The following article by Damian Paletta and Mike DeBonis was posted on the Washington Post website January 21, 2018:
Some party leaders and President Trump have changed their tune on government shutdowns since the last one in 2013. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
With President Trump largely hidden from public view during the government shutdown, the face of the White House’s response belongs to Mick Mulvaney, who has plenty of experience with such events.
He helped cause one in 2013.
Mulvaney, the White House Office of Management and Budget director, said Trump tasked him with minimizing the impact of the shutdown, which could send 800,000 federal employees home without pay and limit operations at the Pentagon.
So Mulvaney is urging agencies to find extra money and push their limits to continue funding operations in a way that retains some sense of normalcy, even after the government’s funding expired at Friday’s end when Congress couldn’t reach a deal on a spending bill.
It’s a sharp reversal from Mulvaney’s role when the government last shut down, five years ago. That’s when he, as a House Republican from South Carolina, helped trigger the closure by leading a conservative rebellion against GOP leaders during a fight over the Affordable Care Act.
“I might have a lot more sympathy if I hadn’t been accused at that time of being an ‘arsonist,’ ” he told reporters Saturday at the White House. “But keep in mind, this is different.”
Mulvaney said in an interview Sunday that the government should continue providing services even amid the congressional impasse, and he accused the Obama administration of “weaponizing” the 2013 shutdown, closing high-profile parks and monuments to pressure Republicans into agreeing to a spending deal.
He mentioned the national monuments in D.C. that were kept open on Saturday and how those monuments allowed a large number of protesters to demonstrate.
“We were actually working to make sure the government was working for everyone, regardless of how they feel about the president,” he said.
Mulvaney’s critics see more nefarious motives, accusing the budget director of spreading funds to create the false impression that a government shutdown doesn’t matter — as well as to mask the importance of government’s role in public life. The White House, they note, is focusing some of its efforts to blunt the shutdown on things that have the biggest public exposure, such as national parks.
“I think there’s sort of a pernicious aspect to that in this sense: Real right wingers like Mulvaney want to demonstrate that there aren’t really real-life consequences to a government shutdown for most average Americans, and they’re going to minimize that pain,” said Rep. Gerald E. Connolly, a Democrat whose Virginia district outside D.C. would be heavily affected by furloughs of federal employees.
“This is kind of a cynical strategy to try to persuade the public that the government shutdown really isn’t a shutdown, and it’s all part of the Orwellian approach to messaging and governance that we have seen in the Trump era,” he said.
Mulvaney is no stranger to political fisticuffs and often seems to revel in it. During the current shutdown, he has made more than a dozen media appearances, prodding Senate Democrats to vote for government funding but acting as if he’d be perfectly capable of continuing to run the government if they don’t.
Democrats are withholding support for funding in part to force a concession on immigration policy, seeking protections for undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children.
Thus far, the effort to keep the government running has had uneven results.
The Air Force Academy canceled all athletic events over the weekend, while the Naval Academy did not. The Statue of Liberty was set to close until the state of New York stepped in, while Everglades National Park has remained open, though most park rangers are home. Visitors have been warned to use extreme “caution,” particularly around the alligators.
In another change from 2013, White House officials cheered the decision to keep operating the American Forces Network, a television broadcast for U.S. troops around the world. This allowed military members to watch NFL playoff games on Sunday. The Environmental Protection Agency also will stay open for at least the next week, even though it saw major restrictions during the 2013 shutdown.
Many conservatives have applauded Mulvaney’s approach so far.
“Obviously, the last time the shutdown happened, there was barricades and yellow tape up at most monuments the next morning,” said Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.). “And so that didn’t happen, and that’s a small area, but he’s actually funding government operations that you would not normally think would be funded under a Republican president.”
Mulvaney is at ease during partisan brawls and doesn’t hesitate to throw punches at Democrats, who he claims are responsible for the lapse in government funding.
He calls it the “Schumer Shutdown,” a GOP way of pinning the whole thing on Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.).
“It’s got that nice little ring to it, doesn’t it?” Mulvaney told reporters Saturday.
But Democratic senators and aides said Mulvaney, at the same time, hasn’t been involved in negotiations to broker a deal and acts at ease with keeping the shutdown in effect as long as necessary. Instead, Schumer has been interacting directly with Trump and made little progress up until Sunday.
Mulvaney said he wants Congress to pass a funding bill as soon as possible, but he isn’t panicking while the shutdown is in place.
He stayed at the White House until 9 p.m. on Friday and signed documents that would begin an orderly shutdown of parts of the government after midnight, when funding lapsed. Then he went home, spoke with Trump about how the shutdown process would work and came back to his office the next morning.
In fact, Mulvaney has repeatedly stressed that this government shutdown will be much less painful than the one in 2013, something that has infuriated former Obama administration officials.
“Only someone who has total and utter contempt and disregard for the role of government in people’s lives would belittle or dismiss the impact of a government shutdown,” said Kenneth Baer, an associate OMB director under Obama. “Not only on the workers in the federal government, but also on the millions of Americans who rely on various parts of the government.”
The anger intensified Friday when Mulvaney said in a radio interview with conservative Fox News host Sean Hannity that it was “kind of cool” to be the “person who technically shuts the government down.”
In a follow-up interview, Mulvaney clarified that he didn’t take glee in doing so. Rather, he had only just learned of the bureaucratic process of ordering agencies to suspend operations. He also shrugged off questions about whether he should be doing more to cut a deal with Democrats.
He said he has pushed them since the summer to agree to a budget deal that would lift spending restrictions in a way both sides supported, but those talks ran out of time, and Democrats finally dug in. The White House doesn’t have a senior official at this point who has much pull with Democrats, which is part of the reason for the standoff.
Mulvaney is the lone senior White House official with significant shutdown experience, but he doesn’t see his role as trying to appease Democrats. Rather, he’s become a central messenger in making it clear that the White House won’t negotiate changes to immigration laws or anything else until Democrats vote to reopen the government. And while the government is shut, he will work to minimize that impact as much as he can.
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