Senator Kim Stands Up for Public Servants During Nomination Hearing for Office of Management and Budget Director
January 15, 2025
WASHINGTON D.C. – Today, Senator Andy Kimemphasized concerns about the incoming Trump administration’s political weaponization and degradation of federal civil service during the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs’ Nomination Hearing for Russell Vought, nominee to be Director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB). As a career public servant prior to being elected to Congress, in his questioning Kim highlighted the need to protect civil servants from political attacks as they serve our nation and work to address the serious challenges facing our nation.
“I’ve also heard you say in other circumstances, ‘We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them not to want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want to put them in trauma.’
“I raise this with you because I was a career, nonpartisan civil servant…I wanted to ask you why you would use language like villains when talking about people serving our nation,” said Senator Kim.
In October of 2020 when Mr. Vought was Director of the OMB, former President Trump issued Executive Order 13957 referred to as “Schedule F”, which aimed to establish a new employment category for federal workers and remove civil servants’ protections to allow termination of a civil servant, including based on their expressions of loyalty or disloyalty to the president. The Biden Administration rescinded this “Schedule F” executive order before it could go into effect.
Senator Kim’s questions to Mr. Vought also included a focus on protecting federal agencies’ independent decision-making and policymaking and preventing presidential overreach.
Senator Kim is a member of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation; the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs; the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP); the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs; and the Special Committee on Aging. Before being elected to the U.S. Senate, Kim represented New Jersey’s Third Congressional District in the U.S. House and was a career public servant working in national security and diplomacy at the White House, State Department, and Pentagon.
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