Budget director Mick Mulvaney is displeased with the Smithsonian

(Image credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

published 12 June 2017

Mick Mulvaney always dreamed of becoming director of the Office of Management and Budget. "As soon as I got to Washington and I found out what this office was, I thought, 'This sounds like the coolest job in Washington,'" Mulvaney, who was elected to the House in 2010, told the Washington Examiner in an interview published Monday. Mulvaney said he was attracted to the job because "if you are a policy wonk and a government junkie, this is the best job ever, and it turned out that it's everything I expected it to be."

However, Mulvaney does have one complaint about his dream job:

Mulvaney, a former Republican congressman from South Carolina before President Trump appointed him to oversee the Office of Management and Budget, says his office feels like a museum. The Smithsonian sent him a list of approved art, but he doesn't like the options."I have to get permission to hang stuff on the walls. So that's why there's nothing here," Mulvaney says."It's all crap," he continues. "All I asked for was American maps, cityscapes, famous Southerners. No, none of that. No, they got like a 1970 picture of a grain silo done by a fifth-grader." [Washington Examiner]

Coincidentally — or perhaps not — President Trump's Mulvaney-orchestrated budget blueprint proposes slashing the budget of the Smithsonian Institution and related agencies by more than $800 billion in the next 10 years.