Mick Mulvaney to bankers: "If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you"

Trump's budget director reveals his "hierarchy" of influence

By Matthew Rozsa

Staff Writer

Published April 25, 2018 11:54AM (EDT)

Mick Mulvaney (Getty/ Win McNamee)
Mick Mulvaney (Getty/ Win McNamee)

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump's budget director, Mick Mulvaney, made it clear to executives from the banking industry that he plans on helping their financial interests by pointing to his past behavior as a Republican congressman who availed himself to the highest bidder.

The former South Carolina congressman opened up about his blatant favoritism toward the financial industry because they gave money to his campaigns. "We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress. If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you," Mulvaney told 1,300 officials from the banking and lending industries at the American Bankers Associations conference in Washington, according to The New York Times.

Perhaps to make himself sound better, he added that "if you came from back home and sat in my lobby, I talked to you without exception, regardless of the financial contributions."

Mulvaney also showed off how much power he has and how he plans on using it to help the business community.

"We’ve got about 25 active lawsuits right now, active enforcement actions and I could dismiss every single one of them without giving an explanation tomorrow. I think that’s wrong . . . We’re not going to do regulation by enforcement. I don’t think it’s fair," Mulvaney told the assembled officials, according to a reporter from MarketWatch.

Mulvaney's unapologetic advocacy for the financial industry says a great deal about the policies he's been pushing as one of Trump's chief economic advisers. In addition to serving as the head of the Office of Management and Budget, Mulvaney's portfolio includes serving as the temporary head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In the former role, Mulvaney has worked to cut the budget for social programs, including Social Security Disability Insurance (successfully) and funding to address the opioid crisis (unsuccessfully), according to Politico. In the latter role, Mulvaney has gutted the bureau and worked to make sure that it couldn't serve its historic mission. As the Times explained:

He has frozen all new investigations and slowed down existing inquiries by requiring employees to produce detailed justifications. He also sharply restricted the bureau’s access to bank data, arguing that its investigations created online security risks. And he has scaled back efforts to go after payday lenders, auto lenders and other financial services companies accused of preying on the vulnerable.

But he wants Congress to go further and has urged it to wrest funding of the independent watchdog from the Federal Reserve, a move that would give lawmakers — and those with access to them — more influence on the bureau’s actions. On Tuesday, he implored the financial services industry to help support the legislative changes he has requested.

The Times also reported:

Such moves include cutting public access to the bureau’s database of consumer complaints, which the agency had used to help guide its investigations.

“I don’t see anything in here that says I have to run a Yelp for financial services sponsored by the federal government,” he said.

Mr. Mulvaney also said he would begin calling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by its official statutory name, the more obscure Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection. Administration officials said the rebranding was an attempt to diminish the agency’s public profile.

Mulvaney has also justified his decision to discontinue public access to the CFPB web portal by arguing that many of the complaints there hadn't been fully vetted by the government, according to The Wall Street Journal. In January he asked that the bureau receive zero funding from the federal government, and in November he admitted that he believes his job is to "try and limit, as much as we can, what the CFPB does to sort of interfere with capitalism and with financial service markets."

At the time, Mulvaney used a tactic that pro-business conservatives frequently employ to justify their policies — namely, claiming that they're trying to curb government overreach.

"The structure of the CFPB is just fundamentally flawed. The authority that I have now as the acting director really should frighten people," Mulvaney told Fox News' Lou Dobbs in November. "You could sit down in a room with three or four people and say, 'Well, let's go off and do this.' And there's no accountability to Congress. I can set the budget pretty much without any input from Congress. In fact, without any input from Congress. We get an allotment from the Federal Reserve. So it's on one hand people call it independent, but the real bottom line is, it's simply unaccountable."

Mulvaney's place in the White House is a particularly unique one. Unlike previous Republican presidents like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, Donald Trump is not ideologically wedded to the tenets of fiscal conservatism. As a result, Mulvaney often finds himself in the position of needing to persuade Trump to pursue policies that the president would not be otherwise philosophically inclined to consider. Very often these efforts have failed, and even when they have succeeded it has frequently been when Mulvaney resorts to trickery, as Politico reported last year:

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.


By Matthew Rozsa

Matthew Rozsa is a staff writer at Salon. He received a Master's Degree in History from Rutgers-Newark in 2012 and was awarded a science journalism fellowship from the Metcalf Institute in 2022.

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Banking Donald Trump Mick Mulvaney