The man in charge of executing the president’s budget agenda wouldn’t own up to his own words when asked Thursday about his promise to put civil servants in “trauma” at a Senate Banking Committee hearing.

Russell Vought, the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and head of the Office of Management and Budget, repeatedly defended deep cuts to the consumer watchdog agency before Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) blindsided him by bringing up remarks he made at a private event for conservative power brokers in 2023.

Asked to grade how “much trauma” he’d inflicted on federal workers, Vought tried to deny the comments, which were even captured on video published by ProPublica in 2024, before telling Warner, “We’ve done aggressive actions to live and have fiscally responsible government.”

When Warner pushed back against the nonanswer, the agency head dismissed the “premise of the question” and was swiftly reminded who was in charge.

WARNER: You said you wanted to 'traumatize the federal workforce.' Give yourself a grade on how much trauma you've brought.VOUGHT: I think we've done an incredible job in running the CFPBWARNER: Don't use bureaucratic mumbo jumbo. I actually think you've done a pretty damn… pic.twitter.com/Ci33MAJoTo

“You wanna ask the questions, get elected and sit up here,” Warner fired back. “You’ve got a United States senator asking a question.”

Vought said he thought his team had “done an incredible job” at the CFPB, a response the senator shot down as “bureaucratic mumbo jumbo.”

Unrelenting, Warner demanded Vought rate whether he’d met his goal of “traumatizing and undermining” the federal workforce.

The top White House official stuck to his script, saying he’d done an “excellent job” of managing the CFPB.

Flipping the answer back at him, Warner said he’d done an “excellent job on terrorizing and traumatizing our federal workforce.”

While Vought’s words were measured during the hearing, he spoke much more freely during an event held by his think tank, the Center for Renewing America, three years ago.

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” said Vought, one of the architects of Project 2025, Republicans’ radical, right-wing blueprint for overhauling the government.

“When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains,” he went on. “We want their funding to be shut down so that the [Environmental Protection Agency] can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.

“We want to put them in trauma.”

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