White House budget director Mulvaney maintains push for entitlement reform

WASHINGTON – Mick Mulvaney, the new director of the Office of Management and Budget, told a conservative radio host Monday that he was looking for ways to reform Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, working around President Donald Trump’s campaign trail promise to leave the programs untouched.

“I’ve already started to socialize the discussion around here in the West Wing about how important the mandatory spending is to the drivers of our debt,” Mulvaney told Hugh Hewitt on Monday morning. “I think people are starting to grab it. There are ways that we can not only allow the president to keep his promise, but to help him keep his promise by fixing some of these mandatory programs.”

Mulvaney, a budget hawk elected to Congress in the 2010 tea party wave, came to OMB with ideas about entitlement spending that diverged widely from Trump’s. At his January hearing, he told senators that he still favored raising the Social Security retirement age to 70, and supported means-testing to reduce Medicare spending. As a congressmen, he was the main driver behind the unsuccessful Cut, Cap, and Balance Act, which would have raised the debt limit only if it came with the passage of a balanced-budget amendment.

At the hearing, Mulvaney acknowledged that he disagreed with Trump on entitlement reform. “I have no reason to believe the president has changed his mind,” said Mulvaney. “My job is to be completely and brutally honest with him.”

During the campaign, as he made significant breakthroughs with working-class white voters who had voted for former president Barack Obama, Trump repeatedly bucked the conservative consensus on entitlement reform.