OMB Director Russell Vought speaks to reporters outside the White House.
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00:00What changes do you expect in the bill in the Senate, including unparried interest, business subdivisions?
00:04Look, we're just getting started with the Senate in terms of, you know, our focus has been on the House.
00:09Enormous historic victory this morning, a lot of hard work into it.
00:13I think, you know, they're going to go home for their recess.
00:17Obviously, Senator Crapo and the team, the senator, they've been working diligently to be prepared.
00:22We'll start those conversations today.
00:25Can you face the cameras more?
00:28Is the White House at all flexible on what's going to happen coming into the Senate?
00:33Look, we're really excited about the package that just occurred.
00:36And I think the message that we would have is the extent to which it's a very careful balance.
00:41And, you know, it was not easy to get to where we were this morning.
00:46Long series of late nights in this week, and ultimately the president closed it out.
00:51And so obviously the Senate's going to want to put its mark on it.
00:54But, you know, there's a certain there's a certain coalition there to both accomplish what the president wants to do and have the votes that are necessary to get through Congress.
01:03And we want to bill the president's desk by July 4th.
01:07Can you speak about this Moody's downgrade?
01:08That's got to hurt a little bit.
01:09Well, look, look, look, Moody's is catching up with their other rating agencies by being irrelevant for the last 15 years.
01:16So I think there's a timing aspect of what they were trying to do in an attempt to sink the president's tax cut.
01:22The long and short of what the credit ratings assessment has been was that you this town could not produce what we just saw today.
01:31But what their accusation is that these, you know, this political class could not get to the point where we actually have major spending reforms on a bill.
01:41And we just put $2 trillion of mandatory reforms and savers that goes to the heart of the argument.
01:46Do we have issues as a country with what we need to do to get to balance?
01:50Absolutely.
01:51President's committed to getting to balance.
01:53That's something that's only going to continue.
01:55But the notion that this was in any way harmful to debt and deficits is fundamentally untrue.
02:00And I think that's what was inaccurate about the timing of the report.
02:03Can we speak to the person's voters in the crowd?
02:07I'm concerned about first things, first of all, is there's no accountability for the right-handing correction, no accountability for the next six, no information on the next six, and finally, the tapes from January 6 have still out of the year.
02:25You know, we're worried about how this is a country that has a life.
02:27Is there any Congress happening?
02:29Look, this has been the most historic start to an administration, the most transparent.
02:35There is so much happening on so many different levels.
02:37I'll let other people speak to it outside of the fiscal lane that I'm in.
02:41But in terms of what we've been able to accomplish, and that's part of the story that I'm trying to share with the country right now.
02:47As enormous of an agenda-setting bill as this was, it's one piece of the fiscal puzzle.
02:54It is a vehicle.
02:56It's not even a budget resolution.
02:57It is a procedural vehicle to get through the Senate without a filibuster.
03:02And so when you add the tariffs and the significant amount of revenues that are coming in from the tariffs, when you add the appropriations process with regard to non-defense spending,
03:10we just in this bill set up a major opportunity to be able to go after non-defense spending consistent with the budget resolution that we just sent up to make the doge cuts permanent as a result of ensuring that with Republican votes we're going to increase defense spending and Republican votes deal with our border security issues and be able to fully secure the border.
03:34So that's something that would ordinarily lead the appropriations process to completely shut down with Republicans all over the place.
03:43We have prevented that from happening with this bill in the House.
03:47Will, some of the things that the fiscal conservatives and the Freedom Caucus folks wanted as it relates to Medicaid, that waste, fraud, and abuse aspect that they're going to have to be handled through executive order by President Trump, was that the promise he made?
04:00Look, the House Freedom Caucus did an incredible job of getting more savings earlier in the window by bringing the work requirements up, by making sure there was more of the IRA repeal, the Green New Deal, earlier in the window.
04:12That will allow us, we were originally at $1.6 trillion, will probably be $1.92 trillion when this is finally updated.
04:20You know, we're going to do everything we can executively to make sure that one of their main concerns was that with this opportunity to do something big on Medicaid, that more states did not come in and expand under Medicaid, under Obamacare.
04:34We never thought that was a real argument.
04:36We thought that they had that argument in good faith.
04:38We didn't share the conclusion, but we're going to do everything we can from an executive perspective to be able to make sure that states are not coming in under Obamacare at an increased rate.
04:49And that means executive orders by the president, and what do those then look like?
04:52Again, we are going to work with those members to make sure that more states are not coming in under Obamacare.
04:58Is there concern on the bond work that's currently missing?
05:01Look, I think over the last week, the debate has been largely about the cost of this bill without a lot of bracketing of reality of both what was in the bill and how literally historic this has been.
05:16I mean, we haven't seen anything like this since the 1990s.
05:19In 1997, we had $800 billion of savings adjusted for inflation.
05:24The big ticket item was work requirements.
05:26Now you're talking about $2 trillion.
05:28Nothing like that ever in the last 30 years, and somehow we're not talking about that.
05:33The other aspect is the extent to which people are not bringing all of the puzzle pieces of what it takes to have a fiscal package together,
05:43and that's tariffs, that's the economic growth, that's the discretionary side of the house.
05:48And I think once that conversation gets made, and once we continue to educate the folks on that, I think the people will settle down.
05:56On salt the other day, the president seemed really skeptical.
06:02He said that was something about the government states.
06:04Now we've got this new $40,000.
06:06How committed is he to that number?
06:08And what's your response to saying that's going to be?
06:10Look, this is a bill that passed.
06:12The president wants to sign it into law.
06:13It's a coalition that comes together to get a bill done.
06:16And I think that it's a very good template for what we think both the House will need to do again
06:22and what the Senate should inform the Senate conversations.
06:25Russ, there's one piece in the Ninth Circuit, a lot of people in the Ninth Circuit that are basically stopping the layoffs of federal workers.
06:33There's a preliminary injunction here today, actually.
06:36Do you still get a preliminary injunction?
06:38Are you going to immediately start making people off?
06:41What does that look like?
06:42With regard to what agency?
06:44Any.
06:45Just the injunction of course.
06:46The reductions in force that are ongoing are various.
06:50I'm in one in CFPB.
06:53Various court cases are dealing with different rifts.
06:56All of these rifts have been lawful.
06:58They've been an effort to scale down the federal workforce with care, with wisdom about what is necessary to statutorily conduct and operate agencies.
07:09And I think at the end of the day, wherever they're at, they're going to be successful when they get to the Supreme Court.
07:14Hopefully those decisions get made.
07:16And we're in a situation right now at CFPB where we almost feel like we're under judicial receivership and the extent to which we can't even eliminate contracts because of the judges that are binding us right now.
07:32And it's totally something that the founders would find to be anathema.
07:36And yet that's where we're living in.
07:37But I don't think ultimately the Supreme Court is going to stand for it.
07:40Russ, how do you see Doge's work changing once Elon Musk formally leaves the government?
07:44We have a great relationship with Doge.
07:47We talk every day.
07:48We talk every day.
07:49We talk every day.
07:50Our teams are locked in step.
07:51And, you know, there's a creativity and a paradigm shift with regard to Doge, and we're trying to take what they've been able to do and lock it into permanent savings wherever we possibly can.
08:03The president's been a part of all of this from the beginning.
08:20This has been his vision.
08:22His priorities are reflected in it.
08:24He's the most hands-on president, I think, in history.
08:28And, you know, he's involved in a thousand different things.
08:32But at every critical juncture, he is there to get something across the finish line.
08:37I don't expect anything along those lines to change.
08:39Last question.
08:42All right.
08:43Thanks, guys.