Russ Vought goes on CNN to argue he can:
The White House is weighing options like impoundment to formalize DOGE's spending cuts without going through Congress, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought said Sunday.
Why it matters: That would tee up a potential Supreme Court fight over the scope of the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which bars the president from cutting funding without congressional approval.
Trump and allies have railed against the law, which was signed after former President Nixon impounded billions.
Driving the news: Vought said on CNN's "State of the Union" that the administration "might" send all of DOGE's cuts to Congress for approval but is waiting to gauge how the $9.4 billion rescissions package the White House plans to send to lawmakers this week fares.
"It's the first of many rescissions bills," he said. "Some we may not actually have to get ... Congress to pass the rescissions bills."
Pressed by CNN's Dana Bash on why the White House would sidestep Congress, Vought continued, "We have executive tools; we have impoundment."
Vought argued spending less than was appropriated by Congress was "totally appropriate" for 200 years but that reforms in the 1970s led to "massive waste, fraud and abuse."
He argued that the Impoundment Control Act also allows for pocket rescissions, a practice of proposing rescissions near the end of the fiscal year to essentially run out the clock, which Vought has long championed.
"It's a provision that has been rarely used, but it's there," he said. "And we intend to use all of these tools. We want Congress to pass it where it's necessary; we also have executive tools."
The other side: Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) — who has recently been at odds with the administration over its so-called big, beautiful bill — said the White House "absolutely" needs to use a rescission when asked about Vought's comments on CBS News' "Face the Nation" Sunday.
"It is done by simple majority, by Republicans only," Paul said, adding "it's a great tool to cut spending."
He continued, "If they don't use it, it will be a huge wasted opportunity."
Friction point: Asked if the administration's moves were intended tee up a Supreme Court battle over the 50-year-old law, Vought said, "We're certainly not taking impoundment off the table."
He continued, "We're not in love with the law," which he said upended two centuries of precedent at the "lowest moment of the executive branch."
Senate GOP, White House Clash on BBB
Politico: Enter the Senate moderates
The Senate’s deficit hawks might be raising the loudest hue and cry over the GOP’s “big, beautiful bill.” But another group of Republicans is poised to have a bigger impact on the final legislative product.
Call them the “Medicaid moderates.”
They’re actually an ideologically diverse bunch — ranging from conservative Josh Hawley of Missouri to centrist Susan Collins of Maine. Yet they have found rare alignment over concerns about what the House-passed version of the GOP domestic-policy megabill does to the national safety-net health program, and they have the leverage to force significant changes in the Senate.
“I would hope that we would elect not to do anything that would endanger Medicaid benefits as a conference,” Hawley said in an interview. “I’ve made that clear to my leadership. I think others share that perspective.”
Besides Hawley and Collins, other GOP senators including Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Jerry Moran of Kansas and Jim Justice of West Virginia have also drawn public red lines over health care — and they have some rhetorical backing from President Donald Trump, who has urged congressional Republicans to spare the program as much as possible.
Based on early estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, 10.3 million people would lose coverage under Medicaid if the House-passed bill were to become law — many, if not most, in red states. That could spell trouble for Majority Leader John Thune’s whip count: He can only lose three GOP senators on the expected party-line vote and still have Vice President JD Vance break a tie.
Republicans already have one all-but-guaranteed opponent in Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky so long as they stick to their plan to raise the debt limit as part of the bill. They also view Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson as increasingly likely to oppose the package after spending weeks blasting the bill on fiscal grounds.
Meeting either senator’s demands could be enormously difficult given the tight fiscal parameters through which House leaders have to squeeze the bill to advance it in their own chamber. That in turn is empowering the senators elsewhere in the GOP conference to make changes — and the Medicaid group is emerging as the key bloc to watch because of its size and its overlapping, relatively workable demands.
Heeding those asks won’t be easy. Republicans are counting on savings from Medicaid changes to offset hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts, and rolling that back is likely to create political pain elsewhere for Thune & Co., who already want to cut more than the House to assuage a sizable group of spending hawks. At the same time, Speaker Mike Johnson is insisting the Senate make only minor changes to the bill so as to maintain the delicate balance in his own narrowly divided chamber.
Can Government Make More Babies?
At a Women’s History Month event in March, President Donald Trump jokingly branded himself the “fertilization president” to the laughter of the group gathered at the White House.
“Fertilization. I’m still very proud of it, I don’t care,” he said. “I’ll be known as the fertilization president, and that’s OK. … I’ve been called much worse.”
Yet the lighthearted moment wasn’t a joke. The Trump White House is ostensibly one of the most pro-family administrations in modern times.
Vice President JD Vance told attendees of the March for Life rally mere days after his inauguration: “I want more babies in the United States of America.”
Trump signed an executive order calling for policy recommendations to make in vitro fertilization affordable for families. The administration is prioritizing birth rates in doling out transportation projects. The White House was even considering a $5,000 cash baby bonus to women who gave birth.
But the reality of enacting policies that would boost the nation’s low birth and marriage rates is easier said than done.
Trump’s signature “big, beautiful bill,” which the House recently passed, doesn’t include funding for IVF or the $5,000 baby bonus. Another provision in the bill imposes stricter work requirements on single parents who receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that if the reconciliation bill is passed, $723 billion in federal spending will be cut from Medicaid, and it will lead to an increase of 7.6 million uninsured people. The impact will likely be felt by the more than 37.3 million children who are enrolled in the federal-state health insurance program.
The bill does increase the child tax credit to $2,500 until 2028, but only for parents with Social Security numbers. Another provision nationalizes school vouchers for private education tuition and homeschooling programs.
Social conservatives are energized by the efforts of the White House to raise the birth rate, but more work could be done, they said.
“Trump campaigned with promises of big, bold moves to help American families. But so far, we have seen just modest moves to help families from the Republicans in Congress and the White House,” said Brad Wilcox, a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia.
“Happy to see a bigger child tax credit, as well as support for adoption and school choice in this bill,” Wilcox continued. “But the child tax credit expansion just barely keeps up with inflation, and the MAGA child accounts don’t help parents cover the costs of raising kids today. I’m hoping the Senate can take bigger and bolder moves to help make family life more affordable.”
Curtis Yarvin in the Catbird Seat
In the spring and summer of 2008, when Donald Trump was still a registered Democrat, an anonymous blogger known as Mencius Moldbug posted a serial manifesto under the heading “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives.” Written with the sneering disaffection of an ex-believer, the hundred-and-twenty-thousand-word letter argued that egalitarianism, far from improving the world, was actually responsible for most of its ills. That his bien-pensant readers thought otherwise, Moldbug contended, was due to the influence of the media and the academy, which worked together, however unwittingly, to perpetuate a left-liberal consensus. To this nefarious alliance he gave the name the Cathedral. Moldbug called for nothing less than its destruction and a total “reboot” of the social order. He proposed “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” and the eventual transfer of power to a C.E.O.-in-chief (someone like Steve Jobs or Marc Andreessen, he suggested), who would transform the government into “a heavily-armed, ultra-profitable corporation.” This new regime would sell off public schools, destroy universities, abolish the press, and imprison “decivilized populations.” It would also fire civil servants en masse (a policy Moldbug later called RAGE—Retire All Government Employees) and discontinue international relations, including “security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.”
Moldbug acknowledged that his vision depended on the sanity of his chief executive: “Clearly, if he or she turns out to be Hitler or Stalin, we have just recreated Nazism or Stalinism.” Yet he dismissed the failures of twentieth-century dictators, whom he saw as too reliant on popular support. For Moldbug, any system that sought legitimacy in the passions of the mob was doomed to instability. Though critics labelled him a techno-fascist, he preferred to call himself a royalist or a Jacobite—a nod to partisans of James II and his descendants, who, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, opposed Britain’s parliamentary system and upheld the divine right of kings. Never mind the French Revolution, the bête noire of reactionary thinkers: Moldbug believed that the English and American Revolutions had gone too far.
If Moldbug’s “Open Letter” showed little affection for the masses, it intimated that they might still have a use. “Communism was not overthrown by Andrei Sakharov, Joseph Brodsky, and Václav Havel,” he wrote. “What was needed was the combination of philosopher and crowd.” The best place to recruit this crowd, he said, was on the internet—a shrewd intuition. Before long, links to Moldbug’s blog, “Unqualified Reservations,” were being passed around by libertarian techies, disgruntled bureaucrats, and self-styled rationalists—many of whom formed the shock troops of an online intellectual movement that came to be known as neo-reaction, or the Dark Enlightenment. While few turned into outright monarchists, their contempt for Obama-era uplift seemed to find voice in Moldbug’s heresies. In his most influential coinage, which quickly gained currency among the nascent alt-right, Moldbug urged his readers to rouse themselves from their ideological slumber by taking the “red pill,” like Keanu Reeves’s character in “The Matrix,” who chooses daunting truth over contented ignorance.
In 2013, an article on the news site TechCrunch, titled “Geeks for Monarchy,” revealed that Mencius Moldbug was the cyber alias of a forty-year-old programmer in San Francisco named Curtis Yarvin. At the same time that he was trying to redesign the U.S. government, Yarvin was also dreaming up a new computer operating system that he hoped would serve as a “digital republic.” He founded a company that he named Tlon, for the Borges story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in which a secret society describes an elaborate parallel world that begins to overtake reality. As he raised money for his startup, Yarvin became a kind of Machiavelli to his big-tech benefactors, who shared his view that the world would be better off if they were in charge. Tlon’s investors included the venture-capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund, the latter of which was started by the billionaire Peter Thiel. Both Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan, then a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, had become friends with Yarvin after reading his blog, though e-mails shared with me revealed that neither was thrilled to be publicly associated with him at the time. “How dangerous is it that we are being linked?” Thiel wrote to Yarvin in 2014. “One reassuring thought: one of our hidden advantages is that these people”—social-justice warriors—“wouldn’t believe in a conspiracy if it hit them over the head (this is perhaps the best measure of the decline of the Left). Linkages make them sound really crazy, and they kinda know it.”
A decade on, with the Trumpian right embracing strongman rule, Yarvin’s links to élites in Silicon Valley and Washington are no longer a secret. In a 2021 appearance on a far-right podcast, Vice-President J. D. Vance, a former employee of one of Thiel’s venture-capital firms, cited Yarvin when suggesting that a future Trump Administration “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” and ignore the courts if they objected. Marc Andreessen, one of the heads of Andreessen Horowitz and an informal adviser to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has started quoting his “good friend” Yarvin about the need for a founder-like figure to take charge of our “out of control” bureaucracy. Andrew Kloster, the new general counsel at the government’s Office of Personnel Management, has said that replacing civil servants with loyalists could help Trump defeat “the Cathedral.”
“There are figures who channel a Zeitgeist—Nietzsche calls them timely men—and Curtis is definitely a timely man,” a State Department official who has been reading Yarvin since the Moldbug era told me. Back in 2011, Yarvin said that Trump was one of two figures who seemed “biologically suited” to be an American monarch. (The other was Chris Christie.) In 2022, he recommended that Trump, if reëlected, appoint Elon Musk to run the executive branch. On a podcast with his friend Michael Anton, now the director of policy planning at the State Department, Yarvin argued that the institutions of civil society, such as Harvard, would need to be shut down. “The idea that you’re going to be a Caesar . . . with someone else’s Department of Reality in operation is just manifestly absurd,” he said.
In another timeline, Yarvin might have remained an obscure and ineffectual internet crank, a digital de Maistre. Instead, he has become one of America’s most influential illiberal thinkers, an engineer of the intellectual source code for the second Trump Administration. “Yarvin has pushed the Overton window,” Nikhil Pal Singh, a history professor at N.Y.U., told me. His work has revived ideas that once seemed outside the bounds of polite society, Singh said, and created a road map for the dismantling of “the administrative state and the global postwar order.”
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“While I’ll never regret a minute spent on the tennis court, I’ve lavished whole cumulative years of my life on repetitive rituals that were stupefyingly dull—suddenly all for nothing.”