Vought defends White House’s ideological grant rule in contentious House hearing

Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought sparred with lawmakers Tuesday over the Trump administration’s plan to impose ideological rules on the federal grant approval process.

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Vought, the Project 2025 author who oversaw President Donald Trump’s controversial cuts to the federal government last year, faced intense scrutiny from House Appropriations Democrats, who argued his agency’s new grant rule is little more than “an attempt to subject all federal funding to a political litmus test,” as Rep. Rosa DeLauro said.

“Under your proposed rule, a recipient must quote ‘demonstrably advance the president’s policy priorities,’ end quote,” DeLauro, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said in her opening statement. “Not the country’s, and not the law’s.”

Vought’s agency proposed a rule in the Federal Register in May that would put political appointees in place of the industry experts tasked with approving complicated federal grant awards for everything from local governments to healthcare research and education. The appointees would evaluate the “alignment of Federal awards with administration priorities,” and have the power to scrap or cancel federal grant funding at any point and for any reason, according to the rule proposal.

The new evaluation criteria, a White House priority billed as a means of preventing taxpayer dollars from “woke” use, swiftly emerged as the defining topic as Vought testified.

“What about grants that have been explicitly funded by Congress?” Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez asked as she pressed Vought over whether the OMB will cancel funds secured by lawmakers for specific improvement projects in their districts.

Vought said those projects would “probably be at the top of the list that needs to be funded.”

But the exception of earmarked funding did little to assuage the concern of lawmakers who argued that Trump’s renovation projects across Washington are more of a waste of taxpayer dollars than any federal grant program could be.

“You have hijacked billions from investments to maintain U.S. military superiority in the future, and you have taken over $400 million in taxpayer funding from the Secret Service to pay for the president’s ballroom project,” DeLauro said, referring to Trump asking Senate Republicans to provide him with $400 million for White House security upgrades and a bunker underneath the ballroom.

Trump and his Cabinet have consistently claimed that the construction of a gilded ballroom in the White House’s East Wing, the troubled renovations to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, repairs to the Kennedy Center, proposed painting of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and myriad other projects in D.C. are not reliant on taxpayer dollars. But a New York Times analysis based on project summaries showed significant taxpayer cost associated with each project.