WASHINGTON, Jan. 4, 2017 - Rep. John Michael (Mick)
Mulvaney, R-S.C., President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for director of the
Office of Management and Budget, brings a determination to cut federal spending
that rivals one of his most notable predecessors, David Stockman – with one key
exception.
Like Stockman, whose controversial tenure lasted through the
first term of the late President Ronald Reagan, the Tea Party favorite Mulvaney
has a record of attempting to slash food assistance spending and disdain for
federal regulations. However, he differs by showing support for popular
agricultural commodity programs such as those Stockman hoped to curtail.
According to contemporaneous reports and his own memoir, Stockman
was rebuffed in attempts to sharply reduce the Food for Peace program in early
1981 and block supply control efforts of fruit and vegetable marketing orders
in the summer of 1982. He also lost a high-visibility battle in late 1983 to
persuade Reagan to veto the dairy diversion program that he called “a $2
billion ripoff.”
In each case, farm-state political clout prevailed over
Stockman’s budget-trimming initiatives. A contemporary USDA official who worked
with him recalled “his aggressive approach to cutting spending for almost
everything” but added that, ultimately, “they didn't really get much done and
the Reagan budgets and deficits were, generally, not a pretty picture.”
In his 1986 memoir, “The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan
Revolution Failed,” Stockman describes a pattern of interest-group political
influence that could help Trump and Mulvaney avoid the tripwires in negotiating
Washington. In each of his three failures to cut deeply into farm spending and
regulation, Stockman acknowledges the influence of “Dick Lyng, a California
Reaganaut” who was deputy secretary and later would be Secretary of
Agriculture.
Initially, Stockman had believed that he could defeat the
farm lobby “if he kept the issues separate – attacking each commodity program
in turn, and undermining urban support by cutting the food and nutrition
programs,” according to an interview with William Greider in The Atlantic in December 1981. “My
strategy is to come in with a farm bill that’s unacceptable to the farm guys so
that the whole thing begins to splinter,” he said.
Mulvaney appears to have been chosen for reasons not unlike
those behind the 1981 Stockman appointment. Trump’s transition announcement
praises Mulvaney’s “strong voice in Congress for reining in out-of-control
spending, fighting government waste and enacting tax policies that will allow
working Americans to thrive.” It quotes Mulvaney as saying that the Trump
administration will “restore budgetary and fiscal sanity back in Washington.”
His most noteworthy effort in the farm and food arena was an
unsuccessful effort to cut food stamp spending in half. His amendment to the
2013 farm bill would have capped the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
(SNAP) at the 2008 level of $37.6 billion. SNAP spending reached a record $79.9
billion in 2013, since falling to $70.8 billion in 2016.
Mulvaney said that he would “vote for just about anything in
the farm bill if we got rid of the nutrition part of it,” according to a
BuzzFeed report. “If we broke that unholy alliance between ag and nutrition
once and for all, then I could vote for just about every subsidy in the book
they could think of if they could make some real structural long-term changes,”
he said.
His support for the failed effort to separate SNAP from the
farm bill is consistent with the 2016 Republican National Convention platform
but goes against the Trump campaign’s position. Sam Clovis, co-chair of the
Trump campaign and Trump’s lead adviser on agriculture policy, said that
nutrition programs should stay in the farm bill. Reductions in nutrition program
costs should come from economic growth that puts people to work, he said.
In 2014, Mulvaney co-sponsored the “SNAP Verify Act” that
would have required recipients to show photographic verification when using a
SNAP electronic benefit card to buy food.
If Trump needs another candidate for a regulation to
eliminate, Mulvaney may have one to offer. He was one of 18 original
co-sponsors of legislation in 2014 that would have overturned Food and Drug
Administration regulations against the interstate sale of raw milk that has not
been pasteurized. FDA and the dairy industry have strong opposition to
legalizing the sale of unpasteurized milk, noting that it is responsible for
most dairy-related food poisoning.
#30
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