Vought Defends Funding Freezes, Won't Rule Out a Shutdown Fight

Russell Vought runs the White House Office of Management and Budget, the agency that turns a president's priorities into actual spending decisions. His appearance on Face the Nation came at a moment when three separate fights over federal money were colliding: a looming succession battle at the Federal Reserve, a standoff with Congress over billions in education and health research funding the administration had quietly withheld, and a broader argument about whether the president can legally spend less than Congress appropriates. All three connect to the same underlying question, whether the executive branch or the legislative branch controls the government's checkbook, and all three were coming to a head as the fiscal year's September 30 funding deadline approached.

Vought is also the architect, in the eyes of many Democrats and some Republicans, of a more assertive approach to executive budget power, and Margaret Brennan pressed him repeatedly on whether his public comments about wanting a "less bipartisan" appropriations process amounted to inviting a government shutdown. His answers, more than any specific dollar figure, are what make this interview worth reading in full.

Below is what Vought actually said about the Fed, about the money the administration held back, and about the impoundment fight that could end up defining his tenure at OMB.

With Jerome Powell's term as Federal Reserve chair set to end in May 2026, Vought laid out the administration's criteria without naming a preferred successor: "he's looking for a chairman that's not continually too late to the developments in the economic marketplace." He argued Powell was "very late in the Biden administration to raise rates" against inflation, saying "inflation is largely a monetary phenomenon" and that Powell wrongly called early price spikes "transitory." Now, Vought argued, Powell is late in the other direction: "now uh he's again too late" to cut rates, at a time when "we have fiscal mismanagement at the Fed" over a headquarters renovation project.

Asked whether the administration, drawing on the Project 2025 blueprint's chapter calling for Congress to overhaul the Fed's structure, wants a legislative overhaul, Vought deflected: "I don't even know what that chapter says," adding "we want an economic system that works for the American people. That includes the Fed," but stopping short of endorsing structural changes beyond lower rates.

Vought confirmed the White House would release the remaining $5 billion in previously withheld education funding, after ten Republican senators publicly objected that the administration's justification — that the money was flowing to "radical left-wing programs" — didn't hold up. Vought defended the review itself, citing English-language acquisition funding he said flowed to "illegal immigration advocacy organizations" through the New York school system, and preschool development grants he characterized as funding curriculum for "putting CRT into the school system" for four-year-olds. Pressed that senators say the same money funds adult-learner job training and after-school programs, Vought said only that the administration "wanted to make sure it got out" after completing its review, while leaving open a future rescissions package that could claw back some of that same funding later in the year.

On withheld National Institutes of Health funding for cardiovascular and cancer research — the subject of a separate letter from Sen. Katie Britt and 13 other Republicans — Vought would not commit to a release date, saying NIH is going "through the same process" as education funding. He justified the freeze with specific line items he described as wasteful, including "$2 million for injecting dogs with cocaine" and "$75,000 for Harvard to study blowing lizards off of trees with leaf blowers," and argued NIH needed "dramatic overhaul" after "gain of function research" funding tied to pandemic origins. Asked whether the freeze was really a backdoor route to the White House budget's proposed 26% cut to HHS and $18 billion cut to NIH, Vought did not deny the connection directly, saying only that the administration retains "the ability and the executive tools to fund less than what Congress appropriated."

The most consequential exchange concerned the legal mechanism behind all of this: the Impoundment Control Act, which Vought argues wrongly stripped presidents of a two-century-old power. "For 200 years, presidents had the ability to spend less than the congressional appropriations," he said, arguing Congress sets "the appropriation ceiling" but that presidents could historically spend below it if they found "efficiencies" or "waste." He said that authority was lost "right around" the 1970s and that the president "ran on restoring that funding authority to the presidency." Asked directly whether he wants the fight over that power to reach the Supreme Court, Vought did not deny it, prompting Brennan to note, "that sounds like a yes."

He also pushed back on the idea that the summer's rescissions package — the first of its kind passed in decades, on a party-line vote — added to the deficit, calling it "$400 billion in deficit reduction" combined with the broader spending bill's "1.5 trillion in mandatory savings reforms."

Brennan pressed Vought on friction with Senate Republicans, including Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, who has said Vought is "pushing the limits of what the executive can do without the consent of the legislative branch." Vought said he has "a great relationship with Senator Collins" but defended a controversial comment he made weeks earlier that the appropriations process needs to be "less bipartisan," explaining it was a response to Democrats arguing the rescissions package itself undermined bipartisan appropriations: "if you're going to call a rescission package... undermining the bipartisan appropriations process, then maybe we should have a conversation about that."

Asked directly whether he wants a government shutdown at the September 30 deadline, given Republicans hold only 53 Senate seats and need Democratic votes to reach 60, Vought said, "No, of course not," while arguing the traditional bipartisan process itself "is broken" and that "all options are on the table" to avoid another catch-all omnibus bill.

Vought's interview points toward a fall defined by the same fight repeating across every agency: a programmatic review used to justify withholding money, followed by targeted release only after political pressure, with a rescissions package held in reserve to claw funds back later. That pattern, already visible with education and NIH funding, is likely to recur as the September 30 deadline nears, and it gives Republican appropriators like Collins and Murkowski recurring leverage — and recurring friction — with an OMB director who has said openly that he wants to change how the process works.

The bigger and slower-moving story is the impoundment question itself. Vought's argument that presidents should regain pre-1970s authority to spend below what Congress appropriates is not a minor technical dispute; it goes to the core of the constitutional balance between the two branches over the power of the purse. If that fight does reach the Supreme Court, as Vought did not rule out, the ruling would shape not just this administration's budget tactics but the leverage of every future president and Congress in spending disputes.

In the near term, the practical test is simpler: whether Vought's OMB and a bipartisan Senate can strike a funding deal before September 30 without a lapse, and whether "all options on the table" ends up meaning a negotiated deal, another continuing resolution, or the shutdown he insists he does not want.