for more and more detailed analyses, the Reagan OMB held up regulations with which it had substantive objections for months and in some cases forever. While OMB softened its approach somewhat under the Clinton administration, the Bush II OMB has again adopted an aggressive anti-regulatory posture, frequently using its cost-benefit mandate to push agencies to roll back or weaken regulatory protections for health, safety and the environment.
The problem is that, while cost-benefit analysis purports to be neutral, its methodologies systematically under-value health, safety and environmental protection. See CPR Perspective on Cost-benefit Analysis, "[Pricing the Priceless: Cost-Benefit Analysis of Health, Safety, and Environmental Protection."] The benefits that we derive from regulation - particularly environmental regulation - are usually intangible and not amenable to measurement in monetary terms. Things like human life, clean air and water, pristine wilderness, or the survival of an endangered species simply cannot be measured in dollars. In its annual report, OMB sometimes responds to this dilemma by simply declining to include all the benefits of a regulation in its monetary estimate. In many instances, this creates the impression that a particular regulation imposes costs far in excess of the benefits it delivers. One needs to read the fine print in order to learn that the quantified estimate "does not fully capture" all of the environmental benefits conferred by the rule. And ultimately, of course, it is only these incomplete monetary estimates of benefits - purged of all narrative caveats - that are incorporated into the ten-year accounting of the overall costs and benefits of all federal regulations in the aggregate.
In other instances, OMB employs highly controversial and contestable methods to derive monetary estimates of environmental values. For example, economists actually purport to put a price on life itself by studying things like how much more pay workers demand to take jobs that increase their risk of death. But aside from the practical difficulties of deriving such numbers, there are theoretical conundrums that decades of scholarly attention have failed to resolve. Consider, for example, the likelihood that rich people will demand more to take on risk than poor people. Which value is correct? Or are the lives of the poor worth less than those of the rich?
This is just one of many difficulties that make estimates of environmental benefits endlessly contestable. The result is that for virtually any determination that the benefits of a particular regulation exceed the costs, anyone with the money to hire an economist can massage the numbers to make the opposite case. EPA's arsenic rule - one of the members of the original "hit list" - provides a telling example. EPA's cost-benefit analysis pegged the costs of the rule at $206 million per year and the benefits at $140 to $198 million per year. A scholarly analysis of EPA's underlying data, however, concluded that reasonable people employing reasonable assumptions could estimate the benefits as low as $13 million or as high as $3.4 billion. In cases like this, cost-benefit analysis is ultimately indeterminate and simply creates an invitation to the rich and powerful to manipulate the numbers to legitimize their desired result. This may explain why industry groups largely support the increased use of cost-benefit analysis in environmental rulemaking, while environmental groups oppose it.
CPR's Perspective
OMB's annual reports on the aggregate costs and benefits of federal regulations are highly misleading. By attaching precise numbers to costs and benefits, they create the false impression that these values can be meaningfully and objectively measured, and that the efficacy and desirability of a regulatory scheme can be determined with scientific precision. In fact, underneath the veneer of mathematical precision lie a host of uncertainties, ambiguities and value judgments.
Moreover, OMB's annual reports are grossly incomplete. While they purport to provide an estimate of the costs and benefits of all federal regulations, they in fact leave out major categories of regulation. Homeland security regulations, for example, are categorically excluded from OMB's accounting of overall costs and benefits because "the benefits of improved security are very difficult to quantify and monetize." The exclusion of this major category of regulation obviously raises questions about the capacity for OMB's aggregate figures to generate meaningful generalizations about the success or "efficiency" of the federal regulatory program as a whole. It also highlights the way in which OMB provides selective treatment to regulations depending on their goals or content. Homeland security regulations apparently get a free ride from OMB. That is, OMB does not require the Department of Homeland Security to justify its regulations with cost-benefit analysis because OMB accepts that the benefits of such regulations are simply too difficult to monetize.
This treatment contrasts sharply with the treatment OMB accords regulations that produce environmental, health, and safety benefits, even though those benefits are also, by OMB's own admission, extremely difficult and often impossible to monetize. Nonetheless, OMB continues to subject environmental regulations to quantified cost-benefit analysis and - even where only a grossly incomplete quantification can be derived - to include them in its aggregate estimate of overall regulatory costs and benefits. This is particularly insidious because cost-benefit analysis often creates the misimpression that the costs of such regulations outweigh their benefits.
By purporting to measure the social costs and benefits of regulations with mathematical precision - sometimes calculating out to the second decimal place - OMB's annual reports create the false impression that cost-benefit analysis can meaningfully sort those regulations that are good for society from those that are bad. OMB has capitalized on this misimpression by using the annual report process to create a "hit list" of purportedly "bad" regulations targeted for elimination or reform. But there are two problems with the "hit list." First, it is not at all clear that cost-benefit analysis provides a meaningful measure of the social desirability of regulations. Second, there is no evidence that OMB has actually even bothered to make compliance with a cost-benefit standard a criterion for inclusion on the list. Indeed, it is not clear that there are any criteria for the list other than lobbying power. In the end, OMB's "hit list" appears to be little more than a backdoor channel for industry lobbyists to create a wish-list of regulations for the chopping block.