Trump Budget Chief Pick Defends Spending Cut Plans — Using Trump Foe Paul Ryan’s Words

Russell Vought, likely to return as director of the Office of Management and Budget, echoed the former House speaker's criticism of the social safety net.

In his presidential campaign, Donald Trump went out of his way to distinguish himself from what he mocked as the hard-hearted, green-eyeshade conservatism of Republicans like former House Speaker Paul Ryan.

Yet on Wednesday, Trump’s pick to head the key Office of Management and Budget defended the administration’s fiscal plans with a statement almost word-for-word repeating one of Ryan’s most famous critiques of government spending.

In response to a question from Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) about where he would try to cut spending, OMB director nominee Russell Vought said federal benefit programs had to be looked at.

“I think we need to go after the mandatory programs that Sen. [John] 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,” Vought said.

Vought’s remarks at his Senate Budget Committee confirmation hearing, unintentionally or not, directly echoed one of Ryan’s most famous formulations of his own pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps approach to government benefit programs, which he tried to cut for years as House Budget Committee chairman and later as speaker of the House.