White House budget director on Federal Reserve and rescissions package

WASHINGTON (CBS, KYMA/KECY) - White House Budget Director Russ Vought spoke with Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation Sunday about what's going on with the Federal Reserve.

According to Brennan, President Donald Trump said he doesn't intend to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, although he still criticizes him.

This prompted Brennan to ask Vought what President Trump is looking for in a successor when Powell's term ends in May of next year, to which he said:

"I think he's looking for a chairman that's not continually too late to the developments in the economic marketplace. And I think what we've seen with Chairman Powell, he was very late in the Biden administration to raise rates, to articulate the concern with regard to the Biden administration's spending. We all knew on the outside...even Larry Summers knew that we were going to have an issue with regard to inflation. And we saw, you know, recent, historical inflationary levels that we hadn't seen before. And now he is too late to lower inflation rates and so that is the kind of thing that we want to see in the next chairman of the Federal Reserve. And one of the reasons why is [he wants] an ability to recognize the developments in the economic marketplace. In this case, we want to be able to see lower rates and to have an ability to get the economy going. And one of the things we saw with Powell is that one of the reasons he was so late was because he didn't understand that inflation is largely a monetary phenomenon. He kept saying that inflation was transitory. He didn't tackle the problem, and now he's, again, too late, and you marry that with fiscal mismanagement at the Fed. It's a huge problem that we're trying to raise the country's awareness level with."

During the interview, Brennan and Vought talked about a possible rescissions package.

According to Brennan, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) spoke to the Washington Post, where he said the Trump Administration is looking to consider "clawbacks from the Department of Education."

When asked if he is seeking to clawback education funds in a rescissions package, and when he is sending it up, Vought said:

"We may be, we're always looking at potential rescission options. This is a set of funding that we wanted to make sure it got out. We did our programmatic review. We wanted to make sure it got out before the school year, even though it's multi-year funding. This is not funding that would expire at the end of this year. We are looking to do rescissions package. We're always gauging the extent to which the Congress is willing to participate in that process, and we're...be looking at a lot of different options along those lines, but certainly have nothing to announce here today. But we're thrilled that we had the first rescissions package in decades, and we've got the process moving again."

Brennan followed up by asking Vought if there won't be a rescissions package before September, and Vought said, "Not here to say that. We're looking at all of our options, we will look at it and assess where the Hill is, what are the particular funding opportunities that we have, but nothing that we're going to announce today."

To watch more of Brennan's full interview with Vought, click here.