Congress
Trump considering bringing Vought back to lead OMB
President-elect Donald Trump is considering giving Russell Vought, his previous Office of Management and Budget director, his old job back. If tapped for the role, Vought would lead the powerful office tasked with reviewing federal regulations and developing the president’s budget.
Vought, a prominent contributor to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 initiative to draft proposals for a second Trump administration, is among the people being seriously considered for the post, according to three people familiar with the transition effort granted anonymity to discuss the considerations.
Vought has been working for months behind the scenes to prepare Trump’s economic and trade policy agenda alongside Trump campaign policy chair Vince Haley and former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who himself is in contention for a top economic job, according to one of the people with knowledge of the transition.
Vought’s nomination to OMB would solidify a revival for the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for a second Trump administration that Democrats attacked repeatedly in an attempt to paint Trump as an extremist. The president-elect repeatedly disavowed the initiative on the campaign trail. And the head of personnel for his transition team, Howard Lutnick, called the Heritage Foundation “radioactive.”
Vought, who authored a chapter on the Executive Office of the President in the Project 2025 document, wouldn’t be Trump’s first hire linked to Project 2025. Tom Homan, Trump’s incoming border czar, also contributed to the project, as did his pick to helm the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr.
Vought and the Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment.
But Vought didn’t deny he is being considered for the OMB role in an appearance Monday on Tucker Carlson’s political talk show on X, formerly Twitter.
Carlson noted that Vought is “very likely” to lead the agency again — an assertion Vought did not dispute. And he told Carlson that Trump can use OMB to “tame the administrative state.”
Vought first served as Trump’s deputy OMB director, surviving a tight 50-49 confirmation vote that relied on a tie-breaking vote by then-Vice President Mike Pence.
Vought later worked as Trump’s acting OMB director after Mick Mulvaney was elevated to acting White House chief of staff in January 2019. He was then nominated to serve in the role permanently in March 2020, clearing the Senate on a 51-45 vote that July.
If confirmed again, Vought will work with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to carry out Trump’s campaign pledge to slash government spending and regulations.
On Carlson’s show, Vought said he expects to work with their new agency — the Department of Government Efficiency — to use recent court decisions limiting federal agency powers to pursue a “massive deregulatory agenda.” They will also be “as radical or aggressive as you can” in reducing full-time federal employees and contractors, he added.
Trump-endorsed Marty O’Donnell won the GOP primary Tuesday to take on Democratic Rep. Susie Lee in Nevada’s battleground 3rd District.
The seat, which touches parts of Las Vegas, is one of Republicans’ targeted pickups this November since President Donald Trump carried it by less than 1 percentage point in 2024 after losing it by nearly seven points in 2020.
But O’Donnell — who also has the backing of the National Republican Congressional Committee — will face an uphill battle. He recently came under fire for hosting a neo-Nazi influencer on his podcast. Trump’s tariffs have hit the district hard, with Canadian tourism to Sin City down by 17 percent, leaving Democrats confident they can hold the seat.
O’Donnell is best known for his role as the audio composer for the “Halo” video game series. It’s his second run in the district after placing fourth in the 2024 Republican primary.
O’Donnell bested several candidates Tuesday, with businessperson Tera Anderson and former Ambassador to Iceland Jeff Gunter — who ran for Senate in 2024 — putting up the most significant challenges.
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham is on his way to clinching his fifth term in the Senate.
Graham won the Republican primary for Senate on Tuesday, vanquishing five opponents that included businessperson Mark Lynch — who challenged the senator over his staunch support for the war in Iran and long history in Washington. Lynch also drew support from some of the president’s most prominent MAGA Republican critics.
But Graham won more than half the primary vote, allowing him to avoid an embarrassing two-week runoff sprint. He is expected to cruise to victory in November; a Democrat has not represented the state in the Senate since 2005, when longtime Sen. Fritz Hollings chose not to seek reelection.
The four-term senator spent big in the final weeks of the campaign to make sure he won, combining with his allies to spend over $18 million in television and digital ads touting his record and endorsement from President Donald Trump. That spending proved to be decisive in staving off Lynch’s challenge from the right.
He even called in the big guns for a last minute bump, bringing in Trump, who reaffirmed his support for his occasional frenemy in a telerally on the eve of the primary election.
Graham’s success is a loss for the strict “America First” wing of the GOP that has criticized the president’s new interventionist foreign policy streak, including former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and former counterterrorism official Joe Kent. They came out in support of Lynch during the final stretch of the campaign, though that was not enough to upset Graham, a fixture of Columbia and Washington politics.
Twenty House Republicans broke with Speaker Mike Johnson to help pass a Democratic-led bill Tuesday aimed at making it easier for workers to form unions, widening the divide between a bloc of pro-labor Republicans and GOP leaders.
Democrats successfully used a discharge petition to sidestep Johnson and force the vote with the help of a handful of House Republicans, including Reps. Don Bacon of Nebraska, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Nick LaLota of New York.
“It’s passing,” Fitzpatrick said before the vote when asked about Johnson’s efforts to whip Republicans against the bill.
The Faster Labor Contracts Act aims to reduce the amount of time between workers voting to form a union and negotiating their first collectively bargained contract, in part by requiring the parties to more quickly enter federal mediation. It’s the latest in a series of employment bills that pro-union House Republicans have bucked their party on in recent months.
House Education and Workforce Chair Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) spoke out sharply against the bill on the floor Tuesday, saying it would “threaten jobs, kill growth and in some cases, shut business down entirely.” But a hefty subset of Republicans backed the bill nonetheless, joining all voting Democrats.
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