While leading the Office of Management and Budget during the first Trump administration, Russell T. Vought took steps to to expand the number of federal employees required to work during a government shutdown, froze military aid for Ukraine and railed against “wasteful spending” such as foreign aid and organizing unions in other nations.
Mr. Vought, whom President-elect Donald J. Trump has tapped to head the budget office in his next term, has since developed an even more expansive view of the White House budget director’s role.
In his writing and speeches, Mr. Vought has made clear that he sees the role as an opportunity to vastly shrink the federal government. He wants to cull its work force, claim “impoundment” authority to allow the executive branch to claw back congressionally approved funding for government agencies and overhaul the so-called administrative state.
Mr. Vought made that case publicly on Wednesday when he testified before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee about his qualifications to once again lead the budget office. He made clear he does not believe that a law forbidding the executive branch from clawing back money approved by Congress is constitutional, suggesting that the Trump administration could seek to impound funds it believes are being misspent.
During the hearing, Mr. Vought dodged questions about whether Mr. Trump would follow the will of Congress, which authorizes federal spending, but made clear that the president-elect intended to test the law.
“No, I don’t believe it’s constitutional,” Mr. Vought said of the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which reasserted Congress’ power of the purse. “The president ran on that view. That’s his view, and I agree with it.”
Mr. Vought’s remarks drew a rebuke from Democrats on the committee.
“I am astonished and aghast that someone in this responsible of a position would in effect say that the president is above the law,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut.
If confirmed, Mr. Vought will be far more than a number cruncher in the second Trump administration. He could play a key role in carrying out Mr. Trump’s agenda to shrink the federal government.
In an interview with the conservative broadcaster Tucker Carlson in November, Mr. Vought described the Office of Management and Budget as the “nerve center” of the federal government and a tool for taming bureaucracy.
“It has the ability to turn off the spending that’s going on at the agencies,” Mr. Vought said. “It has all the regulations coming through it to assess whether it’s good or bad, or too expensive, or it could be done a different way.”
While the agency may be little known, it is an incredibly powerful government department. Established in 1921 as the Bureau of the Budget within the Treasury Department, the agency was re-designated as the Office of Management and Budget in 1970.
But its responsibilities go well beyond formulating a president’s budget and spending priorities. The office has the authority to review all federal regulations that agencies write when they carry out laws passed by Congress. The agencies have broad discretion in how they interpret legislation, often adding to the ultimate cost of a law.
“It’s much more powerful than people realize,” said John Koskinen, who served as deputy director for management at the budget office in the 1990s and later became commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service. “It sounds very bureaucratic, but most people don’t understand how central it is to government operations.”
Mr. Vought would bring a partisan and ideological viewpoint to the agency. A longtime fiscal hawk and self-described Christian nationalist, he previously worked for groups such as Heritage Action for America, the House Republican Conference and the Republican Study Committee.
Stephen Moore, a conservative economist who has advised Mr. Trump, said Mr. Vought would be even more effective in the role this time around because he knew the inner workings of the federal government and the executive branch.
“He’s the one who has the expertise,” Mr. Moore said. “If there’s one thing about Washington, it’s that knowledge is power.”
After leaving the office, Mr. Vought founded the Center for Renewing America, a conservative think tank, and was an architect of Project 2025. That document was an effort by conservative groups to develop detailed policy ideas and executive actions that Mr. Trump could take to tear down and rebuild executive government institutions in a way that would enhance presidential power.
Its legal underpinning of the agenda is a maximalist version of the so-called unitary executive theory that rejects the idea that the government is composed of three separate branches and argues that presidential power over federal agencies is absolute.
Mr. Vought is expected to garner broad support from Senate Republicans, but he faced a barrage of questions from skeptical Democrats over actions he took during Mr. Trump’s first term, as well as his more recent views.
With Russia’s war in Ukraine still raging, the fate of U.S. economic and military aid is top of mind. While he was acting director of the budget office in 2019, before the war started, Mr. Vought was involved in freezing aid to Ukraine.
The handling of the funds, which some career members of the budget office’s staff opposed, became a central issue in Mr. Trump’s first impeachment. Mr. Trump was accused of using the security assistance as leverage to compel Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to announce a corruption investigation into Joseph R. Biden Jr., who was seeking the Democratic nomination to challenge Mr. Trump in the general election.
Asked if he would release funds that have already been authorized for Ukraine, Mr. Vought said, “I’m not going to get ahead of the President on a foreign policy issue of the magnitude of the situation with regard to Ukraine.”
In Mr. Trump’s second term, Mr. Vought would most likely be working closely with the Department of Government Efficiency, an advisory group being formed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
And Mr. Vought is a strong proponent of Mr. Trump’s reinstating Schedule F, an executive order issued late in Mr. Trump’s presidency that would have empowered his administration to convert tens of thousands of civil servants to “at will” employees, who could more easily be fired and replaced with political appointees.
In a speech that Mr. Vought delivered after leaving the White House and that ProPublica unearthed last year, he described career civil servants as villains and said, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.”
A spokeswoman for Mr. Vought said the remarks echoed sentiments he had repeatedly expressed publicly over the years.
Beyond questions about Project 2025, which Democrats tried to tie to Mr. Trump during his campaign, Mr. Vought’s views about the budget will be scrutinized. In late 2022, he released a budget blueprint that aimed to reduce the debt by nearly $9 trillion over a decade through deep spending cuts and “dismantling the woke and weaponized bureaucracy.”
Many of the proposals, including cuts to military spending, would face opposition in Congress. Some ideas, such as reducing disability payments for veterans when they reach retirement age, would most likely be political nonstarters. The plans do not call for direct cuts to Social Security or Medicare benefits, but they do target disability insurance payments and Medicare payments to health care providers. They would also impose deep cuts to Medicaid.
Pressed about such policy positions, Mr. Vought repeatedly said that they should be disregarded and that he would be focused on Mr. Trump’s agenda.
“I‘m not here on behalf of what I think, but I’m here on behalf of the president,” Mr. Vought said.
