House Budget Chair Suspects White House Will Flirt with Shutdown

With the White House now negotiating fiscal 2020 spending levels with Republican senators, the House Budget Committee chairman on Tuesday said he’d been told that acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney wants to delay a deal until “as close to Sept. 30 as possible” to maximize leverage. Speaking at the annual Fiscal Summit on government debt, sponsored by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, John Yarmouth, D-Ky., said Mulvaney “has his own attitude” with his goal of keeping defense spending high while slashing nondefense spending. But in the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, D-Ky., who is up for reelection, is less  interested in drama over a shutdown or the requirement that Congress raise the debt ceiling.