President Donald Trump’s pick for the No. 2 post at the White House budget office cleared his first hoop toward confirmation Thursday morning.
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted 8-1 to approve the nomination of Dan Bishop to be deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, with ranking member Gary Peters (D-Mich.) the sole “no” vote. Another panel, the Senate Budget Committee, is next to hold a hearing with the nominee before Republican senators can vote on the floor to confirm him.
Bishop is already serving as a senior adviser to the White House budget office, where Russ Vought is leading the charge to carry out Trump’s orders to freeze billions of dollars in federal funding and lay off tens of thousands of federal workers.
During his first confirmation hearing this week, Bishop told senators that he would follow the orders of Vought and Trump, if confirmed. Asked whether he would abide by the law if directed to take action that breaks the law, the OMB nominee said “it would not be up to me, as serving in a non-lawyer capacity, to decide what is lawful and not lawful.”
Bishop is a lawyer and lost his race in November to serve as attorney general of North Carolina. During his more than five years as a member of Congress, he authored a bill to block federal employees from doing union work on the clock and sponsored a measure that would make it easier to fire agency workers by changing their employment status to “at will.”
