Mick Mulvaney Tells the Truth

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Mick Mulvaney, the Trump administration’s budget director, made news this week by committing what’s known as a Kinsley gaffe: Mulvaney told the truth. Describing the behavior of himself and his staff during his years in Congress, Mulvaney said: “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.”

Lovely, eh? “It is hard to decide what is the worse thing here,” The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin writes, “Mulvaney’s pay-to-play operation, his shamelessness in bragging about it or Republicans’ utter indifference to it.”

The attention to that comment drowned out nearly everything else that Mulvaney said at a conference of bank executives on Tuesday. But the rest of his remarks deserve some scrutiny, too.

Mulvaney isn’t just the budget director. He is also the interim director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the banking watchdog that the Obama administration and Elizabeth Warren created after the financial crisis. The bureau, often called the C.F.P.B., has had an impressive record since its founding, curtailing abusive lending practices by banks, among other things. It’s helped level the playing field — not all the way, to be sure — between big, powerful companies and American families.

But Mulvaney has set out to dismantle the C.F.P.B. He has, as The Times reports: “frozen all new investigations and slowed down existing inquiries by requiring employees to produce detailed justifications” and “scaled back efforts to go after payday lenders, auto lenders and other financial services companies accused of preying on the vulnerable.”

On Tuesday, he took another step, telling gleeful banking executives that he was interested in shutting down a public database where people can lodge complaints against financial companies. Bureau officials had used the database to figure out when they needed to investigate a company and to gather evidence. Mulvaney dismissively referred to it as “a Yelp for financial services sponsored by the federal government.” Aaron Klein of the Brookings Institution told The Wall Street Journal’s Yuka Hayashi that the database was “an incredibly important tool that empowers consumers.”

Finally, in the pettiest move of all, Mulvaney said he would change the order of the words in the bureau’s name — to the bulkier “Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection.” Administration officials acknowledged to The Times that the move was meant “to diminish the agency’s public profile.” It also seems like an unsubtle attempt to erase the old C.F.P.B. from everyone’s memory.

The whole episode fits a Trump administration pattern. In describing his behavior with lobbyists, Mulvaney did something outrageous and worthy of attention. And yet he also managed to divert attention from policies doing real damage to Americans.

Jobs skepticism. In my column this week, I mentioned the idea of having the federal government play a more aggressive role in creating good jobs. Jonathan Chait of New York magazine argues that the current proposals to do so are poorly conceived and full of flaws.

This kind of criticism is vital. As I wrote in the column, the success of any big, bold economic idea will depend on the details. Obamacare has worked as well as it has in large part because policy experts spent years thinking about, and arguing about, the details.

In The Times, the University of Rhode Island’s Erik Loomis has a more positive take: “The implementation of a federal employment guarantee would consist of difficult compromises, power struggles and policy corrections. But it also provides the most politically realistic answer to our future employment crisis.”