White House official Russell Vought's attempts to outmaneuver Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD) over "evil" cuts to the federal workforce backfired on Thursday when she called his tactics out on the spot.
Vought appeared before the Senate Banking Committee as its sole witness for an oversight hearing on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — the federal agency he has spent months trying to gut as its director.
Alsobrooks, who represents a state home to roughly 160,000 federal workers, came to the hearing with Vought's own words in hand.
"I have been waiting to have the opportunity to come back face to face with you, to ask for an explanation for what I regard as absolutely depraved — depraved — and draconian actions to decimate our public institutions," she told Vought.
"The action taken toward our federal employees has been evil, absolutely evil," Alsobrooks said, "and it is the most galling aspect of what I regard as a shameful tenure at the Office of Management and Budget as director — has been your outright animosity and blatant hostility toward our federal workers."
Then she read his own words back at him — remarks ProPublica obtained from private speeches he gave before taking office.
"We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected," she quoted. "When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly regarded as the villain."
"This is so evil," Alsobrooks said.
"Did you intend to sow terror for parents who need to provide for their families?" she asked. "Is that the kind of trauma that you were anticipating?"
"I was referring to bureaucracies and not the career civil servants that do the job," Vought replied. "Many of those bureaucracies are weaponized against the American people."
She moved to a memo Vought issued last fall directing agencies to prepare for mass firings — firings Roll Call reported a federal judge blocked as unlawful — and pointed to federal workers she said had lined up in the hallways of the Capitol in tears.
"Senator, you shouldn't have shut the government down for more than two months on two separate occasions," Vought deflected. "You don't think that traumatized the same federal workers?"
"The Jedi mind trick does not work," Alsobrooks replied. "The Republicans around here are in charge of everything."
Vought cut in: "They need your votes..."
"I will not fall for the Jedi mind trick," Alsobrooks repeated, "that when the Republicans have the keys to the kingdom, anything regarding a shutdown has to do with Democrats."
She then turned to the CFPB itself. The agency has returned $21 billion to consumers since its founding, she noted — yet Vought has pushed in court to slash its enforcement division by a fraction of its current size, a campaign federal courts have repeatedly blocked.
Alsobrooks said she had led colleagues in an April letter demanding answers about the cuts — a letter Vought had not responded to in three months. She asked how the agency could fulfill its legal duty to enforce consumer protection laws with only one-third of its enforcement staff.
"Unfortunately, the senator's time is up, so I will not allow the witness to respond to the question," committee Chairman Tim Scott (R-SC) said, cutting her off.
