Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Sparks

Trump’s OMB Pick Wants to Purge the Government of ‘Climate Fanaticism’

Re-meet the once and future director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought.

Russ Vought.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Library of Congress

President-elect Donald Trump spent the Friday evening before Thanksgiving filling out nearly the rest of his Cabinet. He plans for his Treasury secretary to be a hedge fund manager who’s called the Inflation Reduction Act “the Doomsday machine for the deficit”; he’s named a vaccine safety skeptic to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and his pick to head the Department of Labor is a Republican congresswoman who may want to ease the enforcement of child labor rules if confirmed.

And — in one of the most consequential moves yet for America’s standing in the fight to mitigate climate change — Trump also named Russ Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget. The decision comes as no surprise — Vought served as deputy director of the OMB under Trump in 2018 and took over the top job in 2019, serving until the end of Trump’s first presidency. The strategic communications group Climate Power had been sounding the alarm on his potential return to the office since this spring, which included sharing their research on him with me.

Unlike many Trump administration nominees, who tend to be loyalists with limited experience in the offices they’re appointed to oversee, Vought is noteworthy for having thought long and hard about how to “purge federal agencies of nonpartisan experts” and replace them with “partisan loyalists who would willingly follow any order without question, regardless of whether it was legal, constitutional, or the right thing to do for the people,” Joe Spielberger, the policy counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, an independent and nonpartisan watchdog group, told me when I covered Vought’s agenda earlier this year.

Vought plans to do so mainly by reinstating Schedule F, a job classification that would designate at least 50,000 career civil servants as “at-will” political employees, including climate scientists National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and others who sit on committees like the Clean Air Scientific Advisory. In Vought’s words in his chapter of Project 2025, “the Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding.” (In a recent conversation with Tucker Carlson, the pair speculated about being able to “fire them all.”) Vought already tried this once, at the end of Trump’s first term, and Biden swiftly reversed it upon taking office.

Beyond gutting America’s scientific corps, possibly for generations, if confirmed, Vought will immediately make his presence in the Trump administration felt, having spent the past few years secretly drafting “hundreds of executive orders, regulations, and memos that would lay the groundwork for rapid action on Trump’s plans,” according to reporting by CNN and based on undercover video released by the Centre for Climate Reporting, which recorded a candid conversation with former OMB director about his plans under false pretenses. “Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies,” Vought told his interviewers. “And we are working doggedly on that,” including by “destroying their agencies’ notion of independence.”

Though Trump (and his campaign) tried to deflect the influence of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 roadmap for his presidency, insisting he is an independent thinker not beholden to anyone, the president-elect’s appointment of Vought and other Project 2025 authors such as Brendan Carr, Tom Homan, and John Ratcliffe to powerful posts in his administration renders those denials specious, to say the least. More crucially, it suggests a certain intellectual deferral to Vought, enthroning him as one of the key architects of Trumpism 2.0. Through his Christian nationalist group, Center for Renewing America, Vought has spread his framework for solidifying executive power (and eliminating its checks and obstacles) throughout Washington’s right-wing intellectual circles, giving him a powerful base of support.

All this from the OMB, though — one of the, let’s face it, more boring offices of government? As Vought knows, however: If you control the budget, then you do everything.

Yellow

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Sparks

The Mad Dash to Lock Down Biden’s Final Climate Dollars

Companies are racing to finish the paperwork on their Department of Energy loans.

A clock and money.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Of the over $13 billion in loans and loan guarantees that the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office has made under Biden, nearly a third of that funding has been doled out in the month since the presidential election. And of the $41 billion in conditional commitments — agreements to provide a loan once the borrower satisfies certain preconditions — that proportion rises to nearly half. That includes some of the largest funding announcements in the office’s history: more than $7.5 billion to StarPlus Energy for battery manufacturing, $4.9 billion to Grain Belt Express for a transmission project, and nearly $6.6 billion to the electric vehicle company Rivian to support its new manufacturing facility in Georgia.

The acceleration represents a clear push by the outgoing Biden administration to get money out the door before President-elect Donald Trump, who has threatened to hollow out much of the Department of Energy, takes office. Still, there’s a good chance these recent conditional commitments won’t become final before the new administration takes office, as that process involves checking a series of nontrivial boxes that include performing due diligence, addressing or mitigating various project risks, and negotiating financing terms. And if the deals aren’t finalized before Trump takes office, they’re at risk of being paused or cancelled altogether, something the DOE considers unwise, to put it lightly.

Keep reading...Show less
Green
Sparks

Treasury Finalizes Another IRA Tax Credit Before You Know What

The expanded investment tax credit rules are out.

The Treasury Department building.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

In the waning days of the Biden administration, the Treasury Department is dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on the tax rules that form the heart of the Inflation Reduction Act and its climate strategy. Today, Treasury has released final rules for the Section 48 Investment Tax Credit, which gives project owners (and/or their tax equity partners) 30% back on their investments in clean energy production.

The IRA-amended investment tax credit, plus its sibling production tax credit, are updates and expansion on tax policies that have been in place for decades supporting largely the solar and wind industries. To be clear, today’s announcement does not contain the final rules for the so-called “technology-neutral” clean electricity tax credits established under the IRA, which will supercede the existing investment and production tax credits beginning next year and for which all non-carbon emitting sources of energy can qualify.

Keep reading...Show less
Green
Sparks

Trump’s Treasury Pick Called the IRA ‘the Doomsday Machine for the Deficit’

Meet Scott Bessent.

Scott Bessent.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Donald Trump ended weeks of Billions-esque drama on Wall Street and Palm Beach by finally settling late Friday on a nominee for Secretary of the Treasury, hedge fund manager Scott Bessent.

In contrast to the quick and instinctive picks for major posts like secretary of defense, secretary of state, and attorney general (albeit, two picks for that job), Trump deliberated on the Treasury pick, according to reports, cycling through candidates including Bessent, long the frontrunner for the job, his transition chief Howard Lutnick, private equity titan Marc Rowan, and former Federal Reserve Governor Kevin Warsh.

Keep reading...Show less