Trump names Mulvaney acting chief of staff

Among some senior White House officials, Mulvaney had long been considered the “Original Plan B.”

Trump made the announcement on Twitter, one week after his first choice for the job, Nick Ayers, a Georgia political operative who is now Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, took himself out of the running, citing family considerations. The sometimes chaotic search process that went on in between served as another measure of the often frenetic manner of decision making in the Trump White House.

“For the record,” the president tweeted later Friday evening, “there were MANY people who wanted to be the White House Chief of Staff. Mick M will do a GREAT job!”

At the beginning of the week, the president said there were 10 to 12 candidates actively vying for the position, but that list seemed to shrink by the day during what was often a highly public audition. Just hours before the announcement about Mulvaney, Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, whom the president was strongly considering, took himself out of contention.

Trump met with members of his family and one of his top political advisers, Brad Parscale, before making his decision on Mulvaney.

For whatever period he serves, Mulvaney will be trying to succeed where John Kelly, the current chief of staff, and Reince Priebus, Trump’s first, struggled. Kelly is set to leave the White House by the end of the year.

While Kelly, a retired Marine general, was initially seen as someone who could work well with Democrats and Republicans, Mulvaney has a reputation as a sharp-elbowed partisan, who as both director of the Office of Management and Budget and acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau pursued a strongly conservative agenda.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said Mulvaney was “hardly the kind of peacemaker” needed to smooth relations between the White House and Democrats on Capitol Hill.

“What he did at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was destroy an agency and undermine its mission,” Blumenthal said in an interview. “He seems to be a Trump surrogate with a clear agenda, and my fear is he will exacerbate divisions at a time when they need to be bridged.”

Last year, Trump asked him to oversee the consumer bureau, an agency the president was bent on diminishing. That led to a messy public spat and court hearing as the Trump administration wrested control over the financial watchdog from an Obama-era holdover.

Mulvaney quickly went to work on the president’s mission. He seemed to relish his role at the agency, where he tried to vastly curtail its activities, including virtually freezing new investigations and changing its well-known name in an attempt to unbrand it.

When he first took over, he promised to split his time between the budget office and the consumer bureau, which is within walking distance of the White House. But as the months dragged on, he spent less time at the bureau and toward the end of his tenure there employees reported seeing him no more than once or twice a week.

Mulvaney was one of the few prospects for the chief of staff job who was seen as openly campaigning for it over most of the year. At one point, he told the president he was right for it because he was the only person in the administration leading a department that was not mired in scandal, according to a person familiar with the discussion.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said Mulvaney was not resigning from his job at the budget office, but would spend all of his time as chief of staff. He will turn over running the department to Russ Vought, the office’s deputy director, at a somewhat precarious time. The budget deficit widened to $305 billion in October and November, compared with $202 billion from the same period last year, the Treasury Department reported Thursday.

During Trump’s first full fiscal year in office, which ended in September, the deficit surged to $779 billion, the largest since 2012, when the economy and federal revenues were still recovering from the depths of the recession. It is on track to hit $1 trillion before 2020.

The deficit has surged in large part because of Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax cut and the spending increases enacted by Congress, which have contributed to the government paying out more than it takes in. Trump has told federal agencies to start finding spending cuts to help reduce the deficit, a process that will require the budget office’s involvement.

Allowing such red ink to mount under his stewardship has been uncomfortable for Mulvaney, a self-proclaimed deficit hawk who envisioned enacting deep cuts across the federal government upon assuming the role of budget director.

Mulvaney, a golfer with a 7 handicap, has long sought to ingratiate himself with Trump, spending time with him on the president’s courses and proposing quick-hit, tweetable policy proposals to get Trump through a difficult news cycle. One such plan, ultimately abandoned, was an attempt to claw back $15.4 billion in domestic spending programs to placate angry members of the House Freedom Caucus.

Similarly, many of Mulvaney’s budget proposals have pleased Trump only to be rejected outright by his former Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., chose not to include Mulvaney in many of his budget negotiations, opting to work directly with Trump’s former legislative affairs director, Marc Short.

On Friday, a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said there would be no end date to Mulvaney’s role despite his “acting” title.

“There’s no time limit. He’s the acting chief of staff, which means he’s the chief of staff,” the official said. “He got picked because the president liked him — they get along.”

In withdrawing his name from consideration Friday, Christie said in a statement that it was not “the right time for me or my family to undertake this serious assignment.” An old friend of the president who campaigned for him in 2016, Christie was summarily dismissed as Trump’s transition chief after the election and has been thwarted in getting the one job he has said he wanted — attorney general.

Another possible choice — and the only person who said publicly that he was interested in the job — Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., was ruled out Tuesday by the White House, with Trump saying he preferred for Meadows to stay in Congress.

Mulvaney was asked about his interest at a briefing with reporters at the consumer bureau in June, when the speculation was intense, and ultimately incorrect, that Kelly was about to leave the White House.

“If the president asks you to be chief of staff, the answer is yes,” Mulvaney said. “Do I think I would be good at it? I have no idea.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Trump names Mulvaney acting chief of staff

In Mulvaney, Trump made a safe choice for a Republican administration — a hard-line conservative and former congressman from South Carolina with a deep understanding of how Congress works and a personal chemistry with the president.

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