White House budget director Russ Vought publicly denigrated the federal government’s top watchdog Friday, a day after it concluded the Trump administration violated the law by withholding federal cash.
The Government Accountability Office issued an opinion Thursday that the administration made an illegal “impoundment” by refusing to spend appropriated funds on infrastructure that supports electric vehicles. Vought predicted the GAO would continue to make similar findings in the coming months. But those findings won’t matter, he added.
“These are non-events with no consequence. Rearview mirror stuff,” Vought posted on social media Friday morning.
The GAO is an independent, nonpartisan federal agency that helps Congress with oversight of the federal government and is now pursuing at least 39 investigations into whether the Trump administration has violated the Impoundment Control Act, the 51-year-old law that bars presidents from usurping the “power of the purse” Congress is granted under Article I of the Constitution.
Vought called GAO a “quasi-independent arm of the legislative branch” in his social media post, accusing the agency of “playing a partisan role” in the “impeachment hoax” of Trump’s first presidency.
During Vought’s first stint as White House budget director, the watchdog concluded in early 2020 that the Trump administration violated the impoundment law by freezing aid to Ukraine, issuing the finding after the House voted to impeach the president for those actions and others.
Vought predicted that GAO will be concluding the same in its new investigations, as Trump administration agencies cancel, shift and withhold billions of dollars Congress passed into law under orders from the Department of Government Efficiency initiative started under Elon Musk and the president’s executive actions.
“They are going to call everything an impoundment because they want to grind our work to manage taxpayer dollars effectively to a halt,” Vought wrote.
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