Donald Trump Considering a Spending Hard-Liner as Budget Director
■ President-elect Donald J. Trump is considering a congressman who is a hard-liner on spending for budget director.
■ Donald Trump Jr. stopped a House Republican leader from becoming his father’s interior secretary.
■ Senate Democrats will try to force the president-elect to sell some of his business empire.
Transition team turns to finding a budget director.
As Mr. Trump rounds out his cabinet choices, the transition team has turned its focus to finding a leader for the Office of Management and Budget, and it is considering Representative Mick Mulvaney, Republican of South Carolina and a hard-liner on spending.
Mr. Mulvaney, who came to Washington on the Tea Party wave of 2010 and was an early proponent of the House Freedom Caucus, had previously expressed interest in the job and has met with Mr. Trump.
But Mr. Mulvaney has also been supportive of Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, who had a tempestuous relationship with Mr. Trump throughout most of the campaign.
Some people close to Mr. Trump are urging him to consider people who were firm in their support for him leading up to the election, such as David Malpass, a senior economic adviser to the Trump campaign for many months.
Trump’s son said to dismiss front-runner for interior secretary.
The short-lived candidacy of Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington for interior secretary was described by two people close to the transition team as stemming from concerns that the president-elect’s eldest son, Don Jr., had with her.
The Department of the Interior is one of the few agencies that the younger Mr. Trump has shown an interest in — he is an avid hunter — and he is said to have highlighted negative comments Ms. McMorris Rodgers made about the president-elect during the campaign. As the chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, she would have given the Trump cabinet a voice from congressional leadership — and another woman, currently in short supply.
Others familiar with the situation said that the elder Mr. Trump was put off by seeing Ms. McMorris Rodgers characterized in news reports as the expected choice — a reminder that getting ahead of announcements by a president-elect comes with risks, particularly with this one.
Senate Democrats try to force Trump to sell assets.
Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and several of her Democratic colleagues said on Thursday that they would introduce legislation requiring the president and vice president to divest any assets that create a financial conflict of interest.
Under the legislation, money from divesting assets would go into a blind trust that would be managed by an independent trustee.
The senators — Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland, Chris Coons of Delaware, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Ms. Warren — announced their proposal the same day Mr. Trump had originally been scheduled to hold a news conference to discuss his plans to leave his real estate business.
The news conference has been delayed until January, though Mr. Trump said on Monday that “no new deals will be done” by his business while he is in office.
But that pledge did little to mollify lawmakers worried about his existing financial ties and the global reach of his business.
“The American people deserve to know that the president of the United States is working to do what’s best for the country, not using his office to do what’s best for himself and his businesses,” Ms. Warren said. “The only way for President-elect Trump to truly eliminate conflicts of interest is to divest his financial interests and place them in a blind trust. This has been the standard for previous presidents, and our bill makes clear the continuing expectation that President-elect Trump do the same.”
P.C: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/15/us/politics/donald-trump-transition.html?_r=0
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