Arsitek Shutdown Trump: Rencana Russ Vought untuk mendekonstruksi pemerintah adalah bertahun -tahun dalam pembuatan | Politik berita

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Follow The Trump administration memo that landed in federal agency in-boxes last week wasn’t subtle.

As Washington careened toward a government shutdown, there would be nothing normal about the agency contingency planning which has become commonplace in more than a decade of partisan warfare that’s consumed government funding deadlines.

Instead, Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought’s 622-word directive dramatically raised the stakes: Every federal agency would now be required to submit detailed plans for mass layoffs.

Those plans would be triggered in the event of a shutdown — and would only be shelved if Democrats agreed to a Republican funding measure they’d already rejected.

The memo symbolized Vought’s methodical march to accumulate power within the executive branch — and the outsized role he has played in getting to this moment.

Vought’s vision for how to deconstruct Washington’s sprawling federal bureaucracy, shaped by his years toiling in Republican circles, is now being enacted.

Vought has transformed a role typically focused on the weeds of congressional appropriations into the Trump administration’s primary instrument to dismantle, piece by piece, federal agencies and spending plans.

The OMB has long been viewed as the government’s nervous system.

But Vought has managed to use its expansive suite of bureaucratic tools in a way that almost reverse-engineers its authorities: OMB’s guidance documents are no longer filled with benign instructions and updates.

Instead, the more than two dozen memos signed by Vought since his return atop the agency track the full scale of the authority he’s leveraged in pursuit of Trump’s agenda, including eliminating longstanding foundations of agency independence and laying the groundwork for actions explicitly intended to break a law designed to ensure congressionally appropriated funds are spent as required.

Activists protest the Russ Vought as he testifies before the Senate Committee on Appropriations on June 25.

Kevin Mohatt/Reuters While Elon Musk and DOGE spent months in the spotlight over sweeping claims of dramatic spending cuts, it was Vought’s long-term plans to drastically overhaul the shape of the federal government that drove the administration’s priorities.

Though much of that work has deliberately taken place outside the public view and congressional oversight, Vought’s fingerprints are across Trump’s most audacious attempts to grab power from Congress: He crafted, calibrated and timed the first successful legislative effort to cancel funds appropriated by Congress in a quarter century with a $9 billion recissions package.

He followed that with a second effort to nix another $5 billion in congressionally appropriated money through what’s known as a so-called “pocket rescission.” The move was carefully choreographed with legal maneuvers by the Justice Department in a case involving frozen foreign aid money and timed to fall within the rapidly shrinking fiscal year calendar to box lawmakers out of the process.

He recommended that Trump refuse to designate nearly $3 billion in emergency funds authorized in a March agreement that passed with bipartisan votes.  The administration has cancelled tens of billions of dollars in federal grants outright and held up hundreds of billions in congressionally appropriated funds as OMB conducted “programmatic reviews” across seemingly every federal spending account.

He played a critical role in securing Republican votes for Trump’s cornerstone legislative achievement — a bill that Vought helped construct and which managed to lock in funding increases for the Pentagon and Homeland Security Department.

In doing so, Vought removed a central point of leverage from Democratic negotiators who for years have cut deals to boost domestic spending in exchange for Republicans’ desire to spend more on defense and immigration enforcement.

He’s been appointed to lead two agencies he’d long disdained for the sole purpose of dismantling them, all while working to reshape the federal workforce through widespread firings.

An estimated 200,000 federal employees have so far vacated their jobs, and administration officials are predicting the federal government will have 300,000 fewer employees by the end of the year.

Vought is also working toward reclassifying large swaths of workers and cutting back on long-standing employment protections.

He carried out the scrubbing of federal contracts for law firms targeted by Trump over past cases viewed as critical of the president, ensured the federal government doesn’t pursue artificial intelligence proposals that are “woke,” explicitly ended any level of cooperation with the non-partisan watchdog authorized to oversee the government’s operations, and deleted any references to climate change across the federal government.

The ‘arsonist’ is now the fire marshal Along the way, Vought has taken on the role of villain in chief among Democratic lawmakers.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer has attacked him as “evil.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called him a “malignant political hack.” According to a review of the Congressional Record, Democrats on Capitol Hill have invoked Vought’s name — and not in a positive way — on the House and Senate floor more than 1,100 times since Trump’s inauguration.

“He learned to convince people that breaking things is worth any repercussions.

In many respects he’s become a puppet master,” Rep.

Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, told Berita.

In March, Democrats cited concerns about what Vought might do in the event of a government shutdown as one of the reasons to avoid one.

This time, however, Democratic leaders brushed aside Vought’s threat of mass firings and refused to back down.

Schumer called the threat “nothing new” and said it was “an attempt at intimidation.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries talk with reporters following their meeting with President Donald Trump and Republican leaders on Monday.

J.

Scott Applewhite/AP But Vought wasted little time when the shutdown started Wednesday, announcing on X that the government was freezing $18 billion in New York City transit projects in a not-so-thinly-veiled shot at Democratic congressional leaders, both from New York.

A few hours later, he announced another $8 billion in cuts to green energy projects in 16 states represented by Democrats in the Senate.

On Thursday morning, Trump said he was meeting with Vought to follow through on plans for mass layoffs, taunting Democrats by referencing his role as a co-author of Project 2025, the conservative policy blueprint Trump disowned in the campaign but that his administration has often turned to.

“I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent,” Trump wrote on Truth social.

There is no shortage of irony in Vought’s starring role in a government shutdown battle.

In his past professional lives on Capitol Hill and within the network of conservative groups outside the government, Vought was an unapologetic booster of using funding deadlines and debt limit increases as leverage points.

“It’s hard not to laugh at the whole arsonist now serving as the country’s chief fire marshal vibe right now,” said one longtime former senior House Republican aide.

“But it’s also pretty clear that it’s a big part of the reason Republicans hold all the cards right now.” There’s no telling how long the shutdown will last, but nine months into Trump’s second term, this is exactly the fight that Vought and his allies want to have as they usher in what is already the most dramatic, if still legally tenuous, shift in the power dynamics that have governed Washington for the last 50 years.

The story of Vought’s role at the forefront of that shift and how he engineered the path to this moment is based on more than four months of interviews with dozens of current and former Trump administration officials, lawmakers and congressional aides with direct knowledge of Vought’s approach throughout his career.

It also includes review of more than 30 hours of speeches, interviews, podcast appearances and videos or recordings obtained by Berita of grassroots political events where Vought spoke over the course of the last two decades, as well as hundreds of pages of tax filings, financial disclosure forms, internal government e-mails, draft proposals, strategy documents and congressional travel and event disclosures connected to Vought’s work outside of government.

Vought, through an OMB spokeswoman, declined an interview request for this story.

OMB declined to comment on the record.

Vought’s shutdown planning memo was unquestionably an effort to seize more leverage in the partisan funding battle.

But the sequence of events that led to its creation, tied explicitly to lessons learned throughout the first nine months back in power, underscores an overarching reality at this stage of Trump’s second term.

Russ Vought is winning.

Russ Vought is seen on Capitol Hill on December 9, 2024.

Francis Chung/Politico/AP ‘We need a second term’ In the summer of 2020, Vought stood in the Oval Office with his family and former Vice President Mike Pence when Trump said something that would stick with him throughout the years of political exile that would soon follow.

By that point Vought had worked his way into Trump’s winnowing circle of trusted advisors.

After nearly 18 months as its acting director, Vought had just been sworn in as the official head of the OMB.

There was much still to do.

But time was running out.

“Russ, we need another term,” Trump told Vought.

“We’ve finally figured out how to do this.” Following Trump’s loss to Joe Biden, as Vought and other Trump allies built out a network of outside advocacy groups, that Oval Office moment was one that Vought would relay as he explained their mission while Trump was in political exile.

Over the next four years, Vought played an integral role in developing legal, legislative and strategic pathways for things Trump had wanted to do in his first term but were often undercut by his own administration’s lawyers and political appointees.

He also created a roster of future administration officials.

Vought’s close allies now sit in top positions across the administration and inside Congress.

No longer a nameless, faceless master of the dark bureaucratic arts, Vought has achieved something of a cult status.

In April he was named to Time’s 100 most influential people list, in what several career OMB officials told Berita had to be a first in the long and distinguished roster of budget directors.

Despite his newfound fame, or infamy, Vought still encounters a recurring problem: how to pronounce his last name.

Earlier this year, his older sister e-mailed Fox News host Will Cain to set the record straight.

It’s pronounced “Vote.” “God bless older sisters,” Vought said with a grin when informed of the e-mail on live television.

‘A student of legislative procedure’ Russell Thurlow Vought sees the world through paradigms that need to be broken.

Listen to him speak for more than 15 minutes and he is almost certain to use the word “paradigm” in some form to capture the scale of his ambitions.

What Vought has set out to break is nothing short of the post-Watergate paradigm designed to check a president’s worst impulses.

To understand his role as Trump’s budget guru, it’s essential to chart his evolution over a nearly 30-year career in Washington, during which he has constantly pushed his party rightward and against political compromise.

Vought arrived in Washington the same way hundreds of other recent college grads do every summer: as an intern for a lawmaker representing their home-state district.

In Vought’s case, that was Connecticut Republican Rep.

Chris Shays.

By the end of the summer of 1998, Vought had earned his degree in history and political science from Wheaton College, a private evangelical school in Illinois, and secured a full-time job as a staff assistant for Republican Sen.

Dan Coats, a Wheaton alum who went on to serve as Trump’s first director of national intelligence in 2017.

Wheaton College in Illinois, pictured in 2017.

Nova Safo/AFP/Getty Images Soon, Vought was working for Republican Texas Sen.

Phil Gramm.

It was in that role that he came to grasp the importance of expertise in granular policy details and, perhaps more importantly, the byzantine procedural rules that govern the Senate.

After Gramm announced he wouldn’t seek re-election in 2001, top staffers moved into other roles.

But Vought stayed by Gramm’s side and steadily expanded his responsibilities in ways that would’ve been far out of reach for most staffers his age.

“He became a student of legislative procedure and mastered federal budget policy,” former Gramm staffer and then-Rep.

Jeb Hensarling said of Vought years later during a tribute delivered on the House floor.

Hensarling won his own House race the same year Gramm left the Senate and quickly hired Vought as his policy director.

Vought’s move across the Capitol Building set in motion his rapid rise to the forefront of conservative policy battles over the next decade.

When Hensarling became chair of the powerful Republican Study Committee, which then represented the largest conservative caucus in the House GOP, Vought took the reins as the group’s policy director, where he drafted lean budget proposals championed by fiscal hawks supporting overhauls of entitlement programs and dramatic cuts to discretionary spending.

Vought also completed law school at George Washington University, where he’d enrolled while in Gramm’s office.

He stayed in his RSC role when another rising GOP star, then-Rep.

Mike Pence, took the helm a few years later.

Vought was soon elevated to RSC executive director and stayed with Pence when the Indiana Republican was elected to party leadership after President Barack Obama’s sweeping 2008 electoral victory.

The Heritage Foundation building in Washington, DC, on July 30, 2024.

Andrew Harnik/Getty Images Vought increasingly found himself at odds with Republican leaders struggling to come to grips with the Tea Party movement and its dramatic, grassroots-driven shift rightward within the party.

In 2011, he left Congress to work for Heritage Action, the newly created outside advocacy arm of the Heritage Foundation that became a permanent thorn in the side of House Republican leadership for the better part of the next six years.

The group’s grassroots army and willingness to pick fights over obscure procedural votes infuriated establishment Republicans.

But those fights were formative for many Heritage Action alums who now fill top political appointments across the Trump administration and include the director of Trump’s Office of Legislative Affairs, top appointments overseeing policy and planning at the State Department, and Vice President JD Vance’s chief of staff.

‘He’s getting me to violate the law’ After Trump’s 2016 win, Pence asked Vought to join the transition team and then OMB as a senior adviser.

Even after a decade spent thinking of how he’d approach a senior role at the budget agency, Vought was still struck by the overwhelming scale of the government’s byzantine processes and structures.

“What I found in the executive branch is that the degree of complexity and minutia is so high and the conservative movement is largely unprepared for that,” Vought recounted on a 2023 podcast.

“Our best guys go in there and they’re like, you know, kind of deer in the headlights.” Vought’s work in the initial months prompted Trump to nominate him as OMB’s deputy director, leading to one of the most formative confrontations of his career.

Vermont Sen.

Bernie Sanders pointedly questioned Vought during his confirmation hearing about an article he published defending his alma mater, Wheaton College, for suspending and moving to fire a tenured professor over a Facebook post intended to show solidarity between Muslims and Christians.

“It is hateful and Islamophobic and an insult to over a billion Muslims throughout the world,” Sanders said.

Vought calmly — and repeatedly amid the senator’s interruptions — attempted to explain his views within the context of his faith.

The public response was immediate — and critical of Sanders for what was viewed by many as an effort to apply a religious test to a nominee for a government post.

President Donald Trump is joined by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem in the Oval Office on June 10.

Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images Vought regularly referenced the moment in remarks after Trump left office.

“Most nominees will not go through what I went through, but I will tell them: you will get through it, you will get to the other side, and it will be the most freeing thing in the world,” Vought told Tucker Carlson in 2024.

But Vought’s reputation from his work at Heritage Action led to a nine-month delay in his confirmation.

As vice president, Pence had to urge Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to even bring his nomination up for a vote and then had to cast the tie-breaking vote to get him confirmed.

Vought’s approach clashed with some of the most powerful officials inside the Trump administration and obscure career employees like the chief statistician of the United States.

But he tended to reserve his sharpest disdain for the lawyers that worked in Trump’s White House counsel’s office, an operation he would later identify as his “number one adversary” throughout Trump’s first term.

“President Trump had a bunch of people around him who were constantly sitting on eggs and saying, ‘Oh my gosh, he’s getting me to violate the law!’” Vought derisively recalled years later on a Heritage Foundation panel.

‘My right arm’ A pivotal moment came in January 2018, when Mark Paoletta joined the OMB from Pence’s office, where he’d worked as general counsel.

Paoletta and Vought quickly formed an ideological bond that shifted the entire trajectory of the agency.

Vought later referred to Paoletta as “my right arm” and he became instrumental helping Vought figure out how to cut money that Congress had already appropriated.

In May 2018, they set their plan in motion.

The White House sent Congress a request to rescind roughly $15 billion in funds across the government, the first such request in nearly two decades — and the largest single attempt to do so.

Trump’s rescissions package fell a single vote short of Senate passage.

But behind the scenes, Vought and Paoletta kept at it, including trying a maneuver known as a “pocket recission” aimed at nixing billions in federal funds in a way that sidestepped lawmakers.

Russ Vought testifies before the Senate Budget Committee, during his confirmation hearings, on January 22.

Kaylee Greenlee Beal/Reuters They were derailed when officials at USAID, apparently tipped off by someone inside the administration, got ahead of Vought and managed to push roughly $1.5 billion out the door in less than two weeks.

The spending spree left only a paltry pot of unspent funds, and the plan was shelved, much to Vought’s dismay in the moment.

But that 2018 “pocket rescissions” effort became the basis for the effort Vought would submit to Congress this August.

The legal opinion Paoletta quietly drafted to authorize the first-term recission served as the same authority Vought relied upon as the basis to claw back nearly $5 billion in foreign aid without congressional approval.

The Government Accountability Office wrote a 2018 opinion that the effort was illegal.

But Vought secured his biggest legal win so far just three days before the start of the government shutdown when the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to indefinitely block a lower court ruling that the pocket rescission was illegal.

It was also Paoletta and Vought who came up with the idea — and legal authority — to use an emergency declaration allowing the White House to divert billions in government funds from the Pentagon to build the border wall.

The proposal drew sharp opposition inside the West Wing, including from the White House counsel.

Inside OMB, Vought fielded similar concerns from senior career officials.

They were undeterred.

Vought’s soaring stock within the administration centered on an approach that continues to guide his stewardship of OMB today.

“I found that the way to serve President Trump was to ask that second question: What are you trying to do?” Vought recounted last year.

Once Trump detailed his desired outcome, Vought continued, then “game on, let’s try to do it.” ‘There were no consequences’ Vought finally got the chance to lead OMB on an acting basis in December 2018, when his boss Mick Mulvaney was tapped to be Trump’s next chief of staff.

In the months that followed, Vought and Paoletta played a critical, behind-the-scenes role in engineering the events that ultimately led to Trump’s first impeachment over his effort to freeze foreign aid to Ukraine.

When Trump grew agitated over a news report detailing US assistance to Ukraine, it was Vought, relying on a legal opinion drafted by Paoletta, who quickly set in motion a freeze on foreign aid to Ukraine through an arcane process known as “apportionments.” The move preceded Trump’s demands to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into Joe Biden before the aid would be released.

The December 19, 2019, edition of The New York Times leads President Donald Trump's first impeachment.

Robert Alexander/Getty Images/File According to the Democratic House impeachment report, OMB had discussions on how to legally implement a hold on the funds in July 2019, ultimately delaying the release of Ukraine funding nine times.

OMB also replaced a career official with a political appointee, Michael Duffey, to approve the release of Ukraine funding. Both Vought and Duffey ignored subpoenas to testify during the impeachment investigation.

In January 2020, the Government Accountability Office found that the OMB’s holds on the Ukraine aid illegally violated the Impoundment Control Act.

Vought dismissed the finding and has continued to chip away at GAO’s authority over impoundments in the years since.

Just this week, the GAO found the Trump administration illegally impounded funds for a seventh time in the nine months since Trump took office.

The nonpartisan watchdog has nearly 50 investigations ongoing.

“His defiance of the subpoena is consistent with his view then of Congress’ authority under the Impoundment Control Act to have the power of the purse, and that is now coming out on steroids during this administration, where he acts as if the Impoundment Control Act just does not exist,” said Democratic Rep.

Dan Goldman, the House Intelligence Committee’s director of investigations when then-Rep.

Adam Schiff led the House’s impeachment inquiry.

“I think he likely realized there were no consequences,” Goldman told Berita.

The same week House Democrats voted to impeach Trump in December 2019, Vought got word that Democrats were seeking limitations on OMB’s apportionment authority in a spending agreement.

Vought was keenly aware of the delicate political dynamics as he walked into the Oval Office with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to read Trump in on the development.

But before he could finish describing a provision that he framed as an impingement on executive authority, Trump cut him off.

“Tell them we’ll veto that,” Trump told Vought and Mnuchin, according to people briefed on the conversation.

Trump’s snap reaction threatened to derail spending talks just days before a shutdown, but he didn’t hedge.

The provision was ultimately scrapped.

“I’ve never found someone more loyal when it comes to getting the backs of those that were fighting on his behalf,” Vought said during an event sponsored by Hillsdale College in 2024.

Russ Vought, then the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget during President Donald Trump's first term, presses the button to start the machine that will print copies of Trump's proposed budget for the US Government for the 2021 Fiscal Year, at the Government Publishing Office in Washington, DC, on February 6, 2020.

Samuel Corum/Getty Images Turning to the culture wars Trump officially nominated Vought as OMB director in March 2020.

He was confirmed that July.

A few weeks later, a memo from Vought arrived in the inboxes of OMB staff that laid bare just how little the Ukraine funding freeze experience shifted his convictions about how the agency should operate.

The August 2020 memo expanded on his 2019 decision that a political appointee, not career officials, control apportionment authority for foreign aid accounts.

Now that would apply to all of OMB’s resource management offices.

As the campaign consumed most of the oxygen in the final months of Trump’s first term, the president increasingly called on Vought to run point on issues that most animated his policy agenda and campaign message alike.

That included leveraging OMB in an effort to launch a government-wide review of the use of federal funding and grant programs “by jurisdictions that permit anarchy, violence, and destruction in America’s cities.” Trump’s memo explicitly targeted Washington, DC, New York City, Seattle and Portland, Oregon.

Vought next assignment originated as Trump was watching a Tucker Carlson segment on Fox News that featured conservative activist Chris Rufo and his investigation into federal agency diversity programs.

Rufo explicitly called on Trump to sign an executive order to abolish their use within the federal government.

Vought later acknowledged he’d been largely unaware of Critical Race Theory and its growing political salience as an issue among conservatives — a reality fueled in no small part by Rufo’s efforts.

Over the course of a single month, Vought triggered a series of actions targeting diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the federal government and helped draft the executive order Trump signed to expand his authorities.

Vought was among a few dozen senior administration officials still serving in the hours before Biden was sworn into office.

But it was a largely unnoticed 14-page letter signed by Vought and Paoletta sent to Congress the day before that set the tone for their next four years of political exile, taking direct aim at Congress’ power of the purse.

‘A little bit more time in the wilderness’ In December 2020, Vought quietly took his first step toward establishing his new home in the political wilderness when he filed paperwork to form a political advocacy group he would eventually call the Center for Renewing America.

“We were ready to go for another four years — we had a lot of things that we wanted to do,” Vought said a few weeks after he left the White House.

“But there’s also certain things that require a little bit more time in the wilderness to be able to think through and refine.” Vought’s IRS application included details to build out an intertwined network of aligned outside groups led by top aides from Trump’s first administration, including Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.

The groups would all exist under a single organization that became the dominant power center fueling the planning and policy development behind Trump’s second term.

The physical address Vought listed for his organization was a townhouse just down the street from the Capitol, the headquarters of the Conservative Partnership Institute.

CPI was launched in 2017 by Jim DeMint, a former Republican senator from South Carolina and Heritage Action chief.

It would soon be home to Mark Meadows, Trump’s fourth and final chief of staff in his first term.

Vought’s application identified CPI as a third-party representative of his new group and disclosed $1.3 million in seed capital, nearly half of which came from CPI grants, according to year-end financial documents later filed with the IRS and reviewed by Berita.

In February 2021, Meadows and Vought were joined at the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, Florida, by three dozen House Republicans for CPI’s private, two-day retreat for conservative lawmakers.

Vought led an hour-long session on House rules and procedures and shared lessons from his final two years of legislative battles inside the White House.

Meadows was a featured speaker on the second day of a gathering that over the following years became central to a Republican Party that would soon coalesce behind Trump’s campaign for a second term.

The sun sets behind the US Capitol, on Monday.

Nathan Howard/Reuters ‘If Congress has given us authority’ Vought and his allies now operate with a level of autonomy that would’ve been anathema to generations of bureaucratic infighters who managed to brush back, and in many cases humble outright, the most powerful presidential aides in prior administrations.

They saw the early signs of what soon became a wave of cultural backlash that formed in the wake of the Covid lockdowns and racial justice movement that defined their final year in Trump’s first term.  Along the way they boosted likeminded candidates and sitting lawmakers, while providing dozens of training seminars, conferences and social events for aspired acolytes.

In the early stages of the 2024 Republican presidential primary, Vought helped secure Trump’s unorthodox embrace of an issue that had never been part of a presidential campaign before: The president’s authority to impound funds approved by Congress.

It became one of the earliest pillars of Trump’s campaign agenda.

Trump’s victory in November was equal parts vindication and validation. It was also a green light.

Nearly a year later, as lawmakers returned to Washington in early September with the government funding fight set to take center stage, Democratic fury over Vought’s repeated encroachments on congressional spending power had reached a boiling point.

In the previous three weeks alone, the White House had notched critical wins in its effort to freeze more than $10 billion in foreign aid at the center of two major court battles.

Vought moved immediately to leverage the order and triggered the first “pocket” rescission in more than five decades.

“Russ Vought has orchestrated a lawless upheaval of the entire federal government based on his diluted and debunked views of government and of the law,” DeLauro, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said as the committee began consideration of a funding measure.

As DeLauro was ripping him on Capitol Hill, Vought was a few miles away, delivering remarks in the cavernous basement ballroom of a downtown Washington hotel.

Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russ Vought gives an interview outside the White House on June 11, 2025.

Kent Nishimura/Reuters Speaking to a crowd of conservative activists, Vought detailed the aggressive approach embraced and authorized by Trump and executed almost entirely through Vought’s authority.

It was a presentation that made one thing exceedingly clear: Vought was here to fight.

“If Congress has given us authority that is too broad, then we’re going to use that authority aggressively,” Vought said.

“Be aggressive — and not let this town define the art of politically possible.” Congressional news US shutdown Donald Trump Trump appointments See all topics Facebook Tweet Email Link Link Copied!

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