In the wake of the reveal of the truly asinine new so-called Trump "budget,” Trump budget enforcer Mick Mulvaney is warning the heads of federal agencies to keep their mouths shut about what their departments will or won't be doing next year. Because if it isn't specifically mentioned in the budget, the public can probably kiss it goodbye.
“Until OMB releases the full FY 2018 Budget,” the memo, sent Friday, says, “all public comments of any sort should be limited to the information contained in the Budget Blueprint chapter for your agency.”
The letter adds, “It is critically important that you not make commitments about specific programs if they are not expressly mentioned in the Budget Blueprint. [...]
Mulvaney’s letter notes a “strong preference that only heads of executive Departments and Agencies or the Acting Head of the Department or Agency should testify on the FY 2018 Budget Blueprint.”
Is this really a problem that needs addressing? It’s unlikely anyone else in the federal government wants to touch Trump's lunatic promises with a 10-foot budgetin' pole; trying to pry information even from Trump's appointed cabinet members as to what the hell their various departments' new policies might be has been, so far, an exercise in comic futility.
But sure, whatever. The Trump team wants to make sure nobody in government publicly mentions what the actual fallout of Trump's arbitrary zeroing out of entire federal programs might be. It's meant to be a surprise, discussed only after the fact.
That may be because they want to hide the impact of the cuts from the public, or it may be because nobody on Trump's entire team has the foggiest damn notion of what they're doing or what the impacts of their half-assed policies will be—so they're still struggling to come up with some narrative that explains all their various cuts and nods towards legalized corruption as something other than "because some asshole on a far-right white nationalist website told us to." Mick Mulvaney's own budget pronouncements have been wrapped in stupidity and flagrant falsehoods, so it's clear that whatever the "plan" is, there's not a person in the building who's figured out how to credibly sell it yet.