Feds on Trump’s shutdown threat: ‘It’s blackmail’
Complaining about the budget process in May, Trump tweeted: “Our country needs a good ‘shutdown’ in September to fix mess!”
Let that sink in — the president thinks the country “needs a good shutdown.”
.. “It’s blackmail. It’s wasteful. It hurts the American people that the government serves as much as it does the employees. Contract employees, cleaners, cafeteria workers, etc. — of which there are more and more and who are the ones most likely to live closest to the bone — are hurt worse than anyone as they are never recompensed,” a Library of Congress staffer said by email.
.. Now, Mick Mulvaney heads OMB. He supported the earlier shutdown as a Republican congressman from South Carolina and doesn’t shy away from the possibility of one next month. Federal programs are funded through Sept. 30. An impasse on spending could result in the closure of many federal operations.
“We believe we did it for the right reasons,” Mulvaney said in 2013. “We believe it was good policy. We believe good policy makes good politics.”
.. In May, he again endorsed the tactic, which is more like extortion than blackmail, saying that if the budget process is “business as usual and nothing changes and it takes a shutdown to change it, I have no problem with that.”