Schatz, Senate Democrats Hold Senate Floor All Night To Oppose Confirmation of Right-Wing Author of Project 2025 To Lead Budget, Management Office

WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawai‘i) joined members of the Senate Democratic caucus in holding the Senate floor for 30 consecutive hours in order to delay the confirmation of Russell Vought, the right-wing author of Project 2025, to be Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

As one of the chief architects of the radical, right-wing manifesto, Project 2025, Vought’s proposals to broadly slash federal funding threaten Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Vought was also behind President Trump’s illegal attempt to freeze federal funding last week, stopping taxpayer dollars from flowing to schools, police and fire departments, community health centers, food pantries, and other vital programs across the country.

“If confirmed as the Director of OMB, Russ Vought may well be the most important man that no one's ever heard of,” said Senator Schatz. “Under normal circumstances, the OMB directors are powerful, but kind of anonymous. But Russ Vought wants to go way beyond that. He wants to take an agency that people outside of Washington haven't even heard of, and turn it into the nerve center and power center of the federal government. He wants to consolidate power at OMB in such a stark and sometimes illegal way that he alone will get to decide who deserves the government's help and who doesn't.”

Schatz previously spoke out about how the now-rescinded OMB memo that froze all federal grants was plainly illegal by disregarding Congress’ constitutional authority to appropriate funding.

A video of Senator Schatz’s initial remarks is available here. A transcript is below:

We're doing something a little unusual. First of all, every Democrat is united on the vote that will occur 26 or 27 hours from now. Second of all, almost every United States Senator on the Democratic side is going to come to this floor to articulate why we are united, and why we think this moment is so important.

If confirmed the Director of OMB, Russ Vought may well be the most important man that no one's ever heard of. Under normal circumstances, the OMB directors are powerful, but kind of anonymous because they're responsible for technical things, nerdy things, developing and implementing the entire federal budget, and they advance the priorities of the president, whomever. Democrat or Republican.

But Russ Vought wants to go way beyond that. He wants to take an agency that people outside of Washington haven't even heard of, and turn it into the nerve center and power center of the federal government. He wants to consolidate power at OMB in such a stark and sometimes illegal way that he alone will get to decide who deserves the government's help and who doesn't.

You do not have to take my word for it. I'm a Democrat. I always want to make the case for our side. But I want you to understand these are his words because he's one of the authors of Project 2025. And let me just say what he says about this job: “The director must view his job as the best, most comprehensive approximation of the president's mind as it pertains to the policy agenda, while always being ready with actual opinions to affect the agenda within legal authorities and resources. This role cannot be performed adequately as a director if the director acts as instead an ambassador of institutional interests once its reputation as the keeper of the Commander-in-Chief's intent is established.”

This is like, everybody's watched Game of Thrones, he wants to be the king's hand. He wants to be able to say, “I represent the president in any and all things foreign policy, domestic policy, tax policy, spending policy, all of it.” And that's actually not what an OMB Director is supposed to do.

He then talks about a practice called “apportionment” to essentially get around the bills that we pass, the appropriations bills. He wrote, “No director should be chosen who is unwilling to restore apportionment decision-making to the program associate directors who are political appointees, not career officials, personally review who is not aggressive in wielding the tool on behalf of the president's agenda, or who is unable to defend the power against attacks from Congress.

Look, the door swings both ways in Washington, and this attempt to consolidate power and basically make the legislature irrelevant is going to bite us all in the butt. There's going to be a progressive president, and if this is allowed to stand, they are going to reach in and defund stuff you like. That is the creature of a duly enacted law.

And I get that this is nerdy. I'm not saying anybody should make this their primary point of opposition to the president, but we're here on the floor of the United States Senate. So let's be a little serious for a moment and say that we swore an oath to uphold the law and Constitution of the United States, and the Constitution is actually it's ambiguous about a couple of things, but it's not ambiguous about this: we hold the purse strings for the Article I branch, and our power, besides confirming or rejecting nominees, is substantially that we set the parameters for a spending bill.

And I get that there are 53 members on the other side of the aisle that have a different view of spending that I than I do, and I get that we just lost. And so we're in for some outcomes that we don't like. I'm not complaining about outcomes that I don't like. I am complaining about an unlawful view of the separation of powers. And we saw it last week when they just literally froze all federal funding, not even with the pretext of like, “Hey, we're just going to review this and make sure, like everything's, you know, no fraud, waste and abuse”.

They just shut down the Medicaid portal. They shut down Head Start. They froze construction projects. And so I want everybody to understand what's at stake here is literally the American system of government, because these guys view this branch of government, the one that is plural, not just one person elected, but 535 people elected from their states and their districts to represent all of the people of the United States of America. And it is supposed to be messy, and it is supposed to be contentious. And you know what? It's also sometimes supposed to be slow.

It's supposed to be slow. It's supposed to be hard. We have the best document undermining any country that has ever existed in human history. And what it does is it says, “We don't want any branch of government to be too powerful. And so this is not some trivial, little partisan dispute about particular programs. This is the ability for the executive branch to literally seize power, storm into the offices of an agency that they hate, and shut it down operationally, and use a bunch of white shoe law firm, fancy pants words to develop a pretext for eviscerating the United States Constitution, which clearly gives us the authority to establish spending laws, right? And can we spare ourselves the punditocracy, “Well, Democrats should be focusing on something else”.

I understand. I understand that some of the stuff that we're going to say to each other on the Senate floor is, like, not necessarily compelling to people outside of this building, but people outside of this building understand on a very basic level that there are three branches of government, and they're supposed to be roughly equal and stealing power from the legislative branch is inherently bad, even if you agree with the outcome, even if you think, “Well, I kind of agree with them, I don't like this program”.

If you don't like a program, introduce a bill. If you want to defund something, there's like an actual process for that. There's a lot of stuff I don't like in the federal budget, and I usually propose cuts to those things that I don't like, and sometimes I prevail, and sometimes I don't. But I have no illusions that I'm a monarch.

And it is true that this president of the United States won a free and fair election to be at the helm of the executive branch, but he did not win a free and fair election to be the monarch of the United States or the CEO of the United States. And I think one of the conceptual problems with bringing in all these billionaires is they really are the monarchs of their companies. That's like how the private sector, where you're the CEO, and you want something to happen, you just tell them, “This is what's going to happen. This is not a democracy. I'm the boss. Do it.” That's literally not our constitutional system.

And so Russ Vought has ideas that I disagree with about the size and the scope of the federal government. And that's part of this, right? He really does want to cut Medicaid, cut Medicare, cut the Affordable Care Act, eliminate programs that I think are essential for people in Hawai‘i and people across the country. But there really is something bigger at stake right now.

And we all of us, Democrats, Republicans, independents, the media, which is so damn casual about what is happening, we have to understand that when you're in the middle of the fight, you're not sure if this is a historic moment. When you read about it in the past, you can identify that historic moment. When you observe it in a faraway place with a hard to pronounce name, you can identify what's happening: creeping fascism. When it happens and you're in the middle of it, you're not so sure if it's your moment to display any sense of independence or courage, and if this is going to be stopped, we only have 47 votes. Three people at some point. I have no illusions that it will be in the next 30 hours. But three people at some point have to say, “I like conservative outcomes. I like conservative justices. I like tax cuts, but I don't like unlawfulness. And those are my parameters.”

I am an adult. I have been here for 13 years. I've been in the majority. I've been in the minority. I've been in sort of every iteration of whatever elections bring. That's okay. That is the way this process works. What is happening right now is an attempt to reorder the whole damn system in a way that is going to make every individual citizen across the country, across the country, less powerful. Because when you elect someone, and I'll yield to the senator from Minnesota in just a moment, when you elect someone, and you tell them you're spending priorities and they come home and say, “Good news, I got this” or “Good news, I cut this.”

And then you realize, that's only a recommendation. It's the OMB director whose name you've never heard of – his name is Russ Vought – who gets to decide. That's not our system of government, and that's why we're going to be fighting all night about this issue.

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