Trump’s Budget Chief Pick Refuses to Answer Questions—and GOP Lets Him

Donald Trump’s pick to run the Office of Management and Budget continued his Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday, but his uncanny ability to slide past tough questions—and the committee’s complicity in allowing him to do so—didn’t get past some of the Democratic lawmakers interviewing him.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse torched Russell Vought’s evasive and bureaucratic non-answers, arguing that the nominee didn’t have any special privileges that afforded him the ability not to be completely transparent with the American public.

“Why can I not get an answer—is there some new rule in this committee?—as to where these executive orders came from?” Whitehouse pressed. “That’s perfectly, to me, legitimate congressional oversight. Over and over again this witness has told us what questions he will answer, but the oath he took was to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth in response to our questions.”

“So if there’s some new limitation about what question I can [have answered], I would like to understand that. And if not, I would like to have the chair tell the witness to answer my questions,” he added.

That roped Senate Budget Committee Chairman Lindsay Graham into the heated back and forth, who impressed on Vought that he did not have attorney-client privilege to evade a line of questioning as some of Trump’s other nominees did.

“I am not claiming a privilege, Senator,” Vought said.

“Generally speaking, you know, I guess the question is, did you advise on executive orders and which ones?” Graham insisted. “Can you kind of tell us that please?”

“Senator, I was not a member of the transition, I was not a member of the campaign,” Vought said, before adding that he did not have a “comprehensive knowledge of where the executive orders were drafted.”

But despite the clarification, Vought still refused to pinpoint where the sudden flurry of Day One executive orders had been drafted, despite the fact that many of them fell in line with Project 2025, a plan of Vought’s own design.

Last week, Vought similarly dipped and dodged hard inquiries by the committee, claiming that a Congressional statute used to reexamine executive branch withholdings from the budget was unconstitutional, and refusing to pledge that he wouldn’t deny grants based on the requester’s political alignment.

Vought ran Trump’s Office of Management and Budget from July 2020 to January 2021, during which time he froze military aid for Ukraine, claimed that foreign aid expenditures were “wasteful spending,” and worked to expand the number of federal employees required to work during a government shutdown.

He scooped up another supporting role in Trumpworld during the incoming executive’s presidential campaign: developing a 180-day “transition playbook” to expedite Project 2025’s implementation into the federal government. But his appointment to run the nation’s budget office could see him enter a critical role in shrinking the federal government and advancing Trump’s agenda.

Vought was also the architect of Trump’s “Schedule F” proposal, which plans to fire thousands of civil servants and replace them with as many as 54,000 pre-vetted Trump loyalists to the executive branch via executive order.

The Fraternal Order of Police has finally spoken: Trump was wrong for pardoning January 6 insurrectionists who were convicted of assaulting police officers.

The country’s most powerful police union released a statement condemning Trump’s pardons after not having a “statement about that” when the pardons initially dropped.

“The [International Association of Chiefs of Police] and FOP are deeply discouraged by the recent pardons and commutations granted by both the Biden and Trump Administrations to individuals convicted of killing or assaulting law enforcement officers,” the union said in a statement. “The IACP and FOP firmly believe that those convicted of such crimes should serve their full sentences. Crimes against law enforcement are not just attacks on individuals or public safety—they are attacks on society and undermine the rule of law. Allowing those convicted of these crimes to be released early diminishes accountability and devalues the sacrifices made by courageous law enforcement officers and their families.”

The FOP endorsed Trump for president in 2024. On Monday, he pardoned over 1,500 people in connection with the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Some, like Julian Khater, who pepper-sprayed Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick in the face, committed deliberate violence against police and were found guilty of doing so (Sicknick died the day after the attack). Multiple Proud Boys and Oath Keepers were also pardoned.

The FOP’s statement is actually fairly weak, as it doesn’t name a single person or pardon it has issue with and even takes time to throw stones at the prisoners Biden pardoned. The union being “discouraged” with both Trump and Biden for pardoning “individuals convicted of killing or assaulting law enforcement officers” could be referring to Biden’s commutation of the sentence of Native American activist Leonard Peltier—a man whose own prosecutor thinks he is innocent. If the FOP truly thinks that Trump pardoning violent insurrectionists is wrong, it should say that with its chest.

Donald Trump’s executive order on Monday against diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives includes a provision to investigate DEI “discrimination” at “institutions of higher education with endowments over $1 billion,” and the MAGA right is celebrating.

The provision would target a large section of universities in the country, including wealthy institutions in the Ivy League, such as Harvard University. The news has right-wing personalities and pundits celebrating, including public education foe Christopher Rufo.

Rufo’s X post received several approving replies from conservatives, including from Elon Musk, and demonstrates the deep hatred among the right wing for colleges and universities that seek to improve diversity.

It would appear that this executive order is the result of Rufo’s efforts. Rufo met with Trump shortly after the election in November, presenting him with a plan to withhold federal money from universities unless they end diversity measures. The conservative activist has sought to push Christian nationalism and right-wing ideology into a dominant place in American life, having given the right its talking points on “critical race theory” and tested out his anti-DEI efforts as a trustee at Florida’s New College.

Now Trump’s executive order seems to be the first step in remaking all of American society to push racial, ethnic, and LGBTQ minority groups out of public life, not just in education but also in the workforce. It’s essentially a culture-war purge that will play out in federal lawsuits.

Donald Trump’s decision to pardon some 1,500 January 6 offenders was a spontaneous move that overrode his administration’s internal debate.

“Trump just said: ‘Fuck it: Release ’em all,’” one White House adviser told Axios.

That was, apparently, completely kosher with Vice President JD Vance, who told Fox News just last week that Trump’s more violent supporters didn’t deserve pardons.

“I think it’s very simple: Look, if you protested peacefully on January 6, and you had Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice treat you like a gang member, you should be pardoned,” Vance told host Shannon Bream. “If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”

But when push came to shove—as in, when Trump was ready to make his own executive call on the long-promised pardons—Vance’s dissenting opinion suddenly caved.

“Vance was 100 percent on board,” a Trump insider told Axios. “The president didn’t change his mind. He just made up his mind, and Vance got a little over his skis on Fox, but it’s no big deal.”

“Never get ahead of the boss,” another Trump transition source told the publication, “because you just never know.”

Trump’s decision to legally and unilaterally forgive his most aggressive supporters was, actually, wildly unpopular with the American public. A November Scripps News/Ipsos survey found that few Americans—just 30 percent—actually supported a legal reprieve for the Capitol rioters, versus an overwhelming 64 percent of the country that was against it. Just 1 percent of respondents believed that the pardons should be Trump’s first priority—let alone something that he issued a sweeping executive order for on his first day in office.

Trump has claimed for years that he would free the men and women who rioted through Congress in 2021, forcing the legislature to delay the certification of the presidential election results. In an interview with NBC News’s Meet the Press in December, the MAGA leader said he would act “very quickly” to release the January 6 defendants.

“They’ve been in there for years, and they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open,” Trump said at the time.

Trump is so intent on winning the DEI culture war that he’s now killing bedrock programs from the segregation era.

The president on Tuesday revoked Executive Order 11246, which was signed into law in 1965 by Lyndon B. Johnson and installed antidiscriminatory practices into U.S. federal government contracting.

EO11246 prohibited federal contractors “who do over $10,000 in government business” from “discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or national origin.”

Trump’s executive order, which was first reported on by Law Dork’s Chris Geidner, formally repealed those protections.

“The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs within the Department of Labor shall immediately cease: Promoting ‘diversity’; holding Federal contractors and subcontractors responsible for taking ‘affirmative action’; and allowing or encouraging Federal contractors and subcontractors to engage in workforce balancing based on race, color, sex, sexual preference, religion, or national origin,” Trump’s order read. Contractors have 90 days until they have to comply.

This is a massive, regressive attack on basic policy that helps protect people from real discrimination. And it won’t lower the price of eggs.

The Trump administration has only been in power for two days, but some of its core players already appear to be at odds.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump announced Stargate—a public-private joint AI venture between the federal government, OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle, which the forty-seventh president claimed could invest as much as $500 billion into the bubbling tech sector over the next four years.

“This monumental undertaking is a resounding declaration of confidence in America’s potential,” Trump told reporters in the White House. “We’re going to make it as easy as it can be.”

But hours later, one of Trump’s closest tech advisers—the richest man in the world, Elon Musk—was already publicly questioning the initiative, telling users on his platform that the effort was a dud.

“They don’t actually have the money,” Musk wrote on X in response to a post from OpenAI announcing the digital infrastructure deal. “SoftBank has well under $10B secured. I have that on good authority.”

OpenAI and SoftBank are set to lead the project, with SoftBank taking on Stargate’s financial responsibility, according to Fortune. OpenAI’s chief Sam Altman called the venture the “most important project of this era.” Stargate involves an initial private investment of $100 billion into America’s AI infrastructure, a move that would begin a digital “re-industrialization of the United States,” ushering in “hundreds of thousands of American jobs,” OpenAI said in a statement Tuesday.

But Musk’s decision to reveal the rocky ground beneath Trump’s trophy deal, all while elevating his own know-how, could cause cracks in the powerful duo’s dynamic. In December, tech journalist Kara Swisher argued that the relationship between the two self-imagined strongmen is destined to flame out, just as it did with Trump’s former chief White House strategist Steve Bannon.

“They’re both narcissists, and there can be only one narcissist as head of the country, and that’s Donald Trump who just won the election,” Swisher said. “You know he owes things to Elon, but at some point, you know if he takes too much of the attention—think about Steve Bannon. You remember he was on the cover of that magazine, and how quickly he got out, even though he was critical to Trump’s first campaign and he was right in the middle of the White House, and then he wasn’t.”

“Trump goes through people like tissues, essentially,” Swisher noted at the time. “And even if it’s Musk, they’re going to clash at some point.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson is planning to use the wildfires in California as an opportunity to impose Donald Trump’s agenda.

During a one-on-one interview Tuesday night, Fox News’s Sean Hannity asked whether Johnson thought that disaster aid could be used for leverage against sanctuary cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco.

“Are you saying that California, if they continue to aid and abet lawbreaking and harboring illegal immigrants, money from D.C. gets cut off?” Hannity asked.

“Yeah, we’re talking about conditions to this disaster aid. Look, they are natural disasters, but there are man-made disasters as well,” Johnson said. “And they made terrible decisions, you know? They knew exactly what they were doing.”

“That reservoir outside the Pacific Palisades, 117 million gallons—it was empty for a year. Why? They were trying to save a smelt fish or something,” Johnson said.

Hannity, who often acts as MAGA’s shadow policymaker, asked a question that was ripped straight from the pages of Project 2025. A chapter written by Ken Cuccinelli, Trump’s former deputy secretary of homeland security, suggested that funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency could be withheld from places that fail to comply with immigration laws, such as sanctuary cities.

But even the authoritarian handbook added one caveat, noting that “post-disaster or nonhumanitarian funding” could be exempt from the immigration policy requirements.

It seems that Johnson is way past concessions for the sake of humanity now. While it’s unclear from his answer whether he plans to use the wildfires to impose immigration policy, it’s clear he views it as an opportunity to reform liberal policies he doesn’t like: namely environmental regulations.

Johnson’s line about smelt is one that Trump has been using to complain about California’s water conservation efforts since he was on the campaign trail. In reality, the reservoir was offline for repairs.

By shifting the lion’s share of the blame onto the California government, Republicans seem to think they can buy themselves more time to play politics with money for struggling families who have lost their homes, businesses, and belongings.

Donald Trump’s Justice Department is already beginning its anti-immigration crusade, starting with policing state and local governments.

The Associated Press obtained a department memo Wednesday directing federal prosecutors to investigate state and local government officials who interfere with new federal immigration laws. The memo states that prosecutors should “take all steps necessary to protect the public and secure the American border by removing illegal aliens from the country and prosecuting illegal aliens for crimes.”

If state or local officials obstruct or add hurdles to federal immigration enforcement, prosecutors are ordered to look at potential criminal charges.

“Federal law prohibits state and local actors from resisting, obstructing and otherwise failing to comply with lawful immigration-related commands and requests,” the memo states. “The U.S. Attorney’s Offices and litigating components of the Department of Justice shall investigate incidents involving any such misconduct for potential prosecution.”

This is all part of Trump’s campaign promise to carry out mass deportations, given that such a large-scale effort will require cooperation from local and state authorities. Republican officials have already pledged their support, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is already taking steps to pass laws to assist the deportation effort.

But Trump is headed for a clash with Democratic state and local officials, many of whom, like California Governor Gavin Newsom, are already preparing to take on the new administration with lawsuits and special legislation of their own. The next weeks and months are going to involve plenty of chaos and legal fights between Trump and immigration advocates.

Trump’s pardons don’t stop with violent January 6 insurrectionists. On Tuesday, he also freed a massive dark web drug dealer.

Ross Ulbricht ran Silk Road, an online black market that moved $200 million worth of illegal drugs, distributed fake passports, helped hackers collaborate, and laundered money. He was also prosecuted for allegedly soliciting six murders for hire, one against a former employee.

Ulbricht was sentenced to double life imprisonment, plus 40 years, in 2015.

“Make no mistake: Ulbricht was a drug dealer and criminal profiteer who exploited people’s addictions and contributed to the deaths of at least six young people,” said U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara after Ulbricht’s sentencing. “Ulbricht went from hiding his cybercrime identity to becoming the face of cybercrime and as today’s sentence proves, no one is above the law.”

Trump initially promised to pardon Ulbricht during a speech at the 2024 Libertarian Convention, making a direct appeal to the right-of-center crowd for their votes.

“And if you vote for me, on day one I will commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht, who was sentenced.… He’s already served 11 years. We’re gonna get him home. I’m proud that I have put forward a detailed plan to smash the censorship and industrial complex and restore free speech.” The room erupted in cheers of “FREE ROSS.”

“I just called the mother of Ross William Ulbricht to let her know that in honor of her and the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly, it was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son, Ross,” the president wrote on Truth Social Tuesday evening. “The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me. He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!”

“Immense gratitude to everyone who voted for President Trump on my behalf. I trust him to honor his pledge and give me a second chance,” Ulbricht wrote on X. “After 11+ years in darkness, I can finally see the light of freedom at the end of the tunnel.”

All federal employees in diversity, equity, and inclusion roles will be placed on paid leave by the end of Wednesday, thanks to a new mandate by President Donald Trump.

The forty-seventh president has set a deadline that all DEI-related offices, programs, and their related websites and social media accounts shall be shuttered by 5 p.m., according to a memo from the Office of Personnel Management.

The memo also states that federal agencies need to submit a written plan by the end of the month for dismissing the DEI employees.

“President Trump campaigned on ending the scourge of DEI from our federal government and returning America to a merit based society where people are hired based on their skills, not for the color of their skin,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told NBC News in a statement Tuesday night, adding that the move to oust diversity roles—which Trump had mentioned in his inaugural speech—should come as “no surprise.”

“This is another win for Americans of all races, religions, and creeds. Promises made, promises kept,” Leavitt said.

Trump signed an executive order ending the programs Monday night. The order, titled “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing,” accused the Biden-era diversity policies of being “illegal and immoral discrimination programs.”

But outside of the federal government and in corporate America, the administration’s message on diversity initiatives is loud and clear: They are, simply, not necessary. Mentions of DEI in company earnings calls have dropped by approximately 82 percent since Q2 of 2021, reported Axios.

The shift away from DEI began when the Supreme Court ruled on the diversity program in 2023, but the “trickle became a flood” after Trump’s election victory, with companies such as Harley Davidson, Ford, Molson Coors, Walmart, and McDonald’s peeling back their corporate diversity commitments, according to the Financial Times.

Major social media companies, including Elon Musk’s X and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, have simultaneously stripped their respective platforms of their content-moderation divisions. Earlier this month, an updated version of Meta’s hateful conduct policy suddenly allowed users on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads to refer to women as property, Black people as “farm equipment,” transgender individuals as “it,” and LGBTQ+-identifying persons as mentally ill.

“What we’re seeing is companies looking at the holistic picture—like social media campaigns that have been run against companies and the political environment in which you have not only Trump, but his closest advisors, such as Elon Musk, going after particular companies around DEI,” Ann O’Leary, partner and co-chair of government controversies and public policy litigation practice at Jenner & Block, told Axios on Thursday. “But we’re also seeing companies really taking a close look at why they’re doing what they’re doing.”