A Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is pressing Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) to call President Trump’s budget director before the panel to explain his threat to escalate federal firings amid the government shutdown.

In a letter sent to Comer on Thursday, Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-Va.) portrayed Russell Vought, the head of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), as a partisan ideologue who’s waged a war against federal workers all year and is now using the shutdown as a pretext to expand the purge.

Those moves are patently illegal, according to Walkinshaw, whose Northern Virginia district is home to almost 60,000 federal workers. He wants Vought to testify before the Oversight Committee to answer for the threat of mass firings, in lieu of the furlo

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