Frequently Asked Questions

Anyone who believes Russell Vought should be impeached for his crimes and harm to the American people. We invite anyone to sign this petition. You do not need to be a federal employee.

Federal workers are well within their rights to sign this petition, as long as they do so in their personal capacity while off duty and without using federal property or resources. 

The Hatch Act only limits federal employees’ ability to express opinions about political issues when the employee is on duty; in any federally owned room, building, or vehicle; or wearing a uniform or official insignia. For more information on how the Hatch Act applies to federal workers, the Office of Special Counsel provides a detailed explainer. 

The anti-lobbying act only prevents the use of federal funding for lobbying Congress. Therefore, federal employees have a right to contact members of Congress so long as they are not on duty time and not using government property or resources. For more information on your rights as a Federal worker to lobby Congress, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) has an explainer on Lobbying Dos and Don’ts. 

Further, federal employee’s right to speak freely in their personal capacity on matters of the public interest was upheld in Pickering vs Board of Education.

To help ensure federal workers are protected in signing, we require signatories to confirm they are not on duty and not using government furnished equipment (GFE) when they sign. 

Russell Vought is the current director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), one of the most powerful jobs in Washington. Vought has used this position to wage a quiet war to change the shape of the entire U.S. government. To this end, he wrote some 350 executive orders, regulations, and other plans to more fully empower the president. “I don’t want President Trump having to lose a moment of time having fights in the Oval Office about whether something is legal or doable or moral,” Vought said in a private 2024 speech. Vought is also the Acting Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where he is attempting to oversee its destruction. He is also the architect of Project 2025, a blueprint for the radical restructuring of the Executive Branch to serve a conservative agenda opposing abortion and reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, immigrants’ rights, and racial equity. As OMB Director, Vought controls how taxpayer dollars are spent and how government policies are carried out. 

The largest office within the Executive Office of the President of the United States, it's responsible for preparing the president's budget proposal to Congress, supervising the administration of federal agencies, evaluating the effectiveness of agency programs, and ensuring that agency reports, rules, testimony, and proposed legislation align with the president's policies. Originally established in 1921, it was reorganized into its current form as the OMB in 1970 under President Richard Nixon, transforming it into a powerful institution directly under presidential control. The OMB oversees federal financial management, procurement, information technology, and regulatory policies, playing a critical role in shaping the federal government’s fiscal and policy landscape. Every penny appropriated by Congress first passes through the OMB. It also reviews all significant regulations proposed by federal agencies, vets executive orders before the president signs them and issues workplace policies for more than 2 million federal employees. The Director of the OMB has no specified term limit.

Impeachment is a constitutional remedy to address serious offenses against the system of government. It is the first step in a remedial process that removes the impeached person from public office and possibly disqualifies them from holding office in the future. The purpose of impeachment is not punishment; rather, its function is primarily to maintain constitutional government.

Impeachment is not just for presidents. The U.S. Constitution also allows for certain government officials to be impeached. Vought has been attempting to wield his power to illegally decimate the Federal workforce and withhold taxpayer dollars for programs and agencies that benefit the American people. Impeachment of government officials is proper where the official conducts themselves in a manner incompatible with the purpose and function of their office.

It is therefore the duty of the members of the House of Representatives to impeach Vought on the grounds that he is abusing his power, breaking the law by illegally dismantling programs and agencies meant to serve the American public, and violating the United States constitution. In doing so, he is actively seeking the collapse of the American system of government, just as Project 2025 promised. Congress must impeach Vought to protect Americans from further harm.

The fight matters. The campaign to impeach Vought will be successful if the American public knows who he is and why he is a threat to the country. We will be successful if members of Congress are willing to voice their opposition often and loudly to Vought’s lawless attempts to usurp their power of the purse. We will be successful if we can shine a spotlight on OMB such that their moves are monitored and their illegal actions stopped or even just slowed. We will be successful if the public understands that Vought is the Shadow President.

No! Project 2025 outlines much more to be done, and we are only in year two of the administration! Future harm can be stopped by impeaching and removing Russell Vought, and can be slowed just by speaking up!

As laid out in Project 2025, Vought’s vision for the U.S. government includes: 

• An all-powerful Executive branch that would be able to cancel programs, shutter agencies, and undo regulations that govern air and water quality, financial markets, workplace protections and civil rights. 

• The Department of Justice would shed its historical independence and operate at the direction of the White House. 

• “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said in a private speech in 2023. “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.”

Withholding congressionally appropriated funds, freezing funds, hiding federal expenditures, and pausing or blocking funds means that the three branches of government (i.e., Executive, Legislative, Judicial) aren't constitutionally acting as checks and balances, and it means essential programs that Americans rely on have been terminated or defunded. When Congress appropriates certain expenditures by the government, but the president decides against spending that specific appropriated money, the Impoundment Control Act authorizes the president to go back to Congress and, through this procedure, Congress decides whether it's going to let the president hold those funds or not. Multiple legal acts have indicated that impoundment is not unconstitutional, including a memo written by Chief Justice John Roberts when, as a young lawyer, he emphasized that impoundment should not be considered a viable budget planning option and underscored that "no area seems more clearly the province of Congress than the power of the purse." During Vought's confirmation hearing in the U.S. Senate, Vought reiterated his belief that the White House has authority over federal spending, not Congress. This contradicts article I, section 8, of the U.S. Constitution, which grants Congress the power to tax and spend for the general welfare of the country.

The drafters of the U.S. Constitution created a system to prevent a dictatorship based on a concept called the separation of powers. The 3 co-equal branches of the federal government, the Executive Branch, Legislative Branch and Judicial Branch each have distinct roles and authorities. This ingenious system creates checks and balances to protect people's rights (some of which extend to citizens and non-citizens alike). The legislative branch makes laws and allocates funding, the Judicial branch interprets laws, and the Executive branch enforces and enacts laws. Concentrating power in the Executive Branch to make, interpret and enforce laws would be disastrous because it would essentially create a dictatorship where all federal power is wielded by the head of that branch.

This letter was written and organized by a coalition of current and former federal workers from across the government. We are working under the name, “the Civil Servants Coalition,” but we are not a formal organization. We have directly seen how Vought’s drastic cuts harm the American people. With this effort, we are inviting all Americans, whether federal employees or not, to join us in calling for Russell Vought's impeachment. We are upholding our oath of office to defend the Constitution from this insider threat to democracy and the rule of law.

The 2025 Trump administration thought they could dismantle entire agencies and fire thousands of federal workers and that nothing would change--they were wrong. People have suffered and died. Federal civil servants from every corner of the government have stood up to bullying and buy-outs because they know the value of their work to the public. Every department and agency has demonstrated the scientific, legal, safety, or administrative value it serves since February 2025, and yet, Russell Vought is still going after them.

For just a few examples:

• USAID had administered humanitarian aid programs since the 1960s that provided food in countries where people are starving, operated the world's detection system to predict where food shortages emerge, and operated health programs, such as offering polio vaccinations in countries where the disease still circulates and helping to stop the spread of viruses which have the potential to cause a pandemic. Purging and eradicating USAID has had a global impact and jeopardizes national and global security.

• The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is an independent agency that was created after the 2008 financial crisis to prevent it ever happening again. The CFPB implements and enforces federal consumer financial law and ensures that markets for consumer financial products are transparent, fair, and competitive. By weakening of the CFPB, consumer financial markets aren't held to standards that work for consumers and the economy as a whole--and consumers won't be as protected from unfair, deceptive, or abusive practices by companies that break the law.

• The Department of Education funds public schools that are attended by 90% of U.S. students and 95% of students with disabilities. Gutting the department means fewer resources for our most vulnerable students, larger class sizes, fewer special education services for students with disabilities, and decreased civil rights protections. Public schools require anti-discrimination protections, have accountability measures for how public money is spent and how students perform, and they uphold the separation of church and state.

The Vought Administration has consistently sought to evade accountability by defunding operations supporting the work of Inspectors General (IGs), undercutting independent agency oversight, and overall neutering these nonpartisan organizations that serve the public (and the Executive branch and Congress) by conducting audits and investigations on the programs and operations of their agencies, including in response to whistleblower reports of wrongdoing. The removal of IG leadership with no consequences is having a chilling effect on whistleblowing. When Congress doesn't protect IGs from removal without cause, whistleblowers are less likely to feel confident that they're protected from retaliation. Absent any action by Congress or the Supreme Court, the administration is free to act with limited accountability or independent oversight, reducing transparency for the public into areas of potential or actual fraud, waste, and abuse, and discouraging whistleblowers who might otherwise report wrongdoing. Integrity, efficiency, effectiveness, and enforcement of the rule of law in federal activities is suffering as a result.

Vought was one of the main authors – credited as the key architect – of Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, which outlines a sweeping transformation of the U.S. federal government that significantly impacts civil rights, democratic institutions, and daily life for millions of Americans. Developed by the Heritage Foundation and over 100 conservative organizations, it is a 900-page policy agenda aimed at reshaping the executive branch to consolidate presidential power and implement an ultra-right, Christian nationalist vision across nearly every federal agency. A main proposal is to reclassify thousands of career civil servants as political appointees through a mechanism known as Schedule F, which would allow an incoming administration to replace them with loyalists. In all of modern history, we've seen that authoritarianism leads to totalitarianism.