OMB Director Russell Vought just outright lied about the massive, damaging cuts they've made in defiance of a court order to the National Institutes of Health, and Jake Tapper just sat there like a potted plant, as usual.

Vought made an appearance on this Sunday's State of the Union on CNN, and was asked by Tapper about the 14 Republican senators who are urging the White House to release the delayed NIH funds, and Vought responded by pretending they're only going after "wasteful spending" and DEI, and Tapper couldn't bother to counter him with anything more than asking why Republicans would be complaining if that's the case, rather than read him a list of specific cuts they've been making and ask him how they qualify as either "wasteful" or "DEI."

Here's the full exchange:

TAPPER: Quickly, if you could, I want to ask you about some medical research funding that the White House is withholding right now from the National Institutes of Health.

14 Republican senators say you're risking "undermining critical research" and "could threaten Americans' ability to access better treatments." Will you allow that funding to go through at the NIH?

VOUGHT: We're going through the same programmatic review of the NIH that we did on the education funding.

So NIH is a program that, if they were a company that went through the last pandemic, the stock, their stock prices would be in shambles. I mean they fundamentally mismanaged and in some respects caused the pandemic by their own research for gain of function research.

Now put that aside for a second. Now you have waste for abuse of funding, injecting dogs with cocaine, and studying the impacts of it, giving money to Harvard to study lizards being blown off of branches by leaf blowers.

Every step of the way, you have fundamental DEI across the board. There's literally entire...

TAPPER: I don't think that what the Republican senators were talking about.

VOUGHT: You literally have an entire institute that does nothing more than DEI research at NIH.

TAPPER: You think that's what the Republican senators want funding for?

VOUGHT: What I'm suggesting is that we have fully funded all important research through our budget proposal.

We will continue to make sure that funding goes out, but we're going to do everything we can to make sure that NIH is not weaponized and wasteful against the American people.

TAPPER: All right, Russ, that's all the time we have.

Pathetic. If you're going to ask the man that question, knowing full well he's going to lie in response, you should have a list of the funding they've cut in front of you to run down and force him to respond to. These liars don't mind going on these shows because they know they can get away with this and not be challenged.