Trump's Budget Director Choice Is an Ominous Sign of Conservative Extremism to Come

By Ed Kilgore

December 19, 2016
11:14 a.m.

It has not drawn the media attention devoted to ostensibly more important appointments, but Donald Trump’s choice of tea-party bravo and House Freedom Caucus co-founder Representative Mick Mulvaney, a Republican from South Carolina, to serve as his director of the Office of Management and Budget could be among the most fateful decisions of the transition.

Trump managed to win the presidency while maintaining a massively self-contradictory set of fiscal policies: He’s for a big upper-end and corporate tax cut, higher defense spending, the repeal and replacement of Obamacare (which will initially cost, not save, money), and a large package of infrastructure investments. On some days, he’s also for reducing the national debt. And on many days, he’s been opposed to “entitlement reform” — the Beltway term for reductions in benefits for, or major structural changes in, Medicare and Social Security — maneuvers most Republicans have favored to “pay for” the other fiscal goodies they want. The selection at OMB is the best signal yet of how Trump intends to deal with these contradictions, at a time when congressional Republicans are planning to make the budget process the fulcrum for radically conservative changes in federal priorities, beginning immediately in January.

Mulvaney is, on paper, an OMB director likely to embrace and intensify the radicalism of GOP budgetary efforts in 2017, and to resolve Trump’s fiscal self-contradictions by going after types of federal spending Republican constituencies don’t care about — for instance, anything even vaguely targeted toward poor and minority folk. A local Mexican-restaurant-chain owner, Mulvaney was elected to Congress in the tea-party wave of 2010, defeating longtime Democratic congressperson (and then-chairperson, as it happens, of the House Budget Committee) John Spratt.

As the New York Times sums him up: