Stop Project 2025 Task Force Founder Sounds Alarm Ahead of Architect’s Confirmation Hearing

January 14, 2025

Washington, D.C. – On Wednesday, January 15 at 1pm ET, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on the nomination of Russell Vought to serve as Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Vought was a key architect of Project 2025, authoring the chapter that laid out a sweeping plan for OMB and the Executive Office of the President to consolidate unprecedented power over every executive branch department, agency, and program.

“We don’t have to guess if Russ Vought will enact the radical vision laid out in Project 2025 if he is confirmed, because he literally wrote the playbook and his record shows that he will stop at nothing to enact it. He is a self-avowed Christian Nationalist who plans to dismantle the civil service – replacing thousands of qualified, nonpartisan federal employees such as scientists and engineers with political lackeys who will be selected to follow partisan orders above the law or the Constitution. He has vowed to ignore the Constitution by seizing unlawful power for Trump to unilaterally withhold or redirect funds for entire agencies or programs that Congress appropriated. His aggressive plan to gut checks and balances clears the way for Trump to enact his entire Project 2025 agenda to sell out the middle class, threaten personal rights and freedoms, and impose biblical morality codes on all of us. We cannot take that risk and let this authoritarian architect of Project 2025 anywhere near the federal budget or the Oval Office,” said Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA), Founder of the Stop Project 2025 Task Force.

Vought previously served as President Trump’s OMB Director during the last two years of the prior Trump administration. During that time, Vought oversaw the implementation of Executive Order 13957, often referred to as Schedule F, which empowers the president to purge the civil service of nonpartisan public servants and politicize the executive branch by unilaterally firing tens of thousands of apolitical federal workers and replacing them with political loyalists. The Executive Order was reversed by President Biden in January 2021.

Following his time in government, Vought founded the Center for Renewing America (CRA), which prepared hundreds of executive orders, regulations, and memos to lay the groundwork for Trump to rapidly enact his agenda. Vought and the CRA have advocated for infusing “Christian nationalism” into a second Trump administration, “invoking the Insurrection Act on Day One to quash protests,” deploying the military within our borders to crack down on American citizens and round up immigrants, and “restoring the President’s authority to impound funds.”

“The Director position is incredibly powerful, charged with producing the president’s annual budget, implementing regulatory objectives, and overseeing agency management. Having helped write a plan that’s about as popular as a kidney stone, it’s no doubt Vought will try to distance himself from Project 2025. He must answer for the plan’s radical ideas to gut the middle class and control Americans’ most personal decisions – and he must make firm commitments that the administration will not adopt Project 2025 policies as the future president crafts annual budgets and regulations,” said Navin Nayak, President and Executive Director of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. President-elect Trump nominated Vought as OMB Director one week after Vought laid out his unconstitutional Project 2025 agenda to grant Trump total control of the federal government and the lives of every American: “We have to solve the woke and the weaponized bureaucracy and have the President take control of the executive branch. So my belief, for anyone who wants to listen, is that you have to – the President has to move executively as fast, and as aggressively as possible, with a radical constitutional perspective to be able to dismantle that bureaucracy and their power centers.”

For planning purposes, Stop Project 2025 Task Force Founder Huffman will be following Wednesday’s hearing and will be available to take questions from the press.

###