Mick Mulvaney, the former acting White House chief of staff, said Tuesday the country might have overreacted a bit to the coronavirus pandemic and that it’s time to allow people to get back to work safely.
“I think we’ve sort of lost perspective on this a little bit. … We’ve overreacted a little bit,” Mr. Mulvaney said on CNBC.
He said he would absolutely feel comfortable flying on an airplane in the middle seat right now if he and his fellow passengers were wearing protective masks.
He pointed out that a year and a half or two years ago, “someplace just shy of” 100,000 people died from the ordinary flu — a figure the U.S. is approaching in terms of coronavirus-related deaths.
“That’s not to say that COVID is the ordinary flu — that’s not my point,” he said. “The country didn’t shut down — it’s time to sort of deal with this in the proper perspective and that’s to allow us to get back to work safely.”
In March, President Trump announced Mr. Mulvaney would be the new U.S. special envoy to Northern Ireland. Mr. Trump had announced Mr. Mulvaney as his acting chief of staff in December 2018.
Mark Meadows is the current White House chief of staff.
Mr. Mulvaney also said lawmakers need to find a way to rein in federal spending moving forward after Congress has signed off on close to $3 trillion worth of rescue legislation to respond to the pandemic.
“We need to figure out a way to hard-wire into whatever comes next a way to reduce the size of the bureaucracy, reduce the size of the regulatory state, prevent the increase of taxes, and get a way for spending to get under control moving forward,” Mr. Mulvaney said.
“[Because] you’re not going to do it right now,” he said.
He said a big risk in the rescue packages is that people are losing perspective on what government costs.
“We’re at risk of training people to believe that government is free,” he said. “When you spend 2 or 3 or 8 trillion dollars, there’s going to be a cost to that at some point. It’s not free.”
Senate Republicans have cited ballooning federal spending as one reason to take a pause on coronavirus legislation and see how the trillions of dollars affect the U.S. economy.
As a former director of the White House budget office under Mr. Trump, Mr. Mulvaney had also been tasked with trekking to Capitol Hill to defend the president’s annual budget blueprints to skeptical lawmakers.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly vowed to protect federal entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, which budget analysts across the political spectrum cite as the key drivers of federal deficits and debt.
• David Sherfinski can be reached at dsherfinski@washingtontimes.com.
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