Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., wants the scalp of acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney. Warren just accused Mulvaney of betraying the public trust and violating the law for personal advancement.
She has asked ethics officials to investigate whether Mulvaney lobbied for a job as president of the University of South Carolina while he oversaw both the Office of Personnel and Management and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Everyone in Washington, D.C. is looking for their next job. No one, however, is supposed to be leveraging a government job into a private position.
As the Daily Beast was first to report, Warren wrote that Mulvaney may have violated the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act which was “designed to stop officials from using their positions to benefit potential employers in order to increase the likelihood of obtaining post-government employment.”
Warren may have gotten the best of Mulvaney on this one. He hasn’t commented publicly so far.
The New York Times reported last month that Mulvaney had reached out to the school to explore the possibility of landing the job. And according to public copies of his schedule, Mulvaney met with the current president of the university, Harris Pastides, and the university’s lobbyist, Steven Beckham.
This is concerning, Warren argues, for two reasons.
First, as OMB director, Mulvaney “is responsible for producing the President’s budget” and “the University of South Carolina is receiving nearly $200 million in federal grants and contracts.” Second, as acting director of CFPB, Mulvaney oversaw financial products “issued in conjunction with universities and alumni associations — including the University of South Carolina Alumni Association.”
These are serious allegations that must be addressed. At the same time, this has as much to do with revenge as much as it does with good government. Warren has had it in for Mulvaney from the moment he kidnapped her baby, the CFPB.
Warren was the chief architect of that bureau, a behemoth beholden to no one but itself. Wound up by Congress and left to its own devices, the CFPB can legislate, execute, and adjudicate its own policies. It is the embodiment of the administrative state, and it runs contrary to the central premise of representative government.
The last time Warren and Mulvaney fought face to face, it was less of a standard committee hearing and more of a cage match. He hates the CFPB because it is unaccountable to the people it governs, and he made sure to throw it in her face by denying that as its head he was answerable to her.
That back-and-forth came in April. It was vicious. Since then, the unmistakable animosity has undoubtedly bled into the current charges. The stakes are higher this time, as Warren also has a political motivation to take out the White House chief.
Mulvaney is perhaps the last conservative ideologue still standing in the administration. He was hell-bent against big government while a member of the House Freedom Caucus, and he now plays the conservative Darth Vader in progressive nightmares.
If Warren knocks him out now, its a huge feather in the cap of her presidential campaign.
