MCG+01-38-005 is a special kind of megamaser; the galaxy’s active galactic nucleus pumps out huge amounts of energy, stimulating clouds of surrounding water.
September 05, 2017
Megamaser
MCG+01-38-005 is a special kind of megamaser; the galaxy’s active galactic nucleus pumps out huge amounts of energy, stimulating clouds of surrounding water.
Voyager in 1979
What are those spots on Jupiter? Largest and furthest, just right of center, is the Great Red Spot -- a huge storm system that has been raging on Jupiter possibly since Giovanni Cassini's likely notation of it 352 years ago. It is not yet known why this Great Spot is red. The spot toward the lower left is one of Jupiter's largest moons: Europa. Images from Voyager in 1979 bolster the modern hypothesis that Europa has an underground ocean and is therefore a good place to look for extraterrestrial life. But what about the dark spot on the upper right? That is a shadow of another of Jupiter's large moons: Io. Voyager 1 discovered Io to be so volcanic that no impact craters could be found. Sixteen frames from Voyager 1's flyby of Jupiter in 1979 were recently reprocessed and merged to create the featured image. Forty years ago today, Voyager 1 launched from Earth and started one of the greatest explorations of the Solar System ever.
Expedition 52
2017 International
2017 International 14 North American Championships
From Sailing Anarchy
15 International 14’s came to Richmond Yacht Club for the biennial I-14 North American Championships. Our Canadian friends to the North elected not to make the trip and focus their travel dollars for next years World Championships being held on the same Berkeley Circle race course in 2018 – which we certainly understand but they and their antics 😉 were certainly missed. With the 15 skiffs that we did have the competition was very stacked with more than half the boats having at least one former National or major championship winner on board and a few former World Championship winning skipper and crews in the mix.
With the next year’s 14 World Championships being held in August 2018 at Richmond Yacht Club; the Club, Race Committee, Race Management, and Organizers were utilizing this NA regatta as a major warm up and test event. That being said, you wouldn’t have known it as RYC ran a flawless regatta from start to finish with key attention to details. All of the starts ran on time, the starting lines were square, the distances of the races were set well and monitored closely. Mark changes were done tightly and by the book and they varied the angles of the reach marks throughout the event but all of them were challenging but fair. Regatta Chair Tim Knowles and Principal Race Officer Del Olson did a tremendous job as did their many volunteers and the fleet was left impressed with how smooth everything ran.
Leading up to the event the weekend before there were quite a few fourteens out practicing. The wind seemed to be a bit lighter for the practices with the core of the days ranging between 14-18 knots of breeze out on the race course. That being said, launching out of RYC is always nice as the ‘Richmond Riviera’ is protected, usually sunny and launch conditions are almost always in less then 8 knots of breeze it seems.
The two practice days before the event showed quite a bit of activity at the club with the local NorCal teams there and people showing up from Seattle, Hawaii, Southern California and a few making the trip up from Australia. We did have 2 Canadians sailing on US boats which was also good to see. Those two practice days showed a solid half dozen boats on the water almost at all times. Those days the breeze ranged from 12-18+ and showed a bit of bump on the race course due to the ebb tides.
Race day 1 had scheduled 2 races the first day. The first being a short race followed by the mandatory Distance race. Instead of a large tour of the bay – the RC opted to send the teams on a large ‘Worlds style’ course with long legs and 4.5 laps including 2 triangles. The first race started in about 16 knots of breeze – the course was a simple but long triangle with a full upwind finish. Former World Champ Kris Bundy and Fritz Lanzinger won the start with Terry Gleeson sailing with Australian Ian ‘Footy’ Furlong also poked out but closer to the pin. Bundy/Lanzinger had strong speed matched with tremendous height.
The lead changed multiple times with both Bundy/Lanzinger and Gleeson/Furlong setting early and not making the reach mark. The rest of the fleet caught up to them while they had to take down, reach and reset and by the bottom mark there was a good pack of five boats rounding together. Bundy/Lanzinger held on to their lead at the finish, followed by Gleeson/Furlong and Michael Radziejowski and Evan Sjostedt on B5 USA 1162.
The second and long race of the day was started in about 18 knots of breeze and during the race in increased to about 20 knots at the top of the course. The long legs allowed for many to focus on speed and at the top mark there were a number of boats rounding in a tight heat together. The first lap was a triangle and at the reach the tight gybe angle left a few of the lead boats tangled together and a number of them resulted in testing the water.
Sailing in the brand new and super flash Henderson B6 USA 1199 owned by John Clark – Australians David Alexander and 3 time World Champ crew, Dan Wilsdon, took advantage of the situation and legged out followed by Gleeson/Furlong. Gleeson/Furlong sailed really hard in the wavy conditions, started legging out little by little over the long race and finished with a substantial lead by the end of the race for a 2-1 for the day. Galvez/MacDonald were 3rd. Alexander/Wilsdon finished with 8 points for the day as did the 2015 North American winning team Steve Goodson and Alan Diercks from Seattle.
That evening after sponsored beverages at the dock – 14 sailor and local Point Richmond resident John Clark, sponsored an epic pizza night at his waterfront home. Beer was flowing as Chef Clark, Greg Mitchell, Jenn Virskus and others attended the pizza oven (no that was not an autoclave) and everyone helped turn out pizzas with miraculously no one getting burned! The entire fleet, friends, and most of the race committee were in attendance and it was a great event at a beautiful home. Thank you John!
The second day was the most breeze that we saw the entire week. The wind ranged from 17-21 knots with some gusts just touching 23 during the second race of the day at the top end of the course. There was very little current with the tides being slack during racing with minimal variance. Strong boat prep, aggressive starts, solid boat handling, and heavier teams all paid a strong dividend in the conditions.
Gleeson/Furlong who had not sailed together before the event put together an impressive day with triple pickets over the 3 races. Alexander/Wilsdon had a tougher first race, but then put up two 2nds. Galvez/MacDonald had a 2nd in the first race of day 2 and then posted a 4-5. Bundy/Lanzinger and Goodson/Diercks both suffered some breakdowns towards the end of the day – while both Radziejowski/Sjostedt and Brad Reutenik & Jake Sorosky in the new B6 USA 1200 each managed one top 3 finish.
That evening there was a lot of camaraderie on the docks and in the boatyard with Galvez Insurance Company sponsoring a keg and just about everyone tending to a bit of boatwork before the club sponsored a great sit down meal for everyone in Richmond Yacht Club’s brand new club house which was built last year. Great times, good wine, regatta photos running on the screen, and panoramic window views out on to San Francisco Bay made for a nice evening for everyone.
On Race Day 3 the forecast was for a bit lighter and then lightening more for the following week. The day we saw the breeze range from 14-18 knots and the final three races were scheduled. Goodson/Diercks, widely known as specialists in breeze came into form and clutched the first race. Radziejowski/Sjostedt sailed a solid race and were 2nd with Dave A & Dan coming in 3rd. Bundy and Lanzinger were in 4th while Gleeson/Furlong lost some form during the race and finished 5th after a quick recovery. The second race turned into a long 3 lapper with two reach legs. The breeze came up a bit and Gleeson/Furlong started stretching out after the first leg and half. Alexander/Wilsdon finished behind and the rest of the fleet was led in by Mikey and Evan on USA 1162.
With one race remaining Gleeson/Furlong had won the event but there was too much fun sailing to still be had. Galvez/MacDonald had great speed all week and really showed it off in the final races with many lead changes and working the left hand side of the course upwind followed closely behind by Goodson/Diecks. Gleeson/Furlong finished the final race 3rd with Reutenik/Sjostedt 4th and Alexander/Wilsdon 5th. Final results posted here.
Richmond Yacht Club put on a tremendous and well run event, both on and off the water. If this is what we have to look forward to for Worlds next year we can say that everyone at this event is very enthusiastic about both the sailing and the proven capabilities for this club to run a great event.
An excellent effort by all of the competitors and we saw many lead changes throughout the regatta. Skiffs are always hard and this is a challenging race course, but never felt that it was too extreme. Gleeson and Furlong sailed a very tight regatta especially with having only two days of practice together in total. They focused on keeping the maneuvers simple while really sailing the boat hard throughout the event. They worked the waves when able, not slowing down while just keeping on the right side of control. Well done and the hard work put in certainly pays off! Terry and Footy were able to walk away with the very large William Randolph Hearst Perpetual Trophy that dates back to the 1940’s. That is a big one!
It is safe to say that the Australians will like this race course with the top 3 regatta finishers having a total of 4 Aussies between them. The US boats are getting plenty of breeze on practice and will get more before our big event next year. The race course is a big area with room for the RC to move the course if it gets lighter or heavier. We would expect that at Worlds we will see conditions like this, but also see some lighter air days maxing at 14-16 knots as well. The Worlds Organizing committee has been busy this last year+ putting the event together and from this regatta we can see that they will do a fantastic job.
We look forward to seeing you all at the 2018 I-14 Worlds!
– Terence Gleason.
From Sailing Anarchy
15 International 14’s came to Richmond Yacht Club for the biennial I-14 North American Championships. Our Canadian friends to the North elected not to make the trip and focus their travel dollars for next years World Championships being held on the same Berkeley Circle race course in 2018 – which we certainly understand but they and their antics 😉 were certainly missed. With the 15 skiffs that we did have the competition was very stacked with more than half the boats having at least one former National or major championship winner on board and a few former World Championship winning skipper and crews in the mix.
With the next year’s 14 World Championships being held in August 2018 at Richmond Yacht Club; the Club, Race Committee, Race Management, and Organizers were utilizing this NA regatta as a major warm up and test event. That being said, you wouldn’t have known it as RYC ran a flawless regatta from start to finish with key attention to details. All of the starts ran on time, the starting lines were square, the distances of the races were set well and monitored closely. Mark changes were done tightly and by the book and they varied the angles of the reach marks throughout the event but all of them were challenging but fair. Regatta Chair Tim Knowles and Principal Race Officer Del Olson did a tremendous job as did their many volunteers and the fleet was left impressed with how smooth everything ran.
The two practice days before the event showed quite a bit of activity at the club with the local NorCal teams there and people showing up from Seattle, Hawaii, Southern California and a few making the trip up from Australia. We did have 2 Canadians sailing on US boats which was also good to see. Those two practice days showed a solid half dozen boats on the water almost at all times. Those days the breeze ranged from 12-18+ and showed a bit of bump on the race course due to the ebb tides.
Race day 1 had scheduled 2 races the first day. The first being a short race followed by the mandatory Distance race. Instead of a large tour of the bay – the RC opted to send the teams on a large ‘Worlds style’ course with long legs and 4.5 laps including 2 triangles. The first race started in about 16 knots of breeze – the course was a simple but long triangle with a full upwind finish. Former World Champ Kris Bundy and Fritz Lanzinger won the start with Terry Gleeson sailing with Australian Ian ‘Footy’ Furlong also poked out but closer to the pin. Bundy/Lanzinger had strong speed matched with tremendous height.
The lead changed multiple times with both Bundy/Lanzinger and Gleeson/Furlong setting early and not making the reach mark. The rest of the fleet caught up to them while they had to take down, reach and reset and by the bottom mark there was a good pack of five boats rounding together. Bundy/Lanzinger held on to their lead at the finish, followed by Gleeson/Furlong and Michael Radziejowski and Evan Sjostedt on B5 USA 1162.
The second and long race of the day was started in about 18 knots of breeze and during the race in increased to about 20 knots at the top of the course. The long legs allowed for many to focus on speed and at the top mark there were a number of boats rounding in a tight heat together. The first lap was a triangle and at the reach the tight gybe angle left a few of the lead boats tangled together and a number of them resulted in testing the water.
Sailing in the brand new and super flash Henderson B6 USA 1199 owned by John Clark – Australians David Alexander and 3 time World Champ crew, Dan Wilsdon, took advantage of the situation and legged out followed by Gleeson/Furlong. Gleeson/Furlong sailed really hard in the wavy conditions, started legging out little by little over the long race and finished with a substantial lead by the end of the race for a 2-1 for the day. Galvez/MacDonald were 3rd. Alexander/Wilsdon finished with 8 points for the day as did the 2015 North American winning team Steve Goodson and Alan Diercks from Seattle.
That evening after sponsored beverages at the dock – 14 sailor and local Point Richmond resident John Clark, sponsored an epic pizza night at his waterfront home. Beer was flowing as Chef Clark, Greg Mitchell, Jenn Virskus and others attended the pizza oven (no that was not an autoclave) and everyone helped turn out pizzas with miraculously no one getting burned! The entire fleet, friends, and most of the race committee were in attendance and it was a great event at a beautiful home. Thank you John!
The second day was the most breeze that we saw the entire week. The wind ranged from 17-21 knots with some gusts just touching 23 during the second race of the day at the top end of the course. There was very little current with the tides being slack during racing with minimal variance. Strong boat prep, aggressive starts, solid boat handling, and heavier teams all paid a strong dividend in the conditions.
Gleeson/Furlong who had not sailed together before the event put together an impressive day with triple pickets over the 3 races. Alexander/Wilsdon had a tougher first race, but then put up two 2nds. Galvez/MacDonald had a 2nd in the first race of day 2 and then posted a 4-5. Bundy/Lanzinger and Goodson/Diercks both suffered some breakdowns towards the end of the day – while both Radziejowski/Sjostedt and Brad Reutenik & Jake Sorosky in the new B6 USA 1200 each managed one top 3 finish.That evening there was a lot of camaraderie on the docks and in the boatyard with Galvez Insurance Company sponsoring a keg and just about everyone tending to a bit of boatwork before the club sponsored a great sit down meal for everyone in Richmond Yacht Club’s brand new club house which was built last year. Great times, good wine, regatta photos running on the screen, and panoramic window views out on to San Francisco Bay made for a nice evening for everyone.
On Race Day 3 the forecast was for a bit lighter and then lightening more for the following week. The day we saw the breeze range from 14-18 knots and the final three races were scheduled. Goodson/Diercks, widely known as specialists in breeze came into form and clutched the first race. Radziejowski/Sjostedt sailed a solid race and were 2nd with Dave A & Dan coming in 3rd. Bundy and Lanzinger were in 4th while Gleeson/Furlong lost some form during the race and finished 5th after a quick recovery. The second race turned into a long 3 lapper with two reach legs. The breeze came up a bit and Gleeson/Furlong started stretching out after the first leg and half. Alexander/Wilsdon finished behind and the rest of the fleet was led in by Mikey and Evan on USA 1162.
With one race remaining Gleeson/Furlong had won the event but there was too much fun sailing to still be had. Galvez/MacDonald had great speed all week and really showed it off in the final races with many lead changes and working the left hand side of the course upwind followed closely behind by Goodson/Diecks. Gleeson/Furlong finished the final race 3rd with Reutenik/Sjostedt 4th and Alexander/Wilsdon 5th. Final results posted here.
Richmond Yacht Club put on a tremendous and well run event, both on and off the water. If this is what we have to look forward to for Worlds next year we can say that everyone at this event is very enthusiastic about both the sailing and the proven capabilities for this club to run a great event.
An excellent effort by all of the competitors and we saw many lead changes throughout the regatta. Skiffs are always hard and this is a challenging race course, but never felt that it was too extreme. Gleeson and Furlong sailed a very tight regatta especially with having only two days of practice together in total. They focused on keeping the maneuvers simple while really sailing the boat hard throughout the event. They worked the waves when able, not slowing down while just keeping on the right side of control. Well done and the hard work put in certainly pays off! Terry and Footy were able to walk away with the very large William Randolph Hearst Perpetual Trophy that dates back to the 1940’s. That is a big one!
It is safe to say that the Australians will like this race course with the top 3 regatta finishers having a total of 4 Aussies between them. The US boats are getting plenty of breeze on practice and will get more before our big event next year. The race course is a big area with room for the RC to move the course if it gets lighter or heavier. We would expect that at Worlds we will see conditions like this, but also see some lighter air days maxing at 14-16 knots as well. The Worlds Organizing committee has been busy this last year+ putting the event together and from this regatta we can see that they will do a fantastic job.
We look forward to seeing you all at the 2018 I-14 Worlds!
– Terence Gleason.
Monterey regatta
Sailing...
From Sailing Anarchy
26 Mercs entered the 2017 championship regatta sponsored by the Monterey Peninsula YC. The forecast was for some sun and 8-10 knot breezes. The courses were to be windward leeward with some finishes on the wind and some downwind.
The first race was course 1, windward, gate, windward and downwind finish. Dave Morris with Jared January took of like a bolt of lighting and led the entire race until the last leg where David West with Chris Krueger passed him to go on to win the race and the Ray Johnson Perpetual Trophy. Mac Kilpatrick with Steve Jeppeson also got by Morris to place second. Morris got third followed by Chris Rabb with Kenny Dair. Fifth place was won by Marc and Liz Chandler.
Next race was windward leeward, twice around. The sea was building a pretty serious chop, mainly having an effect on the port tack. The fastest way to the weather mark was to go left get the smoother water and a better wind to go over or through the chop. Paul Cayard with Ken Maring had to work to get by John Ravizza with Randy Hecht. Cayard won the Park and Lynn Densmore Perpetual Trophy. Ravizza was second followed by Jim and Kathy Bradley in the third spot. Pat and Brendan Bradley were fourth followed by Rabb.
Race three was once around windward leeward, finishing on the wind. Coming off the starting line there was a more southerly shift. Kilpatrick took this port tack. It was also beneficial as the seas were little smaller lower on the course. He then tacked on a nice shift back to what was a nice lift. This starting maneuver off the start set him up to place first and win the Jenkins Perpetual Trophy. Raab was second followed by Cayard in third place. Jack McAleer with Brenden Selvig was fourth followed by John Hansen with Tony Basso in fifth place.
After the first day of racing, Rabb leads with 11 points. Kilpatrick was tied with Cayard with 14, West 17 and Jim Bradley 18.
Day two was offering a fresh north-westerly, at about 12 knots max, with the sun out. The sea had a small chop, more out by the weatherly mark. The same course was set up. Race four was the beginning of a day of determination for Pat Bradley. The course was a windward, leeward, windward, finishing downwind. Bradley controlled the race and won it, winning the Holden Sanford Perpetual Trophy. Ravizza was second, followed by Jim Bradley third, Hansen fourth and West fifth. There were several boat breakdowns creating dropouts. The breeze was showing some very southerly type shifts. The leading boats were doing a good job of recognizing the shifts.
Race five there was no holding Pat back, he and Brendan won the last time the Nationals were held in Monterey. They won the last race which tied them with Raab. Pat won the tie breaker and also won the John Koenig Perpetual Trophy. West was second, Rabb was third and Hansen fourth. Lyn Hines with Dave Bacci, sailing their first Nationals in there newly purchased Merc placed fifth.
Congratulations to Pat Bradley, who won the tie breaker for the Championship. However this was not his first tie for the big win. 1966 was his first Nationals win and it was a tie with Dick Thompson. This was an unbreakable tie by the racing rules at the time, both men were given credit.
Chris Raab was second in the tie breaker. David West was one point back placing third. John Ravizza, racing his recently purchased Merc won the fourth place. Jim Bradley was fifth in the final total. Cayard’s cherry picking adventure didn’t go so well, ending up 12th.
Jim and Kathy Bradley won the Jack and Jill Championship. Lyn Hines won the Silver Championship. Class President Park Densmore was second in the Silver group. John Mowry, back after many years with his fine merc, placed third in this group.
Many thanks to Debbie and David Morris for organizing the event. Jerry Stratton was excellent conducting the races organizing organizing his race committee which included past Merc National Champ, Mike Pokabla. The desk registration was done by by Bobbette Bradley and Judy Clark. Many thanks to the Monterey Peninsula YC for sponsoring this event. It worked out very well.
From Sailing Anarchy
26 Mercs entered the 2017 championship regatta sponsored by the Monterey Peninsula YC. The forecast was for some sun and 8-10 knot breezes. The courses were to be windward leeward with some finishes on the wind and some downwind.The first race was course 1, windward, gate, windward and downwind finish. Dave Morris with Jared January took of like a bolt of lighting and led the entire race until the last leg where David West with Chris Krueger passed him to go on to win the race and the Ray Johnson Perpetual Trophy. Mac Kilpatrick with Steve Jeppeson also got by Morris to place second. Morris got third followed by Chris Rabb with Kenny Dair. Fifth place was won by Marc and Liz Chandler.
Next race was windward leeward, twice around. The sea was building a pretty serious chop, mainly having an effect on the port tack. The fastest way to the weather mark was to go left get the smoother water and a better wind to go over or through the chop. Paul Cayard with Ken Maring had to work to get by John Ravizza with Randy Hecht. Cayard won the Park and Lynn Densmore Perpetual Trophy. Ravizza was second followed by Jim and Kathy Bradley in the third spot. Pat and Brendan Bradley were fourth followed by Rabb.
Race three was once around windward leeward, finishing on the wind. Coming off the starting line there was a more southerly shift. Kilpatrick took this port tack. It was also beneficial as the seas were little smaller lower on the course. He then tacked on a nice shift back to what was a nice lift. This starting maneuver off the start set him up to place first and win the Jenkins Perpetual Trophy. Raab was second followed by Cayard in third place. Jack McAleer with Brenden Selvig was fourth followed by John Hansen with Tony Basso in fifth place.
After the first day of racing, Rabb leads with 11 points. Kilpatrick was tied with Cayard with 14, West 17 and Jim Bradley 18.
Day two was offering a fresh north-westerly, at about 12 knots max, with the sun out. The sea had a small chop, more out by the weatherly mark. The same course was set up. Race four was the beginning of a day of determination for Pat Bradley. The course was a windward, leeward, windward, finishing downwind. Bradley controlled the race and won it, winning the Holden Sanford Perpetual Trophy. Ravizza was second, followed by Jim Bradley third, Hansen fourth and West fifth. There were several boat breakdowns creating dropouts. The breeze was showing some very southerly type shifts. The leading boats were doing a good job of recognizing the shifts.
Race five there was no holding Pat back, he and Brendan won the last time the Nationals were held in Monterey. They won the last race which tied them with Raab. Pat won the tie breaker and also won the John Koenig Perpetual Trophy. West was second, Rabb was third and Hansen fourth. Lyn Hines with Dave Bacci, sailing their first Nationals in there newly purchased Merc placed fifth.
Congratulations to Pat Bradley, who won the tie breaker for the Championship. However this was not his first tie for the big win. 1966 was his first Nationals win and it was a tie with Dick Thompson. This was an unbreakable tie by the racing rules at the time, both men were given credit.
Chris Raab was second in the tie breaker. David West was one point back placing third. John Ravizza, racing his recently purchased Merc won the fourth place. Jim Bradley was fifth in the final total. Cayard’s cherry picking adventure didn’t go so well, ending up 12th.
Jim and Kathy Bradley won the Jack and Jill Championship. Lyn Hines won the Silver Championship. Class President Park Densmore was second in the Silver group. John Mowry, back after many years with his fine merc, placed third in this group.
Many thanks to Debbie and David Morris for organizing the event. Jerry Stratton was excellent conducting the races organizing organizing his race committee which included past Merc National Champ, Mike Pokabla. The desk registration was done by by Bobbette Bradley and Judy Clark. Many thanks to the Monterey Peninsula YC for sponsoring this event. It worked out very well.
Harvey victims suffer more...
Trump gets do-over, comforts Harvey victims
The president returned to Texas to play the role of empathizer-in-chief, after being criticized for not meeting survivors on his first trip.
By MATTHEW NUSSBAUM
President Donald Trump on Saturday got up close and personal with the victims of Hurricane Harvey, picking up and kissing children, shaking hands, posing for pictures, handing out meals and offering words of comfort — seemingly pulling off a do-over after a stilted visit earlier this week.
Trump arrived in Houston Saturday morning for his second trip to Texas since the state was devastated by the storm, which has left the nation's fourth most-populous city flooded and littered a trail of damage across the eastern part of the state.
But unlike his previous visit, when Trump did not see any significant damage or meet with victims, Saturday's trip gave Trump a chance to play the role of empathizer-in-chief, a potentially uncomfortable fit for the former reality television star who generally eschews such encounters.
Still, Trump could not resist talking up his administration's response to the storm and commenting that the media coverage of his visit has been positive.
“They’re really happy with what’s going on," Trump told reporters of the storm victims he'd met with at the NRG Convention Center, which is serving as a major shelter in the city. "It’s something that’s been very well received, even by you guys it’s been very well received.”
And Trump said he wanted the people of Texas to know, in effect, that his administration is doing an effective job in responding to a disaster that has led more than 400,000 households to request housing assistance or repairs.
“The message is that things are working out well," Trump said. "Really, I think people appreciate what’s been done. It’s been done very efficiently, very well, and that’s what we want. We’re very happy with the way everything is going. A lot of love. There’s a lot of love.”
He also managed to get in some talk of his election victory — one of his favorite topics — with members of the military at the NRG Center. As Trump greeted a group of them, one remarked, "We voted for you."
“You better," Trump responded lightly. "Who didn’t in your world? Who didn’t?”
Trump was accompanied on the visit by First Lady Melania Trump, HUD Secretary Ben Carson and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Trump largely worked the room on his own. Socializing with groups of children in a dark rain jacket, he was quick to bend down and lift them in the air, or deliver a kiss on the forehead. The diverse crowd seemed buoyed by his visit, with a number of people walking up to him to pose for pictures.
Trump spent about 45 minutes at the shelter before departing for a meeting with members of Texas' congressional delegation. He traveled to Louisiana later on Saturday and met with some of the state's members of Congress and first responders.
The storm marks the first major natural disaster of Trump's administration, with a years-long recovery effort anticipated. Already the death toll from the storm is at 47, and it is expected to rise. The White House formally asked Congress Friday night for an immediate infusion of $7.85 billion of aid for the region, with another $6.7 billion likely to be needed by month’s end.
The administration's response has received generally positive reviews so far, and Trump appears to have escaped the type of political fallout that bedeviled President George W. Bush in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Still, Trump was met with criticism for not meeting with victims during his initial visit, after which he claimed to have seen the devastation "first hand." The White House said Trump avoided the worst-hit areas so as not to interfere with rescue and recovery efforts.
The president returned to Texas to play the role of empathizer-in-chief, after being criticized for not meeting survivors on his first trip.
By MATTHEW NUSSBAUM
President Donald Trump on Saturday got up close and personal with the victims of Hurricane Harvey, picking up and kissing children, shaking hands, posing for pictures, handing out meals and offering words of comfort — seemingly pulling off a do-over after a stilted visit earlier this week.
Trump arrived in Houston Saturday morning for his second trip to Texas since the state was devastated by the storm, which has left the nation's fourth most-populous city flooded and littered a trail of damage across the eastern part of the state.
But unlike his previous visit, when Trump did not see any significant damage or meet with victims, Saturday's trip gave Trump a chance to play the role of empathizer-in-chief, a potentially uncomfortable fit for the former reality television star who generally eschews such encounters.
Still, Trump could not resist talking up his administration's response to the storm and commenting that the media coverage of his visit has been positive.
“They’re really happy with what’s going on," Trump told reporters of the storm victims he'd met with at the NRG Convention Center, which is serving as a major shelter in the city. "It’s something that’s been very well received, even by you guys it’s been very well received.”
And Trump said he wanted the people of Texas to know, in effect, that his administration is doing an effective job in responding to a disaster that has led more than 400,000 households to request housing assistance or repairs.
“The message is that things are working out well," Trump said. "Really, I think people appreciate what’s been done. It’s been done very efficiently, very well, and that’s what we want. We’re very happy with the way everything is going. A lot of love. There’s a lot of love.”
He also managed to get in some talk of his election victory — one of his favorite topics — with members of the military at the NRG Center. As Trump greeted a group of them, one remarked, "We voted for you."
“You better," Trump responded lightly. "Who didn’t in your world? Who didn’t?”
Trump was accompanied on the visit by First Lady Melania Trump, HUD Secretary Ben Carson and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Trump largely worked the room on his own. Socializing with groups of children in a dark rain jacket, he was quick to bend down and lift them in the air, or deliver a kiss on the forehead. The diverse crowd seemed buoyed by his visit, with a number of people walking up to him to pose for pictures.
Trump spent about 45 minutes at the shelter before departing for a meeting with members of Texas' congressional delegation. He traveled to Louisiana later on Saturday and met with some of the state's members of Congress and first responders.
The storm marks the first major natural disaster of Trump's administration, with a years-long recovery effort anticipated. Already the death toll from the storm is at 47, and it is expected to rise. The White House formally asked Congress Friday night for an immediate infusion of $7.85 billion of aid for the region, with another $6.7 billion likely to be needed by month’s end.
The administration's response has received generally positive reviews so far, and Trump appears to have escaped the type of political fallout that bedeviled President George W. Bush in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Still, Trump was met with criticism for not meeting with victims during his initial visit, after which he claimed to have seen the devastation "first hand." The White House said Trump avoided the worst-hit areas so as not to interfere with rescue and recovery efforts.
Where do they find these freaks???
Mick the Knife
Meet Mick Mulvaney, who proudly calls himself a “right-wing nutjob” and is quietly—and radically—trying to dismantle the federal bureaucracy.
By MICHAEL GRUNWALD
Mick Mulvaney, President Donald Trump’s budget director, walked into the Oval Office in early May on a longshot mission. The slash-government conservative wanted to persuade the president to break one of his most popular campaign promises.
During his populist run for the White House, Trump had vowed to leave Social Security and Medicare alone. But Trump had also vowed to rein in America’s national debt, which Mulvaney didn’t think was possible without reining in the two biggest chunks of the federal budget. So Mick the Knife brought a cut list to his meeting in the Oval.
“Look, this is my idea on how to reform Social Security,” the former South Carolina congressman began.
“No!” the president replied. “I told people we wouldn’t do that. What’s next?”
“Well, here are some Medicare reforms,” Mulvaney said.
“No!” Trump repeated. “I’m not doing that.”
“OK, disability insurance.”
This was a clever twist. Mulvaney was talking about the Social Security Disability Insurance program, which, as its full name indicates, is part of Social Security. But Americans don’t tend to think of it as Social Security, and its 11 million beneficiaries are not the senior citizens who tend to support Trump.
“Tell me about that,” Trump replied.
“It’s welfare,” Mulvaney said.
“OK, we can fix welfare,” Trump declared.
Sure enough, the Trump budget plan that Mulvaney unveiled a few weeks later would cut about $70 billion in disability benefits over a decade, mostly through unspecified efforts to get recipients back to work. That may sound like welfare reform, but the program isn’t welfare for the poor; it’s insurance for workers who pay into Social Security through payroll taxes. The episode suggests Trump was either ignorant enough to get word-gamed into attacking a half-century-old guarantee for the disabled, or cynical enough to ditch his promise to protect spending when it didn’t benefit his base.
The story is also revealing about the source who told it on the record: Mulvaney himself, an ideological bomb-thrower from the congressional fringe who has become an influential player in the Trump administration. Republicans have said for years that government should only take people’s money to provide absolutely vital services, but Mulvaney truly believes it—and as the head of the powerful Office of Management and Budget, he’s got the perfect job to try to act on it. For all the focus on race, the Russia scandal and the president’s latest tweets, this administration’s lasting impact on American lives will likely depend much more on how often Mulvaney can push his conservative ideas into national policy.
In a White House where the president and most of his inner circle are new to government, Mulvaney is one of Trump’s few top domestic policy aides with any prior experience in how Washington works, and the disability story is just one example of how he uses that advantage to target Big Government generosity. At OMB, he gets to weigh in on almost everything the government does, and he’s driving the administration’s ambitious efforts to slash spending, kill regulations and reorganize the federal bureaucracy. He also has juice with the president, which is one reason Trump’s agenda has been much more rigidly conservative and partisan than many expected from an ideologically gelatinous former Democrat who ran as a flexible deal-maker. Mulvaney isn’t the only top White House aide pushing for less spending, less taxation and less regulation, but as he cheerfully points out: “I don’t think anyone in this administration is more of a right-wing conservative than I am.”
Yet it’s also notable that Mulvaney’s story featured Trump rejecting as well as embracing his spending-hawk advice—an unusual revelation in a city where pretending you always agreed with every decision is an indigenous art form. Mulvaney is candid about his role as a movement conservative advising a boss who isn’t one, what he calls “presenting the right-wing perspective” in a White House full of conflicting views. He readily acknowledges that Trump has shot down his limited-government proposals on issues ranging from war funding to the opioid crisis to the Export-Import Bank. It’s a risky message for any presidential aide; the last OMB director to air his differences this publicly, David Stockman, was famously “taken to the woodshed” for questioning President Ronald Reagan’s commitment to fiscal conservatism in a 1981 magazine article. But not only has Mulvaney avoided Trump’s crowded woodshed, he says he plans to keep pressing for Medicare and Social Security retirement reforms, even if Trump keeps shooting him down.
Mulvaney has gotten away with his heresy partly because Trump likes him and thinks he’s good on the Sunday shows, but partly because he always supports Trump’s final decisions—even decisions he would have trashed as a back-bencher in Congress. It’s quite a change for an intransigent provocateur who spent the past decade calling out his own party’s departures from conservative orthodoxy. Mulvaney launched his political career because he thought Republicans were spending too much in the George W. Bush era. He helped launch the hard-right House Freedom Caucus that tormented Republican leaders for compromising too much in the Barack Obama era. Now that he has moved inside the tent in the Trump era, some of his Freedom Caucus pals tease him about selling out his radical dreams.
But Mulvaney still harbors the same dreams of taming the federal leviathan. He just has a different job, conveniently located in the belly of the beast. In the past, he has questioned whether government should fund medical research or student loans, called Social Security a Ponzi scheme, proposed abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency and pushed repeatedly for government shutdowns. In his new gig, he has questioned whether government should fund Meals on Wheels or diabetes treatment for patients who “eat poorly,” called climate action “a waste of your money,” hinted that the Energy and Education departments might be unconstitutional, and suggested he would welcome another shutdown. He is still the same unapologetic ideologue who proposed naming the Freedom Caucus the Reasonable Nutjob Caucus, which gives a sense of his out-there politics, as well as his humor about his out-there politics.
Now he’s in there, and his transition from renegade to insider has not always been smooth. (“Renegade? How about visionary?” he quipped to me.) He was initially Trump’s point man on repealing Obamacare, but his role dwindled after he struggled to convince the Freedom Caucus that the House bill was conservative enough. “What have you done to our friend Mick Mulvaney?” one former colleague needled him. He was sidelined again after urging Republicans to demand spending reforms before raising the debt ceiling, his longstanding position in the House but an incendiary one in his new job; the White House hastily announced that it backed a conventional “clean bill.” Congressional leaders also froze out Mulvaney during its private negotiations over a 2017 budget bill, and ignored most of his public demands.
Still, Trump’s 2018 budget proposal is a very Mulvaney document, proposing radical rollbacks of popular programs, including more than $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, another entitlement Trump pledged to protect. So this fall’s budget negotiations could end up producing some very Mulvaney surgery to federal spending. Or they could produce a very Mulvaney stalemate that forces the government to shut down or even default on its obligations.
They could also end up extending the status quo. Mulvaney has learned from experience that change won’t come easily to Washington, and government won’t automatically shrink just because Republicans control it. In recent years, Tea Party ideals have achieved impressive electoral victories, but Mulvaney’s tenure will be a revealing test of whether they can achieve similar policy victories in the city they aim to conquer. But no matter what happens, as long as Mulvaney holds Washington’s most pivotal wonk job, he’ll get his say on every dollar, every regulation and every executive order—even if he doesn’t always get his way.
“My friends tell me, Mulvaney, you’re the hard-core right-winger, you’re dealing with a president who’s not on the same page all the time, you must be losing all the time,” he says. “I’m like, well, at least I’m losing at the very highest levels!”
***
Mulvaney has an amusing way of announcing his extremism. His first words to Trump’s top economic adviser, Gary Cohn, were: “Hi, I’m a right-wing nutjob!” (Cohn’s deadpan reply: “Hi, I’m Gary.”) At a meeting with OMB analysts, Mulvaney wryly described himself as a crazy reactionary. But he bristles a bit at stereotypes of Southern conservatives as knuckle-dragging backwoods Neanderthals, because he’s not that kind of reactionary. He comes off more like a 50-year-old Rotary Club suburbanite with triplets, a standing desk and an eight handicap, which he is. He studied abroad in Madrid. He drives a Miata. In the House, he represented the same homespun district Frank Underwood did in “House of Cards,” but his own house is in a Charlotte exurb, just barely over the South Carolina line.
“I like to accuse Mick of being from North Carolina,” jokes Congressman Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, his best friend in the House. Mulvaney is more in-your-face than most South Carolina pols; at one home-state prayer breakfast, he joked to the evangelical crowd that he didn’t know what the hell a Roman Catholic like him was doing there. “I call him Robitussin,” Gowdy says. “Doesn’t taste good at first, but good for you.”
His background is not backwoods. John Michael (Mick) Mulvaney was born inside the Beltway, in Alexandria, Virginia, then grew up around Charlotte, where his father became a prominent homebuilder. He attended a Catholic high school and Georgetown University, where he became president of the student body and, after a tip from his dad, an avid fan of a new talk-radio host named Rush Limbaugh. “I was one of the original Rush Babies!” he gushed recently on Limbaugh’s show.
Mulvaney was a star economics student in college—he earned an academic scholarship to law school—and during an interview he mentioned he still keeps Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in his office. But he suggests his worldview came less from books than from his parents, who were middle-class Roman Catholics, children of children of the Depression. He describes his Polish-American mother as a natural fiscal conservative who saved ketchup packets from McDonald’s and soy sauce from the family’s monthly Chinese dinners. “She probably still has them,” Mulvaney says. His Irish-American father, a former teacher, started a construction company and built it into a multimillion-dollar business.
Mulvaney was working for his dad’s firm in 2006 when he decided to run for the South Carolina state legislature, because he was tired of Republicans betraying conservative values. He had expected the Bush era to produce a small-government revolution, not a new entitlement for seniors to buy prescription drugs, a No Child Left Behind law increasing federal power over schools or an explosion of the deficit. He says when Jeb Bush called him in 2015 to seek his endorsement for president, he replied: “Governor, I got into politics because I didn’t like what your family was doing.” Instead, Mulvaney endorsed Rand Paul, another libertarian-leaning ideologue. At the time, he said he had a “very difficult time taking [Trump] seriously,” a stance he would reconsider.
While Mulvaney is a conviction politician, he’s also an ambitious politician. He spent only one term in the state assembly before moving up to the state senate in 2009, then promptly started running for the congressional seat he won in the Tea Party wave of 2010. He soon launched an unsuccessful bid to lead the conservative Republican Study Committee in the House in 2014. And he was considering a race for governor in 2018 before Trump’s victory, when he asked House Speaker Paul Ryan to recommend him for OMB.
Mulvaney never compiled much of a legislative record in the House. But he was an effective agitator. In 2011, he helped lead a group of Tea Party insurgents who threatened to block any increase in the debt limit unless Obama agreed to deep spending cuts, even though experts warned that failing to raise the limit would force the Treasury into default and trigger a global economic meltdown. The crisis Mulvaney helped create eventually did produce significant cuts through the so-called sequester. But it also produced a damaging downgrade of the U.S. credit rating, as well as a lasting rift between Republican firebrands and party leaders who didn’t want to pick apocalyptic fights they couldn’t win.
That rift drove fiscal battles for the rest of the Obama era, including the 2013 government shutdown. Mulvaney and other GOP rebels would refuse to back any budget bill that didn’t include draconian spending cuts along with conservative dreams like the repeal of Obamacare or the defunding of Planned Parenthood. House leaders, unable to pass partisan bills without the so-called Shutdown Caucus, would cut status-quo deals with Democrats that the rebels hated. Then the cycle would begin anew. “They wanted to throw a Hail Mary on every play,” grumbles Congressman Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican aligned with leadership. “They didn’t believe in forward progress.”
But Mulvaney didn’t see progress. He saw Republican leaders breaking promises to Tea Party voters. His campaign to take over the RSC in the House was his boldest protest, dedicated to the proposition that the group was too cozy with squishy House leaders. When he lost, he and several allies responded by starting the smaller, purer and more confrontational Freedom Caucus. Their rabble-rousing soon helped hassle House Speaker John Boehner into retirement.
Even though Mulvaney was in the thick of the rebellion, he was always considered among the more reasonable of the Reasonable Nutjobs. “Mick said a lot of ‘no,’ but he was always willing to explain how he could get to ‘yes,’” says Congressman Jim Jordan, the original leader of the Freedom Caucus. He was close with the new House leaders, Speaker Ryan and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy. He also worked with liberal Democrats like Barney Frank to push for accountability in military spending. He even hosted a town hall in Spanish where he supported a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants, which got him slammed by Breitbart News as Ryan’s “Amnesty Ally.” He could come off as brash and mouthy—the Robitussin thing—but he was mostly regarded as a rock-thrower with goals, not just a rock-thrower who enjoyed throwing rocks.
“Mick sometimes brought those Freedom Caucus guys back to reality,” says Al Simpson, his former chief of staff. “He’d say: ‘If we’re always telling leadership to fuck off, we’ll never get anything.’”
Frustrated with never getting anything, Mulvaney saw a potential escape route when Ryan agreed to call Vice President Mike Pence to recommend him for the OMB job. Sources say Trump first offered it to House Financial Services Chairman Jeb Hensarling, who suggested Mulvaney instead.
“He’s a principled conservative who actually knows what’s in the budget,” Hensarling said. “There are a finite number of those around here.”
Mulvaney’s confirmation hearings became a fierce partisan battle, partly because of his failure to pay $15,000 in Social Security taxes for a nanny, mostly because of his refusal to walk back his indelicate views—like his support for raising the retirement age to 70, or his belief that failing to raise the debt ceiling wouldn’t trigger a catastrophic default. He also faced blistering attacks from Republican Senator John McCain, who denounced his skepticism about Pentagon spending. In the end, every Senate Democrat voted against Mulvaney, but McCain was the only Republican to break ranks, so he was confirmed by a 51-49 margin.
Mulvaney made it clear at his hearings that his core convictions would not change, that he would give Trump “completely and brutally honest” advice. He says that after his job interview at Trump Tower, he asked strategist Steve Bannon whether Trump wanted a yes man, and Bannon assured him Trump wanted to hear dissenting opinions. In fact, Trump was hiring a bunch of conservatives with similar views, starting with Pence, who had led the RSC when it was almost as hard-edged as today’s Freedom Caucus. And several of Trump’s conservative Cabinet picks—including Scott Pruitt at EPA, Rick Perry at Energy and Betsy DeVos at Education—had expressed deep skepticism about their new departments, a promising sign for a budget director hoping to downsize them.
But in his testimony, Mulvaney also noted that representing the president would be different from representing 700,000 voters, and “that change could result in dramatically different action on my part.” His friend Gowdy, a longtime trial lawyer, says it’s like having a new client. Cole puts it more archly: When you take the king’s shilling, you become the king’s man.
Mulvaney’s friends wondered how he would adjust to being Trump’s man. The new president had promised no cuts for Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security, plus a huge boost for defense. That put three-fourths of federal spending off limits, which didn’t leave much room for Mulvaney to wield his ax. Congressman Mark Meadows of North Carolina, the current Freedom Caucus chair, says he asked Mulvaney how long he thought he would last before Trump fired him or killed him.
“It’s gotta be tough to carry water for a president who doesn’t believe what Mick believes,” says Congressman Jeff Duncan, another South Carolina Republican.
So far, though, Mulvaney is all in. He says Trump isn’t ideological, but is definitely skeptical, which gets him to similar policies. “His view that government can screw things up as much as fix things is real,” he says. Mulvaney also seems to get along with Trump’s other aides, who haven’t knifed him in the press the way they seem to delight in knifing one another.
He’s less popular inside his own agency. And he’s still having a hard time on Capitol Hill, where he’s fighting the same uphill battles he used to lose in the House.
***
The Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the exuberant Second Empire architectural marvel where OMB’s leaders work, sits next door to the White House, which makes it easy for a budget director to pop into meetings and stay in the loop. But successful directors also take advantage of OMB’s in-house staff of nearly 500 civil servants, some of Washington’s most knowledgeable bureaucrats. They have a powerful ethic of nonpartisan analysis—and since most other presidential aides lack staff, they can give their boss a leg up in West Wing debates.
That’s why the opening of Mulvaney’s first speech to his career staff seemed so shocking: “For starters, you should know that I’m not interested in anything you have to say. I know way more than any of you.”
Then he grinned: “Oh, crap, I was reading from Peter Orszag’s notes.”
It was a savvy starter joke. When Orszag was Obama’s first budget director, many staffers saw him as a dismissive know-it-all, and Mulvaney was signaling that he intended to show more respect for their analytical chops. OMB’s mission, he said, would be speaking truth to power, even when the numbers spoke inconvenient truths. He made a solid first impression, though some brows did furrow when he urged everyone to read The Art of the Deal.
Most OMB analysts are number-crunchers with advanced degrees, not exactly a Trump-friendly demographic, but they share Mulvaney’s goal of rooting out waste. He won some points internally when he persuaded Trump to propose killing several questionable programs that help Trump voters, like Essential Air Service subsidies for rural airports and the Appalachian Regional Commission for coal country. Agency sources said he also earned some credibility by winning a West Wing battle to limit the defense increases in Trump’s budget to $54 billion, still huge but smaller than the $100 billion bonanza that Bannon and some Pentagon officials had sought.
Still, several OMB analysts who didn’t want their names used say Mulvaney consults them without really listening to them, assigning them to war-game drastic cuts he has already decided on and then ignoring their analyses of the impacts. They feel like he is conscripting them into a partisan crusade to dismantle government, while trashing the technocratic norms he pledged to uphold.
“He’s a personable guy. He’s respectful when we see him,” says one OMB budget analyst. “But a lot of us feel nauseous about what he’s doing.”
What Mulvaney is doing is trying to revolutionize the way Washington spends money, judging programs from the perspective of the taxpayers who finance them instead of the recipients who benefit from them. More concretely, he is pushing to roll back funding for foreign aid, research, health care, transportation and almost everything else that doesn’t involve Trump’s priorities of defense and the border. His “America First” budget blueprint included $54 billion in cuts to offset the hike for the military, squeezing “non-defense discretionary spending” to its lowest level as a share of GDP since the Hoover administration. The budget would kill the National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Legal Services Corporation that provides attorneys for the poor, and dozens of other line items Mulvaney believes ordinary citizens shouldn’t have to pay for. He says he wrote the budget to reflect Trump’s promises, but even though Trump overruled him sometimes—preserving the National Office of Drug Control Policy, boosting a Pentagon war account Mulvaney sees as a slush fund—he did write the budget.
The analysts say it was always clear that Mulvaney wanted to mimic The Heritage Foundation’s conservative wish-list budget; his deputy, Russ Vought, is a Heritage veteran. What annoyed them were Mulvaney’s public suggestions that he was just targeting waste and duplication, as if shredding the EPA budget by a third and stripping $7.7 billion out of the National Institutes of Health would have no effect on the environment or medical research. They cringed when he argued without evidence that after-school programs were ineffective, and especially when he lashed out at the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, attacking the agency’s integrity and competence, sniping that “the day of the CBO” has probably “come and gone.” He even accused a midlevel CBO analyst of bias because she had served during the Clinton administration, even though she wasn’t a political appointee.
“That really rubbed people the wrong way,” another OMB staffer told me. “The CBO has the same kind of good-government analytic ethos that we do, and Mulvaney undercut it. It was like saying there’s no such thing as an honest broker.”
That’s been a consistent theme for Trump, who often blasts the “fake news” media, “so-called” judges and other independent challengers of his authority. Mulvaney’s staff frets that he is obliterating norms in a less bombastic way. For example, White House budgets have always relied on economic forecasts from the CBO, but Mulvaney tweaked his 10-year budget into balance by simply assuming steady 3 percent annual growth, a gimmick that generated trillions of dollars on paper. He also assumed a flood of new revenues through unspecified tax reforms, which many budget wonks flagged as a $2 trillion double-counting error. He defends those heroic assumptions as the essence of Trump’s pledge to Make America Great Again—Mulvaney coined the phrase MAGAnomics in a column about the necessity of 3 percent growth—but every administration wants higher growth, and every previous administration followed CBO’s assumptions.
“There’s been a lot of sighing and rolling of eyes,” says a third OMB analyst. “Presidents always play games with budgets, but never to this extent.”
Democratic critics have been predictably scathing, attacking Mulvaney as a cartoon villain cooking the books to shaft the hungry and the sick. Think tanks are churning out white papers about his unprecedented cuts to clean energy and other innovation funding, while trying to point out the abnormality of a budget director who believes blowing through the debt ceiling wouldn’t be a catastrophe.
Mulvaney hasn’t tried to push back through intense bipartisan outreach. “I’d be the Democrat to get outreach from Mick, and it hasn’t happened,” says Congressman John Yarmuth of Kentucky, who is the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee and also a Mulvaney golfing buddy. “He’s not the best guy to try to compromise with anyway. He’s as vicious a budget hawk as there is.”
A much bigger concern for Mulvaney is that congressional Republicans, especially appropriators, have been almost as scathing about his priorities, declaring the Trump budget dead on arrival even more emphatically than they usually declare presidential budgets dead on arrival. House Appropriations Committee Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen publicly called the NIH cuts “ridiculous.” Senator Susan Collins was overheard slamming the budget on a hot microphone while chairing a hearing: “No measurement, no thinking about it, no metrics, no nothing. It’s just incredibly irresponsible.” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, another Mulvaney golf buddy, warned that his 29 percent cut for the State Department would lead to “a lot of Benghazi situations.”
When Mulvaney met with top House appropriators, Cole confronted him over his plan to abolish low-income heating aid: “Do you want some poor 80-year-old widow to freeze to death?” Appropriators often defend appropriations, but Cole says it’s terrible politics as well as terrible policy to nickel-and-dime bipartisan priorities like pandemic defense and cancer research. “I respect Mick’s principles, but I don’t think these are things he understands deeply,” Cole told me.
Mulvaney says he’s just trying to disrupt budget culture to promote compassion for taxpayers as well as benefit-receivers. And he argues that adopting Democratic framing about the cruelty of cuts is futile politics for Republicans, since they’ll get tarred as mean and stingy no matter what. But he knows from experience that Congress is not an institution that welcomes disruption, and that politicians rarely get tossed out of office for putting extra spending on the national credit card. The danger from the blowback is not that Trump’s budget will get picked apart on Capitol Hill—all budgets do—but that it will be completely discarded.
That’s what happened this spring with the “omnibus” budget funding the last few months of fiscal year 2017. After Mulvaney sent Congress a hastily prepared list of spending cuts for agencies like NIH, Congress accepted none of them, and actually increased funding for NIH. He also publicly demanded money for Trump’s border wall, and when Democrats balked, he floated a compromise to fund Obamacare payments the Democrats wanted if they agreed to fund the wall. The final deal included the Obamacare payments but not the wall, and the media coverage portrayed it as a humiliating smackdown of the president.
The next morning, Trump called Mulvaney at home in a rage, asking why it sounded on his TV like the Democrats won. “It was a candid discussion at 6:30 a.m.,” Mulvaney gingerly recalls. He told Trump he would explain to the press that the White House did fine, securing some funding Trump wanted for the military and border security. In reality, OMB officials believed they had entered the talks too late to have much impact, but Mulvaney was worried that if he didn’t call out Democrats for spiking the football, Trump would veto the deal and create a crisis. Within hours, Trump unleashed his rage on Twitter, implicitly admitting the Democrats had preserved the Obama-era status quo and explicitly threatening to provoke a crisis in the fall: “Our country needs a good ‘shutdown’ in September to fix mess!”
Mulvaney tried to do cleanup with a media call, but it quickly degenerated into a viral-audio technical fiasco that Rachel Maddow replayed in its chaotic entirety on her show, featuring classical music and then smooth jazz drowning out confused questioners, as well as Mulvaney muttering: “This is gonna be a disaster.” He then held a news conference aimed at an audience of one, attacking Democrats for “trying to make it look like they pulled a fast one on the president,” declaring that “I just won’t stand for it, because it’s not true.” But he basically confirmed it was true, criticizing the deal as “business as usual,” warning that he would have “no problem” with a September shutdown if things didn’t change. Mulvaney also made the kind of nothing-to-see-here statement that can define an embattled White House: “We are competent, we know what we’re doing, and the country is safe in our hands.”
This was exactly the kind of kick-the-can-down-the-road deal Mulvaney had hated in the House. In fact, several of his former colleagues say he lobbied them to back it with exactly the kind of pragmatic arguments he scoffed at from House leaders: If this fails, the revised deal will be worse; you need to support the team; we’ll fight harder next time. When I asked Mulvaney if he would have voted for the deal in Congress, he didn’t answer, except to say he has a “different boss now,” and he “went into this eyes wide open,” essentially confirming how he would’ve voted.
Mulvaney has tried to be the kind of team player he never was in the House, staying on message without abandoning his principles. It’s tricky. Gowdy still remembers Congressman Mulvaney explaining to him why the Export-Import Bank was a boondoggle, so he was amused when Director Mulvaney urged him to reauthorize it. Similarly, on the debt ceiling, Mulvaney made the case against a clean bill, but he very publicly lost, so he says he’s “more than happy to defend the administration’s position.” Speaker Ryan called him on the golf course to razz him about his discovery that the perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of the good.
It’s jarring to hear an aide admit he disagreed with a president, especially a president as touchy about authority as Trump. But it can be seen as a validation of that authority, an unusually self-abasing proclamation that Trump calls the shots. “Mick makes it clear: This isn’t how I’d do it, but it’s how we’re doing it,” Gowdy says. “I never thought I’d use the words humility and Mulvaney in the same sentence, but it takes a certain humility.”
Mulvaney’s former Freedom Caucus colleagues don’t expect him to throw rocks anymore, but they considered the omnibus deal an ominous moment. For years, their leaders had told them they couldn’t expect radical budget changes when Republicans didn’t control Washington. Now Republicans controlled Washington, with their own guy on the inside, but the outcome seemed awfully familiar. “We thought the cavalry was coming. How can we still be funding Planned Parenthood and sanctuary cities?” Jim Jordan says.
Several Freedom Caucus members told me they’re worried that “New York”—their shorthand for Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner and Cohn, the advisers they associate with cosmopolitan liberalism—will end up marginalizing Mulvaney on fiscal issues. But he has assured them the White House will not let Congress dictate another status-quo result this fall, even it takes a government shutdown to get Trump’s priorities.
“This isn’t a unilateral disarmament team,” one official warned.
***
Shortly before the president left on his first overseas trip, Ivanka Trump walked next door to get a briefing from Mulvaney and his team. The 2018 budget was going to be released while her family was in Europe, and she had questions. “I’m sure she was worried that an extreme right-winger from South Carolina was about to make her dad look bad,” one administration official says.
Ivanka’s spokesman said her visit was purely informational. But while the “New York” formulation is exaggerated—and perhaps vaguely anti-Semitic—she is considered an internal voice for moderation, and her questions at the meeting did suggest concern that Mulvaney’s proposed cuts to refugee aid, civil rights enforcement and similar accounts would expose her father to charges of heartlessness. There was a long discussion of his cuts in famine aid, especially the elimination of the Food for Peace program that sends U.S. farm products abroad. Mulvaney says he argued that sending food is less efficient than sending cash, which is true; he also said the budget held emergency famine aid steady, though it sharply reduced global food aid. In any case, Ivanka’s office says she was satisfied, and Mulvaney didn’t revise anything.
“She had a natural reaction that a lot of people have, when you reduce spending on programs with wonderful names, people think you’re against that wonderful thing,” Mulvaney says. “What I did, not only with Ivanka but with everyone in the White House who had never been through a budget process, was walk her through it, and show her it’s not just that we hate kittens and puppies.”
White Houses worry about appearing anti-puppy. But even though Mulvaney’s inflammatory budget was released while Trump was away, the president hasn’t distanced himself from it. And there hasn’t been a torrent of leaks accusing Mulvaney of boxing in the president with doomed proposals for cuts to infrastructure, a top Trump priority, or the State Department, a top congressional priority. Mulvaney’s colleagues don’t even seem to mind his meanderings off the party line, even as they backstab one another in the press for alleged disloyalty.
“Mick has adapted to the president’s point of view, while trying to stay consistent to who he is,” Cohn says.
Mulvaney says the Trump White House is incorrectly perceived as chaotic because the president encourages debate. “Groupthink wouldn’t look chaotic, would it?” he asks. Mulvaney also argues that Trump’s helter-skelter approach to meetings has fostered a misleading impression that he’s clueless about policy. “He’ll bounce around to a bunch of different topics, so people will say, ‘Oh, he’s got a short attention span,’ or ‘Oh, he can’t follow the details,’” Mulvaney says. “I can assure you, the people who discount his ability to grasp the issues do so at their own peril.”
Perhaps, but Trump is still a first-time public servant, and so are aides like Ivanka, Kushner and Cohn. Mulvaney’s governing experience, while limited for a budget director, is immense compared with Trump’s top domestic advisers other than Pence. The president routinely calls him to the Oval Office to ask about numbers, as well as nonfiscal matters ranging from wetlands rules to House politics. “He realizes there’s a value to understanding the rhythm of Washington,” Mulvaney says.
So far, Trump has struggled to get things done in Washington. There’s been no health reform, no tax reform, no infrastructure bill. Hensarling mused to me that Thomas Jefferson said the ground of liberty is to be gained in inches, but these days it feels like millimeters. “It’s not going nearly as quickly as we had hoped, and the president is learning that it’s all going to be harder than he thought,” Mulvaney says. “That’s one of the great learning processes he’s gone through, how slow things move in D.C.”
The gridlock in Congress is only amplifying Mulvaney’s influence, because he can get things done at OMB without legislation. He’s overseeing a governmentwide effort to roll back the regulatory state that has already blocked 860 proposed Obama rules. He has also collected restructuring plans from every federal agency, the first step in a bold effort to scramble Washington’s org chart.
But Mulvaney’s next big test will be the budget. It isn’t clear how Congress can pass a spending plan that Trump would be willing to sign. Inertia is a powerful force, and so is the Senate filibuster; a major defense increase would require 60 votes, which would require a deal with Democrats, which would inspire the kind of Freedom Caucus resistance Mulvaney knows well. It’s not even clear whether Trump wants to get to yes, or if he’d prefer that “good shutdown” he tweeted about.
No matter how the budget is resolved, the national debt that Mulvaney loves to denounce is almost certain to keep growing. Most legislators enjoy spending more than cutting spending—and judging from the early maneuvering over tax reform, Republicans seem more eager to cut taxes than they are to end the loopholes and deductions necessary to avoid a new flood of red ink. Fiscal dessert remains more enticing than fiscal vegetables. But Mulvaney has been warning his White House colleagues that in the future, if they want to get serious about debt, they’ll have to get serious about Medicare and Social Security reforms.
Of course, that would require another chat with the president. Mulvaney says Trump listens to him a lot more closely than House leaders used to listen to the Freedom Caucus. But the federal government today is as vast as it was under Obama, and while he may derive some satisfaction from losing at the highest levels, Mulvaney would rather win. One belief he still shares with his fellow Big Government-bashers in the Freedom Caucus is that if Republicans don’t transform Washington now that they control it, voters will never trust them with power again.
“Look, Mick’s frustrated, we’re all frustrated, but at some point, we’ve got to get some stuff done,” Meadows says. “Otherwise, there will be a day of reckoning.”
Meet Mick Mulvaney, who proudly calls himself a “right-wing nutjob” and is quietly—and radically—trying to dismantle the federal bureaucracy.
By MICHAEL GRUNWALD
Mick Mulvaney, President Donald Trump’s budget director, walked into the Oval Office in early May on a longshot mission. The slash-government conservative wanted to persuade the president to break one of his most popular campaign promises.
During his populist run for the White House, Trump had vowed to leave Social Security and Medicare alone. But Trump had also vowed to rein in America’s national debt, which Mulvaney didn’t think was possible without reining in the two biggest chunks of the federal budget. So Mick the Knife brought a cut list to his meeting in the Oval.
“Look, this is my idea on how to reform Social Security,” the former South Carolina congressman began.
“No!” the president replied. “I told people we wouldn’t do that. What’s next?”
“Well, here are some Medicare reforms,” Mulvaney said.
“No!” Trump repeated. “I’m not doing that.”
“OK, disability insurance.”
This was a clever twist. Mulvaney was talking about the Social Security Disability Insurance program, which, as its full name indicates, is part of Social Security. But Americans don’t tend to think of it as Social Security, and its 11 million beneficiaries are not the senior citizens who tend to support Trump.
“Tell me about that,” Trump replied.
“It’s welfare,” Mulvaney said.
“OK, we can fix welfare,” Trump declared.
Sure enough, the Trump budget plan that Mulvaney unveiled a few weeks later would cut about $70 billion in disability benefits over a decade, mostly through unspecified efforts to get recipients back to work. That may sound like welfare reform, but the program isn’t welfare for the poor; it’s insurance for workers who pay into Social Security through payroll taxes. The episode suggests Trump was either ignorant enough to get word-gamed into attacking a half-century-old guarantee for the disabled, or cynical enough to ditch his promise to protect spending when it didn’t benefit his base.
The story is also revealing about the source who told it on the record: Mulvaney himself, an ideological bomb-thrower from the congressional fringe who has become an influential player in the Trump administration. Republicans have said for years that government should only take people’s money to provide absolutely vital services, but Mulvaney truly believes it—and as the head of the powerful Office of Management and Budget, he’s got the perfect job to try to act on it. For all the focus on race, the Russia scandal and the president’s latest tweets, this administration’s lasting impact on American lives will likely depend much more on how often Mulvaney can push his conservative ideas into national policy.
In a White House where the president and most of his inner circle are new to government, Mulvaney is one of Trump’s few top domestic policy aides with any prior experience in how Washington works, and the disability story is just one example of how he uses that advantage to target Big Government generosity. At OMB, he gets to weigh in on almost everything the government does, and he’s driving the administration’s ambitious efforts to slash spending, kill regulations and reorganize the federal bureaucracy. He also has juice with the president, which is one reason Trump’s agenda has been much more rigidly conservative and partisan than many expected from an ideologically gelatinous former Democrat who ran as a flexible deal-maker. Mulvaney isn’t the only top White House aide pushing for less spending, less taxation and less regulation, but as he cheerfully points out: “I don’t think anyone in this administration is more of a right-wing conservative than I am.”
Yet it’s also notable that Mulvaney’s story featured Trump rejecting as well as embracing his spending-hawk advice—an unusual revelation in a city where pretending you always agreed with every decision is an indigenous art form. Mulvaney is candid about his role as a movement conservative advising a boss who isn’t one, what he calls “presenting the right-wing perspective” in a White House full of conflicting views. He readily acknowledges that Trump has shot down his limited-government proposals on issues ranging from war funding to the opioid crisis to the Export-Import Bank. It’s a risky message for any presidential aide; the last OMB director to air his differences this publicly, David Stockman, was famously “taken to the woodshed” for questioning President Ronald Reagan’s commitment to fiscal conservatism in a 1981 magazine article. But not only has Mulvaney avoided Trump’s crowded woodshed, he says he plans to keep pressing for Medicare and Social Security retirement reforms, even if Trump keeps shooting him down.
Mulvaney has gotten away with his heresy partly because Trump likes him and thinks he’s good on the Sunday shows, but partly because he always supports Trump’s final decisions—even decisions he would have trashed as a back-bencher in Congress. It’s quite a change for an intransigent provocateur who spent the past decade calling out his own party’s departures from conservative orthodoxy. Mulvaney launched his political career because he thought Republicans were spending too much in the George W. Bush era. He helped launch the hard-right House Freedom Caucus that tormented Republican leaders for compromising too much in the Barack Obama era. Now that he has moved inside the tent in the Trump era, some of his Freedom Caucus pals tease him about selling out his radical dreams.
But Mulvaney still harbors the same dreams of taming the federal leviathan. He just has a different job, conveniently located in the belly of the beast. In the past, he has questioned whether government should fund medical research or student loans, called Social Security a Ponzi scheme, proposed abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency and pushed repeatedly for government shutdowns. In his new gig, he has questioned whether government should fund Meals on Wheels or diabetes treatment for patients who “eat poorly,” called climate action “a waste of your money,” hinted that the Energy and Education departments might be unconstitutional, and suggested he would welcome another shutdown. He is still the same unapologetic ideologue who proposed naming the Freedom Caucus the Reasonable Nutjob Caucus, which gives a sense of his out-there politics, as well as his humor about his out-there politics.
Now he’s in there, and his transition from renegade to insider has not always been smooth. (“Renegade? How about visionary?” he quipped to me.) He was initially Trump’s point man on repealing Obamacare, but his role dwindled after he struggled to convince the Freedom Caucus that the House bill was conservative enough. “What have you done to our friend Mick Mulvaney?” one former colleague needled him. He was sidelined again after urging Republicans to demand spending reforms before raising the debt ceiling, his longstanding position in the House but an incendiary one in his new job; the White House hastily announced that it backed a conventional “clean bill.” Congressional leaders also froze out Mulvaney during its private negotiations over a 2017 budget bill, and ignored most of his public demands.
Still, Trump’s 2018 budget proposal is a very Mulvaney document, proposing radical rollbacks of popular programs, including more than $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, another entitlement Trump pledged to protect. So this fall’s budget negotiations could end up producing some very Mulvaney surgery to federal spending. Or they could produce a very Mulvaney stalemate that forces the government to shut down or even default on its obligations.
They could also end up extending the status quo. Mulvaney has learned from experience that change won’t come easily to Washington, and government won’t automatically shrink just because Republicans control it. In recent years, Tea Party ideals have achieved impressive electoral victories, but Mulvaney’s tenure will be a revealing test of whether they can achieve similar policy victories in the city they aim to conquer. But no matter what happens, as long as Mulvaney holds Washington’s most pivotal wonk job, he’ll get his say on every dollar, every regulation and every executive order—even if he doesn’t always get his way.
“My friends tell me, Mulvaney, you’re the hard-core right-winger, you’re dealing with a president who’s not on the same page all the time, you must be losing all the time,” he says. “I’m like, well, at least I’m losing at the very highest levels!”
***
Mulvaney has an amusing way of announcing his extremism. His first words to Trump’s top economic adviser, Gary Cohn, were: “Hi, I’m a right-wing nutjob!” (Cohn’s deadpan reply: “Hi, I’m Gary.”) At a meeting with OMB analysts, Mulvaney wryly described himself as a crazy reactionary. But he bristles a bit at stereotypes of Southern conservatives as knuckle-dragging backwoods Neanderthals, because he’s not that kind of reactionary. He comes off more like a 50-year-old Rotary Club suburbanite with triplets, a standing desk and an eight handicap, which he is. He studied abroad in Madrid. He drives a Miata. In the House, he represented the same homespun district Frank Underwood did in “House of Cards,” but his own house is in a Charlotte exurb, just barely over the South Carolina line.
“I like to accuse Mick of being from North Carolina,” jokes Congressman Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, his best friend in the House. Mulvaney is more in-your-face than most South Carolina pols; at one home-state prayer breakfast, he joked to the evangelical crowd that he didn’t know what the hell a Roman Catholic like him was doing there. “I call him Robitussin,” Gowdy says. “Doesn’t taste good at first, but good for you.”
His background is not backwoods. John Michael (Mick) Mulvaney was born inside the Beltway, in Alexandria, Virginia, then grew up around Charlotte, where his father became a prominent homebuilder. He attended a Catholic high school and Georgetown University, where he became president of the student body and, after a tip from his dad, an avid fan of a new talk-radio host named Rush Limbaugh. “I was one of the original Rush Babies!” he gushed recently on Limbaugh’s show.
Mulvaney was a star economics student in college—he earned an academic scholarship to law school—and during an interview he mentioned he still keeps Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in his office. But he suggests his worldview came less from books than from his parents, who were middle-class Roman Catholics, children of children of the Depression. He describes his Polish-American mother as a natural fiscal conservative who saved ketchup packets from McDonald’s and soy sauce from the family’s monthly Chinese dinners. “She probably still has them,” Mulvaney says. His Irish-American father, a former teacher, started a construction company and built it into a multimillion-dollar business.
Mulvaney was working for his dad’s firm in 2006 when he decided to run for the South Carolina state legislature, because he was tired of Republicans betraying conservative values. He had expected the Bush era to produce a small-government revolution, not a new entitlement for seniors to buy prescription drugs, a No Child Left Behind law increasing federal power over schools or an explosion of the deficit. He says when Jeb Bush called him in 2015 to seek his endorsement for president, he replied: “Governor, I got into politics because I didn’t like what your family was doing.” Instead, Mulvaney endorsed Rand Paul, another libertarian-leaning ideologue. At the time, he said he had a “very difficult time taking [Trump] seriously,” a stance he would reconsider.
While Mulvaney is a conviction politician, he’s also an ambitious politician. He spent only one term in the state assembly before moving up to the state senate in 2009, then promptly started running for the congressional seat he won in the Tea Party wave of 2010. He soon launched an unsuccessful bid to lead the conservative Republican Study Committee in the House in 2014. And he was considering a race for governor in 2018 before Trump’s victory, when he asked House Speaker Paul Ryan to recommend him for OMB.
Mulvaney never compiled much of a legislative record in the House. But he was an effective agitator. In 2011, he helped lead a group of Tea Party insurgents who threatened to block any increase in the debt limit unless Obama agreed to deep spending cuts, even though experts warned that failing to raise the limit would force the Treasury into default and trigger a global economic meltdown. The crisis Mulvaney helped create eventually did produce significant cuts through the so-called sequester. But it also produced a damaging downgrade of the U.S. credit rating, as well as a lasting rift between Republican firebrands and party leaders who didn’t want to pick apocalyptic fights they couldn’t win.
That rift drove fiscal battles for the rest of the Obama era, including the 2013 government shutdown. Mulvaney and other GOP rebels would refuse to back any budget bill that didn’t include draconian spending cuts along with conservative dreams like the repeal of Obamacare or the defunding of Planned Parenthood. House leaders, unable to pass partisan bills without the so-called Shutdown Caucus, would cut status-quo deals with Democrats that the rebels hated. Then the cycle would begin anew. “They wanted to throw a Hail Mary on every play,” grumbles Congressman Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican aligned with leadership. “They didn’t believe in forward progress.”
But Mulvaney didn’t see progress. He saw Republican leaders breaking promises to Tea Party voters. His campaign to take over the RSC in the House was his boldest protest, dedicated to the proposition that the group was too cozy with squishy House leaders. When he lost, he and several allies responded by starting the smaller, purer and more confrontational Freedom Caucus. Their rabble-rousing soon helped hassle House Speaker John Boehner into retirement.
Even though Mulvaney was in the thick of the rebellion, he was always considered among the more reasonable of the Reasonable Nutjobs. “Mick said a lot of ‘no,’ but he was always willing to explain how he could get to ‘yes,’” says Congressman Jim Jordan, the original leader of the Freedom Caucus. He was close with the new House leaders, Speaker Ryan and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy. He also worked with liberal Democrats like Barney Frank to push for accountability in military spending. He even hosted a town hall in Spanish where he supported a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants, which got him slammed by Breitbart News as Ryan’s “Amnesty Ally.” He could come off as brash and mouthy—the Robitussin thing—but he was mostly regarded as a rock-thrower with goals, not just a rock-thrower who enjoyed throwing rocks.
“Mick sometimes brought those Freedom Caucus guys back to reality,” says Al Simpson, his former chief of staff. “He’d say: ‘If we’re always telling leadership to fuck off, we’ll never get anything.’”
Frustrated with never getting anything, Mulvaney saw a potential escape route when Ryan agreed to call Vice President Mike Pence to recommend him for the OMB job. Sources say Trump first offered it to House Financial Services Chairman Jeb Hensarling, who suggested Mulvaney instead.
“He’s a principled conservative who actually knows what’s in the budget,” Hensarling said. “There are a finite number of those around here.”
Mulvaney’s confirmation hearings became a fierce partisan battle, partly because of his failure to pay $15,000 in Social Security taxes for a nanny, mostly because of his refusal to walk back his indelicate views—like his support for raising the retirement age to 70, or his belief that failing to raise the debt ceiling wouldn’t trigger a catastrophic default. He also faced blistering attacks from Republican Senator John McCain, who denounced his skepticism about Pentagon spending. In the end, every Senate Democrat voted against Mulvaney, but McCain was the only Republican to break ranks, so he was confirmed by a 51-49 margin.
Mulvaney made it clear at his hearings that his core convictions would not change, that he would give Trump “completely and brutally honest” advice. He says that after his job interview at Trump Tower, he asked strategist Steve Bannon whether Trump wanted a yes man, and Bannon assured him Trump wanted to hear dissenting opinions. In fact, Trump was hiring a bunch of conservatives with similar views, starting with Pence, who had led the RSC when it was almost as hard-edged as today’s Freedom Caucus. And several of Trump’s conservative Cabinet picks—including Scott Pruitt at EPA, Rick Perry at Energy and Betsy DeVos at Education—had expressed deep skepticism about their new departments, a promising sign for a budget director hoping to downsize them.
But in his testimony, Mulvaney also noted that representing the president would be different from representing 700,000 voters, and “that change could result in dramatically different action on my part.” His friend Gowdy, a longtime trial lawyer, says it’s like having a new client. Cole puts it more archly: When you take the king’s shilling, you become the king’s man.
Mulvaney’s friends wondered how he would adjust to being Trump’s man. The new president had promised no cuts for Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security, plus a huge boost for defense. That put three-fourths of federal spending off limits, which didn’t leave much room for Mulvaney to wield his ax. Congressman Mark Meadows of North Carolina, the current Freedom Caucus chair, says he asked Mulvaney how long he thought he would last before Trump fired him or killed him.
“It’s gotta be tough to carry water for a president who doesn’t believe what Mick believes,” says Congressman Jeff Duncan, another South Carolina Republican.
So far, though, Mulvaney is all in. He says Trump isn’t ideological, but is definitely skeptical, which gets him to similar policies. “His view that government can screw things up as much as fix things is real,” he says. Mulvaney also seems to get along with Trump’s other aides, who haven’t knifed him in the press the way they seem to delight in knifing one another.
He’s less popular inside his own agency. And he’s still having a hard time on Capitol Hill, where he’s fighting the same uphill battles he used to lose in the House.
***
The Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the exuberant Second Empire architectural marvel where OMB’s leaders work, sits next door to the White House, which makes it easy for a budget director to pop into meetings and stay in the loop. But successful directors also take advantage of OMB’s in-house staff of nearly 500 civil servants, some of Washington’s most knowledgeable bureaucrats. They have a powerful ethic of nonpartisan analysis—and since most other presidential aides lack staff, they can give their boss a leg up in West Wing debates.
That’s why the opening of Mulvaney’s first speech to his career staff seemed so shocking: “For starters, you should know that I’m not interested in anything you have to say. I know way more than any of you.”
Then he grinned: “Oh, crap, I was reading from Peter Orszag’s notes.”
It was a savvy starter joke. When Orszag was Obama’s first budget director, many staffers saw him as a dismissive know-it-all, and Mulvaney was signaling that he intended to show more respect for their analytical chops. OMB’s mission, he said, would be speaking truth to power, even when the numbers spoke inconvenient truths. He made a solid first impression, though some brows did furrow when he urged everyone to read The Art of the Deal.
Most OMB analysts are number-crunchers with advanced degrees, not exactly a Trump-friendly demographic, but they share Mulvaney’s goal of rooting out waste. He won some points internally when he persuaded Trump to propose killing several questionable programs that help Trump voters, like Essential Air Service subsidies for rural airports and the Appalachian Regional Commission for coal country. Agency sources said he also earned some credibility by winning a West Wing battle to limit the defense increases in Trump’s budget to $54 billion, still huge but smaller than the $100 billion bonanza that Bannon and some Pentagon officials had sought.
Still, several OMB analysts who didn’t want their names used say Mulvaney consults them without really listening to them, assigning them to war-game drastic cuts he has already decided on and then ignoring their analyses of the impacts. They feel like he is conscripting them into a partisan crusade to dismantle government, while trashing the technocratic norms he pledged to uphold.
“He’s a personable guy. He’s respectful when we see him,” says one OMB budget analyst. “But a lot of us feel nauseous about what he’s doing.”
What Mulvaney is doing is trying to revolutionize the way Washington spends money, judging programs from the perspective of the taxpayers who finance them instead of the recipients who benefit from them. More concretely, he is pushing to roll back funding for foreign aid, research, health care, transportation and almost everything else that doesn’t involve Trump’s priorities of defense and the border. His “America First” budget blueprint included $54 billion in cuts to offset the hike for the military, squeezing “non-defense discretionary spending” to its lowest level as a share of GDP since the Hoover administration. The budget would kill the National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Legal Services Corporation that provides attorneys for the poor, and dozens of other line items Mulvaney believes ordinary citizens shouldn’t have to pay for. He says he wrote the budget to reflect Trump’s promises, but even though Trump overruled him sometimes—preserving the National Office of Drug Control Policy, boosting a Pentagon war account Mulvaney sees as a slush fund—he did write the budget.
The analysts say it was always clear that Mulvaney wanted to mimic The Heritage Foundation’s conservative wish-list budget; his deputy, Russ Vought, is a Heritage veteran. What annoyed them were Mulvaney’s public suggestions that he was just targeting waste and duplication, as if shredding the EPA budget by a third and stripping $7.7 billion out of the National Institutes of Health would have no effect on the environment or medical research. They cringed when he argued without evidence that after-school programs were ineffective, and especially when he lashed out at the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, attacking the agency’s integrity and competence, sniping that “the day of the CBO” has probably “come and gone.” He even accused a midlevel CBO analyst of bias because she had served during the Clinton administration, even though she wasn’t a political appointee.
“That really rubbed people the wrong way,” another OMB staffer told me. “The CBO has the same kind of good-government analytic ethos that we do, and Mulvaney undercut it. It was like saying there’s no such thing as an honest broker.”
That’s been a consistent theme for Trump, who often blasts the “fake news” media, “so-called” judges and other independent challengers of his authority. Mulvaney’s staff frets that he is obliterating norms in a less bombastic way. For example, White House budgets have always relied on economic forecasts from the CBO, but Mulvaney tweaked his 10-year budget into balance by simply assuming steady 3 percent annual growth, a gimmick that generated trillions of dollars on paper. He also assumed a flood of new revenues through unspecified tax reforms, which many budget wonks flagged as a $2 trillion double-counting error. He defends those heroic assumptions as the essence of Trump’s pledge to Make America Great Again—Mulvaney coined the phrase MAGAnomics in a column about the necessity of 3 percent growth—but every administration wants higher growth, and every previous administration followed CBO’s assumptions.
“There’s been a lot of sighing and rolling of eyes,” says a third OMB analyst. “Presidents always play games with budgets, but never to this extent.”
Democratic critics have been predictably scathing, attacking Mulvaney as a cartoon villain cooking the books to shaft the hungry and the sick. Think tanks are churning out white papers about his unprecedented cuts to clean energy and other innovation funding, while trying to point out the abnormality of a budget director who believes blowing through the debt ceiling wouldn’t be a catastrophe.
Mulvaney hasn’t tried to push back through intense bipartisan outreach. “I’d be the Democrat to get outreach from Mick, and it hasn’t happened,” says Congressman John Yarmuth of Kentucky, who is the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee and also a Mulvaney golfing buddy. “He’s not the best guy to try to compromise with anyway. He’s as vicious a budget hawk as there is.”
A much bigger concern for Mulvaney is that congressional Republicans, especially appropriators, have been almost as scathing about his priorities, declaring the Trump budget dead on arrival even more emphatically than they usually declare presidential budgets dead on arrival. House Appropriations Committee Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen publicly called the NIH cuts “ridiculous.” Senator Susan Collins was overheard slamming the budget on a hot microphone while chairing a hearing: “No measurement, no thinking about it, no metrics, no nothing. It’s just incredibly irresponsible.” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, another Mulvaney golf buddy, warned that his 29 percent cut for the State Department would lead to “a lot of Benghazi situations.”
When Mulvaney met with top House appropriators, Cole confronted him over his plan to abolish low-income heating aid: “Do you want some poor 80-year-old widow to freeze to death?” Appropriators often defend appropriations, but Cole says it’s terrible politics as well as terrible policy to nickel-and-dime bipartisan priorities like pandemic defense and cancer research. “I respect Mick’s principles, but I don’t think these are things he understands deeply,” Cole told me.
Mulvaney says he’s just trying to disrupt budget culture to promote compassion for taxpayers as well as benefit-receivers. And he argues that adopting Democratic framing about the cruelty of cuts is futile politics for Republicans, since they’ll get tarred as mean and stingy no matter what. But he knows from experience that Congress is not an institution that welcomes disruption, and that politicians rarely get tossed out of office for putting extra spending on the national credit card. The danger from the blowback is not that Trump’s budget will get picked apart on Capitol Hill—all budgets do—but that it will be completely discarded.
That’s what happened this spring with the “omnibus” budget funding the last few months of fiscal year 2017. After Mulvaney sent Congress a hastily prepared list of spending cuts for agencies like NIH, Congress accepted none of them, and actually increased funding for NIH. He also publicly demanded money for Trump’s border wall, and when Democrats balked, he floated a compromise to fund Obamacare payments the Democrats wanted if they agreed to fund the wall. The final deal included the Obamacare payments but not the wall, and the media coverage portrayed it as a humiliating smackdown of the president.
The next morning, Trump called Mulvaney at home in a rage, asking why it sounded on his TV like the Democrats won. “It was a candid discussion at 6:30 a.m.,” Mulvaney gingerly recalls. He told Trump he would explain to the press that the White House did fine, securing some funding Trump wanted for the military and border security. In reality, OMB officials believed they had entered the talks too late to have much impact, but Mulvaney was worried that if he didn’t call out Democrats for spiking the football, Trump would veto the deal and create a crisis. Within hours, Trump unleashed his rage on Twitter, implicitly admitting the Democrats had preserved the Obama-era status quo and explicitly threatening to provoke a crisis in the fall: “Our country needs a good ‘shutdown’ in September to fix mess!”
Mulvaney tried to do cleanup with a media call, but it quickly degenerated into a viral-audio technical fiasco that Rachel Maddow replayed in its chaotic entirety on her show, featuring classical music and then smooth jazz drowning out confused questioners, as well as Mulvaney muttering: “This is gonna be a disaster.” He then held a news conference aimed at an audience of one, attacking Democrats for “trying to make it look like they pulled a fast one on the president,” declaring that “I just won’t stand for it, because it’s not true.” But he basically confirmed it was true, criticizing the deal as “business as usual,” warning that he would have “no problem” with a September shutdown if things didn’t change. Mulvaney also made the kind of nothing-to-see-here statement that can define an embattled White House: “We are competent, we know what we’re doing, and the country is safe in our hands.”
This was exactly the kind of kick-the-can-down-the-road deal Mulvaney had hated in the House. In fact, several of his former colleagues say he lobbied them to back it with exactly the kind of pragmatic arguments he scoffed at from House leaders: If this fails, the revised deal will be worse; you need to support the team; we’ll fight harder next time. When I asked Mulvaney if he would have voted for the deal in Congress, he didn’t answer, except to say he has a “different boss now,” and he “went into this eyes wide open,” essentially confirming how he would’ve voted.
Mulvaney has tried to be the kind of team player he never was in the House, staying on message without abandoning his principles. It’s tricky. Gowdy still remembers Congressman Mulvaney explaining to him why the Export-Import Bank was a boondoggle, so he was amused when Director Mulvaney urged him to reauthorize it. Similarly, on the debt ceiling, Mulvaney made the case against a clean bill, but he very publicly lost, so he says he’s “more than happy to defend the administration’s position.” Speaker Ryan called him on the golf course to razz him about his discovery that the perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of the good.
It’s jarring to hear an aide admit he disagreed with a president, especially a president as touchy about authority as Trump. But it can be seen as a validation of that authority, an unusually self-abasing proclamation that Trump calls the shots. “Mick makes it clear: This isn’t how I’d do it, but it’s how we’re doing it,” Gowdy says. “I never thought I’d use the words humility and Mulvaney in the same sentence, but it takes a certain humility.”
Mulvaney’s former Freedom Caucus colleagues don’t expect him to throw rocks anymore, but they considered the omnibus deal an ominous moment. For years, their leaders had told them they couldn’t expect radical budget changes when Republicans didn’t control Washington. Now Republicans controlled Washington, with their own guy on the inside, but the outcome seemed awfully familiar. “We thought the cavalry was coming. How can we still be funding Planned Parenthood and sanctuary cities?” Jim Jordan says.
Several Freedom Caucus members told me they’re worried that “New York”—their shorthand for Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner and Cohn, the advisers they associate with cosmopolitan liberalism—will end up marginalizing Mulvaney on fiscal issues. But he has assured them the White House will not let Congress dictate another status-quo result this fall, even it takes a government shutdown to get Trump’s priorities.
“This isn’t a unilateral disarmament team,” one official warned.
***
Shortly before the president left on his first overseas trip, Ivanka Trump walked next door to get a briefing from Mulvaney and his team. The 2018 budget was going to be released while her family was in Europe, and she had questions. “I’m sure she was worried that an extreme right-winger from South Carolina was about to make her dad look bad,” one administration official says.
Ivanka’s spokesman said her visit was purely informational. But while the “New York” formulation is exaggerated—and perhaps vaguely anti-Semitic—she is considered an internal voice for moderation, and her questions at the meeting did suggest concern that Mulvaney’s proposed cuts to refugee aid, civil rights enforcement and similar accounts would expose her father to charges of heartlessness. There was a long discussion of his cuts in famine aid, especially the elimination of the Food for Peace program that sends U.S. farm products abroad. Mulvaney says he argued that sending food is less efficient than sending cash, which is true; he also said the budget held emergency famine aid steady, though it sharply reduced global food aid. In any case, Ivanka’s office says she was satisfied, and Mulvaney didn’t revise anything.
“She had a natural reaction that a lot of people have, when you reduce spending on programs with wonderful names, people think you’re against that wonderful thing,” Mulvaney says. “What I did, not only with Ivanka but with everyone in the White House who had never been through a budget process, was walk her through it, and show her it’s not just that we hate kittens and puppies.”
White Houses worry about appearing anti-puppy. But even though Mulvaney’s inflammatory budget was released while Trump was away, the president hasn’t distanced himself from it. And there hasn’t been a torrent of leaks accusing Mulvaney of boxing in the president with doomed proposals for cuts to infrastructure, a top Trump priority, or the State Department, a top congressional priority. Mulvaney’s colleagues don’t even seem to mind his meanderings off the party line, even as they backstab one another in the press for alleged disloyalty.
“Mick has adapted to the president’s point of view, while trying to stay consistent to who he is,” Cohn says.
Mulvaney says the Trump White House is incorrectly perceived as chaotic because the president encourages debate. “Groupthink wouldn’t look chaotic, would it?” he asks. Mulvaney also argues that Trump’s helter-skelter approach to meetings has fostered a misleading impression that he’s clueless about policy. “He’ll bounce around to a bunch of different topics, so people will say, ‘Oh, he’s got a short attention span,’ or ‘Oh, he can’t follow the details,’” Mulvaney says. “I can assure you, the people who discount his ability to grasp the issues do so at their own peril.”
Perhaps, but Trump is still a first-time public servant, and so are aides like Ivanka, Kushner and Cohn. Mulvaney’s governing experience, while limited for a budget director, is immense compared with Trump’s top domestic advisers other than Pence. The president routinely calls him to the Oval Office to ask about numbers, as well as nonfiscal matters ranging from wetlands rules to House politics. “He realizes there’s a value to understanding the rhythm of Washington,” Mulvaney says.
So far, Trump has struggled to get things done in Washington. There’s been no health reform, no tax reform, no infrastructure bill. Hensarling mused to me that Thomas Jefferson said the ground of liberty is to be gained in inches, but these days it feels like millimeters. “It’s not going nearly as quickly as we had hoped, and the president is learning that it’s all going to be harder than he thought,” Mulvaney says. “That’s one of the great learning processes he’s gone through, how slow things move in D.C.”
The gridlock in Congress is only amplifying Mulvaney’s influence, because he can get things done at OMB without legislation. He’s overseeing a governmentwide effort to roll back the regulatory state that has already blocked 860 proposed Obama rules. He has also collected restructuring plans from every federal agency, the first step in a bold effort to scramble Washington’s org chart.
But Mulvaney’s next big test will be the budget. It isn’t clear how Congress can pass a spending plan that Trump would be willing to sign. Inertia is a powerful force, and so is the Senate filibuster; a major defense increase would require 60 votes, which would require a deal with Democrats, which would inspire the kind of Freedom Caucus resistance Mulvaney knows well. It’s not even clear whether Trump wants to get to yes, or if he’d prefer that “good shutdown” he tweeted about.
No matter how the budget is resolved, the national debt that Mulvaney loves to denounce is almost certain to keep growing. Most legislators enjoy spending more than cutting spending—and judging from the early maneuvering over tax reform, Republicans seem more eager to cut taxes than they are to end the loopholes and deductions necessary to avoid a new flood of red ink. Fiscal dessert remains more enticing than fiscal vegetables. But Mulvaney has been warning his White House colleagues that in the future, if they want to get serious about debt, they’ll have to get serious about Medicare and Social Security reforms.
Of course, that would require another chat with the president. Mulvaney says Trump listens to him a lot more closely than House leaders used to listen to the Freedom Caucus. But the federal government today is as vast as it was under Obama, and while he may derive some satisfaction from losing at the highest levels, Mulvaney would rather win. One belief he still shares with his fellow Big Government-bashers in the Freedom Caucus is that if Republicans don’t transform Washington now that they control it, voters will never trust them with power again.
“Look, Mick’s frustrated, we’re all frustrated, but at some point, we’ve got to get some stuff done,” Meadows says. “Otherwise, there will be a day of reckoning.”
Expertise
How We Killed Expertise
(And why we need it back.)
By TOM NICHOLS
Average Americans have never much liked eggheads. That’s not a bad thing in itself: Americans are a skeptical but level-headed people—or were until recently—whose common sense and ingenuity allowed their nation to achieve great heights in science, diplomacy and the arts, while never displacing the ordinary voter as the deciding voice in affairs of state.
But recently skepticism has curdled into something more toxic, even dangerous. Donald Trump explicitly campaigned against experts, calling them “terrible” and saying he didn’t need them. As president, he seems determined to prove that experts are unnecessary to the running of a superpower—winging important conversations with foreign leaders, issuing an executive order without advice from his own Cabinet and picking a radio talk-show host with no background in science or agriculture for the top science position in the Department of Agriculture.
In the far less grand homes of ordinary American families, knowledge of every kind is also under attack. Parents argue with their child’s doctor over the safety of vaccines. Famous athletes speculate that the world might actually be flat. College administrators ponder dropping algebra from the curriculum because students keep failing it. This is all immensely dangerous, not only to the well-being of individual citizens, but to the survival of the United States as a republic.
How all this happened, and why it threatens our democracy, is a complicated story. Even Alexis de Tocqueville took note of the American distrust of intellectuals in the 19th century, and it only deepened with the social and political traumas of the 1960s and 1970s. Since then, globalization and technological advances have created a gulf between people with enough knowledge and education to cope with these changes, and people who feel threatened and left behind in the new world of the 21st century.
As a result, the implicit social contract between educated elites and laypeople—in which professionals were rewarded for their expertise and, in turn, were expected to spread the benefits of their knowledge—is fraying. Americans live increasingly separate lives based on education and wealth, part of a decades-long “big sort.” What is qualitatively different today is that ordinary citizens seem increasingly confident in their views, but no more competent than they were 30 or 40 years ago. A significant number of laypeople now believe, for no reason but self-affirmation, that they know better than experts in almost every field. They have come to this conclusion after being coddled in classrooms from kindergarten through college, continually assured by infotainment personalities in increasingly segmented media that popular views, no matter how nutty, are virtuous and right, and mesmerized by an internet that tells them exactly what they want to hear, no matter how ridiculous the question.
It is easy to dismiss hostility toward experts as a function of a poor education, but that’s inaccurate. The affluent, educated parents of Marin County in California, after all, led the way on the anti-vaccine madness. “Dilbert” cartoonist Scott Adams, who holds an MBA, has a large audience for his attacks on experts, including his astonishing claim that there’s nothing a president can’t master in a conversation with a specialist in an hour. Narcissism and know-nothingism are not afflictions found only among a few disgruntled high-school dropouts in the heartland. They are endemic across the country, exacerbated over the past half-century by affluence, technology, a permanent youth culture—and, above all, politics: academic postmodernism and fashionable relativism on the left, and the anti-intellectualism of certain evangelical strains and a long history of populist skullduggery on the right.
Voters say they reject expertise because experts—whom they think of as indistinguishable from governing elites—have failed them. “Americans might look back on the last 50 years and say, ‘What have experts done for us lately?’” one USA Today columnist recently wrote, without irony. Somehow, such critics missed the successful conclusion of the Cold War, the abundance of food to the point that we subsidize farmers, the creation of medicines that have extended human life, automobiles that are safer and more efficient than ever, and even the expert-driven victories of the previously hopeless Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs. Experts, in this distorted telling, have managed only to impoverish and exploit ordinary Americans; anything that has benefited others apparently happened only by mere chance.
This mythology was central to Trump’s 2016 victory. The experts, voters were told, waged wars they didn’t know how to win, signed trade deals that depopulated America’s towns and unleashed a plague of terrorism. Trump adviser Steve Bannon even required new White House staff to read The Best and the Brightest, the landmark study of the origins of the Vietnam War, as a cautionary tale about intellectual pinheads who rammed the United States into a ditch in Southeast Asia. But Bannon, like so many others, misunderstood the book’s message, which was not about the domination of experts, but rather about what happens when experts are ignored. Before and during the debacle in Vietnam, actual experts on Asia and other subjects were pushed aside, often by people who thought their own intelligence and professional success in other endeavors (running a car company, for example) made them more capable. Bannon is right that the book is a cautionary tale—but one mostly about people like Steve Bannon.
Sure, there’s truth even in the stereotypes about the educated classes. They do, in fact, run the day-to-day affairs of the nation, and often in ways that voters would not approve if they understood them. Nor are the experts blameless; their track records are full of mistakes, some of great consequence. Worse, because experts tend to speak mostly to one another, they often display a lack of empathy with those who do not understand them or their specialized jargon. They barely veil their pleasure at the distance, both physical and intellectual, they enjoy from laypeople. And they too easily fall prey to the arrogance of believing that their expertise in one subject can be applied to almost any issue—especially if there’s a healthy paycheck involved.
The cure for these transgressions, however, is not to replace expertise with ignorance: It is to replace it with better expertise. If complaints about experts were meant to restore a balance between experts and laypeople, experts would be the first to support it. But this requires voters to be at least modestly informed, not simply convinced they are automatically right. And as it stands now, attacks on expertise often amount to a demand from ordinary citizens—sometimes encouraged by politicians and hucksters—that their views, no matter how contradictory or hazardous, be considered equal to those of the most experienced expert.
No country, and especially not a republic based on delegated powers, can maintain the values and practices that sustain democracy when voters remain ignorant about their own system of government. When most Americans think a quarter of the U.S. federal budget is devoted to foreign aid, when more than 70 percent of them cannot name all three branches of government—and nearly a third can’t name even one—the basic structures of American democracy cannot survive.
The Founding Fathers believed that civic virtue was built on education and knowledge. In a republic, citizens need not be experts, but they must learn enough to cast an informed vote. Or, in the words of James Madison: “A people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” If Americans do not rediscover this foundational truth about their own system of government, they not only court disasters from pandemics to wars; they risk ceding their government either to the corruption of a mindless mob—or, in the wake of a disaster, to a new class of technocrats who will never again risk asking for their vote.
(And why we need it back.)
By TOM NICHOLS
Average Americans have never much liked eggheads. That’s not a bad thing in itself: Americans are a skeptical but level-headed people—or were until recently—whose common sense and ingenuity allowed their nation to achieve great heights in science, diplomacy and the arts, while never displacing the ordinary voter as the deciding voice in affairs of state.
But recently skepticism has curdled into something more toxic, even dangerous. Donald Trump explicitly campaigned against experts, calling them “terrible” and saying he didn’t need them. As president, he seems determined to prove that experts are unnecessary to the running of a superpower—winging important conversations with foreign leaders, issuing an executive order without advice from his own Cabinet and picking a radio talk-show host with no background in science or agriculture for the top science position in the Department of Agriculture.
In the far less grand homes of ordinary American families, knowledge of every kind is also under attack. Parents argue with their child’s doctor over the safety of vaccines. Famous athletes speculate that the world might actually be flat. College administrators ponder dropping algebra from the curriculum because students keep failing it. This is all immensely dangerous, not only to the well-being of individual citizens, but to the survival of the United States as a republic.
How all this happened, and why it threatens our democracy, is a complicated story. Even Alexis de Tocqueville took note of the American distrust of intellectuals in the 19th century, and it only deepened with the social and political traumas of the 1960s and 1970s. Since then, globalization and technological advances have created a gulf between people with enough knowledge and education to cope with these changes, and people who feel threatened and left behind in the new world of the 21st century.
As a result, the implicit social contract between educated elites and laypeople—in which professionals were rewarded for their expertise and, in turn, were expected to spread the benefits of their knowledge—is fraying. Americans live increasingly separate lives based on education and wealth, part of a decades-long “big sort.” What is qualitatively different today is that ordinary citizens seem increasingly confident in their views, but no more competent than they were 30 or 40 years ago. A significant number of laypeople now believe, for no reason but self-affirmation, that they know better than experts in almost every field. They have come to this conclusion after being coddled in classrooms from kindergarten through college, continually assured by infotainment personalities in increasingly segmented media that popular views, no matter how nutty, are virtuous and right, and mesmerized by an internet that tells them exactly what they want to hear, no matter how ridiculous the question.
It is easy to dismiss hostility toward experts as a function of a poor education, but that’s inaccurate. The affluent, educated parents of Marin County in California, after all, led the way on the anti-vaccine madness. “Dilbert” cartoonist Scott Adams, who holds an MBA, has a large audience for his attacks on experts, including his astonishing claim that there’s nothing a president can’t master in a conversation with a specialist in an hour. Narcissism and know-nothingism are not afflictions found only among a few disgruntled high-school dropouts in the heartland. They are endemic across the country, exacerbated over the past half-century by affluence, technology, a permanent youth culture—and, above all, politics: academic postmodernism and fashionable relativism on the left, and the anti-intellectualism of certain evangelical strains and a long history of populist skullduggery on the right.
Voters say they reject expertise because experts—whom they think of as indistinguishable from governing elites—have failed them. “Americans might look back on the last 50 years and say, ‘What have experts done for us lately?’” one USA Today columnist recently wrote, without irony. Somehow, such critics missed the successful conclusion of the Cold War, the abundance of food to the point that we subsidize farmers, the creation of medicines that have extended human life, automobiles that are safer and more efficient than ever, and even the expert-driven victories of the previously hopeless Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs. Experts, in this distorted telling, have managed only to impoverish and exploit ordinary Americans; anything that has benefited others apparently happened only by mere chance.
This mythology was central to Trump’s 2016 victory. The experts, voters were told, waged wars they didn’t know how to win, signed trade deals that depopulated America’s towns and unleashed a plague of terrorism. Trump adviser Steve Bannon even required new White House staff to read The Best and the Brightest, the landmark study of the origins of the Vietnam War, as a cautionary tale about intellectual pinheads who rammed the United States into a ditch in Southeast Asia. But Bannon, like so many others, misunderstood the book’s message, which was not about the domination of experts, but rather about what happens when experts are ignored. Before and during the debacle in Vietnam, actual experts on Asia and other subjects were pushed aside, often by people who thought their own intelligence and professional success in other endeavors (running a car company, for example) made them more capable. Bannon is right that the book is a cautionary tale—but one mostly about people like Steve Bannon.
Sure, there’s truth even in the stereotypes about the educated classes. They do, in fact, run the day-to-day affairs of the nation, and often in ways that voters would not approve if they understood them. Nor are the experts blameless; their track records are full of mistakes, some of great consequence. Worse, because experts tend to speak mostly to one another, they often display a lack of empathy with those who do not understand them or their specialized jargon. They barely veil their pleasure at the distance, both physical and intellectual, they enjoy from laypeople. And they too easily fall prey to the arrogance of believing that their expertise in one subject can be applied to almost any issue—especially if there’s a healthy paycheck involved.
The cure for these transgressions, however, is not to replace expertise with ignorance: It is to replace it with better expertise. If complaints about experts were meant to restore a balance between experts and laypeople, experts would be the first to support it. But this requires voters to be at least modestly informed, not simply convinced they are automatically right. And as it stands now, attacks on expertise often amount to a demand from ordinary citizens—sometimes encouraged by politicians and hucksters—that their views, no matter how contradictory or hazardous, be considered equal to those of the most experienced expert.
No country, and especially not a republic based on delegated powers, can maintain the values and practices that sustain democracy when voters remain ignorant about their own system of government. When most Americans think a quarter of the U.S. federal budget is devoted to foreign aid, when more than 70 percent of them cannot name all three branches of government—and nearly a third can’t name even one—the basic structures of American democracy cannot survive.
The Founding Fathers believed that civic virtue was built on education and knowledge. In a republic, citizens need not be experts, but they must learn enough to cast an informed vote. Or, in the words of James Madison: “A people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” If Americans do not rediscover this foundational truth about their own system of government, they not only court disasters from pandemics to wars; they risk ceding their government either to the corruption of a mindless mob—or, in the wake of a disaster, to a new class of technocrats who will never again risk asking for their vote.
Deep State
The Deep State Is Real
But it might not be what you think.
By MICHAEL CROWLEY
At a conference in mid-July, Barack Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, remarked that executive branch officials have an “obligation … to refuse to carry out” outrageous or anti-democratic orders from President Donald Trump. The comment quickly caught the attention of Rush Limbaugh, who saw nothing short of a threat to the republic. “He practically called for a coup!” the radio host bellowed on the air a few days later, warning of a plot orchestrated by “embeds in the deep state at the Pentagon, State Department, various intelligence agencies.”
Embeds in the what? A year ago, the term “deep state” was the province of Edward Snowden acolytes and fans of paperback espionage thrillers. Today, Limbaugh takes it for granted that his millions of listeners know what it meant.
The deep state entered America’s national discourse in 2017 with the feeling of an already familiar character, ready to assume a starring role as hero or villain—depending on how you feel about Trump. It’s easy to dismiss the idea as the breathless complaint of a frustrated president who hasn’t learned to work the system. But it’s not that simple: There really is a kind of cabal that operates independently of elected officials in Washington—even if it’s not quite what Trump or his conservative allies think it is.
Political scientists and foreign policy experts have used the term deep state for years to describe individuals and institutions who exercise power independent of—and sometimes over—civilian political leaders. They applied it mainly to developing countries like Algeria, Pakistan, Egypt and Turkey, where generals and spies called the real shots in nominally democratic societies and replaced elected leaders when they saw fit. (Turkey and Egypt have recently moved to more overt security-state dictatorships, in which the deep state is the only state.)
For a generation, the people who saw something like an American deep state—even if they rarely called it that—resided on the left, not the right. The 9/11 attacks triggered the rapid growth of an opaque security and intelligence machine often unaccountable to the civilian legal system. In the 2000s, the critique focused on a “war machine” of military and intelligence officials, defense contractors and neoconservative ideologues who, in some versions, took orders directly from Vice President Dick Cheney. In the Obama era, the focus shifted to the eerie precision of “targeted killings” by drones, and then the furor over Snowden, the ex-National Security Agency contractor whose 2013 leaks exposed the astonishing reach of the government’s surveillance. “There’s definitely a deep state,” Snowden told the Nation in 2014. “Trust me, I’ve been there.”
Even measured academics began to describe a dual-state system in the United States, the focus of Tufts University international law professor Michael J. Glennon’s 2014 book, National Security and Double Government. Glennon observed that Obama had campaigned against Bush-era surveillance and security policies in 2008 but acquiesced to many of them as president—suggesting a national-security apparatus that holds sway even over the elected leaders notionally in charge of it.
Enter Donald Trump. After January 2017, the unaccountable string-pulling bureaucracy suddenly came to seem, especially to liberals, less a sinister cabal than a crucial check on a president determined to blow up the system we had come to take for granted. Trump was openly hostile to much of the government he now ran, and its institutions began fighting back, sometimes in public ways. They did so with a combination of the severe (leaks of Trump’s conversations with foreign leaders) and the absurd (critical tweets from federal accounts like that of the National Park Service). To Trump and his allies, the new president is now the victim of conspiratorial bureaucrats threatened by a president trying to “drain the swamp.” In August, after Environmental Protection Agency employees alerted the New York Times to an EPA report on climate change they feared would be quashed, a headline at the conservative Breitbart News website shouted: “Deep State Teams with Fake News.” Even more anxiety swirls around classified information: In July, the Republican-led Senate Homeland Security Committee released a report that found the Trump administration was being hit by national security leaks “on a nearly daily basis” and at a far higher rate than its predecessors encountered. (After the report was picked up in the conservative media, Trump’s son Donald Jr. tweeted a link to it. “If there ever was confirmation that the Deep State is real, illegal & endangers national security, it’s this,” he wrote.)
Thus have the old battle lines flipped. Conservatives who once dismissed concerns about political abuse of NSA surveillance now complain about intelligence leaks linking Trump associates to the Kremlin; liberals who not long ago were denouncing the CIA for its unaccountable power have discovered new affection for the heroes at Langley who might uncover impeachment-worthy dirt.
Beneath the politics of convenience is the reality that a large segment of the U.S. government really does operate without much transparency or public scrutiny, and has abused its awesome powers in myriad ways. And sometimes the government bureaucracy really does exercise power over the commander in chief: Obama felt that the military pressured him into sending more troops to Afghanistan than he had wanted, while an inexperienced George W. Bush was arguably led to war by a bipartisan cadre of national security insiders who had long wanted to take out Saddam Hussein.
Even the Trump critique about the deep state in revolt, however exaggerated, is worth consideration. Hillary Clinton voters might delight in the classified material gushing forth about the president’s men—but its release can be criminal. (In May, Brennan called the intelligence leaks “appalling.”) Yes, the president could be covering up misdeeds of his own, raising thorny ends-and-means questions. But Trump haters should consider the precedent—and how they would feel if, say, a President Kamala Harris were to enter the White House in 2021 and be hobbled by a similar blizzard of leaks from intelligence officials who consider her soft on terrorism.
Whether any of this means there is a deep state in America depends on your definition. Powerful bureaucrats with access to government secrets and trusted media friends certainly do try to influence presidents from the shadows. But in Washington, at least, their views and goals are not monolithic. And unlike their counterparts in the developing world, they do tend to execute the orders they’re given by the president, however grudgingly—and are committed to upholding the rule of law.
Some of the subversion and leaks Trump has faced are merely federal employees defending their turf from budget cuts and bone-headed ideas. That’s far from the way the right-wing blogger Mike Cernovich described matters in August, when he told fellow conspiracy theorist and talk-radio host Alex Jones that the deep state would turn, literally, murderous: “Trump will be killed. … They’re going to kill us, they’re going to kill him, they’re going to kill everybody.”
For Trump, a man who has always defined himself against caricatured enemies, the deep state is a useful boogeyman that allows him to merge several disparate political targets—real, exaggerated and imagined—into a single villain he can use to rally his supporters. The media’s role is particularly crucial: When Fox News host Sean Hannity tweeted on June 16 that he would open his show that night with an examination of “the deep state’s allies in the media,” the president of the United States retweeted him. It’s not easy to make conservatives distrust law enforcement and intelligence officials, but showing them to be in league with snotty liberal reporters makes that possible.
And so, after Trump’s fired FBI director, James Comey, admitted in June that he had relayed accounts of his bizarre interactions with the president to a friend, who in turn shared them with a New York Times reporter, former Trump campaign manager Cory Lewandowski appeared on NBC and attacked Comey as “part of the deep state.” “He’s everything that’s wrong in Washington.” It was as clever as it was insidious. Americans might be foggy about what, exactly, the deep state really is. But Washington they know—and know they hate.
But it might not be what you think.
By MICHAEL CROWLEY
At a conference in mid-July, Barack Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, remarked that executive branch officials have an “obligation … to refuse to carry out” outrageous or anti-democratic orders from President Donald Trump. The comment quickly caught the attention of Rush Limbaugh, who saw nothing short of a threat to the republic. “He practically called for a coup!” the radio host bellowed on the air a few days later, warning of a plot orchestrated by “embeds in the deep state at the Pentagon, State Department, various intelligence agencies.”
Embeds in the what? A year ago, the term “deep state” was the province of Edward Snowden acolytes and fans of paperback espionage thrillers. Today, Limbaugh takes it for granted that his millions of listeners know what it meant.
The deep state entered America’s national discourse in 2017 with the feeling of an already familiar character, ready to assume a starring role as hero or villain—depending on how you feel about Trump. It’s easy to dismiss the idea as the breathless complaint of a frustrated president who hasn’t learned to work the system. But it’s not that simple: There really is a kind of cabal that operates independently of elected officials in Washington—even if it’s not quite what Trump or his conservative allies think it is.
Political scientists and foreign policy experts have used the term deep state for years to describe individuals and institutions who exercise power independent of—and sometimes over—civilian political leaders. They applied it mainly to developing countries like Algeria, Pakistan, Egypt and Turkey, where generals and spies called the real shots in nominally democratic societies and replaced elected leaders when they saw fit. (Turkey and Egypt have recently moved to more overt security-state dictatorships, in which the deep state is the only state.)
For a generation, the people who saw something like an American deep state—even if they rarely called it that—resided on the left, not the right. The 9/11 attacks triggered the rapid growth of an opaque security and intelligence machine often unaccountable to the civilian legal system. In the 2000s, the critique focused on a “war machine” of military and intelligence officials, defense contractors and neoconservative ideologues who, in some versions, took orders directly from Vice President Dick Cheney. In the Obama era, the focus shifted to the eerie precision of “targeted killings” by drones, and then the furor over Snowden, the ex-National Security Agency contractor whose 2013 leaks exposed the astonishing reach of the government’s surveillance. “There’s definitely a deep state,” Snowden told the Nation in 2014. “Trust me, I’ve been there.”
Even measured academics began to describe a dual-state system in the United States, the focus of Tufts University international law professor Michael J. Glennon’s 2014 book, National Security and Double Government. Glennon observed that Obama had campaigned against Bush-era surveillance and security policies in 2008 but acquiesced to many of them as president—suggesting a national-security apparatus that holds sway even over the elected leaders notionally in charge of it.
Enter Donald Trump. After January 2017, the unaccountable string-pulling bureaucracy suddenly came to seem, especially to liberals, less a sinister cabal than a crucial check on a president determined to blow up the system we had come to take for granted. Trump was openly hostile to much of the government he now ran, and its institutions began fighting back, sometimes in public ways. They did so with a combination of the severe (leaks of Trump’s conversations with foreign leaders) and the absurd (critical tweets from federal accounts like that of the National Park Service). To Trump and his allies, the new president is now the victim of conspiratorial bureaucrats threatened by a president trying to “drain the swamp.” In August, after Environmental Protection Agency employees alerted the New York Times to an EPA report on climate change they feared would be quashed, a headline at the conservative Breitbart News website shouted: “Deep State Teams with Fake News.” Even more anxiety swirls around classified information: In July, the Republican-led Senate Homeland Security Committee released a report that found the Trump administration was being hit by national security leaks “on a nearly daily basis” and at a far higher rate than its predecessors encountered. (After the report was picked up in the conservative media, Trump’s son Donald Jr. tweeted a link to it. “If there ever was confirmation that the Deep State is real, illegal & endangers national security, it’s this,” he wrote.)
Thus have the old battle lines flipped. Conservatives who once dismissed concerns about political abuse of NSA surveillance now complain about intelligence leaks linking Trump associates to the Kremlin; liberals who not long ago were denouncing the CIA for its unaccountable power have discovered new affection for the heroes at Langley who might uncover impeachment-worthy dirt.
Beneath the politics of convenience is the reality that a large segment of the U.S. government really does operate without much transparency or public scrutiny, and has abused its awesome powers in myriad ways. And sometimes the government bureaucracy really does exercise power over the commander in chief: Obama felt that the military pressured him into sending more troops to Afghanistan than he had wanted, while an inexperienced George W. Bush was arguably led to war by a bipartisan cadre of national security insiders who had long wanted to take out Saddam Hussein.
Even the Trump critique about the deep state in revolt, however exaggerated, is worth consideration. Hillary Clinton voters might delight in the classified material gushing forth about the president’s men—but its release can be criminal. (In May, Brennan called the intelligence leaks “appalling.”) Yes, the president could be covering up misdeeds of his own, raising thorny ends-and-means questions. But Trump haters should consider the precedent—and how they would feel if, say, a President Kamala Harris were to enter the White House in 2021 and be hobbled by a similar blizzard of leaks from intelligence officials who consider her soft on terrorism.
Whether any of this means there is a deep state in America depends on your definition. Powerful bureaucrats with access to government secrets and trusted media friends certainly do try to influence presidents from the shadows. But in Washington, at least, their views and goals are not monolithic. And unlike their counterparts in the developing world, they do tend to execute the orders they’re given by the president, however grudgingly—and are committed to upholding the rule of law.
Some of the subversion and leaks Trump has faced are merely federal employees defending their turf from budget cuts and bone-headed ideas. That’s far from the way the right-wing blogger Mike Cernovich described matters in August, when he told fellow conspiracy theorist and talk-radio host Alex Jones that the deep state would turn, literally, murderous: “Trump will be killed. … They’re going to kill us, they’re going to kill him, they’re going to kill everybody.”
For Trump, a man who has always defined himself against caricatured enemies, the deep state is a useful boogeyman that allows him to merge several disparate political targets—real, exaggerated and imagined—into a single villain he can use to rally his supporters. The media’s role is particularly crucial: When Fox News host Sean Hannity tweeted on June 16 that he would open his show that night with an examination of “the deep state’s allies in the media,” the president of the United States retweeted him. It’s not easy to make conservatives distrust law enforcement and intelligence officials, but showing them to be in league with snotty liberal reporters makes that possible.
And so, after Trump’s fired FBI director, James Comey, admitted in June that he had relayed accounts of his bizarre interactions with the president to a friend, who in turn shared them with a New York Times reporter, former Trump campaign manager Cory Lewandowski appeared on NBC and attacked Comey as “part of the deep state.” “He’s everything that’s wrong in Washington.” It was as clever as it was insidious. Americans might be foggy about what, exactly, the deep state really is. But Washington they know—and know they hate.
Russia probes
Russia probes kick into high gear
Three congressional committees are pursuing investigations, and high-ranking Trump associates are expected to testify soon.
By AUSTIN WRIGHT and ALI WATKINS
The congressional Russia investigations are entering a new and more serious phase as lawmakers return from the August recess amid fresh revelations about contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia.
In the coming weeks, both intelligence committees are expected to conduct closed-door interviews with high-ranking members of the Trump campaign, and potential witnesses could include Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort and Donald Trump Jr.
The two panels are also looking at possibly holding public hearings this fall.
In addition, Trump Jr. is set to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is conducting its own parallel investigation into President Donald Trump and his associates’ alleged ties to Moscow.
The return of the congressional Russia probes also means the return of a phenomenon that has reportedly enraged Trump and caused him to lash out at GOP leaders: constant headlines about the latest incremental developments in these sprawling and unwieldy investigations.
There will be the daily, sometimes hourly, leaks about new witnesses, new lines of inquiry. There will be ominous cable news footage of lawmakers and witnesses disappearing into classified briefing rooms. And there will be grandstanding and bickering among members of Congress in both parties, many of them trying to capitalize on the Russia investigations to further their own political ambitions.
There will also be competition between three committees investigating many of the same issues and seeking testimony from the same witnesses — and doing very little to coordinate their efforts.
"They're doing their thing and we're doing our thing," said an aide on one of the Senate committees, speaking of the other congressional panels.
In some cases, lawmakers asked their staffs to hold off on scheduling high-profile interviews while they were gone for the August recess — only to get annoyed when another committee then swooped in and scheduled their own interviews in the interim.
Over the summer, the respective probes bumped up against each other even more often than usual.
House Intelligence Committee investigators traveled to London in July to attempt to find and interview former MI6 operative and Trump dossier author Christopher Steele, either not knowing or not caring that Steele’s lawyers were already engaging with the Senate Intelligence panel.
Officials on the Senate panel were irked when the Senate Judiciary Committee announced its own open hearing with several witnesses — including Trump Jr. and Manafort — that the intelligence committee was also working to arrange interviews with. Neither Trump Jr. nor Manafort ended up testifying at the open hearing, and the committees are now separately seeking to arrange closed-door interviews with them.
Cohen, meanwhile, is set to appear for a closed-door interview with the House panel. The Senate committee is also expected to seek testimony from Cohen, a longtime Trump confidant and lawyer for the Trump Organization who is under scrutiny because of his outreach to Russian officials about a since-abandoned proposal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.
Of the three congressional panels, the one with the best record for bipartisan cooperation is the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and ranking Democrat Mark Warner of Virginia have forged a close relationship, often holding joint press conferences and issuing joint statements about their efforts. The Senate panel also includes several Republicans who’ve been highly critical of Trump and expressed a willingness to get to the bottom of his campaign’s alleged ties to Russia, regardless of the political consequences. They include Marco Rubio of Florida, Susan Collins and Maine and James Lankford of Oklahoma. Arizona Sen. John McCain, one of Trump’s chief GOP critics, is an ex-officio member of the committee.
The House Intelligence Committee has been beset by internal bickering over witnesses and strategy. The panel’s controversial chairman, Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), stepped back from the probe in April after the House Ethics Committee announced it was investigating his handling of classified information. Since then, the investigation has been led by Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas), who has sought to repair relations with the committee’s Democrats.
Top Democrat Adam Schiff of California has repeatedly said the committee’s goal is to produce a single, bipartisan report detailing Russia’s efforts to sway the presidential election, whether the Trump campaign was involved, and what can be done to stop future efforts by foreign powers to influence U.S. elections. But Schiff earlier this week expressed doubts about whether the committee can accomplish this goal, suggesting that it could end up producing separate Republican and Democratic reports.
If that happened, he told USA Today, “then Americans will have to read both reports and decide which one to believe. And that is far less than ideal."
For its part, the Senate Judiciary Committee got a late start in its Russia investigation but has had a big impact.
In June, Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and top Democrat Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) announced a deal to investigate two issues: the circumstances behind the firing of former FBI Director James Comey and whether the Obama administration improperly interfered with the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.
Since then, Grassley and Feinstein have sought testimony from key witnesses, including Manafort and Trump Jr., using the threat of subpoenas to secure interviews. Their panel has also received about 20,000 pages of documents from the Trump campaign.
Three congressional committees are pursuing investigations, and high-ranking Trump associates are expected to testify soon.
By AUSTIN WRIGHT and ALI WATKINS
The congressional Russia investigations are entering a new and more serious phase as lawmakers return from the August recess amid fresh revelations about contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia.
In the coming weeks, both intelligence committees are expected to conduct closed-door interviews with high-ranking members of the Trump campaign, and potential witnesses could include Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort and Donald Trump Jr.
The two panels are also looking at possibly holding public hearings this fall.
In addition, Trump Jr. is set to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is conducting its own parallel investigation into President Donald Trump and his associates’ alleged ties to Moscow.
The return of the congressional Russia probes also means the return of a phenomenon that has reportedly enraged Trump and caused him to lash out at GOP leaders: constant headlines about the latest incremental developments in these sprawling and unwieldy investigations.
There will be the daily, sometimes hourly, leaks about new witnesses, new lines of inquiry. There will be ominous cable news footage of lawmakers and witnesses disappearing into classified briefing rooms. And there will be grandstanding and bickering among members of Congress in both parties, many of them trying to capitalize on the Russia investigations to further their own political ambitions.
There will also be competition between three committees investigating many of the same issues and seeking testimony from the same witnesses — and doing very little to coordinate their efforts.
"They're doing their thing and we're doing our thing," said an aide on one of the Senate committees, speaking of the other congressional panels.
In some cases, lawmakers asked their staffs to hold off on scheduling high-profile interviews while they were gone for the August recess — only to get annoyed when another committee then swooped in and scheduled their own interviews in the interim.
Over the summer, the respective probes bumped up against each other even more often than usual.
House Intelligence Committee investigators traveled to London in July to attempt to find and interview former MI6 operative and Trump dossier author Christopher Steele, either not knowing or not caring that Steele’s lawyers were already engaging with the Senate Intelligence panel.
Officials on the Senate panel were irked when the Senate Judiciary Committee announced its own open hearing with several witnesses — including Trump Jr. and Manafort — that the intelligence committee was also working to arrange interviews with. Neither Trump Jr. nor Manafort ended up testifying at the open hearing, and the committees are now separately seeking to arrange closed-door interviews with them.
Cohen, meanwhile, is set to appear for a closed-door interview with the House panel. The Senate committee is also expected to seek testimony from Cohen, a longtime Trump confidant and lawyer for the Trump Organization who is under scrutiny because of his outreach to Russian officials about a since-abandoned proposal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.
Of the three congressional panels, the one with the best record for bipartisan cooperation is the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and ranking Democrat Mark Warner of Virginia have forged a close relationship, often holding joint press conferences and issuing joint statements about their efforts. The Senate panel also includes several Republicans who’ve been highly critical of Trump and expressed a willingness to get to the bottom of his campaign’s alleged ties to Russia, regardless of the political consequences. They include Marco Rubio of Florida, Susan Collins and Maine and James Lankford of Oklahoma. Arizona Sen. John McCain, one of Trump’s chief GOP critics, is an ex-officio member of the committee.
The House Intelligence Committee has been beset by internal bickering over witnesses and strategy. The panel’s controversial chairman, Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), stepped back from the probe in April after the House Ethics Committee announced it was investigating his handling of classified information. Since then, the investigation has been led by Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas), who has sought to repair relations with the committee’s Democrats.
Top Democrat Adam Schiff of California has repeatedly said the committee’s goal is to produce a single, bipartisan report detailing Russia’s efforts to sway the presidential election, whether the Trump campaign was involved, and what can be done to stop future efforts by foreign powers to influence U.S. elections. But Schiff earlier this week expressed doubts about whether the committee can accomplish this goal, suggesting that it could end up producing separate Republican and Democratic reports.
If that happened, he told USA Today, “then Americans will have to read both reports and decide which one to believe. And that is far less than ideal."
For its part, the Senate Judiciary Committee got a late start in its Russia investigation but has had a big impact.
In June, Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and top Democrat Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) announced a deal to investigate two issues: the circumstances behind the firing of former FBI Director James Comey and whether the Obama administration improperly interfered with the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.
Since then, Grassley and Feinstein have sought testimony from key witnesses, including Manafort and Trump Jr., using the threat of subpoenas to secure interviews. Their panel has also received about 20,000 pages of documents from the Trump campaign.
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