| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
Hearing Mr. Vogt
00:06:04
|
||
|
unidentified
|
Of the non-fiction book publishing industry with insider interviews, industry updates, and bestsellers lists. | |
| Find all of our podcasts by downloading the free C-SPAN Now app or wherever you get your podcasts and on our website c-pan.org/slash podcasts. | ||
| The C-SPAN Bookshelf Podcast feed makes it easy for you to listen to all of C-SPAN's podcasts that feature non-fiction books in one place so you can discover new authors and ideas. | ||
| Each week, we're making it convenient for you to listen to multiple episodes with critically acclaimed authors discussing history, biographies, current events, and culture from our signature programs about books, afterwards, booknotes plus, and QA. | ||
| Listen to C-SPAN's bookshelf podcast feed today. | ||
| You can find the C-SPAN Bookshelf Podcast feed and all of our podcasts on the free C-SPAN Now mobile video app or wherever you get your podcasts and on our website c-pan.org slash podcasts. | ||
| Coming up, President Trump's pick to be director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vogt. | ||
| He appeared before the Senate Budget Committee for a confirmation hearing. | ||
| During the hearing, Mr. Vogt was questioned about his affiliation with Project 2025 and his experience as the Deputy White House Budget Director during the first Trump presidency. | ||
| He's also asked about President Trump's executive order that pauses some funding in the bipartisan infrastructure law signed by former President Biden in 2022, known as the Inflation Reduction Act. | ||
| Good morning, everybody. | ||
| Welcome. | ||
| So, we're going to have a hearing with Mr. Vogt, right, Russell? | ||
| Is vote like voting, right? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, I'm going to give a quick introduction. | ||
| You can say anything you want. | ||
| We're going to have five-minute questioning. | ||
| Be hard, be challenging. | ||
| Don't make a complete ass of yourself. | ||
| And let's get through this thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| So, with that said, you're no stranger to this job. | ||
| Mr. Vogt had this job. | ||
| He was deputy director. | ||
| He was OMB director in President Trump's first term. | ||
| He was born in Mount Vernon, New York. | ||
| He attended Wheaton College, graduated in 98, completed a JD from Georgetown University. | ||
| He worked on Capitol Hill as a legislative senate assistant for Senator Phil Graham and Chuck Hagel. | ||
| That's a big delta there. | ||
| From 2004 to 2008, he worked as executive director for the Republican Study Committee. | ||
| And from 2009 to 2010, he's policy director of the House Republican Conference. | ||
| Again, he was OMB Director under the first Trump term, deputy, and became OMB Director when Mulvaney left. | ||
| So you've done it once, and you want to do it again. | ||
| And we're glad on our side you're willing to do it again. | ||
| Senator Merkley. | ||
| Well, thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. | ||
|
Betrayal Of Working Families
00:09:50
|
||
| Congratulations on your new role. | ||
| I look forward to working with you. | ||
| And welcome to the committee, Senator Cornyn, Senator Ricketts, and new to the Senate and new to the committee, Senator Moreno. | ||
| Welcome. | ||
| This Congress, the Senate Budget Committee, is going to be deeply engaged in the policies that emerge because reconciliation is going to play a central role, and reconciliation begins right here in this room. | ||
| We'll consider Trump's budget requests. | ||
| And I must say, my deepest concern about the reconciliation bills is that they're going to betray working Americans. | ||
| Working Americans who President Trump appealed to in his campaign, working Americans who listened to the strategies that he laid out, that he proposed. | ||
| But certainly, the actual plan isn't to help working people. | ||
| The actual plan is to help the wealthy get wealthier with massive tax giveaways, with working families paying the bill. | ||
| Now, how are these massive giveaways to the wealthiest families going to be paid for? | ||
| Well, by slashing services to working families and to struggling families who are trying to get on their feet so they can thrive and get to the middle class. | ||
| This is the great betrayal. | ||
| And today we'll consider President-elect's nomination of Russell Vogt to lead the Office of Management and the budget, which is really the place where this campaign is coordinated. | ||
| And we'll hear very different ideas about how to take our country forward. | ||
| From my friends across the aisle and from Mr. Vogt, we'll hear that we need to continue to give tax giveaways, massive tax giveaways to the wealthiest Americans. | ||
| And we'll hear about how nonpartisan expertise that makes our country run smoothly should be replaced by those with blind political loyalty. | ||
| And you'll hear how programs that have assisted for the environment or for unions organizing working people for public health should instead be replaced by programs to serve big corporations and the mega millionaires. | ||
| Our side of the aisle has a different vision. | ||
| That we stand up for working families. | ||
| That the wealthy need to pay their fair share of our taxes. | ||
| That the government should serve everyone, not just the privileged and the powerful. | ||
| From my side of the aisle, you'll hear about how we need to expand Medicare's ability to negotiate the price of 15 expensive drugs. | ||
| Those drugs were laid out by President Biden according to the law as he left. | ||
| I'll submit this for the record, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And those drugs include, for example, the weight loss drugs that currently serve 2.3 million people. | ||
| You know, the first 10 drugs that were negotiated Cut the price some third to two-thirds or more, including 79% on one drug. | ||
| And Americans are simply outraged that we spend more on RD to develop these drugs than any other nation. | ||
| That is our taxpayer dollars. | ||
| And then we get the highest price, the highest price among the developing countries instead of the best which we deserve. | ||
| This vision, as laid out, is the great betrayal of America's working families. | ||
| And we'll continue to debate that, I'm sure, in the course of the hearings that are ahead. | ||
| And I have no doubt, Mr. Vought, that you have the intellectual expertise and the experience. | ||
| You were OMB director before. | ||
| You know all the ins and outs. | ||
| It's really a question of whether we're going to accomplish something that provides a foundation for American families to thrive or simply to increase the wealth disparities that make this a government buying for the powerful instead of buying for the people. | ||
| The Washington Post reported that officials said the result of your last tenure underscored the tensions that come with having a deeply ideological operative thrust into position with complicated, often nonpartisan challenges. | ||
| And this turned out to be spot on. | ||
| You were responsible for the fiscal year 2021 budget issued by the Trump administration, and it had close to a trillion-dollar cuts to health care for struggling Americans. | ||
| It had $300 billion in cuts to social safety programs, things like nutrition assistance and earned income tax credit and the child tax credit. | ||
| $170 billion cut by increasing the cost of college loans for those who are aspiring. | ||
| You know, I'm the first in my family to go to college. | ||
| I think college should be affordable to everyone, not making it more expensive so only rich families can afford to go have their kids go to college. | ||
| So we certainly profoundly disagree. | ||
| You zeroed out programs like the Community Development Block Grants, which are used for housing all around this country. | ||
| Meanwhile, you proposed over a trillion dollars in tax giveaways, with over two-thirds going to the top 10%. | ||
| That is very, very troubling. | ||
| And, Mr. Vogt, you were at the center of the strategy of impounding funds. | ||
| Now, we had this conversation in 1974 here in Congress. | ||
| We passed the Budget and Empowerment Control Act because Congress said when we say this amount of money should be spent on this program, it isn't up to the President to spend less. | ||
| But you told me in your office that you're quite comfortable assuming that the law doesn't matter and that you'll just treat the money for a program as a ceiling as a ceiling rather than a required amount. | ||
| Well, the courts have found otherwise, but the fact that you're willing to say this is exactly what you plan to do again should trouble every single member of the Senate. | ||
| And when you were at the center of the impoundment of the funds for Ukraine that resulted in the impeachment of President Trump and his former service, you blamed a staff subordinate. | ||
| That troubles me too. | ||
| That something you were so involved in, when it goes awry, you say, oh, it wasn't me. | ||
| I gave that responsibility to somebody else who works for me. | ||
| That is not leadership. | ||
| And certainly your views are deep held. | ||
| Deeply held. | ||
| You continued to advocate for them in your think tank, the Center for Renewing America. | ||
| So we saw that. | ||
| There's other things that trouble many of us. | ||
| The fact that you are for the abolition of abortion rights and don't believe in exceptions, not exceptions for rape, not exceptions for incest, not exceptions for the life of the mother. | ||
| And it's troubling that you continue to participate in the big lie that the 2020 election was rigged. | ||
| This may be essential for your loyalty test to the President, but it's a willingness to manipulate and deceive Americans that certainly bothers me. | ||
| I think we need a director who respects the rule of law, not the rule of one man, who is guided by facts, not partisan ideology, who serves working families, not mega-millionaires and billionaires. | ||
| So I am disturbed that you are eager to lead the betrayal of America's working families. | ||
| Mr. Chairman, I turn it back to you. | ||
| We'll put you in the undecided column. | ||
| So I disagree with what he said. | ||
| That's why we have the hearing here. | ||
| More importantly, the American people apparently disagree because we won. | ||
| And, you know, I don't know what your views on abortion are. | ||
| I don't know how I believe much matters. | ||
| President Trump said it was rigged, he won. | ||
| I don't particularly agree with that, but you know, the bottom line is I think you're qualified for the job. | ||
| I know why he picked you. | ||
| I think all of us are going to vote for you. | ||
| None of them will vote for you. | ||
| But you do need to explain, the best you can, how you see the job, why you do the things you do, whether or not you're betraying the country or trying to get the country on a more sustainable track. | ||
| And again, we just had an election, and when you win, you get to pick people. | ||
| And I'm glad he picked you. | ||
| So would you stand up and let me swear you in? | ||
| Raise your right hand, please. | ||
| Do you solemnly swear that testimony you give before this budget committee is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? | ||
|
Government Works Promise
00:11:17
|
||
| So there you go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I do. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| The floor is yours. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman, the ranking member, members of this esteemed committee for the opportunity to appear before you today. | ||
| Let me begin by thanking my girls, Ella and Porter, who are now returning to the scene of congressional confirmation hearings as veterans. | ||
| Their love and support and enthusiasm for me serving again is a major reason why I feel that going back to OMB is the right endeavor at the right moment. | ||
| Beyond my enthusiasm for being at President Trump's side, it is a profound honor to be nominated a second time by President Trump to serve as the director of the Office of Management and Budget. | ||
| The President has promised the American people a federal government that works for all Americans, not the interests of bureaucrats and an entrenched establishment. | ||
| Making a start in fulfilling that vital promise during my previous time at OMB as both deputy director and director was among the most rewarding career experiences of my career. | ||
| Throughout that time, I've been driven by a commitment to taxpayers and their families. | ||
| Growing up as the son of an electrician and a schoolteacher, I saw firsthand the sacrifices my parents made to balance their budget and save for the future. | ||
| They are a reminder of the burden government spending can place on everyday Americans. | ||
| My parents and countless others like them have always been the measure by which I evaluate policies and spending decisions. | ||
| Today, nearly 80% of Americans do not feel confident that their children will lead better lives than they have, nearly double the 40% of Americans who said the same two decades ago. | ||
| When I look at the government waste and our national debt, I know that I fear for my daughter's future. | ||
| Almost half of our fellow citizens expect their standard of living to be worse than that of their parents, a critical part of understanding the President's election. | ||
| I am eager to get back to fulfilling the promise of the Federal Government that works as hard as people like my parents. | ||
| OMB's mission goes beyond crafting the President's budget. | ||
| It encompasses the management of the Federal Government, reforming regulation, and coordinating policy across agencies to ensure efficient and effective implementation of the American people's will as expressed by the last election. | ||
| A strong interagency process delivers the best results for all Americans, and I believe OMB's collaborative ethos is key to achieving those outcomes. | ||
| The civil servants at OMB are among the most resourceful and innovative individuals I have ever worked with. | ||
| It has been my privilege to work alongside them, and I look forward to leading and supporting them as director once again as we labor together to make government work. | ||
| We have to use taxpayer dollars wisely because inflation, driven by irresponsible spending, taxes Americans twice. | ||
| The average American household has lost roughly $2,000 of purchasing power since January 2021. | ||
| The forgotten men and women of this country, those who work hard every day in cities and towns across America, deserve a government that empowers them to achieve their dreams. | ||
| While Office of Management and Budget may not be a household term, the agency's work profoundly impacts their lives. | ||
| If confirmed, I will continue to serve with their best interest at heart, striving to ensure every decision contributes to a more prosperous future for all Americans. | ||
| Thank you for considering my nomination. | ||
| I look forward to answering your questions and the opportunity to discuss how OMB can continue to deliver on that vital mission. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| And to your family, welcome. | ||
| So to start with, what would happen to the economy if the 2017 tax cuts that were passed through reconciliation by the Republicans expire and go away? | ||
| What would happen? | ||
| I think Americans would have a major tax increase on their hands that would lead to a lot less innovation, a lot less productivity, and we would have a worsening economy that I would not want to predict how bad it would be. | ||
| So the Treasury Secretary nominee said it would be catastrophic. | ||
| Do you agree with that? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So that's one of the things we want to do on our side. | ||
| Is it like $4.5 trillion of new taxes that all this goes away? | ||
| That's the static cost of it, yes, sir. | ||
| So we don't want it to go away. | ||
| I guess they do. | ||
| So on regulations, do you have a say about regulations, government regulations? | ||
| OMB runs the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. | ||
| It's going to be charged to reset up the President's deregulatory agenda, and if confirmed, that will be a major aspect of the job. | ||
| So when it comes to energy production, will you pledge to try to make it easier for America to soundly and safely extract the natural resources that we own so we don't have to buy oil and gas from people who hate our guts? | ||
| Yes, Senator. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Do you believe that would make us safer or energy independent? | ||
| I do believe it is vital from a security standpoint and from the standpoint of America's pocketbooks to rely on cheap American energy and not to squander that. | ||
| Is it part of the goal of this administration to make sure that we, in the AI space, we dominate? | ||
| Yes, it is. | ||
| Will you have a role in that, how to create a regulatory environment that allows us to compete with China? | ||
| We will. | ||
| We help as part of the policy process in articulating to the Federal agencies the guidance that the President would like with regard to the artificial intelligence. | ||
| When it comes to spending, is it your goal to reduce Federal spending where you can responsibly? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Do you believe there is some room in our budget to eliminate programs that most Americans wouldn't feel the effect of? | ||
| I do. | ||
| There are plenty of areas in the Federal Government to be able to begin to tackle our spending and debt. | ||
| So you promised me you would do the best you can to reduce Federal spending in a responsible way? | ||
| Yes, Senator. | ||
| Good. | ||
| When it comes to the President's executive order about suspending foreign assistance for 90 days, do you know exactly how that works? | ||
| Does that stop money going to Israel? | ||
| No, Senator. | ||
| The Senator, it is a 90-day review of the programs that are in place, and it is to ensure that all of those programs are consistent with the President's viewpoint, of which, of course, aid to Israel continues to be one of them. | ||
| So what is the most important function of the Federal Government, in your view? | ||
| I believe it is to keep the American people safe and secure so they can enjoy their liberties and to protect their rights. | ||
| Are you familiar with the amount of money we spend GDP-wise on defense? | ||
| What is it right now? | ||
| I am aware. | ||
| I think we are in 3 percent, yes, senator. | ||
| And it is going down to the mid-2s. | ||
| Do you realize that is the only four times in American history we have had that small of amount of money spent on our defense? | ||
| Will you be open-minded to make sure that we can defend this nation by creating a bigger Navy? | ||
| Absolutely, Senator. | ||
| It is a priority of the President. | ||
| It was a priority at OMB in the first term to make sure that we establish maritime supremacy in this country, and it will be if confirmed. | ||
| What is the size? | ||
| Do you know how much money the State and Foreign Operations Subcommittee spends on the State Department and foreign assistance? | ||
| Off the top of my head, no, I don't know what the allocation is for the three. | ||
| It is $69 billion. | ||
| Now, that's for the entire State Department, all our embassies, everybody, and the aid we provide to distressed places in the world. | ||
| What percentage of the Federal budget is that? | ||
| Do you know, outlays? | ||
| I believe if you did a small percentage, it would be a small percentage compared to. | ||
| It is 1 percent. | ||
| Now, having said that, try to save money. | ||
| Let's don't waste money. | ||
| But I believe, I'm a pretty hawkish guy, if you don't get involved in the world and you don't have programs in Africa where China is trying to buy the whole continent, we're making a mistake. | ||
| So it's 1 percent of the budget. | ||
| You can eliminate it all. | ||
| You're not going to balance the budget. | ||
| I think soft power is a critical component of defending America and our values. | ||
| I look forward to working with you to make that count better, but the concept of soft power means a lot to me, and that's coming from a pretty hawkish guy. | ||
| With that, Senator Merkley. | ||
| Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| And on day one, President Trump issued an executive order that requires agencies to pause the disbursement of funds that were authorized, Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. | ||
| There is a legal mechanism for changing past law. | ||
| It is called a rescission. | ||
| And there is an illegal way. | ||
| It is called an impoundment. | ||
| Will you send a rescission message to Congress or will you use the illegal impoundment strategy? | ||
| Senator, thanks for the question. | ||
| Those EOs were, again, pauses to ensure that the funding that is in place is consistent and moves in a direction along the lines of what the President ran on, unleashing American energy away from the Green New Deal. | ||
| Recisions or impoundments? | ||
| Which strategy will you use? | ||
| That's a simple question. | ||
| There is a section in those EOs that says that the Office of Legislative Affairs will work with the Office of Management and Budget. | ||
| They may put forward rescissions, but again, the language of the EO says required by law, and it is meant to do a programmatic delay to figure out what are the best ways to make sure that the legal method, rather than the illegal method. | ||
| That is a big concern for all of us here because the Constitution laid out the vision that Congress makes the law, not the President. | ||
| So the fact that you continue to advocate for this impoundment strategy, that is completely in violation of our Constitution, and I am deeply disturbed that you will not renounce that today. | ||
| So let's turn to work requirements. | ||
| You have been a big advocate of work requirements. | ||
| You encourage States to adopt waivers that would allow them to do that for Medicaid. | ||
|
Whistleblowers and Legal Advice
00:15:49
|
||
| One State tried it, Arkansas. | ||
| It produced no increase in the hours worked, no increase in employment. | ||
| It failed. | ||
| Why did it fail? | ||
| Because the way that people are able to work is when they are healthy. | ||
| When they can't access health care because you want to cut it off, they are really trapped in poverty. | ||
| And trapping people in poverty is really, well, not helpful. | ||
| Now that your idea failed so miserably, are you going to advocate for it again? | ||
| You know, Senator, one of the major legislations that our side has been very proud of since the 1990s was the impact of welfare reform in the 1990s. | ||
| It led to caseload reductions, people getting off of welfare, going back into the workforce. | ||
| And we think that that type of thinking should be applied to other Federal programs. | ||
| And it has informed not only Medicaid but other programs to be able to encourage people to get back into the workforce, increase labor force participation, and give people, again, the digital. | ||
| And you believe cutting off health care encourages people to work when they need to get better health in order to work? | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| And it's been a failed experiment. | ||
| But you've answered the question. | ||
| You're still an advocate of that failed approach that traps people in poverty and is quite disturbing. | ||
| Now, according to the Treasury Department analysis produced this month, the Trump tax giveaways would give an average tax cut of $314,000 to the richest Americans, the top 0.1 percent, and $6 annually to the average member of the bottom 10 percent. | ||
| A cup of coffee for those trying to get on their feet in the course of a year and $300,000 in additional income for the richest Americans. | ||
| Isn't this kind of asked backwards? | ||
| Senator, the President's tax cuts provided tax cuts for all Americans. | ||
| It had a sizable increase in the child tax credit. | ||
| It had expansion of the standard deduction. | ||
| It was something that benefited all Americans and as a result led to a strong economy that we hope to replicate again by having an extension of those important tax cuts. | ||
| So you are very comfortable with a cup of coffee per year for the bottom 10 percent while you give $300,000 to the richest Americans, according to the Treasury Department analysis? | ||
| Look, there are people at the higher end who are in charge of small businesses that are taking great risks to innovate and hire additional people that are not in their tax bracket. | ||
| And that's part of the way that you structure economic growth. | ||
| My final question, because I'm running out of time. | ||
| At your think tank, in 2023, you proposed $3.6 trillion in tax giveaways, primarily going to the richest Americans. | ||
| And to make the numbers work, you assume that your giveaway would produce the magic asterisk. | ||
| You're probably familiar with the magic asterisk. | ||
| Magic asterisk is saying, don't worry, be happy. | ||
| The economy will improve because we give away the Treasury to the richest Americans and more revenue will come in. | ||
| It's failed every single time it's been put forward. | ||
| Not a single analysis has confirmed it. | ||
| Not from any serious analysis from CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, not from the Joint Committee on Taxation. | ||
| And yet, are you still a believer in the magic asterisk? | ||
| Senator, I'm a believer in dynamic growth for sure. | ||
| That when you cut taxes, it actually has a dynamic impact on the economy. | ||
| And we see that with revenues continuing to go up after all of the tax cuts that we've seen in history, 1920s, 1960s, 1980s, both of the Bush tax cuts, and including the Trump tax cuts. | ||
| We have seen a dynamic impact on the economy. | ||
| Your facts are wrong, but we'll continue the discussion, I'm sure. | ||
| During the first term before COVID, when African American Hispanic household incomes at their highest? | ||
| Yes, Senator. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Senator Brassley. | ||
| I've got a figure in front of me of $610 billion of improper payments just in health care. | ||
| I would bet a lot of this information comes from whistleblowers. | ||
| For my question to you is about whistleblowing. | ||
| Do you have any role in protecting whistleblowers, encouraging whistleblowers, maybe changing the culture in a lot of agencies that treat whistleblowers like skunks at a picnic? | ||
| Would you tell me about if there's anything you can do to help this process of whistleblowing that helps us explain not just the waste of money, but also improper government action? | ||
| Senator, thanks for the question. | ||
| I think the whistleblowers play an enormous role in helping us weed out waste fraud and abuse. | ||
| As a Senate staffer and Hill staffer, I benefited greatly from reading Inspector General reports in which they were a part of. | ||
| From my standpoint at OMB, my view is OMB should be an advocate for whistleblowers in every possible way and to make sure that we value, and as a result, the agency heads value the work that they do. | ||
| And so we'll always be looking for opportunities along those lines. | ||
| Would like your view of how you can play a role in making the recent Supreme Court decision overturning the Chevron Doctrine, the Loper case, | ||
| how that can help you stop our government from being over-regulated, bureaucrats, overreaching, using a statute that maybe can be liberally interpreted and all that. | ||
| Thank you, Senator. | ||
| It is one of those aspects of the regulatory process in terms of deregulating, in terms of making sure that agencies are sticking to the law, that we want to make sure, if confirmed, we get properly set up. | ||
| That would be part of the review process, not unlike cost-benefit analysis and making sure agencies are not coming up with new interpretations of what the statute should say. | ||
| We want to stick to the statute. | ||
| So you will be watching that regulatory process to make sure that Loper is followed. | ||
| Yes, Senator. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Another thing that irritates me about By the way, these problems I'm talking about aren't just Democrat problems. | ||
| They're Republican and Democrat problems that we've got to deal with. | ||
| So another one would be not answering our letters. | ||
| Now, I don't know whether I've got a lot of letters to your department or not that haven't been answered, but I can give you the Justice Department's example. | ||
| When Pam Bomney was in my office, I gave her a stack of 158 letters that the Justice Department just the last four years haven't answered. | ||
| And it was somewhat the same under Obama and Trump in previous sense. | ||
| We've got a constitutional responsibility to make sure that the executive branch faithfully executes our laws. | ||
| So we want to make sure that these letters are answered. | ||
| So on September 15th, 2023, I sent President Biden's OMB director a letter asking a simple question. | ||
| Where is the implementation guidance for the Open Government Data Act? | ||
| As just one example. | ||
| At that point, OMB was five years late in issuing the guidance. | ||
| The guidance was intended to make government information more open and available. | ||
| In the final days of the Biden administration, they released the guidance, but they never directly responded to my request. | ||
| If confirmed, will you commit to ensuring OMB provides timely and complete responses to congressional oversight? | ||
| Yes, Senator. | ||
| I think it's very important. | ||
| It's one of the things that I asked my team to know, to let me know immediately, the day of when senators and congressmen are writing and sending us letters. | ||
| I want to be immediately aware, and quite frankly, and I've said this to all of you in our individual meetings, I want to know before it gets time to have to send a letter, of which that's an important part of the process. | ||
| Should you be confirmed, you will face a daunting task of reining in the bloated federal government. | ||
| Besides crafting a responsible budget, what actions can you take as OMB director to begin right-sizing the Federal Government? | ||
| Well, we're going to go, if confirmed, Senator, right into the process of finishing the fiscal year 25, helping the President come to a view on how that should proceed. | ||
| We'll be in the process of various discussions with regard to reconciliation of which are very important. | ||
| And then there's just the normal management of different agencies for waste, fraud, and abuse beyond sending up a presidential budget of which we will have to get started and get caught up based on just the normal process of an incoming administration. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| If I were you, I'd answer Senator Grassley's letter, if he ever sent one. | ||
| And I'd be pro-whistleblower. | ||
| Senator Murray. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Mr. Voter, I appreciated the opportunity to meet with you last week, but I do continue to have very serious concerns regarding your nomination, starting with your position and record on impoundments. | ||
| I do not believe what happened in the case of withholding security assistance to Ukraine in 2019 while you were acting OMB director was an accident or a misunderstanding. | ||
| And I fear it is actually a harbinger of what is to come these next four years. | ||
| In fact, on his first day in office, we saw the President order, among other things, what appears to be an illegal deferral of Inflation Reduction Act, bipartisan infrastructure law, and foreign assistance funds, as Senator Merkley referred to. | ||
| And Mr. Vogt, your written response when pressed on this, that you will follow the advice of the incoming OMB General Counsel, Mark Paoletta, someone who has called the Impoundment Control Act a stupid law, and recently tweeted at you to impound baby impound, is a bit rich. | ||
| Look, as I said to you at our meeting, members of Congress on both sides must know a deal is a deal. | ||
| A deal is a deal when we reach a bipartisan agreement on major legislation. | ||
| Agreements cannot happen, and Congress cannot function without that level of trust. | ||
| And impound baby impound is not the answer I am looking for. | ||
| So I want to ask you today, will you, if confirmed, ask director, faithfully follow the law, the Impoundment Control Act, yes or no? | ||
| Senator, we will faithfully uphold the law. | ||
| The President ran on the notion that the Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional. | ||
| I agree with that. | ||
| I would, in response to both questions, say that what the President has unveiled already are not impoundments. | ||
| They are programmed. | ||
| Has the impoundment law ever been said to be unconstitutional by a court of law? | ||
| Not to my knowledge. | ||
| It has not. | ||
| So it is the law of the land. | ||
| I don't care what the President said when he was running. | ||
| It is the law of the land. | ||
| So will you follow that law if you are confirmed to this office? | ||
| Senator, the President and his team is going to go through a review with our lawyers, if confirmed, including the Department of Justice, to explore the parameters of the law with regard to the Impoundment Control Act. | ||
| He hasn't developed a strategy that he has announced as it pertains to how we would approach it. | ||
| There are pieces of legislation that have been proposed by members of this committee. | ||
| We propose legislation all the time. | ||
| If the rule of the law in a state is that it is a 50-mile-an-hour speed limit, you can't just say, well, I think that's irresponsible and I'm going to challenge it, so therefore I don't have to follow it. | ||
| The impoundment law is the law. | ||
| Will you follow it or not? | ||
| You can say that we're going to look at it and might challenge it in court, but it is the law today. | ||
| Will you follow that law as director? | ||
| Senator, the reason why the president ran on this is that 200 years of presidents had to be aware of the government. | ||
| You're telling me why you don't agree with the law, but the law is the law. | ||
| Will you follow the law? | ||
| And what he found in the first term was that we had agencies that would push out spending at the end of the fiscal year. | ||
| Mr. Chairman, I'm going to take my time back for a minute and just tell all of us. | ||
| We work all the time on appropriations where I am ranking member to come to an agreement. | ||
| Senator Graham, you and I work on agreements and we decide, yeah, okay, we'll both vote for this. | ||
| We have an agreement. | ||
| How can we ever have an agreement in the future if a president, whoever he or her may be in the future, has say over that, saying, nep, never mind, I'm not going to pay for this part of it. | ||
| We have to have agreements. | ||
| It is the law of the land. | ||
| And I have to say that your answer to this should be disconcerning to every single member on this committee. | ||
| I have a minute left and I want to ask you another important question to me because as director of the powerful Office of Management and Budget, your job will not be merely to execute the President's agenda. | ||
| It is also to advise the President on policy, as you have made clear. | ||
| So I want to ask about women's health policy. | ||
| You were a lead author of the Anti-Abortion Project 2025. | ||
| You were also caught just a few months ago saying that when it comes to abortion, you, quote, want to get to abolition. | ||
| Now, everyone should understand that abortion, abolition means zero abortions under any circumstance whatsoever. | ||
| So, Mr. Vogt, you have said that you don't believe in exceptions for rape, for incest, or life of the mother. | ||
| Is that your position? | ||
| Senator, my views are not important. | ||
| I'm here on behalf of the President as his nominee to restore fiscal accountability. | ||
| I'm asking you a question under oath, sir, because you want to be director of an office that will advise the president, and we have a right to know your views. | ||
| Will you answer the question? | ||
| I will, Senator, because it's consistent with the views that the president ran on repeatedly, made his views very clear on abortion with regard in the last election. | ||
| Even in the case of rape, incest, life of the mother. | ||
| That is his view. | ||
| And I will strictly abide by the president's view, and that will be a general theme throughout this entire hearing. | ||
| My view of the position is that you come into an administration and you do what the president ran on, what the president's viewpoints are, and you take that viewpoint. | ||
| You don't need to say anything else. | ||
| My time is up. | ||
| It's very clear what your stance is on this. | ||
| And people in this country, women and men alike, should know that. | ||
|
Federal Spending Over Decades
00:00:57
|
||
| Thank you. | ||
| Senator Grapep. | ||
| Never mind. | ||
| Senator Johnson. | ||
| Mr. Vogt, thanks for being here again. | ||
| Hope this is one of many appearances before this committee. | ||
| In your appearance before the Homeland Security Committee, I really spent a lot of time on spending. | ||
| I want to focus on the other part of the budget, which is revenue, on this one. | ||
| But I do want to just kind of talk in general on macro terms. | ||
| If you take a look at federal outlays, averages over the decades, back in the 60s, we spent 8.2 percent on average. | ||
| 70s it was 19.6, 80s, 21.5. | ||
| The 90s, 19.9 percent. | ||
|
Advising On Healthcare Spending
00:12:09
|
||
| The 2000s, 19.6 percent. | ||
| The 2010 through 19, 21 percent. | ||
| This year, we are right around 25 percent of GDP, federal spending. | ||
| What do you think is an appropriate level as a percentage of GDP? | ||
| I mean, what would be a goal for this administration to, again, we talked about getting back to a pre-pandemic level spending. | ||
| 2019, we spent 4.4. | ||
| Last five years, we've averaged 6.5 percent or 6.5 trillion dollars. | ||
| What's an appropriate percentage of GDP for federal spending? | ||
| Well, Senator, it's a great question. | ||
| You know, we haven't set a fiscal goal yet for this administration, but I think trying to get back to historical levels of outlays is one of those important first steps to begin to find out ways to be able to not set records as a percentage of GDP, whether that is spending outlays as a percentage of DEP or debt as a percentage of GDP. | ||
| As you know, we're now above levels in World War II, which we never thought we would get there outside of crises. | ||
| And we need to change the trajectory that we're on as a country for sure. | ||
| Okay, so we want to work very closely with you to, again, bring down that level of spending to a reasonable pre-pandemic level. | ||
| It's absurd that we're basically spending at pandemic levels. | ||
| In terms of the automatic tax increase that would go into effect if we don't take action, I would think the first goal would be to return certainty that that will not happen. | ||
| Would you agree with that? | ||
| Yes, Senator. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| One way of doing that, I proposed this this morning at a political event is I know people are talking about one big beautiful bill or two-step. | ||
| I would actually recommend three steps. | ||
| First, reconciliation, handle the border, keep it simple. | ||
| We all agree on that. | ||
| Second would be just extend the Tax Cut and Job Acts as it is. | ||
| That would take any tax increase off the table because what I want to do in the third step is simplify and rationalize the tax code. | ||
| And one thing I found is there's nothing simple about doing that. | ||
| So I just want to throw that out there. | ||
| I think we Republicans all agree that we want to return certainty that there's not going to be a massive tax increase. | ||
| This would be one way to do it. | ||
| Just let's quick get in there, extend it using current policy, Senator Crapo's idea there, which makes a lot of sense. | ||
| By the way, let's just discuss that for a minute. | ||
| In past budgets, we adhere to the rule that a spending policy that expires, if you extend that, there's no cost. | ||
| But if it's a tax cut that expires, now all of a sudden you're dealing with trillions of dollars. | ||
| And by the way, I don't believe those scores. | ||
| Don't you think it makes a lot of sense to treat both spending and taxes the exact same way, that if we pass a budget in this committee, it's going to be based on current policy, both for spending and for taxes? | ||
| Senator, I'm not here to make any announcements strategically for the administration, but I do think it makes sense to be able to treat spending in the same way that you treat the tax baseline. | ||
| And so I think that's something that should be considered as you navigate the reconciliation process and have conversations with the parliamentarians. | ||
| But I think that's a very important discussion that needs to continue to move forward to give options for the President and for this body. | ||
| So again, I'm always big in terms of the goals of things. | ||
| So again, I think it's a goal to return that certainty. | ||
| Let's take any kind of automatic tax increase off the table as quickly as possible. | ||
| Then whatever we do do, and again, I don't like the term tax reform. | ||
| I like the term tax simplification or rationalization. | ||
| But whatever we do, it needs to be permanent. | ||
| Let's not make the mistake of having automatic tax increases in what we do next. | ||
| Now, that's going to be complex. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| There's nothing simple about tax simplification. | ||
| One of the things I think we ought to look at are tax expenditures. | ||
| I just had my staff print me out the list of tax expenditures. | ||
| This is like about 170 of them, totaling almost $1.7 trillion, about 6 percent of our economy. | ||
| Now, some of these, as I look at these, are legitimate business deductions. | ||
| I wouldn't consider them a tax expenditure. | ||
| But is this something the administration is willing to take a look at is just trying to dramatically simplify our tax system? | ||
| It costs $400 billion at least to comply with it. | ||
| I mean, is that something that you and Treasury Department and President will work with me and this committee on trying to simplify our tax system? | ||
| Yes, Senator, happy to look at that list as well. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| I don't know if it's going to be one step, two steps, or three steps, but let's take a step. | ||
| Senator Sanders. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| I look forward to working with you. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Thanks for being here. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Mr. Volk, we are living at a moment in American history where at a time when 60 percent of our people are living paycheck to paycheck, we have more income and wealth inequality than we have ever had. | ||
| Three multi-billionaires own more wealth in the bottom half of American society. | ||
| People are struggling to put food on the table. | ||
| The very rich are getting much richer. | ||
| We have heard from our Republican colleagues in the House that they think it is a good idea to go forward to provide massive tax breaks to the billionaire class and at the same time help pay for that by cutting back on Medicaid. | ||
| I know that you are more than aware that Medicaid not only provides health care to tens of millions of lower-income people, but two out of three people in nursing homes in America, elderly people, are on Medicaid, paid for by Medicaid. | ||
| You are going to be an advisor to the President if you are approved. | ||
| Will you tell the President? that it is immoral, that it is wrong to cut Medicaid, cut health care for low-income Americans, for children, and for the elderly, and give tax breaks to the very richest people in our society. | ||
| Is that something we can count on you to do? | ||
| Senator, one of the problems, and I appreciate the questions, one of the problems that we have in the Medicaid problem is the extent to which instead of being a program for the poor alone and the extent to which it's meant for nursing homes and things of that nature, we have able-bodied working adults on the program that are benefiting from a higher match rate than the populations that it was originally designed for. | ||
| And as a result of that expanded match, you also have states kind of chasing that match in other ways that have made it so that they're not looking at improper payments. | ||
| I don't have a lot of time. | ||
| You're going into another area, and that is a health care system in general. | ||
| As you well know, unfortunately, the United States of America is the only major country on earth not to guarantee health care to all people as a human right. | ||
| And the result of that, despite Medicaid, and we can argue about this or that aspect of Medicaid, despite that 85 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured. | ||
| And importantly, and your colleague Mr. Musk made this point, we are spending far more on health care than any other country per person. | ||
| I wonder, as an advisor to the President, will you try to determine how it is that countries around the world are able to provide care to all of their people and in some cases spend 50 percent per capita of what we are spending? | ||
| Do you think the function of the American health care system should be to make huge profits for the insurance companies and the drug companies? | ||
| Or do you think maybe we should have a system that guarantees health care to all people as a human right? | ||
| Do you believe that health care is a human right? | ||
| Senator, I believe that it's very, very important that we put the health care dollars that the taxpayers are covering for the health care system, which you just mentioned, is substantial, and to make sure we have the best outcomes in those programs. | ||
| I want the people who benefit from Medicaid to have a great Medicaid program. | ||
| And I look at a situation, the tragedy we had where DeMonte Driver, a 12-year-old, dies of a toothache because the infection was never. | ||
| Look, I don't want to argue, the health care system, in my view, is broken. | ||
| It's dysfunctional. | ||
| But my question to you, it's a simple one, as an advisor to the President. | ||
| Do you think we should join every other major country on earth and say, you know what? | ||
| Whether you're poor, you're rich, you're young, you're old, health care is a human right. | ||
| We are the richest country in the history of the world. | ||
| Do you think we should do what every other major country on earth does? | ||
| Senator, I think it's important to provide legitimate evidence-based outcomes for people within the health care system and to make sure that we tailor all of the dollars that are spent towards the same. | ||
| But that's that they have good. | ||
| Mr. Vogue, my question, fine. | ||
| Question is a simple question. | ||
| In America, should we do what every other major country does and say, I don't care if you're poor, you're rich, you're old, you're young, health care is a human right. | ||
| Yes, no. | ||
| Senator, I think the President has not made a, he didn't, he ran on providing good health care outcomes. | ||
| That's my view. | ||
| You're an advisor to the President. | ||
| You're going to be a key advisor if you are approved. | ||
| Do you think that health care is a human right that every American should be entitled to? | ||
| I believe the role of the Office of Management Budget Director is to take what the President has run on, the things that the President has as a policy agenda, and to turn that into policy, to implement that. | ||
| And so to the extent that he has run on having lower prescription drugs, that's a priority of the administration. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| All right. | ||
| The President in the past, I don't know about recently, has indicated that he would maybe do what President Biden did, stand up to big pharma. | ||
| We are paying now, in some cases, 10 times more, as you know, the same exact drug that other countries are paying. | ||
| Are you going to advise the President to take on Big Pharma and do what he promised to do, and that is have Americans not pay a nickel more than other countries for prescription drugs? | ||
| Will you advise him to do that? | ||
| Senator, the President has not made an announcement since he has been in office, but he certainly ran on this issue. | ||
| There was a speech with regard to making sure that we were getting the same types of arrangements that the other countries were, given the amount that we are investing in it. | ||
| But he also, Senator, wants to do it in a careful way so that we are not ruining the phenomena and the industry that allows us to have life-saving. | ||
| I got it. | ||
| I do understand that. | ||
| I don't disagree with that. | ||
| We want innovation. | ||
| But will you maintain what we fought very hard to, to do what every other country does, have Medicare negotiate prescription drug prices with the industry? | ||
| No, Senator, I'm not here to get in front of the President on any of his policies other than to say that this has been a priority for him, and I think your question reflects that it's been a priority of his. | ||
| I've overextended my time. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Thank you, Senator Sanders. | ||
| Senator Cornyn. | ||
| Mr. Vogt, thank you for your willingness to serve the nation again, and especially you and your family. | ||
| You know that this job comes with more than its fair share of abuse that you receive, but I believe this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to do what we need to do to get our spending in check and to re and to make sure that we do what you said, | ||
| I think, at the beginning of your testimony, which is the most important thing the Federal Government does, is provide for the security and safety of the American people. | ||
|
Government Spending Crisis
00:04:56
|
||
| You remember 15 years ago, Admiral Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the biggest threat to our national security was our debt. | ||
| Now, when he said that, I thought that was kind of an unusual thing to say, but if you think of it as a prediction, it's literally become true. | ||
| Because now we spend more money on interest on the national debt than we do on defense. | ||
| And that is a recipe for disaster in what I think is the most dangerous world we have seen since World War II. | ||
| But let me take you back to the issue of inflation. | ||
| We have just come off of a 40-year high inflation rate for the American people, which is sort of a silent tax, which degrades the standard of living for all Americans. | ||
| And how is inflation related to government spending? | ||
| Well, thank you, Senator. | ||
| This is an important moment in historic for our country to be able to get a handle on our debt and deficits. | ||
| And I believe that spending is a big driver of inflation. | ||
| I think you saw that under the Biden administration when they put forward some of the COVID packages early in his administration, all of a sudden we had an inflation problem. | ||
| I predicted it at the time. | ||
| Larry Summers on the Democrat side predicted at the time. | ||
| And we saw something that the so-called experts told us we'd never see again, which is inflation at the levels that the American people could not absorb, nor should they ever be expected to. | ||
| So I think it's both an energy phenomena, I think it's a regulatory phenomena, and I think it's a spending concern. | ||
| I think Milton Friedman would agree with you on the spending side, certainly. | ||
| So the Federal Government spends roughly $6.75 trillion at the present time. | ||
| I know none of us can really even get our brain around how much money that is. | ||
| It's a lot of money. | ||
| But we also took in last year about $4.5 trillion in revenue. | ||
| So there's a significant gap between what the Federal Government spends and what the Federal Government gets in terms of revenue. | ||
| Do you think that is sustainable? | ||
| No, sir, it is not. | ||
| We have to get spending under control. | ||
| I think what we have seen, though, is that revenues have been hovering about where they have been historically as a percentage of GDP. | ||
| And as a result, the problem is primarily on the spending side. | ||
| And that's one of the reasons that you have seen in the first term the President put forward substantial numbers of savings and reforms to get a handle on the spending component of the Federal budget. | ||
| And right now, the Congress appropriates roughly 28 percent of the money that the Federal Government spends. | ||
| The rest of it is mandatory spending and is spent under the tax code, as Senator Johnson pointed out. | ||
| I don't know how we are ever going to balance the budget just looking at 28 percent of what the federal government spends. | ||
| That is not to say we should not look at it, but do you agree with me that we need to look at mandatory spending programs? | ||
| I understand that Medicare and Social Security absent bipartisan support are unlikely to be the sources of any savings on spending. | ||
| But we spend, I think at last count, roughly $700 billion a year on mandatory spending programs that Congress turns on. | ||
| It doesn't cap. | ||
| It doesn't have a cost of living index. | ||
| It's just based on demand, and they grow at 6, 7, 8 percent. | ||
| Do you think we need to look at non-Social Security, non-Medicare mandatory spending to find some of the savings? | ||
| Yes, Senator, and it is one of the reasons why there are substantial numbers of savings and reforms. | ||
| Many of us just get better outcomes in these programs that were consistent with the President's protection of Social Security and Medicare that still allowed us to get to balance in the budget that we last sent up in the first term. | ||
| The President's approach has been get after the bureaucracy that is largely wasting money and be able to get people back to work with things like welfare reform and other reforms that we have seen historically work to get better labor force participation and a better economy. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Senator Warner. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Mr. Vogt, good to see you. | ||
| You know, these hearings are important. | ||
| I kind of view them as a job interview. | ||
|
Breaking Up the Intelligence Community?
00:06:11
|
||
| I got to tell you, though, kind of curious about your background. | ||
| Dozen years on the Hill, government bureaucrat, right-wing think tank. | ||
| Seems to me. | ||
| You are a total product of what MAGA folks call the swamp. | ||
| I am not sure how that swamp expertise is going to help you in this job. | ||
| I am a little different than most folks here. | ||
| I actually run a business, met a payroll, managed an operation. | ||
| You have had no private sector experience. | ||
| And I look then at what you have said from just the management standpoint, it seems like what you want to do is how many Federal workers can you get to quit? | ||
| How many Federal work offices can you go out and relocate? | ||
| And I got to tell you, your words, quote, we want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected because they are increasingly viewed as villains. | ||
| We want to put them in trauma. | ||
| I got to tell you, you want to be OMB and help oversee this workforce and you want to put the workforce in trauma? | ||
| Sir, that would be management malpractice. | ||
| I appreciate the fact of what you've done in the past. | ||
| Let's look at your record. | ||
| It's an interview. | ||
| 2019, you helped move the BLM out. | ||
| 170% increase in vacancies at the BLM. | ||
| GAO, the folks supposed to be independent, said that move dramatically impaired its ability to serve the American people. | ||
| Another failure that some of us pointed out, last time you said, let's move part of the Department of Agriculture out, two bureaus, led to 40% and 60% reduction in effectiveness. | ||
| Then we get to your magnus. | ||
| At least I give you credit for putting it down in writing, Project 2025 in that handbook. | ||
| Sir, I do appreciate the fact one of the things you said, which was you think it's important for the federal government to keep our nation safe. | ||
| Probably the most important thing I've done in this job is my work with the intelligence community. | ||
| And, Chair and Vice Chair, now, we've got thousands of men and women work in the intelligence community without a lot of fanfare. | ||
| You realize, of course, I hope, that to become a CIA agent, it takes about a year to get a secure cleaner. | ||
| You aware of that? | ||
| Yes, Senator. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| So in your Project 25, Magnus, you put forward the idea that somehow breaking up the CIA and moving it around the country would make our nation more safe. | ||
| Do you not understand, sir, that if President Trump, by having the intelligence community close to him, to have ability from folks from NSA, CIA, the Pentagon, the FBI in this region, your idea of let's somehow go on this ideological jihad to break up the intelligence community's effectiveness, I would ask you, sir, | ||
| can you show any evidence that somehow we would make our nation safer if you put your political litmus test and this idea of bringing trauma to the Federal workforce by taking the intelligence community, | ||
| which has been supported on a bipartisan basis year in and year out, and somehow breaking it up and spreading it hither and yon just for a political purpose? | ||
| How does that make our nation safer? | ||
| Senator, I never proposed that, and the President has disassociated himself from Project 2025. | ||
| It's a mischaracterization of the Prime Minister. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, good. | |
| We're here on the record. | ||
| You're going to commit to make sure, you know, I would argue you have to make a business case before you start breaking up the government. | ||
| I'm all for effectiveness. | ||
| But you're going to be willing here to commit not to undermine our national intelligence community by arbitrarily trying to break them up and spread them around just because you want to blow up the Federal workforce in this region? | ||
| Yes, Senator. | ||
| There's no policy process that the Trump administration had done that's producing arbitrary results. | ||
| And let me speak to the question that you raised with regard to my comments about the bureaucracy. | ||
| They were specifically in reference to the weaponized bureaucracy that we've seen. | ||
| And so you are the arbiter of who's weaponized and who's not? | ||
| Again, I hope my colleagues will raise, I think, your completely irresponsible actions on so-called Schedule F. You know, we put a civil service in place. | ||
| But I urge you, sir, if you become in this position, think long and hard about the men and women of the national security and the intelligence community before you go on some political jihad of trying to score points by simply trying to break up an operation that actually functions better because of their close collaboration. | ||
| And your comments about the federal workforce, I find disqualifying on this basis. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Senator Kennedy. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Mr. Vogt, welcome. | ||
| Thank you, Senator. | ||
| In my judgment, I do not know a single person in Washington or outside Washington who knows more about the federal budget than you do. | ||
|
Woke Weaponized Debate
00:11:13
|
||
| I used to read your suggestions during President Trump's first term, many of which Congress ignored. | ||
| We shouldn't have. | ||
| I am delighted that the President picked you. | ||
| I have read that since 2019, the population of America has increased 2 percent, and our spending has increased 55 percent. | ||
| Under President Biden, I wish him well. | ||
| If we had discovered life on Mars, he would have sent it money. | ||
| Is that sustainable? | ||
| Senator, it's totally unsustainable. | ||
| And the problem is that you go on these trajectories that we are currently on, and you don't know when you're going to get to the point at which you have some major, major problems as an economy, as a country. | ||
| And we know that historically. | ||
| I hope you'll start with the low-hanging fruit. | ||
| There's a lot. | ||
| When we sent out stimulus checks to save our economy, $1.6 billion went to dead people, and the checks were cashed, obviously fraud. | ||
| OMB is estimated that in fiscal year 2023, we sent out $1.3 billion of checks to dead people, which were cashed, obviously fraud. | ||
| When you die in America, your name is sent to the Social Security Administration. | ||
| As you know, you become part of the master death file. | ||
| Senator Carper and I discovered that Social Security would not share that information with any other department of government. | ||
| So we passed a bill saying you have to share it with Treasury and other people who write checks, so we'll stop paying dead people. | ||
| Duh. | ||
| We got pushback, believe it or not, on the bill. | ||
| We had to agree to a trial period, and that trial period ends in 2026. | ||
| Will you help us make that program permanent so we can stop paying dead people? | ||
| Yes, Senator. | ||
| Now, you've served in Washington for years. | ||
| You're going to be called. | ||
| You're going to be challenging the status quo. | ||
| You're going to be called crazy. | ||
| Many people also called Noah crazy. | ||
| And then the rains came and all the fact checkers died. | ||
| You have to persevere. | ||
| Now, I'm asking you, I'm not asking you to get ahead of President Trump. | ||
| But if you were king for a day, tell me how you would save money in the federal budget without impacting the American people. | ||
| Thank you, Senator. | ||
| I think it's the strategy that we had in the first term, which is to go really and take a very close look at the agencies that are spending and wasting money, and I believe weaponized at times against the American people. | ||
| When they put a 77-year-old Navy veteran in jail, Joe Robertson, for 18 months for building four ponds on his ranch to be prepared for wildfires, that's the EPA. | ||
| I think we have to look at that, and we have to look at the agencies that Congress has a vote on every single year through the appropriations process. | ||
| And then I think we need to go after the mandatory programs that Senator Cornyn mentioned that are keeping people out of the workforce because they have become not just a social safety net, but they have become a benefit hammock and increasingly so in the aftermath of COVID as many of these policies were impacting people's decisions to go back into the workforce. | ||
| And I believe, and because we produce budgets along these lines, you can get sizable levels of savings and reforms that can lead to a balanced budget and get us back headed in a fiscal trajectory, not only that we would all be proud of, but we could say this is going to keep us from fiscal ruin. | ||
| My time has expired. | ||
| Ella Porter, do you have anything you'd like to add? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Now's your shot. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Vogt, for your time. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
| Good call there, young lady. | ||
| So apparently we're going to Mars and I'm on reserve whether or not I want to help them. | ||
| Maybe we do if we find them up there. | ||
| Anyway, as to dead people, I don't want to give them checks or they shouldn't vote either. | ||
| So Senator King. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chair. | ||
| Congratulations on the nomination, Mr. Vogt. | ||
| I want to go back to the comment that Senator Warner read to you. | ||
| There's 140,000 federal employees in Virginia. | ||
| And you gave a speech that got a lot of attention when you said, we want bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. | ||
| When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. | ||
| Now, I pay attention to the way people say things because there's a million ways you can make a point. | ||
| And the way you choose to make a point tells you something about the person. | ||
| There's a wonderful sense. | ||
| I had an Old Testament reference over there. | ||
| I'll go to a New Testament. | ||
| And when Luke 6, 45, from the fullness of the heart, the mouth speaks. | ||
| We want people to be traumatized. | ||
| We want people to be traumatized. | ||
| I've heard a million people in this room give speeches about we want to cut the budget, we want to reduce federal spending, want to deal with the deficit, but I haven't heard anybody give a gleeful speech about traumatizing the federal workforce. | ||
| You don't want federal air traffic controllers going to the airport traumatized, do you, Mr. Vogt? | ||
| No, Senator. | ||
| You don't want the people inspecting our food, our medicine, our infant formula as federal. | ||
| You don't want them to go to work traumatized, do you? | ||
| No, Senator. | ||
| You don't want the people interdicting drugs at the border. | ||
| You don't want them going to work traumatized, do you? | ||
| No, Senator. | ||
| And you don't want people who are working for you at the OMB, who many people would think, well, they're in the White House. | ||
| They must be. | ||
| You don't want them traumatized, do you? | ||
| No, Senator. | ||
| Thank you for expanding on that. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, so, well, I felt like I had to, because I got 140,000 people, and most of them have families. | ||
| And they're trying to do a good job. | ||
| Was your comment about people being traumatized just focused on the federal workforce, or was it more broadly about state employees and local government employees, too? | ||
| Senator, it was about the weaponized bureaucracy that unfortunately. | ||
| I'm going to get to weaponized in a minute, but you were talking about the federal workforce. | ||
| I was talking about the bureaucracy that I experienced and that have state employees. | ||
| I have no experience with the state. | ||
| You were not talking about local employees. | ||
| Was not. | ||
| Your mother was a public school teacher, correct? | ||
| Yes, Senator. | ||
| So you were talking about you want the federal workforce to be traumatized. | ||
| Bureaucracy. | ||
| I like a lot of presidents. | ||
| I'm a Lincoln fan. | ||
| Are you a Lincoln fan? | ||
| Yes, Senator. | ||
| Lincoln spoke to a nation at war, and he said, with malice towards none and charity towards all. | ||
| And he was saying that to the North and the South. | ||
| He didn't say, we want you to be traumatized. | ||
| He was a bridge builder and a unifier, and that's what public servants should be. | ||
| They shouldn't gleefully be wishing trauma on people who are trying to serve their fellow men. | ||
| I want to get to woke and weaponized. | ||
| You were the president of the Center for Renewing America, and the think tank produced a 2023 budget proposal calling a commitment to end woke and weaponized government. | ||
| Do you remember that? | ||
| Yes, Senator. | ||
| And that's the correct title? | ||
| Yes, Senator. | ||
| It's 104 pages of details to end woke and weaponized government. | ||
| And it proposes deep cuts to the SNAP program. | ||
| Is providing nutrition assistance to low-income kids woke and weaponized? | ||
| Senator, I'm not here to talk about the budget that the center put out. | ||
| I'm here on behalf of the city. | ||
| Yeah, but you just said you did that. | ||
| I want to know what's woke and weaponized about providing food assistance to low-income kids. | ||
| Well, again, I'm not here on behalf of my center, on behalf of the president. | ||
| I know that, but this is your work product. | ||
| I mean, you can say it's not woke and weaponized, or you can tell me why it's woke and weaponized. | ||
| I don't think SNAP programs or benefits for kids are woke and weaponized. | ||
| Do you agree with me? | ||
| When we refer to the federal government being weaponized, we're referring to bureaucracies that okay, so you're not in, you didn't include SNAP. | ||
| You proposed to cut SNAP, but you're not saying it's woke and weaponized. | ||
| Again, I am not going to answer questions about the Center for Renewing Employment. | ||
| You propose deep cuts to Pell Grants. | ||
| Is helping kids pay for college and helping their families, is that woke and weaponized? | ||
| Again, I'm not here to defend the Center for Renewing Environmental Commission. | ||
| I get it that you're not here to defend that work product, and I can understand why. | ||
| You propose deep cuts to Medicaid for millions of low-income families. | ||
| Why is that woke and weaponized? | ||
| You propose undermining health insurance. | ||
| Why is that woke and weaponized? | ||
| Eliminating tenant-based rental assistance. | ||
| Why is that woke and weaponized? | ||
| Eliminating the low-income housing energy assistance program. | ||
| This was all in your document about ending woke and weaponized government. | ||
| Okay, let's see. | ||
| We want to traumatize federal employees, and then we want to take all these programs that help everyday people who are struggling and cut them because they're woke and weaponized. | ||
| Those are your words, not mine. | ||
| From the fullness of the heart, the mouth speaks. | ||
| I yield back. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Senator Ricketts. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| My colleague next to me here from Louisiana has already referenced the federal spending, roughly $4.4 trillion in 2019 and 6.8, 6.9 in 2024. | ||
| I think the budget that President Biden's proposal was for $7 trillion. | ||
| He referenced the 55 percent increase in just five years. | ||
|
Americans Worse Off
00:03:41
|
||
| We greatly expanded federal spending, recklessly expanded it, including a number of areas that my colleague from Virginia just was referencing. | ||
| Areas were expanded, for example, during COVID and never brought back down to, say, 2019 levels. | ||
| That reckless spending has led to 40-year high inflation. | ||
| We've talked about that as well. | ||
| And you, in your opening remarks, remarked how Americans are worse off today four years later after Joe Biden, because of his reckless spending, contributed to this inflation. | ||
| But that's not the only thing that contributed to how Americans are being hurt by the policies of this Biden administration that just left. | ||
| One of the other areas that they have been hurt by is the regulation. | ||
| And you've mentioned some of the bureaucracies out of control throwing a man, a 77-year-old in prison for building ponds. | ||
| But if you look over the last four years, the Biden administration put in over 100,000 pages of new regulation, 33 feet tall, taller than a three-story building worth of regulations. | ||
| One study said it was adding $3,300 to the costs of every American household. | ||
| This kind of like hidden costs that we see on American households is also one of the reasons why Americans are worse off today than they were four years ago. | ||
| One of the examples of hiding some of these costs was actually in the EPA with the tailpipe regulations, also known as the EV mandate. | ||
| That was a 573-page document, and there was one table on costs, one table. | ||
| And so what we see from this outgoing administration is hiding the cost from the American people so that they don't understand and don't see what their government is trying to do to them, how their government is actually laying on these regulations that harm them. | ||
| And that's why they feel worse off today than they did four years ago. | ||
| If you're confirmed, will you commit that you will work with me to help reverse and expose the regulations and how agencies try to hide the cost, try to play around with the numbers? | ||
| You may have heard the phrase, there's lies, damn lies, and statistics, right? | ||
| We need to make sure that when we are passing regulations, that we have a full cost-benefit analysis, that people understand the trade-offs they're making by having regulation. | ||
| Will you, if you're confirmed, commit that you will work with us to be able to make sure that we fully understand the cost of this and that these agencies will not try to hide the cost of the regulations? | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| This is one of those fundamental apparatuses that we need to get back in place that we had in the first term. | ||
| If confirmed, it will be one of the earliest projects that I'm a part of. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Thank you very much, Mr. Volk. | ||
| Also, I want to switch gears on you a little bit here as well, because it's also another example of how the bureaucracy is failing. | ||
| As you know, biofuels are important to my state of Nebraska. | ||
| We're an agricultural state. | ||
|
Renovo Delay Debate
00:10:09
|
||
| Biofuels are a way for us to be able to help clean up the environment, reduce our reliance on foreign sources of energy, and it's great for farmers and ranchers as well. | ||
| Also help save consumers money at the pump. | ||
| The renewable fuel standard and the renewable volume obligations, RVOs, are priorities for me and my state. | ||
| The 2026 RVOs were supposed to be filed November 1st, 2024, and now it looks like it's going to be in December. | ||
| And I'm sure the folks who were in business in the past know that certainty is important for businesses. | ||
| And we're going to be over a year behind. | ||
| Will you commit to working with me to help make sure that the bureaucracies are following the law and fulfilling their obligations, for example, in this case specifically, to get the RVOs out on a timely basis? | ||
| Yes, Senator. | ||
| Great. | ||
| And then one last area, since I'm running out of time here, real quick. | ||
| We must tackle the national debt. | ||
| It's the biggest internal threat. | ||
| We've kind of talked about it already, but the Chinese Communist Party is the biggest external threat we face as a nation. | ||
| How will you ensure that we are protecting Federal dollars in the contracting process to make sure that our adversaries and entities that are hostile to us, like the Chinese Communist Party, are not being subsidized by our American tax dollars? | ||
| And how will you advise the administration on that? | ||
| Well, it will be a priority through our role in advising contractors and the agencies that are engaged with them. | ||
| In the first term, we had a lot of work that we were doing on behalf of the laws that were passed to make sure that Huawei was not a part of getting taxpayer contracts. | ||
| And that will be a trend that we will continue. | ||
| And we will be working with you on any new laws that are put forward and looking closely at the statutes that are already in place. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Voter. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| I've run over my time, but you also have very cute daughters. | ||
| I'm glad they're here today. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Senator Van Holland. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Mr. Vogue, good to see you. | ||
| Look, we are just a few days into the Trump administration and already seeing a huge gap between what candidate Trump ran on, which was helping working men and women in this country, and what he's actually focused on, including recently pardoning people who had been convicted of assaulting and bludgeoning police officers, | ||
| including an executive order that stops ongoing initiatives to reduce the costs of prescription drugs, including, as we've heard today, a renewal of a tax plan that disproportionately benefited the very wealthy and the biggest corporations at the expense of other Americans. | ||
| As we saw on the dais during the swearing-in, the golden age for America will be great for the billionaire tech titans who had seats better than those of the incoming Cabinet officers. | ||
| So President Trump was very clear that he's going to govern in a way that was different than candidate Trump. | ||
| You're going to play a very instrumental role in this administration if confirmed. | ||
| And I believe that the best way to sort of judge or guess what the future looks like in terms of your conduct is to look at the past. | ||
| And in December 2019, I wrote to the GAO asking them if OMB, you, the previous Trump administration, had violated the Empowment Control Act by withholding funds from Ukraine. | ||
| And in January, I got the response back, and their conclusion was yes, that you had violated the Empowerment Control Act. | ||
| Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent that the letter I received from GAO be entered into the record. | ||
| Without objection. | ||
| Now, I listened very carefully to the exchange you had with Senator Murray, and you had a very clear opportunity to say, yes, you will comply with the Empowment Control Act. | ||
| I didn't hear you say that. | ||
| So just to give you another chance, will you comply with the Empowerment Control Act? | ||
| Senator, the President ran against the Empowerment Control Act. | ||
| Mr. Vogt, I know what the President did. | ||
| He wants to change lots of things. | ||
| He can submit legislation to do that. | ||
| But you are going to be the head of OMB, and here today at this hearing, you are refusing to commit to comply with the Empowerment Control Act. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Are you refusing to commit to complying? | ||
| Senator, the administration has to go through a policy process to understand the legal parameters for operating in the ICA. | ||
| Okay, I'm going to reclaim my time. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| It seems that complying with the current law, even if you disagree with it, would result in a clear answer. | ||
| Yes, I will comply with the current law, including the Empowerment Control Act. | ||
| Let me turn to Doge. | ||
| All of us support greater government efficiency. | ||
| I'd like to see it in many different agencies, including the Pentagon, which is the one agency which has continued to fail audits. | ||
| Now, Elon Musk is going to head up Doge. | ||
| And what I'm worried about Doge is that it will not bring efficiency, but it will open the door to political cronyism. | ||
| So my question to you is this. | ||
| Will Elon Musk and the other folks at Doge will they be required to recuse themselves from recommending changes to programs in which they are huge beneficiaries? | ||
| Because I think, as you know, Elon Musk has lots of interests in government actions and government contracts. | ||
| So will those members have to recuse themselves from putting forth proposals in areas where they have a clear conflict of interest? | ||
| Senator, this administration has the highest ethical standards, and anyone who is a Federal employee will be going through the reusal process and the ethics process that is expected and required for all employees of the Federal Government. | ||
| So they will be. | ||
| Good. | ||
| Now, I just want to pick up on the quote that Senator Kaine, Senator Warner mentioned about traumatically inflicting trauma on Federal employees. | ||
| Is this an opportunity for you to retract that statement and apologize to those civil servants? | ||
| Do you want to use this opportunity to do that? | ||
| Senator, as I have said before, I was referring specifically to weaponized bureaucracies that are aimed against the American people themselves and the president that was their boss, the person that was put in charge of that. | ||
| I have looked at the transcript. | ||
| It was much broader than that. | ||
| It wasn't just focused on those individuals. | ||
| I will say on Schedule F, and this is my last question, because there are lots of concerns that this will be used to convert a merit-based civil service, which we have today, into one based on political cronyism. | ||
| So if you were successful at going through with Schedule F and you decided to fire an individual, would they continue to have the due process rights that merit-based civil servants have? | ||
| Senator, Schedule F is not a tool to fire individuals. | ||
| It is something that is so that the President gets people who are policy-based, confidential staffers that are still merit, are still career. | ||
| They are still in and in. | ||
| Mr. Vogt, just my question was: if you choose to fire somebody, are you firing them at will, or will they have the due process rights that currently apply to merit-based civil servants to avoid having them fired for political reasons? | ||
| Senator Schedule F is a different classification. | ||
| It is meant to ensure that the administration, the president, has people who are working for him that are actually going to do the policies that he ran on that he's articulating. | ||
| We think that's an important fundamental principle, and it does not mean that we have any intent to use that to fire career civil servants. | ||
| I worked with them. | ||
| I value the work that they do. | ||
| I hope that the same people there that were working for, I had one person that was there from Jimmy Carter. | ||
| I actually had a person there from LBJ. | ||
| I love the fact that the career individuals from OMB bring with them that expertise to be able to advise us on our policies. | ||
| It is not a desire to just fire anyone that has that classification. | ||
| I understand, but, Mr. Chairman, let the record show. | ||
| I asked simply whether those individuals, when they're fired, would have any due process rights as they currently have in the merit-based civil service. | ||
| And the answer, it was not, I was not given an answer. | ||
| Well, as I understood it, you are not firing anybody. | ||
| You are just saying if you are going to be in this job, you need to be like moving the direction of the police. | ||
| But if you do fire somebody, but if you do fire someone in one of these chairs, then does that person have any due process rights? | ||
| I just don't think there's a right to a particular job in the government, is what we're all going to do. | ||
| No, the question is a right to due process and not being fired for political reasons. | ||
| Senator Murray. | ||
| Thank you, Chairman. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Vogt. | ||
| You have two shots. | ||
| I have two interviews with me, so that you have double bonus here. | ||
|
Addressing Working-Class Americans
00:15:53
|
||
| So you did a great job in the Homeland Security Committee. | ||
| I appreciate your transparency, your answers. | ||
| And I'll start where I ended in that session, which is thank you. | ||
| Thank you for your willingness to serve. | ||
| Thank you for your willingness to put yourself through this process. | ||
| And thank you for the great thought and intellect that you're going to bring to this job. | ||
| Since this is a meeting where we should be questioning you and not just giving you opinions that you respond to, if it's okay, we'll give you some quick 10 questions. | ||
| Is that okay? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So there's been a lot of comments, especially from the ranking member, about betraying working Americans. | ||
| So let me ask you a question. | ||
| When the government forgives the debt of people who paid, took out a loan for college debt, does that help working Americans like my technicians, my sales consultants, my receptionists, my drivers, my car wash guys who didn't go to college? | ||
| Does it help them when student debt is illegally forgiven? | ||
| It doesn't. | ||
| When you have insane government spending that unleashes generationally high inflation, that makes going to Taco Bell a luxury, does that help working class Americans? | ||
| It doesn't. | ||
| When you spend hundreds of billions of dollars to fight endless wars in foreign countries that most Americans don't even know where they are, does that help working Americans? | ||
| No. | ||
| When you have policies that all of them voted for, every single one of them voted for electric vehicle subsidies so that when I had a Rolls-Royce dealership, a customer could come in and lease a $515,000 Rolls-Royce Specter, that's a fully electric Rolls-Royce, and get a check for $7,500 from the U.S. government. | ||
| Does that help working class Americans? | ||
| No. | ||
| And again, I just put on the record that every single one of my colleagues on the Democrat side voted for just such a subsidy. | ||
| When you house illegals in this country, people who are not invited here like I was, like my family was, when you house them in luxury hotels at a cost of $6,000 per month per room, does that help working-class Americans? | ||
| No. | ||
| When you give health care to those very illegals, When Americans don't have the health care that they need, does that help working-class Americans? | ||
| No. | ||
| When you provide food to illegals, and in some cases, when they don't like the food, you give them $1,000 prepaid credit cards. | ||
| Does that help working-class American citizens? | ||
| No, sir. | ||
| When you give sex change operations to illegals, does that help working-class Americans? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| When you offer DEI courses, and instead of being promoted based on merit, and rather you have this insane move to DEI, does that help working-class Americans? | ||
| No. | ||
| And when you fly immigrants from foreign countries to the United States on private jets, does that help working-class Americans? | ||
| No. | ||
| So last question for you. | ||
| You can answer it however you'd like, Mr. Vogue. | ||
| Why do you think hourly wages for working-class Americans declined under the policies of Joe Biden and Democrat control of Congress? | ||
| And yet, when President Trump was in the White House, hourly wages actually went up for the first time in a generation. | ||
| Well, Senator, thanks for the question. | ||
| I think it's because we had an administration that was doing everything it can to unleash the American economy, have cheap energy, to be able to have a regulatory sector that was not adding burdens that was not worth it from a cost-benefit perspective, and to free the American people and entrepreneurs to take risks and to hire people and to increase salaries. | ||
| And I think you get that with the policies that the President has run on. | ||
| I think we're going to see that in a very soon amount of time. | ||
| So if you were to say who betrayed working class Americans, was it Joe Biden and the Democrats or President Trump? | ||
| He certainly was not President Trump. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Senator Lujan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. | |
| Mr. Vogue, you authored sections of Project 2025, which sets forth a blueprint for dangerous plans under this new administration. | ||
| You'll have an enormous responsibility at OMB. | ||
| And given your record, I have serious questions about whether you can be trusted to carry out the law and safeguard programs that many Americans rely on, like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and many more. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You also authored this 2023 budget proposal at a foundation that I believe you helped found over at the Center for Renewing Americans. | |
| Is that correct? | ||
| I did help found the Center for Renewing America and put that together. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And you stand by your name? | |
| Senator, I'm not here to talk about the proposals of the Senate for Renewing America. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Vogt, my question is a simple one. | |
| You stand by your name? | ||
| I do stand by my name. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you stand by your word? | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I appreciate that because you signed this document. | |
| This is your signature? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Appreciate that. | |
| Mr. Vogue, in 2021, what was the reason for founding this center? | ||
| We wanted to continue the work on policies that were based on the principles of President Trump running for office in his first term. | ||
| And we wanted to make sure that the political class here, the agenda setting functions, were not going to ignore those important Amerifer's perspectives. | ||
| But again, Senator, I'm not here on behalf of the Center. | ||
| I'm here on behalf of the President's policies that it ran on, that he's already acting on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to submit this into the record. | |
| Mr. Vog, do you know how many families receive assistance through the low-income energy assistance program? | ||
| Not off the top of my head. | ||
| Would it surprise you if it was estimated about 5.9 million families according to the National Consumer Law Center? | ||
| It would not. | ||
| Your 2023 budget from Center for Renewing America proposed eliminating LIHEAP funding entirely, which would force millions of Americans to see skyrocketing energy costs, especially this week as temperatures are dipping below zero across the country. | ||
| I think that's important, especially those of us that represent states where many of our constituents depend on these programs when it gets cold. | ||
| Mr. Vogt, you authored Chapter 2 of Project 2025 titled Executive Office of the President of the United States, correct? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to enter Chapter 2 of Project 2025 into the record. | ||
| In this chapter, you wrote that the Trump administration must reaffirm its commitments to, quote, preventing drug use before it starts, providing treatment that leads to long-term recovery, end quote. | ||
| Mr. Vogt, do you know that Medicaid is the largest payer for substance use disorder services in the United States? | ||
| Yes, Senator. | ||
| About 38% of folks in this space depend on that program, but in the budget from your group, the Center for Renewing America, you included significant cuts to Medicaid, a total of $2.3 trillion of cuts over 10 years. | ||
| Now, Mr. Vogt, on April 8, 2024, you tweeted that, quote, defending life is the most important thing to me, end quote. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Does that sound correct? | |
| Senator, on behalf of the administration, I will be putting in place the President's views on life and abortion. | ||
| Mr. Vogt, do you know that roughly, or do you know what roughly percentage of American babies are born with Medicaid health coverage every year? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
About 41 percent. | |
| Would that surprise you? | ||
| It would not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
In your same budget, you call to eliminate the federal matching percentage floor for states. | |
| This would eliminate crucial investments that will put the health care of pregnant mothers in jeopardy. | ||
| Your budget says that it would cut over $650 billion from that program alone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Vogt, do you know that Head Start promotes school readiness for children from birth to age 5? | |
| Yes, Senator. | ||
| Do you know how many children were served by Head Start in FY23? | ||
| Not off the top of my head, Senator. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Over 770,000 children. | |
| Your budget proposes a 50% funding reduction for Head Start programs. | ||
| In your budget, you included a statement that said Head Start participants have worse behavior and academic outcomes than children who do not enroll in the program, end quote. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Two members of this committee are Head Start graduates, including myself. | |
| Does that surprise you? | ||
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That outcomes from Head Start got a couple folks to the United States Senate? | |
| It does not surprise me, Senator. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Would you like to apologize about that statement? | |
| I wasn't referring to anybody in particular, Senator. | ||
| We were looking at the program, the reforms that were a part of that proposal, and that proposal is not an administration document, and I'm not here to defend it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I appreciate it. | |
| Mr. Chairman, could I add to the record a document from the National Head Start Alliance that cites over 30 studies that find the advantage for Head Start kids? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| And Mr. Chairman, just one last question on Native American programs around safety. | ||
| Mr. Voe, I assume that you support making American communities safer? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Does this include Native American communities surrounding rural, local, and border towns? | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Do you plan to defund BIA and tribal police again as you did under your first tenure in OMB? | ||
| Senator, we haven't begun the budget process. | ||
| I'm not confirmed and won't be able to comment on what a future budget where we don't have a fiscal goal that the President has agreed to would look like at this point. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're not willing to say no today? | |
| I'm not willing to comment on any programs that have not been articulated as part of the budget process that has not been done. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Chairman, I just hope that in this case, so we talk about border security, safety in our communities. | |
| Bipartisanly, we've worked on several of these committees to improve law and order, support for the Bureau of Indian Affairs with Native American police officers, things of that nature. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is an area where there's bipartisan support to protect these programs, and I hope that we can continue to do that. | |
| I yield. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Senator Scott. | ||
| Mr. Vogue, congratulations. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| You did a great job under the first Trump administration, and I know you're going to do a great job under this administration, and I look forward to working with you. | ||
| We have seen the bloating of the federal government under the Biden administration. | ||
| In the last four years, he has added $8 trillion to the national debt, increased our federal spending by 53 percent, while our population growth was two. | ||
| We can't continue down this path of spending way above pre-pandemic levels. | ||
| And with the past four years of Joe Biden, there hasn't been any serious discussion on planning how to control spending or reduce our $36 trillion of debt. | ||
| I mean, it's just crazy where the debt is. | ||
| Can you talk about this existential threat to our economy and what we are leaving to our children if we don't address it? | ||
| Well, we're currently living them a legacy of debt and higher taxes if we don't deal with the fact that as a country we're spending too much. | ||
| And that's one of the reasons that we have consistently in the first term put forward budgets that would address the fiscal situation, have common sense reform savings, get a handle on the agencies that we think are wasting taxpayer dollars, and also to keep the economy growing. | ||
| I mean, that's a part of what's necessary to balance the books. | ||
| You've got to also have a dynamic accounting where you bring revenues in. | ||
| And that's something that's going to be very, very important for this administration. | ||
| I went to a drive-through restaurant the other day, and one of the ladies said to me, she said that she moved to Florida when I was governor because she thought she could get a job, and she clearly did. | ||
| We added 1.7 million jobs. | ||
| But she said the last four years with the inflation, she's finding it very difficult to survive. | ||
| She's got two little kids. | ||
| So what are some of the policies that could be implemented? | ||
| Not that you haven't done this yet, but what are some of the ideas that President Trump could implement to start reducing inflation? | ||
| Well, Senator, we're clearly going to address the spending side. | ||
| The President's instituted and created Doge in addition to OMB. | ||
| He's already put out an EO to unleash American energy and directing all the agencies to be trying to do everything they can to get permits going, to be able to get rid of regulations that are binding the pursuit of American energy. | ||
| And then the deregulatory process of getting that back up and running. | ||
| The President's given us a new goal. | ||
| In the first term, we had a two-for-one goal. | ||
| Now we have one for 10-for-one. | ||
| We think we can hit that. | ||
| We overshot the first goal, and we fully intend to do our best to hit that goal. | ||
| But those are all things that are going to be impacting the bottom line, the pocketbook of the person that moved to Florida for that precise reason. | ||
| So if we don't, You know, you've seen some of Senator Ron Johnson's work he's put out that how much the budget has just grown. | ||
| If you look at inflation adjusted since Clinton, inflation adjusted after Obama, it's just staggering how much it's grown. | ||
| So what's the chance that we're going to see a significant reduction in interest rates, which are hurting people, the high interest rates under Biden? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What's the chance that we're going to see inflation come under control if we don't get this budget down? | |
| I think those two come together. | ||
| I think you've got to tackle your budgets, your spending, to be able to have a shot at taming inflation, about having interest rates that can come down. | ||
| Obviously, when we left office, interest rates were nowhere near where they are. | ||
| The debt was, we spent $350 billion on interest payments the last year that I was there. | ||
| We are now up to about $900 billion in interest payments beyond what we spent in defense. | ||
| This is the wrong trajectory that you want to be on, and we fully intend, if confirmed, for me to have a role in changing that course. | ||
| So this is not the easiest job you had before. | ||
| It's not the easiest job you're going to do again. | ||
| Why do you want to do this? | ||
| I mean, it's work to try to eliminate the cruel inflation and the impact on people's inability to buy a house because of interest rates and things like that. | ||
| Why would you want to do this? | ||
| Well, I think that I bring a particular expertise, having done the job before, that I want to be able to hit the ground running. | ||
| And it's very rare that you have a chance to do a job better after thinking about it for four years. | ||
| And I'm very thankful that the President has given me this opportunity. | ||
| And hopefully I get through as a confirmed appointee. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Senator Badilla. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Mr. Chair. | |
|
Budgeting Back Home
00:12:29
|
||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Vogue, thank you for being here. | |
| I can't help but notice how many times I've heard throughout the hearing today your argument that the Impowerment Control Act is unconstitutional. | ||
| But the fact that the incoming general counsel at OMB, along with you in your final days of the first Trump administration, specifically requested legislative adjustments to the Impoundment Control Act. | ||
| What that tells me is that you do, in fact, understand the constitutionality of this law as not just currently on the books, but upheld by the courts. | ||
| In your testimony here today and through how you served in the first Trump administration, it also strikes me you come across as someone who thinks they know better than Congress, better than this committee, and at times even better than the President during the first Trump administration. | ||
| You testified last week that you've been thinking about returning to the OMB for the last four years. | ||
| And I can only hope and pray that should you be confirmed that you would uphold the Constitution above all else. | ||
| I mean, I normally thank folks willing to put themselves out for a position in public service for their willingness, because it's not easy. | ||
| My colleague Senator Lujan raised some of your contributions to Project 2025. | ||
| And in that Project 2025, you're right that the OMB director should be, quote, aggressive in wielding the tool of apportionment on behalf of the President's agenda and, quote, defend the apportionment power against attacks from Congress. | ||
| It's Particularly striking that there's so many members of this committee that seem eager, anxious, ready to vote for your confirmation when there's a clear disregard and disdain for Congress's appropriation authority. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Frankly, Mr. Chairman, I know you're one of the appropriators. | |
| I wish you would join us in trying to drive home this point because it's setting the stage for how we will be working together over the next four years. | ||
| I have to take this opportunity to echo Senator Peters, who raised a specific concern during your hearing in the Homeland Security Committee last week, outlining the fact that your record is particularly concerning for disaster-impacted states, given your previous unlawful actions to politicize, withhold, and slow the distribution of disaster or even foreign aid. | ||
| So, my question to you is this, Mr. Vogt. | ||
| If confirmed, will you or will you not politicize disaster funding and deny funds provided by Congress for American families and businesses that have been devastated by natural disasters? | ||
| Senator, I would not politicize the dispersing of federal funds in any capacity. | ||
| That's great to hear because you say you're going to implement the President's agenda, and I've been paying very close to his remarks since the outset of the devastating fires in Southern California these last few weeks. | ||
| I'd like to ask you, Mr. Vogue, will you commit to getting congressionally appropriated funding out to Californians devastated by these fires as quickly as possible? | ||
| Senator, this President has always been a firm distributor of Federal resources to areas that need disaster money, and I don't expect that to change. | ||
| And that has been that's characterized my time at OMB the first time around to your earlier question. | ||
| I do support and will take an oath to uphold the Constitution, and that will continue if confirmed in this capacity. | ||
| So, two comments, just again for the record, gradual pleasure to uphold the Constitution because the Constitution and the law is clear as it pertains to the Empowerment Control Act. | ||
| So, unlike some of your clearly understood efforts in the first term, I hope you don't go back to those bad faith practices and efforts in the second term. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And you're suggesting that you're not going to politicize the disbursement of funds, you're going to get them out the door as quickly as possible. | |
| Again, I would appreciate you living up to that commitment that you stated here today because I continue to hear comments from President Trump from leaders in Republican leaders in Congress on both sides of the Capitol about attaching disaster funding to a debt limit vote or attaching disaster funding to some other element of the new administration's agenda, | ||
| whether it's tax breaks for billionaires, whether it's some unrelated issue in Northern California as it pertains to federal land management or anything else. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So, thank you for your comments on the record. | |
| I look forward to holding you to them. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Senator Marshall. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Welcome, Mr. Vogt. | ||
| Glad to have you here. | ||
| I think I want to speak today in terms of hardworking families in Kansas. | ||
| The average salary back home for a hardworking Kansas is about $50,000 a year. | ||
| Over the last four years, we've seen cumulative inflation of 20 percent. | ||
| So that $50,000 Only really could purchase about $40,000 worth of goods and services, almost $1,000 a month hit to the average Kansan. | ||
| When we think about the Trump tax cuts, though, those put $1,000 a month back into the pockets of Kansans. | ||
| Overall, if this Trump tax cut goes away, it's going to cost Americans about $4.3 trillion over 10 years. | ||
| Middle America is going to get hit with about 60 percent of that. | ||
| Again, $1,000 a month. | ||
| If those tax cuts go away, it's going to impact hardworking Kansans to the tune of $1,000 a month. | ||
| I just want you to comment just a second on how big of a priority getting these tax cuts made actually permanent would be and how it would impact our economy and those hardworking Kansans back home. | ||
| Well, I think, Senator, thank you for the question. | ||
| I think it would devastate their bottom line in having to face a massive tax increase that they are not prepared for, nor should they. | ||
| I think there should be, and the President has run on this, an extension of the tax cuts and some of the other provisions that he has proposed on the campaign trail. | ||
| And we have got to go after the spending. | ||
| We have to go after ensuring that we are producing as much American energy as we possibly can. | ||
| And we have got to get beyond the regulatory burden that we have put on the American people. | ||
| And I think those are all policies that you'll see if confirmed me prioritize in this role. | ||
| Let's talk a little bit about budgeting. | ||
| Folks back home, they're expected to balance their checkbooks, pay off their credit card debt. | ||
| Unfortunately, they're seeing their credit cards are maxed out. | ||
| It's tough times, no doubt about it. | ||
| But Congress seems to not care about a budget. | ||
| If Congress would go to a zero-based budgeting reform, working with your office, what could be the impact of that? | ||
| And I mean zero-based budgeting, even grants. | ||
| We make grants on their five-year terms typically, but if we would just start looking at those grants, especially the ones going out of the country, what impact would zero-based budgeting have for getting towards a balanced budget? | ||
| Well, I think the concepts of zero-based budgeting is that you get a sense of what are the things that you haven't taken a look at in a long time. | ||
| And starting from the ground up, it doesn't mean you're not going to fund that. | ||
| Just it means that you're taking an approach to looking at each agency spend and where the big dollars are coming from. | ||
| And I think every family does that in America. | ||
| They look at what's the amount that they are going to bring in from a paycheck, and then they look at their spending and they say, what are the big pockets of discretionary funding that they could do without? | ||
| And that's what I think that budgeting is about. | ||
| And I think it's important not to lose that level of common sense that comes from a family balancing their own books. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I think just give you a little time here to just discuss inflation in general. | ||
| You made the comment earlier that Federal borrowing causes inflation. | ||
| And that's pretty intuitive to some of us. | ||
| But I think you just want you to take that just a little bit and explain to, again, those folks back home. | ||
| When the Federal Government is borrowing money, spending more than they have, how does that lead to inflation? | ||
| Well, you certainly have more money in the system that's coming from Federal dollars that are providing competition and the ability to have prices go up as a result of that. | ||
| And then you add the component to which who is buying much of that debt? | ||
| Much of that debt is being bought by the Federal Reserve that is printing money to buy that debt To the economy. | ||
| And of course, that's going to impact interest rates as well. | ||
| So one of the goals would be to get interest rates down. | ||
| What's it going to take for interest rates to meaningfully come down, not just because of what the Fed's doing? | ||
| Well, it's going to require us to get a handle on our spending to begin to have deficits that are much more manageable. | ||
| Thank you, Chairman. | ||
| I yield back. | ||
| General Highgate. | ||
| Chairman, and welcome to the seat recently occupied by myself. | ||
| I'm delighted to see you there and look forward to working with you. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| Mr. Vogt, the backdrop to the conversation we're having here is indicated by this graph, which shows from 1980 to 2020 how income has grown in the United States. | ||
| The bottom line, showing essentially no income growth, is the bottom 20% of income earners. | ||
| And as you can see, their household income has stayed essentially flat. | ||
| The second line up, this lower one, is how the top 1% of income earners have done. | ||
| They're up 600%, nearly, compared to near 0% for the working people in that lowest 20%. | ||
| And if you look at the topmost line that's up more than 800%, that's the top 0.01%. | ||
| What worries me as we go into this effort is that what we're trying to produce is a golden age for fat cats, billionaires, and polluters that is going to make this discrepancy worse and worse and worse. | ||
| And it is in that context that I would like to ask you some questions about these executive orders. | ||
|
Research Center Claims
00:05:44
|
||
| President Trump fired off 26 executive orders, I believe, his first day. | ||
| Are you familiar with them? | ||
| I'm getting familiar with them, Senator. | ||
| I've been trying to stay abreast of them and read them. | ||
| I haven't read through all of them, but I am aware that he has been very active and I've been reading a number of them. | ||
| Did you have any role in preparing any of them? | ||
| Senator, that's part of the deliberative process that the transition goes through, and I'm not going to invade that deliberative process. | ||
| Wait, Hold. | ||
| Can we kind of have a point of order here and stop the clock? | ||
| I was the chairman, you can put that down now for a Congress in which we had, I think, over 40 hearings. | ||
| And in those hearings, never once did I tell a Republican colleague what questions they could or could not ask. | ||
| Those are kind of not my business. | ||
| And we had somebody out there questions, I will tell you. | ||
| And we certainly never had a witness tell senators what questions they could and could not ask. | ||
| So I want to, I guess I'm like, why can I not get an answer? | ||
| Is there some new rule in this committee as to where these executive orders came from? | ||
| That's perfectly, to me, legitimate congressional oversight. | ||
| And over and over, 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 is some new limitation about what question I can answer, I would like to understand that. | ||
| If not, I'd like to have the chair tell the witness to answer my questions. | ||
| Well, as I understand it, there's no attorney-client privilege here, right? | ||
| You're not claiming an attorney-client privilege. | ||
| I'm not claiming a privilege, Senator. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, you're not part of the administration. | ||
| Generally speaking, I guess the question is: did you advise on executive orders and which ones? | ||
| Is that the question? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Can you kind of tell us that, please, if you could? | ||
| Senator, I was not a member of the transition. | ||
| I was not a member of the President's campaign. | ||
| Do you have knowledge of where the executive orders were drafted? | ||
| I don't have a comprehensive knowledge of where the executive orders were. | ||
| Do you have any knowledge of where the executive orders were drafted? | ||
| Do you know, for instance, if some of them came out of language from the Center for Renewing America, or some of them came out of Project 2025, or some of them came out of the Heritage Institute, or some of them came out of the American Petroleum Institute? | ||
| Do you know an answer to those questions? | ||
| I can't imagine they came from Project 2025. | ||
| The President disassociated himself repeatedly from that. | ||
| But no, I can't give you a comprehensive answer with regard to where the executive orders were compiled. | ||
| My assumption is that they were compiled within the transition. | ||
| Well, we will see, because I think there's every reason to believe that they came from special interests and lobbyists, and we'll pursue that. | ||
| Let me ask you about a letter that you wrote some time ago on Center for Renewing America letterhead to the Judicial Conference. | ||
| I think it's the only letter that you ever wrote to the Judicial Conference. | ||
| It was dated December 18, 2023, and it goes into a certain amount of detail about the Ethics and Government Act and about Justice Jackson's financial disclosure forms. | ||
| Did you do the research for this letter into the Ethics and Government Act and into the judicial financial disclosure forms personally? | ||
| Senator R. Center did the research on that. | ||
| And who in your center did the research on that? | ||
| Our center did the research on that, and I can't speak to who did the work specifically on it. | ||
| You don't know? | ||
| No, I didn't say that, Senator. | ||
| I said it's not why can't you speak to that? | ||
| There's no privilege about that. | ||
| No, but a think tank is a public policy organization that has a decision to note who does the work on something and who doesn't do the work on it. | ||
| And I stand by that letter. | ||
| I haven't read it in some time. | ||
| I'm happy to look at it. | ||
| But I am aware that we sent it, that I signed it. | ||
| Did Mr. Paletta, who is here, have a role in preparing this letter? | ||
| He is a member of the Center for Renewing America, but I am not going to speak beyond that. | ||
| Here we go again, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| I'm not going to speak. | ||
| I want to answer what else. | ||
| He said he stands by the letter. | ||
| It's his letter. | ||
| That's not the question. | ||
| Yeah, well, he just said. | ||
| That's not the question. | ||
| My time is up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Thanks. | ||
| Senator Lee. | ||
| Thanks so much for being here, Mr. Vogt, and for your willingness to serve. | ||
| The administrative state has been crushing the American economy and American innovation. | ||
| It is also something that operates in a manner that is fundamentally contrary to the structure and intent of the U.S. Constitution. | ||
|
Vulnerable People's Medicaid Concerns
00:10:53
|
||
| Article 1, Sections 1 and 7 make clear that only Congress may enact federal law. | ||
| In Article 1, Section 7, in particular, it makes clear that you cannot make a federal law unless you follow the formula. | ||
| And the formula involves bicameral passage of a single bill, a single item, a legislative text, in both Houses, followed by submission to the President for signature, veto, or acquiescence. | ||
| Unless you follow that model, you cannot, under the Constitution, make a Federal law. | ||
| For the last 80 or 90 years, Congress has been veering off course in that direction, and tragically, the courts have been at least inconsistent, or you might say largely absent in enforcing these restrictions. | ||
| Nonetheless, it is important that we arrest the problem because the problem is arresting Americans, in some cases very literally, and not just metaphorically. | ||
| It is estimated that in 2024 alone, executive branch bureaucrats in the Biden administration promulgated Federal regulations that added $1.5 trillion in regulatory compliance costs just during that narrow time period. | ||
| This, on top of previous estimates, suggesting as far back as 2016, 2017, that existing regulatory compliance costs imposed by Federal regulators in Washington were somewhere in the range of around $2 trillion. | ||
| So it is much higher than that now. | ||
| These laws written by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats, they can't really be fired by anyone. | ||
| They certainly don't ever have to stand for election. | ||
| They are not known to the American people. | ||
| And they promulgate nearly 100,000 pages of law, Federal law, or initial drafts that could become law every single year. | ||
| A simple solution to that would involve passage of a bill called the Rains Act. | ||
| The Rains Act stands for Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny, would require that all Federal regulations, before they may be enforced as Federal law, if they qualify as major rules imposing affirmative legal obligations on the public, would have to be subjected to the bicameralism and presentment standard imposed by Article 1, Section 7. | ||
| Mr. Book, what are your views on the Rains Act, and will you and the Trump Administration work with Congress to enact reforms like these? | ||
| Thank you, Senator. | ||
| It is obviously an important area for the President of ensuring that the bureaucracies can't promulgate regulations that are harming the economy, harming the American people. | ||
| And it is one of those creative ideas that I think Congress should take a strong look at. | ||
| And the Administration certainly supports the thrust of the direction of the legislation. | ||
| Now, there are those who argue that a significant amount of reform to Federal regulations and to the process itself could be carried out through the executive branch itself, acting alone. | ||
| What are your views on that and whether that would or could adequately do the job? | ||
| Isn't there a risk there that if it is performed only by the executive branch, that might bring relief to Americans as long as this President is in office, but subject us to the same risk immediately after he leaves? | ||
| That would be the problem, and we saw that with regard to some of the proposals regarding administrative PAYGO. | ||
| When you give the administration or whoever the OMB director is the ability to execute this outside of statute, then you have got a situation where you can minimize costs and maximize benefits and potentially escape the process that Congress has intended. | ||
| I have recently reintroduced a bill in this Congress that I introduced last year. | ||
| It's a bill called the America First Act. | ||
| The America First Act imposes a simple principle on American law, a simple principle that most Americans agree with, which is that welfare benefits provided by the Federal Government should be available to Americans and not to those who are not Americans, especially those who are here unlawfully. | ||
| It would ensure specifically that only U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents could be eligible to receive benefits under programs like Medicaid, SNAP, housing, education, some tax benefit programs, and a handful of other government benefits. | ||
| These are things that impose significant costs on the American economy. | ||
| They are draining resources meant to benefit Americans and not those who have come here, contrary to our laws, in order to receive them. | ||
| Mr. Bogt, would you commit to working with Congress to bring about reforms like these? | ||
| Absolutely, Senator. | ||
| That is exactly the types of reforms that the President ran on. | ||
| Great. | ||
| I see my time has expired. | ||
| Thank you, Mayor, very much. | ||
| Thank you, Chairman. | ||
| I have one more. | ||
| Are you okay? | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Senator Wyden. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Mr. Vogt, let me ask you about Medicaid. | ||
| As you know, I am the ranking Democrat on the Finance Committee. | ||
| I have been perplexed by your views about Medicaid over the years because Medicaid is already an incredibly efficient payer within the health care system. | ||
| So here we have this program that helps with rest homes. | ||
| It helps with workers. | ||
| It helps with kids. | ||
| It helps with disabled. | ||
| The track record is it is efficient. | ||
| Do you disagree with that? | ||
| Well, Senator, thanks for the question. | ||
| I think it's the extent to which Medicaid is efficient. | ||
| Yes or no? | ||
| Do you agree with the point that I am making that Medicaid is efficient? | ||
| Because I have read everything you have had to say about it. | ||
| You are an influential figure. | ||
| Your politics are different than mine, but I look at the merits of the arguments. | ||
| And Medicaid is an efficient program that helps vulnerable people. | ||
| And I want to know, do you think Medicaid is inefficient? | ||
| Well, I don't know if we're using the same definition of efficiency, and I think the challenge... | ||
| You used something that would suggest other than the point I'm making, because right now, four-person spending grew less than Medicare and private insurance over the last few years. | ||
| So this program that you want to clobber, that you want to reduce, is more efficient than practically a host of other things. | ||
| And I want to know what your argument is for Medicaid being inefficient, which you used to justify the cuts. | ||
| Well, I'm not sure I used efficiency as the reason to justify reforms to Medicaid. | ||
| What I was referring to and have, particularly defending the budgets that President Trump sent up, is that the populations that you mentioned are no longer just the populations of Medicaid, | ||
| but now we have able-bodied working adults that get a higher match, and that has taken away from the ability to have a focus on those specific populations because you have states chasing the match instead of trying to focus on those it was intended for and weed out improper payments and waste foreign abuse and we know that there is improper payments in Medicaid to a very high degree. | ||
| Well, what we know is that spending grew less in all these other programs and that the analyses that have been done by objective people is dollar for dollar. | ||
| This is an important way to help the poor. | ||
| So let's start with that. | ||
| And you haven't told me anything this morning that would suggest that you have a good argument that indicates you believe Medicare is inefficient because the facts suggest otherwise and let's leave the record open. | ||
| You can send me anything you want. | ||
| Let me ask you one other question because my time is short. | ||
| I think the distillation of the Trump economic program is to give tax breaks to all the people at the top, and it's going to be paid for by these kinds of cuts, cuts in efficient health care programs like Medicaid and hunger programs and the like. | ||
| And I'd like to know, does that concern you at all, that we have these values that are going to help the people right at the top, at the tippy top of the top? | ||
| And we're going to cut these programs like Medicaid and hunger. | ||
| Are those your values? | ||
| Do you think that that's something that is in line with American values? | ||
| Because I think we want everybody to have a chance to get ahead. | ||
| Senator, I fully support the notion that we want everyone to get ahead, and we would not characterize our economic program that way. | ||
| We think it's important to give people tax cuts at all levels. | ||
| The President wants to extend those tax cuts. | ||
| But what about the vulnerable people who are going to get hurt in the process? | ||
| Because no matter how you try to reframe this, this is an efficient program, Medicaid, that serves some of the most vulnerable people in America. | ||
| It's a lifeline for them. | ||
| And the people at the top are going to get the benefits. | ||
| And I gather that you don't have a problem with that. | ||
| And I think most Americans want a sense of fairness that you're not offering today. | ||
| Senator, I hope there's a better Medicaid program and that Medicaid is an important program for the poor and that they get a better health care as a result of the reforms that align the incentives so that states are doing everything they can to have the best programs that they possibly can as opposed to expanding them unnecessarily that hurts the federal taxpayer and honestly I believe hurts the people that the Medicaid program was meant for. | ||
| If you have a way to show that you can make Medicaid more efficient, because right now it is clearly meeting the objective test of using federal dollars in a smart way and do it without hurting them and perhaps, heaven forbid, you would take some of the money that's going to go to tax breaks for people at the top to do it, I'll be all ears. | ||
| But right now, what I see is a path to hurting many more vulnerable people, and instead the money is going to go to the people at the top, and I don't think that's right. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Senator Wyden. | ||
| Mr. Vogue, thank you. | ||
| Well done. | ||
| For appearing before the committee today, your full statement will be included in the record. | ||
|
10 AM Eastern Live
00:02:20
|
||
| The hearing record will remain open until noon tomorrow for the submission of statements and questions. | ||
| For the record delivered to the committee clerk, Senator Merkley and I met yesterday. | ||
| We had a very good meeting. | ||
| Our staffs are working together the best we can. | ||
| I enjoyed our meeting and I thought we had a good hearing today. | ||
| And I'll speak later about the Impoundment Act at the markup. | ||
| I have concerns too, and I'll share those with you there. | ||
| But thank you very much, Mr. Vogue. | ||
| Anything? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not, hearings adjourn. | |
| I'm sorry. | ||
| Oh, were you? | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| So I apologize. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Live today on C-SPAN, the House meets at 10 a.m. Eastern for legislative business. | |
| And later in the day, we'll vote on a wildfire prevention and forest management bill and on abortion legislation. | ||
| On C-SPAN 2 at 10, members of the Senate are expected to vote on the nomination of John Radcliffe to be CIA Director and continue debate on Pete Hegseth's nomination to be Defense Secretary. | ||
| Senate lawmakers could vote later in the week on whether to confirm Mr. Hegseth after new allegations about misconduct and abuse have surfaced. | ||
| And on C-SPAN 3, President Trump's pick for Agriculture Secretary, former White House aide Brooke Rollins, will take questions at a Senate Agriculture Committee confirmation hearing. | ||
| That also at 10 a.m. Eastern. | ||
| You can also watch all of our live coverage on the C-SPAN Now video app or online at c-span.org. | ||
| If you ever miss any of C-SPAN's coverage, you can find it anytime online at c-span.org. | ||
| Videos of key hearings, debates, and other events feature markers that guide you to interesting and newsworthy highlights. | ||