Russ Vought, the fiercely conservative budget chief, emerged as a crucial figure this week in selling President Donald Trump’s sweeping economic package to reluctant House GOP fiscal hawks.
Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, has plenty of credibility with the House Freedom Caucus and was in the room with Trump Tuesday, drilling down into the specifics of the legislation, as the president worked to sell the package to caucus members, according to two administration officials granted anonymity to speak freely.
Hours later, he was on the Hill, huddling in a meeting just off the House floor with House Freedom Caucus Chair Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.,), Rep. Lloyd Smucker (R-Pa.), and other Republicans who had signed onto Smucker’s letter calling for the Senate to be fiscally disciplined in its passage of the bill. Throughout, the officials said, Vought pounded one core message: The bill would reduce the deficit by $1.4 trillion over the decade, a calculation that defines Trump’s expiring tax cuts as “current policy” and not new spending that adds to the deficit.
Publicly and privately, he dismissed the $3.3 trillion debt increase projected by the Congressional Budget Office and the $3.9 trillion figure from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget as misleading and aggressively leftist prognostications of the bill, one of the officials said, and accused the two groups of being “fiscal watch dogs on the outside playing artificial games with the baselines.”
To bolster the pitch, Vought walked through ways that the White House could find future spending cuts through executive orders and additional reconciliation packages to fix what he and House Freedom Caucus members see as a broken appropriations process. Vought also deployed former Freedom Caucus member Dan Bishop, now a senior official at the budget office, to echo his arguments with his former colleagues, according to one of the officials.
Vought’s credibility as a fiscal conservative and his reputation for holding the line on spending — even when politically painful — lent weight to his assurances that the bill fit within the GOP’s fiscal principles and that the Trump administration had other tools at its disposal. The former Heritage Foundation policy director and author of Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for a second Trump term, is deeply trusted among House conservatives, having spent years building relationships as both a policy strategist and Hill staffer.
In the end, the Freedom Caucus members including Harris and Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) and others who had threatened to block the legislation came around, clearing the way for the bill’s passage on Thursday, ahead of Trump’s July 4 deadline.