Mick Mulvaney, who has focused his Washington
career on driving down federal spending even at the risk of shutting down the
government and defaulting on the debt won confirmation Thursday as President
Donald Trump’s budget chief.
The Senate’s 51-49 vote to put the South
Carolina congressman in charge of the Office of Management and Budget sends
Mulvaney into the center of all federal spending decisions. Among them: funding
the government for the rest of fiscal 2017, because the current spending law
runs only through April 28.
Mulvaney will present Trump’s fiscal 2018
budget request to Congress in the coming months, and has said he would
recommend the president pay for infrastructure investment and a military
buildup with deep spending cuts, including to entitlements.
“He will do a spectacular job of this,”
Budget Committee Chairman Mike Enzi said on the Senate floor. “He will be a
voice for fiscal restraint, responsible budgets and for honest budgeting that
avoids the use of gimmicks such as emergency funding designations for
non-emergencies.” Mulvaney was first elected to Congress as part of the 2010
Tea Party wave. He built a record as an aggressive advocate for budget cuts,
and as an opponent of using emergency war funds to avoid caps on military
spending
That led Armed Services Committee Chairman
John McCain to oppose the nomination because of Mulvaney’s record on military
spending. Aging Committee Chairman Susan Collins of Maine and Appropriations
Committee Chairman Thad Cochran waited until Wednesday evening to signal their
support.
***All
Senate Democrats voted against confirmation.***
“He has used debt ceiling and shutdown as a
leverage to gain his way on points of lesser importance than whether the
government stays open,” Virginia Democrat Tim Kaine said in a Senate floor
speech.
Democrat Bill Nelson of Florida, where the
Census Bureau estimates that 19.4 percent of the state’s population is 65 or
older, said he worried that Mulvaney would push to restrain the growth of
entitlement programs by making seniors wait until age 67 for Medicare and age
70 for Social Security. “He called Social Security a Ponzi scheme. He further
has said he supports turning Medicare into a voucher system,” Nelson said on
the Senate floor.
In his confirmation hearing, Mulvaney told
senators he would recommend that Trump reverse his campaign promise not to cut
Medicare and Social Security, because phased-in cuts for future seniors now
would keep the program solvent.“I talked to him about my concern that he had
never voted for a budget or a debt limit increase and he said that he
recognized he would have a very different role as an OMB director than he would
as a congressman from South Carolina,” Collins said in an interview after a
private meeting with Mulvaney.
As a congressman, Mulvaney opposed a stopgap
spending bill needed to keep the government running into the early months of
the Trump administration, objected to using budget gimmicks to let the Pentagon
avoid the pain of automatic spending cuts, and was one of the ringleaders of a
breakaway group of lawmakers who bristled at the willingness of their fellow
Republicans, then led by Speaker John Boehner, to govern through compromise.
Their group, the House Freedom Caucus, was a
thorn in Boehner’s side and a contributing factor to the Ohioan’s 2015 decision
to quit without finishing his term in office.
***Shutdown
Provocateur***
Mulvaney was one of the leaders of the effort
to defund Obamacare that resulted in a 16-day partial government shutdown. The
government reopened without cuts to Obamacare. He also wasn’t successful when
he pushed his colleagues to offset the extra dollars spent on emergencies such
as Hurricane Sandy by subtracting money approved for some other government
purpose.
He so distanced himself from the governing
wing of the Republican Party that he refused at campaign time to kick in money
to the National Republican Congressional Committee.
0 Comments