Rose Garden renovation, luxury Air Force One are 'administration priorities': Trump budget chief

11 July

Russell Vought with Donald Trump in 2019 (Creative Commons)

Russell Vought, President Donald Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, is defending plans to spend an estimated $1 billion retrofitting an aging luxury 747 jetliner for use as Air Force One—even though it will be in service for only about a year—while also backing deep cuts to discretionary programs, including at the CDC, and in public health, education, housing, and science.

Vought, a self-avowed Christian nationalist, is the architect of The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and the founder of the religious right group Center for Renewing America. He has been described as President Trump’s “holy warrior” who “wants to crush the ‘deep state.'”

On Friday, Vought spoke to reporters, defending billions in cuts to “discretionary spending” while insisting the administration will continue to spend taxpayer funds on its “priorities.”

“We have a lot of administration priorities,” Vought said (video below), when asked specifically about the luxury Air Force One retrofit and Trump’s Rose Garden renovations. “We need ships. We need aircraft, we need a new presidential plane that’s been in the works and been delayed for a long time because contractors are behind.”

When again asked about the billion-dollar Air Force One that will be in service for about a year and then be given to the Trump Library, Vought continued to defend the decision.

“We need additional assets to be able to run this government, including fly the president, keep the president safe, and we’re way behind in that program,” he said, failing to explain if the two current Air Force One jets are no longer capable of keeping the President safe.

“And so that doesn’t mean we don’t spend where we need to spend, but we’ve always offered up a fiscal picture that gets to balance, that reduces the deficit, that deals with our debt, and we’re doing it on a host of ways in this term, and so that won’t change,” he vowed. “So we will continue to, you know, we set up a budget that was $163 billion in cuts to non-defense discretionary spending.”

He insisted the administration needs “to spend in certain areas to secure the country, to perform the functions of the government, and to make sure that, you know, we are investing where we need to invest.”

Calling Trump’s spending “lavish,” The Independent on Friday noted that last week Trump “signed his federal budget bill into law, which extends 2017 tax cuts from Trump’s first term and slashes Medicaid spending by about $1 trillion.”

During his confirmation hearings in January, Vought referred to social safety net programs like Medicaid as a “benefit hammock.”

“You can get sizable levels of savings and reforms,” he said, through so-called welfare reform, The Washington Post reported at the time.

In a 2022 paper produced through Vought’s Center for Renewing America, the “term ‘woke’ appeared 77 times in Mr. Vought’s document,” The New York Times reported in March.

“The proposal looked to slash the ‘woke agenda’ at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, targeting money meant for ‘niche and small population groups.’ It proposed jettisoning billions of dollars in ‘woke foreign aid spending’; eliminating entire programs for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities; and striking the ‘secular, woke religion’ of climate change from the federal ledger.”

“That is the central and immediate threat facing the country — the one that all our statesmen must rise tall to vanquish,” Vought wrote. “The battle cannot wait.”

Watch the video below or at this link.

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