Read the follow-up post here.
Two congressional hearings this week will put President Donald Trump’s budget proposal under the microscope, but the real story should be the administration official sent to defend it: Russell Vought. His rare appearance before Congress will give committee members a unique opportunity to confront the administration on the full range of its anti-constitutional, illegal, and otherwise harmful actions — provided they seize it.
While he may not be a household name, Vought is one of the administration’s key figures — perhaps the key figure. Officially, Vought is the Director of the White House Office of Management Budget (OMB), which gives him extraordinary control over how tax dollars are spent (or not) and how agencies implement the laws Congress passes.
He also became the de facto head of DOGE — or the so-called Department of Government Efficiency — following Elon Musk’s departure. In that role, Vought has continued to push out tens of thousands of public servants, eviscerate entire agencies, and dismantle a wide variety of programs covering everything from foreign aid to disaster relief.
By the time Trump took the oath office in January 2025, Vought had already spent years laying the groundwork for the second term. He served as OMB Director during Trump’s first term, giving him a chance to test drive many of his signature policies, including impoundment — or illegally refusing to spend money that Congress has provided — and converting many career public servants into at-will employees, making it possible to fire them for political reasons.
Vought didn’t let Trump’s loss to President Joe Biden slow him down, either. He founded the Center for Renewing America, a controversial think tank dedicated to advancing Christian nationalism and something called the unitary executive theory — a once fringe legal concept that holds that the Constitution gives presidents unchecked authority to do their jobs.
He was also a chief architect of the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for establishing an authoritarian presidency, known as Project 2025. The second Trump administration initiated or completed 53 percent of its domestic policy recommendations in its first year alone.
In short, Vought’s fingerprints are on nearly every illegal or harmful policy action that the administration has taken so far. Holding them accountable for those actions begins with him.
The problem is that, unlike most of those in the administration’s upper echelons — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Pete Hegseth, and Elon Musk to name a few — Vought fastidiously eschews the limelight. When he does poke his head out, he resorts to technocratic bureaucratese to deflect, obscure, or bore.
That is what makes this week’s hearings so important. They offer a high-profile public platform for forcing Vought to answer under oath and on the record for the damage the administration has done under his direction and supervision.
Members should use the hearings to present a clear and incontrovertible story about the Trump administration’s efforts to violate the cherished rights of millions of Americans, weaponize the government’s coercive powers to silence its critics and punish its enemies, and demolish countless programs that working families and communities depend upon — all while trampling the rule of law and longstanding constitutional safeguards and norms.
To accomplish all this, though, committee members and their staff must be ready with a battery of probing questions, each carefully crafted to prevent evasion or equivocation. During the hearings, members must be persistent in getting substantive responses to these questions, rejecting Vought’s attempts to get away with non-answers or feigned ignorance.
Aggressively challenging Vought carries a lot of potential upsides. In the best-case scenario, he will fold under tough questioning and make incriminating or embarrassing statements. Such gaffes during hearings helped doom Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi, and perhaps the same fate could await Vought.
Short of that, though, committee Democrats can still lay the foundation for meaningful oversight of the administration should they retake a majority in either chamber of Congress following the midterms. Vought’s testimony can provide invaluable fodder for future hearings, investigations, and subpoenas.
Perhaps even some Republicans may be emboldened by Trump’s declining popularity to use the hearing to defend their prerogatives as members of Article I. After all, Vought is the perfect avatar for this administration’s encroachments on Congress’ constitutional authorities, particularly as they relate to spending powers and declaration of war. In doing so, they would have strong public support; recent polling from RealClearPolitics reveals that the public opposes the unitary executive theory by more than 2-to-1.
Nothing short of the future of U.S. democracy could be riding on these hearings. Let’s hope they live up to the hype — and the hype lives up to its potential.
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James Goodwin | April 15, 2026
Two congressional hearings this week will put President Donald Trump’s budget proposal under the microscope, but the real story should be the administration official sent to defend it: Russell Vought. His rare appearance before Congress will give committee members a unique opportunity to confront the administration on the full range of its anti-constitutional, illegal, and otherwise harmful actions — provided they seize it.
Evan George | April 14, 2026
This Earth Day, environmental advocates are looking backward as well as forward. With the U.S. federal government so dramatically overhauling environmental policy, history shows how American social movements of the 19th and 20th centuries overcame seemingly insurmountable odds to preserve public lands and pass laws protecting human health. “I’ve been trying to look through the history of the United States to understand how we’ve gotten where we are,” said Alejandro Camacho, a Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law and co-author of Lessons for a Warming Planet: A Vital History of U.S. Environmental Law, which comes out on Earth Day, April 22, 2026. “Prior generations did meet the moment and at least partially addressed some of the major problems that were in front of them.” Camacho discusses the book in this lightly edited transcript.
Sophie Loeb | April 8, 2026
In 2025, North Carolina saw an effective repeal of its carbon plan, and the state is now on track to approve over 100 data center projects. This will further imperil the state’s 2050 decarbonization goal while creating a new slew of environmental and public health concerns and electricity affordability problems. The state is charting a harmful path and should change course before its policies hurt more people and communities.
Robert Verchick | March 30, 2026
A fan of place-based education, every year I haul my students to Louisiana’s Maurepas Wildlife Management Area to paddle the swamps and learn about coastal law. This semester, I had ten students with me, each paddling a kayak on the swamp’s shimmering water. Bits of salvinia, a free-floating aquatic fern, eased downstream at an almost imperceptible rate. Stories on the bayou are always changing. This year, the narrative wrestled with a choice the state is making about what the Maurepas Swamp will become — an ecological jewel or a carbon-capture dump. The community is torn.
Hannah Wiseman, Matthew McHale | March 23, 2026
In the past five years, the United States began experiencing a rapid increase in electricity demand, fueled primarily by data centers for artificial intelligence. A single data center can use the amount of electricity consumed by a city of approximately 80,000 people. Most data center companies seek electricity from the same utilities that provide electricity to retail and commercial customers (including all of us). And these utilities are building massive amounts of transmission and generation to meet data centers’ growing demands.
Robert Verchick | March 19, 2026
I was writing in a New Orleans coffee house last spring when another customer noticed the ocean stickers on my laptop and offered me a new one in support of a regional cause: the Rice’s whale, a species that had only recently been identified and is listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). That’s because only about 50 of these creatures exist. And they all live full-time in the Gulf of Mexico. I’ve seen many species of whales, but never this one. I’m told they have very distinct vocalization patterns and a unique diving pattern. Unlike many whales that feed near the surface, Rice's whales make deep dives toward the seafloor during the day to feed on fish and spend their nights sleeping within 50 feet of the surface. The Trump administration apparently wants them gone.
Brian Gumm, Bryan Dunning, Catalina Gonzalez, Federico Holm, James Goodwin, Rachel Mayo, Sophie Loeb, Spencer Green, Tara Quinonez | March 12, 2026
We mourn the lives of all Iranian civilians and U.S. service members lost in the illegal preemptive strike on Iran, and that of all civilians killed and hurt in subsequent strikes in the region. This war is continuing to fuel broader conflict and instability in the region and around the world. We join every American who objects to this war. Our planet can be a beautiful place, and stewarding and protecting all of its inhabitants and its natural resources is our noblest calling.
Daniel Farber | February 24, 2026
If the Trump EPA successfully repeals the endangerment findings for vehicles and stationary sources, states will be the only resort for climate action. A key question is how the repeals would impact state power relating to carbon emissions. The bottom line answers are: (1) the impact on state power to regulate tailpipe emissions seems unclear but could be positive; (2) there would be no effect on state power to regulate stationary sources like power plants; (3) plaintiffs suing oil companies would probably benefit.
Federico Holm | February 19, 2026
How has the local renewable energy ordinance landscape changed since mid-2023, the last time we took stock of this fast-moving policy issue? It turns out a lot has happened since then. In our latest analysis, we address this question by summarizing the major trends across the Lower 48, including a comprehensive update of our local ordinance database. This update provides advocates, journalists, researchers, and county board officials with valuable information, in an open and accessible way. With it, we seek to empower stakeholders with critical data in our efforts to ensure that the clean energy transition not only happens, but that it does so consistent with just transition and energy democracy principles.