Trump administration officials downplayed differences among them over attaching conditions to an increase in the federal debt ceiling Friday, portraying their differing statements on the issue as normal, given their distinct roles.
As it stands, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has called on Congress to pass a “clean” bill to raise the debt ceiling before leaving for August recess. Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, on the other hand, told the Washington Examiner this week that his preference was to attach spending reforms to legislation to lift the debt ceiling from its current $20 trillion level.
On Friday, though, Mulvaney said that there was no conflict inside the administration, even though the White House has not arrived at an official position on lifting the debt ceiling and avoiding the possibility of missing a payment, which could have dire effects.
“People want to say there’s conflict between me and Mnuchin. Nothing could be further from the truth,” Mulvaney said in a Facebook live interview with the New York Times.
Mulvaney explained that the treasury secretary, charged with managing the government’s debt, should be expected to advocate simply lifting the debt ceiling to allow him to do his job. The debt ceiling is a cap on federal debt, preventing the Treasury from issuing new debt to pay for spending that Congress has already authorized and bills the government has already incurrred. On the other hand, Mulvaney said, for a budget director concerned about the budget, it’s normal to use the necessary vote as a chance to implement fiscal reforms.
“This is an ordinary course of business,” he said. On his desk, he added, is a four-page list of possible budget reforms that he would favor instituting. Rather than mere spending cuts, those would be changes to the way the federal government budgets and authorizes spending.
Speaking on CNBC Friday morning, National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn, President Trump’s top economic adviser, said the debt ceiling had to be raised, but that the administration was prepared to accept conditions that Congress might impose on the bill to do so.
“In a perfect world you would love to have a clean debt ceiling,” Cohn said. “But if we need to get things attached to get it through, we’ll attach things.”
“The credit of the United States is the utmost, and I’ve said to Congress they should do it as quickly as they can,” Mnuchin said Thursday in a Fox Business interview. “But we are very focused on working with them, and I’m confident we’ll get there before there’s an issue.”
Many congressional Republicans favor tying spending reduction reforms to debt ceiling hikes. In negotiations over the debt limit with former President Barack Obama, then-House Speaker John Boehner sought future savings of a dollar for every dollar increase in the ceiling, a trade-off termed the “Boehner Rule.”
The Freedom Caucus, the group of several dozen hard-line conservatives in the House, has already announced that it seeks spending cuts to go along with the debt ceiling vote requested by the Trump administration.
