Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, bristled at Rep. Bill Foster during a House Financial Services Committee hearing on July 15.
The Illinois Democrat, who also is a Ph.D. physicist and manufacturer, used his five minutes to drag Vought through a bruising tour of everything the Trump administration is dismantling at once.
Foster opened with a story. Omar Yaghi, a Palestinian refugee who grew up in Jordan, came to the United States, and won a Nobel Prize, had just announced he was leaving the country for China, where he will lead materials science labs at one of their top universities.
“Could you please tell your boss that his current score on Nobel Prizes is negative one,” Foster said. “Could you tell him that?”
Vought didn’t take it well. “No, I’m not going to tell him that,” he shot back. “I think it’s an inappropriate comment from you.”
“I think it’s a factual comment,” Foster replied.
From there, Foster shifted to the economy, drawing a direct line between the Trump administration’s gutting of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and the conditions that caused the 2008 financial crisis.
He noted that U.S. household debt has ballooned from $12.68 trillion at the peak of the 2008 crisis to $18.8 trillion today, while the administration moves to cut 95 percent of CFPB staff.
“American families are facing significant economic challenges,” Foster said, “and you specifically are attempting to cut 95 percent of the staff of the one agency empowered by Congress to protect them from abusive loans and predatory lenders.”
He also tied in the administration’s tariff policy and the conflict in Iran, calling both “increasing cost and economic stress on Americans” with “no intelligible strategy to end either one of these.”
When Foster pressed Vought on how many CFPB examinations had been carried out since he took over, Vought offered a vague defense of the agency’s enforcement posture, arguing that some legal theories used to oversee non-bank lenders were “quite novel.”
Foster was unmoved. “We passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill that gave you authority to deal with non-bank lenders,” he said. “You’re heading us down a path that, I’m afraid, is just going to send us right back.”
