Donald Trump nominates South Carolina Rep. Mick Mulvaney to be budget director
ORLANDO, Fla. -- President-elect Donald Trump has settled on a White House budget director. It’s Mick Mulvaney, a conservative Republican congressman from South Carolina who’s viewed as a budget hawk.
Mr. Trump calls Mulvaney, 49, a “very high-energy leader with deep convictions for how to responsibly manage our nation’s finances and save our country from drowning in red ink.”
Mulvaney was first elected to Congress as part of the tea party wave in 2010.
He’s a founder of the conservative House Freedom Caucus - a group of Republican members of Congress who edged John Boehner out of the House speaker’s role.
If confirmed by the Senate, Mulvaney would be charged with pushing Mr. Trump’s budget proposals through Congress and overseeing the final issuance of major regulations. As the director of the Office of Management and Budget, he will likely be responsible for helping fulfill some of the president-elect’s campaign promises, including the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, a boost in infrastructure investment, and a reworking of the tax code.
Mr. Trump says that with Mulvaney as his budget director, his administration will make “smart choices” and “renew the American taxpayer’s trust in how their money is spent.”
Mulvaney has taken a hard line on budget matters, routinely voting against increasing the government’s borrowing cap and pressing for major cuts to benefit programs as the path to balancing the budget. He has also advocated a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution.
Actually balancing the federal budget requires deeper spending cuts than the GOP-controlled Congress can probably deliver on, especially if Trump prevails on revenue-losing tax cuts and a big infrastructure package next year.
Mulvaney is pledging to help restore what he’s calling “budgetary and fiscal sanity ... after eight years of an out-of-control, tax and spend financial agenda” under President Obama.
