Mulvaney rips Biden infrastructure spending: The numbers are ‘bizarrely huge’
Mulvaney says Biden's spending plan contains 'bits and pieces' that are 'mind-blowing'
Former acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, during an appearance on FOX Business' "Mornings with Maria," slammed President Biden's infrastructure bill, arguing that the numbers in the $2.3 trillion spending plan are "bizarrely huge."
MICK MULVANEY: First off, I don't think people grasp exactly how much $2 trillion is. I think the specific proposal is 2.3 and every time we do that, it sounds like it's a small change from 2 trillion to 2.3 trillion. That's $300 billion. The overall budget, Jackie, of the United States government, the budget that we wrote every single year at the Office of Management and Budget, was about $1.3 trillion. So this bill by itself, which may get a couple of weeks' worth of debate, will spend almost twice as much as the entire federal government does in a single year. And it's got bits and pieces in it that are just mind-blowing. I think there's $400 billion dollars for care for the elderly. Great, wonderful. Let's have that debate. But that's not infrastructure. I think it's got $200 billion for affordable housing. Great, wonderful discussion, not infrastructure. Keep in mind the entire budget of Housing and Urban Development, entire agency of the federal government, is only $50 billion a year. That's the entire agency. And this one bill proposes to spend four times that on a single line item in HUD's regular budget. So the numbers are just huge, bizarrely huge. It makes you wonder if it's really a serious bill, or if it's just designed to make political points.
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I think the best evidence of the fact that it's not really an infrastructure bill is that the Democrats are talking about reconciliation because both parties have been trying to pass a reconciliation bill now for - excuse me, a infrastructure bill - now for several years. They got bogged down during the Trump administration over the Democrats' refusal to reduce the environmental regulations and the delays in getting roads and bridges built. But the simple fact now that the Democrats are talking about reconciliation means they know they're not going to get any Republican support, especially in the Senate. Why is that? Because it's not an infrastructure bill. If it was a regular infrastructure bill, it could pass by itself. Reconciliation, one of those really boring inside-the-beltway type of discussions about how to pass something in the Senate with only 50 votes...traditionally, you would never be able to do that more than twice a year. Democrats are now talking about using it again and again and again to pass their agenda.
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Your network is doing a decent job on it, but most of the media is burying the fact that the Democrats really are not interested at all in bipartisanship, not interested in working with Republicans. In fact, they're not even interested in working with their own moderate wing of their own party. Some folks have come out and said this infrastructure bill is five times too small.