On Wednesday, the US Senate confirmed former Republican North Carolina Rep. Dan Bishop as deputy White House budget director in the US Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
The vote was 53-45.
Bishop, who will serve under OMB Director Russ Vought, has been serving as a senior adviser at OMB while awaiting confirmation.
His political career started as a Mecklenburg County commissioner from 2005-2009. He then served in the North Carolina General Assembly as a state representative from 2015-2017 and a state senator from 2017-2019. He won a special election in September 2019 for to represent North Carolina’s Ninth Congressional District in congress, serving until 2023, when the district changed to NC-08.
Bishop continued serving before running for North Carolina Attorney General and losing to fellow former congressman Jeff Jackson, a Democrat, in November’s General Election.
He had faced two Senate Committees for his nomination, including the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee last month.
US Sen. Ted Budd, R-NC, introduced Bishop and talked about their first meeting when Budd was in his late 20’s running a landscaping and janitorial business while Bishop was a Mecklenburg County commissioner, fast-forwarding to the time when they both served in Congress.
“I’ve seen firsthand his thoughtfulness, his deep understanding of the issues, his love for our country, his care for people, and his commitment to stopping runaway spending and getting the federal budget under control,” Budd said of Bishop. “I have no doubt that Dan will bring the same tenacity to the job at OMB that he has shown throughout his career both as a litigator and his time serving the people of North Carolina.”
Trump nominated Bishop in December.
Bishop said it has been an honor to be nominated by Trump for such an important agency that crafts the president’s budget, manages and coordinates it among federal agencies, along with implementing the president’s regulatory agenda and is a critical part of ensuring that the government responds to the democratically elected president to respond to the will of the American people, who want accountability, transparency, and an end to the waste and the Washington status quo and not to be entrenched Washington interests and the political establishment.
“They recognized in this past election that our nation was at a crossroads on the precipice of either renewed greatness or ruin,” he said. “In that precarious moment, they placed their confidence in President Donald Trump to usher in a new golden age for America. I’m here on behalf of that mission.”
Questioning and statements ran along party lines, with Democrats like Sen. Gary Peters, MI, who told Bishop that his record and views, including support for legislation that would make all federal employees “at will,” give him serious pause about how he would manage the federal workforce. He also said he had questions about Bishop’s record for what he said was “disregard for independent oversight including retaliatory actions by revealing the name of a whistleblower.”
Peters and Sen. Andy Kim, D-NJ, would ask Bishop if the recent firings of several civil service employees were indiscriminate, to which he replied “no,” adding that the change might have been necessary after those advising Trump took a look at the size of the federal workforce.
Bishop said that he supports President Trump’s views, which include impoundment or not spending money that has been appropriated by Congress, and that the decision-making would involve lawyers, not him, when Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-MI, asked if he believes that the President has the ability to spend appropriated dollars in different ways than they were appropriated.
Committee chair Sen. Rand Paul, R-KY, said that there has been some good coming out of the investigation into agencies like USAID, which the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has found gave $2 million in taxpayer money for things like sex changes in Guatemala.
“We should debate not whether Elon Musk is Satan, but maybe whether or not we should spend $3 million out of State Department funds on girl-centric climate change in Brazil, whether there’s been $30,000 on a trans opera in Colombia, $25,000 on a trans comic book in Peru, $660,000 on microaggressions among obese Latin X,” Paul said, adding that none of this would have been made public if Musk hadn’t found it.
Bishop told Sen. Rick Scott, R-FL, during his line of questioning, that he thinks the budget could be balanced and compared what he did as governor of Florida, going line by line of the state’s budget as to what Trump and Musk are doing now with the drastic changes going on at the federal level.
He also told Sen. Joni Ernst, R-IA, founder of the Senate DOGE caucus, that he would work with Vought to get the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to submit annual reporting requirements.
She also added that politicians and bureaucrats in Washington seem to be much more upset that DOGE is finding more waste, fraud, and abuse than what has been funded.
“There are nearly fifty federal agencies right now that are not reporting their spending on usaspending.gov, accounting for more than $5 billion each year, so Congressman Bishop, every American can be one of our dogged deputies across the United States, but they actually need OMB’s help to do that,” Ernst said. “Will you require all agencies to provide timely, accurate, and complete reporting of their spending?’
Bishop said he’s learned a great deal about it, through research, since being nominated and will pay close attention to the matter.