The Senate has voted 53 to 47, along party lines, to confirm Russell Vought as head of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought is an architect of Project 2025, a radical playbook to seize executive power and to radically reshape federal agencies. Last year, Vought told undercover reporters his plans for mass deportations, restricting abortion, gutting independent government bureaucracies and using the military against racial justice protesters. Vought also said he would work to paint federal workers as “villains” and “put them in trauma” in order to drastically reduce the size of the federal civilian workforce. This is Democratic Senator Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland, who represents over 150,000 federal workers.

Sen. Angela Alsobrooks: “They are public servants in the truest sense of the word, who are not guided by party, not moved by vicious news cycles, but they are driven instead by mission, a mission to serve this country to the very best of their ability under any president of any party. And in just 17 days, this president has put all of their livelihoods on the line. How shameless. How reckless. How callous. How depraved.”

On Thursday, a federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s “deferred resignation” program offering eight months’ pay and salary to any government worker replying to a mass email sent out by Elon Musk’s DOGE operation. The judge will revisit the case on Monday.