Is like to work with the president. This is 30 minutes. Mulvaney, what is the job of budget director . Mr. Mulvaney its the greatest job no one has ever heard of. The description of it is if you live outside of the beltway, you have never heard of omb, if you live inside the beltway, you have no idea what it does. It is sort of the there is a bunch of different ways to describe it. Some people describe it as where we are the policy police for the president. We make sure other parts of the executive branch are following through on the president s policy. The way we do that is we actually serve as a central junction box for the government. Every dollar that goes from to the agencys flows through this office. Agencies flows through this office. Every regulation that comes from the agency ends up coming through this office. We handle procurement for the federal government. We handle a lot of personnel issues. A lot of i. T. Issues. We work with the inspectors general of all of the agencies. We dont do anything, but we oversee everything. And thats been kind of neat. Host how much of it is policy and how much of it is numbers . Mr. Mulvaney same thing. Our policy is numbers. When we wrote the budget, for example every line item of the , budget is a policy for the president. If the president wants to spend more money on School Choice, we would go into every line item in the budget that touches on School Choice and make sure there is Adequate Funding to support the president s initiatives. And then assuming that is approved by congress because they still appropriate we will make sure that before the money goes out to this agency or that agency, they are using it to actually follow through on the president s policies. For us, money and policies are the same thing. Host as you know the congress can propose and congress can dispose. How important is the president s budget . Many people say they are dead on arrival. Mr. Mulvaney they are. No president gets their exact budget passed. They are guides, and articulation of the president s priorities, one of many ways the president says to congress i want more money for x, less money for y. Sometimes that will inform their decisions and sometimes it will not. Senate the house and the it will inform them to a greater , extent than it would under president Obamas Administration where clearly, many of his priorities were not in line with republicans on the hill. I hope to have a lot more overlap and a lot less daylight between our ideal budget and the hills ideal budget. Host you have done the first budget blueprint. How did you begin and how did you put it all together . Mr. Mulvaney this new administration is not the best example of how the budget process works. Its that way for every first year of the new administration. For this year, what we did is unveiled a budget blueprint in march, the discretionary part of the budget, about one fourth of the money we spend. We will unveil the rest of the full budget, which is mandatory programs, 10 year plans, pathways to balance, and the full budget in a couple weeks. Year that would be wrapped up in march. We are working on the 2018 budget now and preparing the first steps of the 2019 budget. The 2019 budget, the fiscal 19 budget the work in this office , starts in earnest in september of this year, september of calendar year 2017 we work on fiscal year 2019 budget. Host i want to talk about the politics of washington and whether or not you think it is working, but one issue that comes up often is why not have a twoyear budget . Why do it year to year . What are the advantages and disadvantages . Mr. Mulvaney a lot of advantages. One of the things we hope to Start Talking to the people on the hill about is budget reform. The chairman has some neat ideas about how you do a twoyear budget, a rolling twoyear budget. You do six of the spending bills there are supposed to be 12 and that process has completely broken down. But in a perfect year you do six , and each of those is for two years. The next year, you do another six for another two years. Each year you are doing half a budget for a twoyear basis. Thats a tremendous idea and one we want to explore with the hill. There are a lot better ways to budget than we do and a twoyear budget is one of them. Host how do you get there . How does congress go along with this. Mr. Mulvaney my experience is congress only fixes things after they are broken. We are just not very good and i say it we because i was in congress for six years we are not very proactive. I think the folks on the hill are now coming to the full realization that the spending process is broken, this regular conversation about a Government Shutdown is not out of the ordinary. Continuing resolutions or these massive omnibus spending bills like we are going to do today or tomorrow, thats not the ordinary process. I think folks on the hill have started to realize that they cant do what the constitution wants them to do, which is exercise the power of the purse. Once they recognize its broken, i think maybe that sort of ushers in the conversation about how to fix it. Analogy with having an addiction you have to admit , you have a problem before you can get on the road to recovery. Maybe all of the government is starting to enter the realization that the process needs to be fixed. Host who does the budget in the mulvaney household . Mr. Mulvaney i give it to her and it is dead on arrival. She does a great job managing the household. We have the three 17yearolds at home. Of like the process here in the appropriations committee, we have very clear guidelines. I am in control of everything outside the front door. I get the yard and the garden. We live on 16 acres. Once it comes inside the house, its hers, everything from education to the cooking budget to the utilities. I still run around and turn down the heat in the winter time and turn up the air in the summer, and she comes behind me and fixes that. It is just like any other family. It works for us. Pam . How did you meet mr. Mulvaney i picked her up online at a bookstore in 1991. I was trying to get her attention so i did dramatic readings from dr. Seuss books while she was behind me in line. Host her reaction . Mr. Mulvaney complete disgust and disinterest overcome only by unbelievable persistence on my part to get her to go out with me. Host what did you see in her . Mr. Mulvaney there is no magic formula on how to meet the special person in your life. I dont know how you met the person you might be with. It could be a bar, a church. A bookstore is not a bad place to meet somebody. Host triplets. 17 years old. Mr. Mulvaney yeah, yeah. What did you want to know . Host whats it like to raise triplets . Mr. Mulvaney for us, its completely normal to come home from the hospital with three kids because we dont know any different. These are our children. It has been fabulous. How do i describe it to people . Its like having a Slumber Party at your house every single night. At least it was. Two of the kids are already away from home. My daughter is a senior in high school. She skipped a year in school. She is at a publicly funded boarding school for science and mathematics right now. One of my sons is a year behind her in school. We only have one child at home. Things are a lot quieter at home. I think my wife liked it a lot more when there was more activity in the house. Host what are their names, and are they similar or different . Mr. Mulvaney the thing about having triplets is its one science experiment about nature versus nurture. I can tell you that without any reservation, my children are who god made them to be. They had that personality in the womb. I am not making it up, it is not hyperbolic. We went a lot to do the sonograms, the ultrasounds. You could see the children, and the personalities they had in the womb are the personalities they have as 17 year olds. My daughter couldnt stand her brothers and spent most of the beating up onmb them. But theynot identical do look like brother and sister. They are james and caroline and finnegan. When caroline was seven, she came home and announced she was changing her name to isabel. Most of her friends call her that. I still call her caroline. I guess thats what dads do. She is going to georgetown next year, so i might actually get a chance to see her more now that she is a college than when she was in high school. Host when did you first become interested in politics . Mr. Mulvaney a little bit in high school. I was student body president my senior year, but that was almost an accident. I was not involved in it very heavily in college, do not think i had elected office. I may have had some minor things and then did nothing until 2006 , when the local Republican Party came and asked me to run for a seat because they needed somebody on the ballot. The Republican Party in rural South Carolina at that time was almost nonexistent. The first Republican Party meeting i went to had four people at it. But i ran and i ended up winning 212 votes for a seat in the state legislature. I was the first republican to hold that seat ever. The next year, our senator retired and i ran for that seat and became only the second republican in that seat. And in 2010, i got angry at a member of congress, previously conservative Senate Democrat who voted for a bunch of stuff like obamacare and the bailouts and so forth, and i ended up winning wave, the party coming the first republican in 130 years in that seat. It was fun while it lasted. I am glad to be out of politics. It was never my strength. I would much rather sit in an office and work than go out and work a room or shake hands with people to raise money. I am much more results oriented. I enjoy spending more time in that office. I would rather work 18 hours a day doing this than six hours a day shaking hands and kissing babies, so this is my dream job. Host Robert Smalls was the last republican. Do you know anything about him . Mr. Mulvaney he was a runaway slave. Right before the war and or right after the war. They came back and represented the Fifth District of South Carolina extraordinarily well. Fairly famous. Im glad you know the name. He got National Attention for some of the work he did. It was an honor to remind people that the Republican Party used to be and could be again a with theer affiliated africanamerican community. We have lost touch with that over the course of the last couple of generations, but there is a tremendous opportunity to rebuild that. Host and you come from a part of the country that has a distinct accent, but you dont have one. Mr. Mulvaney no, i went to Catholic School which meant i went to school with other yankees even though i was born in the south and raised there. I can do it if you need me to. I do it a lot easier after a couple of beers or a glass of wine at the end of the day. Yall is still part of my vocabulary, it just doesnt sound very southern coming out of my mouth. The one thing about understanding southern but speaking without an accent is that i can translate for trey gowdy. We would go places and when we were in the deep southern part of the district, he would tell people what i was saying, and i could translate for him. We were in the deep southern part of the district, he would tell people what i was saying and up north, i could translate. It was a pretty fun combination. Host what was the biggest learning curve for you in congress . Mr. Mulvaney everybody who comes out of state legislature is sort of ahead of the curve when it comes to congress. So much of what we do here or what we did when i was on the hill has parallels and analogies in the state legislature. It was not to the process as much as size and scope of what you were doing. Our budget in the State Government was 7 billion or 8 billion. The budget here for the federal government this year will be 1 trillion. We will spend 4 trillion. The scope and the size of the government is what really caught me, not offguard, but surprised me. 8 billion, our entire budget, is not a rounding activity. It is not a lot of money if that , sounds right, in a federal government when you are spending 4 trillion. Host a 20 trillion debt. Do debts and deficits matter . Mr. Mulvaney yes. I will take to my grave that i thought dick cheney was wrong when he said deficits dont matter. I think you could make the argument that statement was taken out of context, but he has had it hung around his neck for a long time. Deficits absolutely matter, especially when you dont have a plan to pay it back. If i take money from you but i believe i am going to give it back to you and you believe i am going to give it back to you, we call that debt. If i take money from you and we dont believe i am going to give it back, there is another name for that, we call that theft. We are stealing from our grandkids. I have made the argument a couple of times in the media that we would be better off printing new dollars every single year for every deficit dollar we run, because that makes you and me pay for our own deficit. If we have to print all this extra money and put it in circulation, that means the money in our pocket is worth less, and then we would feel what we are doing when we borrow money. But we do not do that right now we borrow it from our grandkids. , we dont feel it. They do. I think i could make a strong that is not a moral morally defensible thing to do. Host do you cut spending, raise taxes, combination of both . Mr. Mulvaney you keep spending in line. I dont think its a political environment, Political Support from people back home to cut spending fairly dramatically. You can reform and spend in line but you cannot balance the budget this year. You could not do it. You would have to cut about half trillion dollars. I think if we did that this year, every elected official would lose their jobs because the people back home are not ready for that. What you try to do instead is keep spending under control, reduce it where you can, reform it where you can, take a long view in fixing mandatory spending programs and then figure out a way to grow the economy so that revenues catch up. In fact, that is what we did in the 1990s. We did not cut our way to surpluses in the 1990s. We did not tax our way to surplus in the 1990s. What we had was a circumstance where the Clinton Administration and the gingrich led house did came together to get some welfare reform and spending rich bright spending restraint to keep spending flat while the economy grew and revenues caught up to spending. Thats why we had a surplus. That is why you are seeing so much focus in this administration on economic growth. You can grow your way to a balanced budget. Host based on that, and the spending issues where does , compromise begin . Where do principles end . How do both parties come together on this . Mr. Mulvaney you can compromise without compromising principles. You and i can find common areas to agree on without compromising our principles. One of my favorite examples was when i first got here, ive met a guy named peter welch. Hes fairly leftwing, a democrat from vermont. He and i worked together on a bill to try to save energy in federal buildings. I remember asking him why he wanted to do this with me because he was leftwing and i am not. He said, i dont like wasting money any more than you do. He said, i am a tree hugger and i think Wasting Energy is bad for the environment. I said i dont like Wasting Energy either. I especially dont like the fiscal impact of that. So we found we could Work Together on something that lined up nicely with his principles and mine. It was a compromise but neither one of us compromised our principles. Host what advice would you give democrats and republicans on the hill today . Mr. Mulvaney spend more time talking about what we agree on and not what we disagree on. We need to get health care out of the way. That was never going to be a bipartisan bill. It wasnt a bipartisan bill when it came became law. Obamacare was not bipartisan on its way in. Its not going to be bipartisan on its way out. No democrat worth his weight in democratic brand will vote to get rid of obamacare. But once we vote to get rid of it, which i think we may be doing by the time this airs, at least in the house, then the opportunity may exist Going Forward, once obamacare is gone, replace it with the American Health care act to reform it in the years to come on a bipartisan basis. One example i use is how do we deal in internet sales. How do we deal with the longterm costs of prescription drugs . That could be bipartisan. Unnecessary lawsuits, medical malpractice reform, might be able to be bipartisan. Whatever Health Care Environment we end up in at the end of this, maybe we can all improve it Going Forward on a bipartisan basis. Host when did you first meet donald trump . Mr. Mulvaney ive met him a couple of different times, at Golf Tournaments, believe it or not. I was at a Golf Tournament with Lindsey Graham raising money for wounded warriors. And the president was at his golf course, met the president there. I met him once or twice on the campaign trail. I was working with senator rand paul at the time. Ive bumped into him a couple of times. It was never more than, nice to meet you until i interviewed for this job. I was really excited because i wanted this job since i was on the Budget Committee in the house in 2011. The budget director i think it was orzack, i think. I asked my staff what the office of budget management does. I had heard about it in the 1980s but that was about it. That was the extent of my knowledge about the omb office. They gave me this write up of what it is. I was like, wow, this sounds like a really cool job. The more time i spent on the Budget Committee and other committees including Small Business and government oversight omb kept popping up , again and again. I said this is the job i would love to