For the Record: Who's in charge here?

Wu Wei, Berlin-based virtuoso on the sheng, or ancient Chinese mouth organ, with the ensemble Holland Baroque, in a version of the Baroque hit La Folía. I was just looking for an excuse for posting it, it's outrageously good.

Mr. Trump, you have informed the public that you know nothing about "Project 2025" and that some of its ideas are "ridiculous". And yet your nominee for Office of Management and Budget is the author of the Project 2025 chapter on "The Executive Office of the President of the United States"...

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) November 22, 2024 at 9:43 PM

When he ran OMB in your previous term, were his ideas ridiculous? Have the two of you come up with an agreement on whose views are going to be followed? Can you tell us how that's going to work?

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) November 22, 2024 at 9:45 PM

Did anybody tell you that Russell Vought and FCC chair nominee Brendan Carr and "border czar" Tom Homan were contributors to Project 2025? Now that you know, do you think you should maybe reconsider their nominations? You don't want ridiculous people working for you, right? Are you in charge?

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) November 22, 2024 at 10:02 PM

Did you know your deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller did a promo video for Project 2025, and his America First Legal was on the project’s advisory board, though they later asked to be removed from it? Are these guys making fun of you, Mr. Trump?

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) November 22, 2024 at 10:07 PM

Because it really looks to me like Project 2025 is making you into a laughingstock, sir. Tears are running down my cheeks as I think about it, honest to god. I think Project 2025 is planning to run the government behind your back, laughing at you the whole time.

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) November 22, 2024 at 10:10 PM

Just kidding, of course that's not what "Project 2025" has in mind, though as we understand Trump wouldn't be able to know that, since he's rigorously determined not to know anything about it at all. But I suspect he'd like it quite a lot if he knew what it said. 

In "Project 2025", the once and future Director of the Office of Management and Budget writes that the Director's job is absolutely to embody "the president's mind" without being distracted by any other views:

Ignoring the views of the "wider bureaucracy", as he says, but also I think ignoring the views of the Congress that passed the law in question, who he doesn't mention at this point. He is preemptively dismissing them and whatever their agenda might have been. But the real attitude comes across when he's talking about the Schedule F question, the perceived need to fire all the career department heads in the civil service and replace them with (obviously Republican) politicals, and he throws in the need to ignore Congress too:

If Congress passed, and the president signed, something that conflicts with the president's agenda as perceived by the sacred person of the OMB Director, the OMB Director has to be "aggressive" against Congress?

Well, not in what used to be seventh-grade civics. The law the Congress passed, not the law somebody in the White House wishes they had passed, is the law. And in particular if the law Congress passed directs the White House to spend some money, the White House is required to spend it. This was fought out in the Nixon administration, when Nixon took to the habit of "impounding" funds appropriated by the Democratic Congress and the Congress clarified the matter by passing the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.

But in the Trump White House in 2019, when Trump secretly decided he didn't want to keep the Congress's commitment to spending money on Javelin missiles for the Ukrainian military unless President Zelenskyy did him the favor he secretly asked him for, of opening up a criminal investigation against the son of the Democratic candidate he'd probably be facing in 2020, he got away with it, with the cooperation of Russell Vought and the Republican Senators:

Vought and his then-boss, OMB Director and acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, violated that law by following Trump’s orders to withhold millions of dollars in military aid for Ukraine. (Trump wanted to pressure Ukraine to give him dirt on Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 election; he was impeached for those efforts but was acquitted in his Senate trial.)

It wasn't the first time Trump showed his contempt for the part of the presidential oath about taking care that the laws be faithfully executed, but it was the first time it was acted out so thoroughly and officially, with a complaint transmitted to the Government Accountability Office by Michael Atkinson, the inspector general in the intelligence committee, and the GAO's formal decision that the White House had violated the law (the White House said they "disagreed" with GAO and fired the inspector general) and of course the impeachment. It really established Trump's position that he's entitled to make his own decisions as to whether he wants to obey the law or not himself,  since ratified by Chief Justice Roberts's decision on presidential immunity. If democracy in the United States is really going to die, and you wanted to pinpoint the exact moment when it received its mortal wound, that Senate impeachment vote would be the one, and Vought was at the heart of the process. 

Vought's probably not going to use impoundment to make all the program cuts his think tank has threatened of

$2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, the health program for the poor; more than $600 billion in cuts to the Affordable Care Act; more than $400 billion in cuts to food stamps; hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to educational subsidies; and a halving of the State Department and the Labor Department, among other federal agencies.

If it's done, Congress will no doubt have to help him out, and it won't be easy, with the very narrow majorities the Republicans have. With any luck it will be impossible. But the impoundment power will be there in his toolbox, because he wasn't stopped earlier, and Trump will continue breaking the law one way and another, in the spirit of Project 2025.