By Sabrina Eaton
cleveland.com
(TNS)
WASHINGTON — Members of the U.S. House of Representatives spending subcommittee led by Ohio’s Dave Joyce lambasted Trump administration budget chief Russell Vought on Wednesday over the administration’s mass firings of federal workers, freezing of federal grants and trampling Congress’ authority.
Joyce, a South Russell Republican who heads an appropriations subcommittee that funds multiple government agencies, said his committee needs to work with the Office of Management and Budget that Vought heads “to ensure that funds are being used as Congress intended.”
He cited OMB’s “critical role” implementing the 157 executive orders, 39 memoranda and 62 proclamations that Donald Trump has signed since taking office in January.
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The subcommittee’s top Democrat, Steny Hoyer of Maryland, declared that the Trump administration “has traumatized Americans, not just federal employees, reduced efficiency, broken the law and trampled on Congress’s authority.”
He criticized OMB for cutting off federal money for thousands of infrastructure projects throughout the country that had been approved by Congress and were already under construction.
Democrats say the Impoundment Control Act, enacted in 1974, makes clear that presidents can’t withhold funds approved by Congress. They say Trump has not followed to procedures it established that might let a president delay or rescind funding.
“You support autocracy, not restrained or limited government,” agreed the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, Connecticut’s Rosa DeLauro. “You have shown nothing but utter disregard and disrespect, disrespect for this committee, for Congress as a whole, and for the laws that we have enacted.”
Vought said his agency has worked tirelessly to deliver on Republican President Trump’s “promise of a federal government that works for the American people, not bureaucrats and the entrenched establishment.”
He said that under the administration of the last president, Democrat Joe Biden, “government spending aggressively turned against our citizens, who saw their tax dollars used to fund cultural Marxism, the Green New Scam, foreign projects unaligned with American interests, and even our own invasion. Every agency became a tool of the Left.”
“Under President Trump, those days are over,” said Vought, adding that Trump’s 2026 budget proposal along with ”the One Big Beautiful Bill [Act] and other tools this administration has at its disposal, will finally end the era of unchecked federal spending, stop the weaponization of government, and turbocharge economic growth.”
He said Trump’s budget called for the lowest level of non-defense spending seen in 25 years, while incorporating historic increases for defense and border security. His agency is seeking to increase its staffing, telling Joyce it needs more people so it can “analyze programs and agencies that are growing exponentially larger.”
He told Joyce the administration is in the process of establishing DOGE’s leadership “on an ongoing basis,” and that agency heads are in charge of their departments, and were “benefiting from the consulting that DOGE was doing.”
When asked about Vought’s past statement that he wanted to traumatize government employees and make them want to “not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains,” Vought said he was “referring specifically to bureaucracies that are weaponized against the American people.”
He said that across the federal government, many career employees are doing “incredible work,” but said parts of the bureaucracy have been weaponized against U.S. citizens.
“I think all employees, political and career, should be treated with respect and dignity, and to have that reflected through all of our employment processes,” Vought said.
U.S. Rep. Glenn Ivey, a Maryland Democrat who represents an area where many federal employees reside, said Vought’s claim that government employees should be treated with respect conflicts with “what I saw on the ground level.”
He said he saw fired employees crying when they were coming out of U.S. Agency for International Development headquarters when they’d been given 15 minutes to retrieve their belongings
“I talked to people who were probationary employees who’d been given these mass emails that they’re going to be terminated,” said Ivey. “They’d quit jobs and moved from other places, sold their houses to come do this work … they were unceremoniously pushed out the door.”
“I appreciate your view of what’s going on, but you got to know that it’s entirely different from the standpoint of the people who are going through this,” Ivey continued.
Photo caption: Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, answers questions during a House Appropriations Committee hearing on June 4, 2025.
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©2025 Advance Local Media LLC. Visit cleveland.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency LLC.
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