United States Office of Management and Budget

Hi, AG and DG.

Dana's coverage of the hostile takeover of NIH grants by the OMB reminded me of some good news.

I wrote back in July asking listeners to comment on OMB's horrendous proposed rule changing the federal financial assistance and to sign a letter to impeach Russ Vought while they were at it.

Vote.

Two good things.

Yeah.

I mean, according to several news sources, I think this was broken originally by the Washington Post, there was a big fight in the Oval Office last week with Jay Bhattacharya, the head of NIH, a former researcher who's received NIH grants, and Russell Vogt, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, who's behind this effort to put a political layer of approval on top of the grant-making process.

And according to the stories, Vogt won, although now, after Susan Collins wrote a strongly worded letter that I actually snidely said, well, this isn't going to have much impact.

Clearly, it did.

We're now talking about an additional layer of approvals for NIH grants.

That's what Russell Vaught and OMB wants to do, and they want to get rid of quote unquote woke ideology in the process of grant making, what does that actually mean? What they really want to get rid of is health disparities research.

Why is it that we study why one county does more poorly than say another county when it comes to basic health outcomes? You're an emergency physician, you're at the front lines of this.

If they get rid of the research that goes into health disparities and related outcomes, it can then justify why they're hollowing out Medicaid, why SNAP has been cut by billions, why subsidies for the Affordable Care Act are down by 30%.

But the principle of the thing can lead to the policies and sort of the political posture that – rescission set up.

And so it is an executive authority held by the president, of course, but delegated to the director of the Office of Management and Budget.

In this case, our great friend and collaborator, Russ Vogt.

Russ is the premier conservative fiscal policy expert.

Background Briefings Analeya examines Trump's planned cuts to climate change research, denying us the ability to learn about changing weather and sea levels at all.

A coming Office of Management and Budget rule would give mega-political lackeys control over roughly $1 trillion in federal funds to everything from local governments to elementary schools and research institutes, but also firefighting, farm programs and veterans care.

Joining Anna is climate scientist Andra Garner at Rowan University who researches changes to sea levels in the era of climate change.

She has advised the United Nations on priorities and what it's designated as the decade of ocean science for sustainable development and sits on the New Jersey State Advisory Panel for how to deal with changes to its coast and storms.

This is Analeya for Background Briefing.

Let's dive into one of the most important government offices you probably haven't heard about.

The Office of Management and Budget decides how the government spends money.

So if the EPA wants to install more air monitors, OMB will weigh in about whether or not the money will be there.

In the House, he was chairman of the Budget Committee.

In the Clinton administration, he served as director of the Office of Management and Budget and also White House Chief of Staff.

And then he came back to Washington in the Obama administration to serve as head of the CIA and Secretary of Defense.

And because he was Secretary of Defense, I thought it would be interesting to ask him to evaluate our nation's fiscal outlook using the same scale that the military uses to evaluate readiness.

The court says that in fact, waivers are orders, not rules.

She completely ignores a Office of Management and Budget letter from last year that explained why that's wrong.

She completely ignores a Ninth Circuit case called Yesler Terrace versus Council, Community Council versus Cisneros, a 1994 Ninth Circuit case that says that sub-delegations of regulatory authority to states, federal regulatory authority to states, have, quote, all the hallmarks of a rule, even if the procedures around it might look a little adjudicatory.

And she blows right past the fact that Congress just last year passed legislation that in the text of the Congressional Review Act resolution says that waivers are rules.

... of whose benefits.

That's Russ Vought over at OMB.

He's, he is-

Yeah