Trump OMB Head Says Balancing Budget Will be 'Very Difficult' Without Entitlement Reforms

Donald Trump's first budget request does not propose fixing the two major entitlement programs, Social Security retirement and Medicare. But as Trump's director of the Office of Management and Budget testified Wednesday, the White House's proposal could be the last balanced budget request to not address these growing entitlement programs.

"I will tell you it's probably the last time we can do that," said Mick Mulvaney while testifying before the House Budget committee. "It'll be very difficult in the future to do that because of the role that those programs play in our future spending."

It's why Mulvaney tried convincing Trump, unsuccessfully, to consider bucking his campaign promise not to touch Social Security or Medicare—and it's why, according to Republican sources on both Capitol Hill and the White House, Mulvaney will continue to press the president to change his mind.

Mulvaney will have some help in that effort from his former House colleagues. The chairman of the Budget committee, Diane Black, seemed to be trying to make the argument to the president as well in her questions to Mulvaney.

BLACK: Do you consider entitlement reform an indispensable part of reaching that balanced budget, especially as we look at how we're only spending one-third of our total dollars on everyday spending, and the rest of it is over in that column with the debt and entitlements—Social Security, Medicare, and the other entitlement programs? So, do you consider that an indispensible part of what we must be doing? And along with that, do you agree that even if we weren't facing a fiscal crisis that reforming these entitlement programs really is the right thing to do?

MULVANEY: Let me answer it this way, Chairman. I don't believe it's possible—in fact, I know it's not possible to balance the budget solely using the discretionary portion of the budget. There have been years when I was here, 2010, 2011, I believe, where we could have taken discretionary spending to at or near zero, and we still would have had a deficit. In our budget, we do address mandatory spending, what some people call entitlement spending, but we do not address the two that the president simply didn't want to touch, which was Social Security retirement and Medicare.