The Senate began its public vetting on Tuesday of President Donald Trump’s pick for the No. 2 post at the White House budget office, a position key to carrying out the president’s funding freeze.
Dan Bishop, a former congressmember from North Carolina, testified before senators in his first confirmation hearing to be deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget. Pledging to follow the orders of Trump and White House budget director Russell Vought, the OMB nominee vowed to “fix” a federal bureaucracy he characterized as “self-absorbed, inefficient, unaccountable and mal-administered.”
Bishop skirted a direct question about whether he would follow the law, or Trump, if the president directed him to take action that would break the law.
“I’m confident that President Trump will issue lawful orders. It would not be up to me, as serving in a non-lawyer capacity, to decide what is lawful and not lawful,” Bishop, a lawyer who lost his bid in November to be the attorney general of North Carolina, told senators on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
Already, Bishop is serving as a senior adviser to OMB as the budget office leads the Trump administration in freezing billions of dollars in foreign aid and federal grant money, prompting federal judges throughout the country to temporarily halt many of those actions amid lawsuits challenging their constitutionality.
During his five years in Congress, Bishop introduced bills he touted as a way to “drain the swamp” by making it easier to fire federal workers and blocking them from doing union work while on the clock. On Tuesday, he told senators he doesn’t think the Trump administration “is proceeding in an indiscriminate way to terminate employees” amid the firing of tens of thousands of federal workers.
Despite telling senators that he won’t be judging the legality of the president’s demands, Bishop laid out an argument for historical precedent supporting Trump’s power to freeze funding, telling senators that former President Harry Truman canceled a squadron of bombers that Congress approved despite his veto.
“These things have happened across history by presidents,” he said.
Bishop also noted that Trump “has run on the issue of impoundment.” On the campaign trail, Trump argued that the more than 50-year-old Impoundment Control Act, which blocks presidents from withholding money without Congress’ approval, is unconstitutional.
Democrats were not impressed. “I will skip the irony,” Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) said, “of a congressman who ran for office and was deeply involved in appropriating dollars — and voting on those things for years and years and years — now being seemingly willing to give up that authority. It’s a fundamental principle.”
On the other side of the aisle, Republicans gushed over Bishop.
Sen. Ted Budd (R-N.C.), who has known Bishop since he was a county commissioner in Charlotte about two decades ago, praised the OMB deputy nominee for “his care for people,” as well as “his commitment to stopping runaway spending and getting the federal budget under control.”
Bishop is likely to be confirmed with the same unanimous Republican support Vought received earlier this month. Like Bishop, Vought also would not promise senators that he would not circumvent impoundment law, after famously freezing aid to Ukraine during Trump’s first presidency.
Vought is now leading the charge to carry out Trump’s executive orders demanding the freeze of foreign aid, as well as funding from the Democrats’ 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure package enacted in 2021.
Bishop told senators on Tuesday that he is “thrilled” with Vought’s work.
“And I can assure you, he is the man to get the management of the federal government back on track,” Bishop said. “If confirmed, I look forward to serving as his deputy.”
