Bear with me for a moment, because this is an excellent illustration of Republican dysfunction.
Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney revealed Trump's fantasy budget last week that calls for eliminating dozens of federal programs and agencies while boosting defense spending. Both Mulvaney and his boss have presented the budget as their own vision but, as it turns out, Jim DeMint's Heritage Foundation wrote most of it.
Why did the White House essentially plug and play a Heritage budget proposal? We need not speculate.
The Trump budget proposal released last week bears a striking resemblance to the Heritage Foundation’s “Blueprint for Balance: A Federal Budget for 2017,” complete with a list of deep spending cuts designed to scale back the size and scope of the federal government. [...]
“I don’t think there’s any question. Heritage was the Number 1 source,” Stephen Moore, a senior economic policy expert at Heritage who advised the Trump campaign. “That was partly because there wasn’t a lot of time. They decided ‘we will get rid of this, and get rid of that.’”
It's not exactly a revelation that a Republican-controlled White House is reading Heritage budget proposals, but Heritage is partially responsible for the defeat of Trumpcare.
Heritage Action, the foundation's advocacy PAC, key-voted against Paul Ryan's Trumpcare bill because it didn't go far enough and they will more than likely do so again in the near future when funding for the federal government or even tax cuts are considered.
In other words, the White House has adopted the policy proposals of a think tank that's also actively undermining the White House. The joint White House/Heritage proposal calls for deep cuts that even many Republicans can't support, such as a $1 billion cut for cancer research funding, and Heritage Action will key-vote against anything less than what they and the White House called for.
You could call this a moot discussion right now because Republicans are going to extend the continuing resolution signed by President Obama that funds the federal government in fiscal 2017, but this will come into play in September when Republicans are struggling to fund the government in fiscal 2018.
No one likes Mick Mulvaney so, if Trump ever needs someone to blame, he'll be one of the first to go.