Expect This Project 2025 Co-Author & Trump Cabinet Pick to Help Gut Reproductive Care

Russell Vought, who's been tapped to manage Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), said during his confirmation hearing on Wednesday that the president should have broad powers over funding allocated by Congress.

By Kylie Cheung | January 16, 2025 | 2:20pm

Photo: Screenshot Politics

Expect This Project 2025 Co-Author & Trump Cabinet Pick to Help Gut Reproductive Care

Within days of Donald Trump winning reelection, the president of the Heritage Foundation—the organization behind Project 2025—said he was “ecstatic” about Trump’s cabinet selections, which were “exceeding our expectations.” On Wednesday, the Senate held confirmation hearings for one cabinet pick who stands to be a key facilitator in enacting Project 2025 within the administration: Russell Vought, who’s been tapped to manage Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Vought ran OMB in Trump’s first term and is a co-author of Project 2025.

The 900-page agenda details how the Trump administration could effectively ban abortion without Congress, ban porn, destroy the environment, and target immigrants and LGBTQ people, among other, heinous proposals. Vought, who believes immigrants should be granted legal status based on whether they’ve “accept[ed] Israel’s God, laws and understanding of history,” wrote a chapter explicitly about how the OMB could advance a Christian nationalist agenda.

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Disappointingly enough, Senate Democrats didn’t directly ask Vought about abortion or Project 2025. (Relatedly, they also didn’t ask Pam Bondi, Trump’s pick for attorney general who could wield the Justice Department to enforce the Comstock Act and ban the mailing of abortion pills, about abortion.) But they did ask Vought about his views on the president’s powers to withhold money appropriated by Congress for programs the president doesn’t support. Vought said he sees any laws that restrict the president’s powers to do so “are not constitutional.”

Specifically, Vought said the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 isn’t “constitutional.” What’s impoundment? It’s when Congress approves funding for something but the president ignores it. The act was passed after Congress accused President Richard Nixon of abusing his power when they overrode his veto of the Clean Water Act of 1972, but he then refused to spend the $24 billion in funds designated to clean water systems of sewage.

Trump has repeatedly said reclaiming the power of impoundment would be one of his top priorities. “The president ran on that view,” Vought said of Trump’s rejection of the 1974 law. “That’s his view, and I agree with it.” So, hypothetically, Congress could vote against funding anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers, or CPCs, and Trump and Vought could just send them money anyway.

“I am astonished and aghast that someone in this responsible of a position would in effect say that the president is above the law,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) said in response.

Reproductive rights organizations now warn that Vought’s appointment could be devastating for access to reproductive care across the country. His positions on the broad powers of the executive branch to direct funding show he supports “policies that place abortion and reproductive care further out of reach,” according to the National Women’s Law Center’s Alison Gil, “including banning providers who perform abortions from receiving essential federal funds and allowing anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers “to receive federal money that would help them to further spread misinformation.”

Already, between the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling in June 2022 and the summer of 2024, one watchdog group tracked over $500 million in state funding poured into CPCs, which target and prey on typically low-income, desperate abortion seekers by pretending to be clinics. CPCs then pump abortion seekers with disinformation about abortion and sometimes harass them for prolonged amounts of time, or collect and store their personal data for the anti-abortion movement. NWLC warns that under Vought, CPCs are likely to receive more funding and support from the federal government. Meanwhile, just as the first Trump administration imposed global and domestic gag rules to revoke funding from organizations that provide or offer referrals for abortion, we can expect the same this time around, in addition to cuts to family planning programs more broadly.

Project 2025 also directs the Justice Department to enforce Comstock and prohibit the mailing of abortion pills or abortion-related supplies, and for the Health and Human Services Department and FDA to crack down on medication abortion. The draconian document advocates for a “male-female,” “biblically based” definition of the family unit.

Outside of his work on Project 2025, Vought, who’s openly called himself a Christian nationalist, has been caught on tape disclosing that his organization, the right-wing Center for Renewing America, has already drafted hundreds of executive orders for Trump. In July, Vought was caught on a hot mic speaking with two undercover climate reporters who he believed were conservative donors; he told them that Trump had “blessed” his organization and is “very supportive of what we do,” and that Trump’s attempt to distance himself from Project 2025 was “graduate-level politics.”

Vought’s public, non-hot mic comments are just as chilling: In 2023, Vought appeared to call for a ban on medication abortion, and for Congress to not wait for courts to take action. In 2022, he railed against funding for Planned Parenthood, pushing the right-wing smear that the organization unethically harvests fetuses.

In a lengthy letter calling on senators to reject Vought, NWLC points to a range of disturbing policy positions Vought holds, including his goals, articulated in Project 2025, “to eliminate both transgender health care from Medicare and Medicaid and federal anti-discrimination rules,” and to hack away at civil rights, diversity programs, and social services for low-income families.

Nonetheless, in the Republican-majority Senate, the New York Times reports that Vought is “expected to garner broad support from Senate Republicans.” And unlike some of the other advisers and sycophants Trump keeps close, Vought is eerily competent and likely to wield his power effectively. “[OMB] is a President’s air-traffic control system with the ability and charge to ensure that all policy initiatives are flying in sync and with the authority to let planes take off and, at times, ground planes that are flying off course,” he wrote in Project 2025. Cooool.