White House Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney faces a tough road ahead as Trump’s third chief of staff in just over two years. | Alex Wong/Getty Images Government Shutdown Mulvaney starts to draw ire as shutdown drags on White House aides and close advisers are sniping about Mick Mulvaney’s political skills as the government shutdown enters its second month.

Mick Mulvaney brought more political chops to the job than his predecessor as chief of staff, yet those skills have failed to stop the government shutdown from stretching into its second month.

Less than one month after replacing John Kelly, Mulvaney’s entire tenure has been dominated by unsuccessful efforts to persuade Congress to give President Donald Trump money for his border wall. And senior administration staffers and close White House advisers are increasingly directing their ire at Mulvaney over the unconsummated deal, according to 10 former and current administration officials and close White House advisers.


Mulvaney’s counsel on the shutdown has largely been to urge Trump to keep up his demands for $5.7 billion in funding for a wall or structure along the U.S.-Mexico border. He previously advised Trump not to support any short-term funding bill to reopen the Department of Homeland Security, one of the government agencies currently without funding, and it was his idea to cancel Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Afghanistan aboard a military airplane as payback for her request to delay the president‘s State of the Union address, said senior administration aides and sources close to Mulvaney.

But apart from being a cheerleader of Trump’s own instincts, aides say they have not seen much of Mulvaney’s imprint inside the West Wing. He has yet to assert much control.

He is not taking the lead in shutdown negotiations with Congress — even though he is a former three-term Republican lawmaker from South Carolina. Instead, he has deferred to Vice President Mike Pence and senior adviser Jared Kushner, who’s still riding high from passing criminal justice reform late last year.

“Mulvaney’s big selling point is that he a political guy, but he seems to have screwed this up and put us in a box,” said one Republican close to the White House. “It’s not like the president or others are saying, ‘This is Mick’s fault’ but he cheered it on.”

Mulvaney’s also mostly left Trump to his own devices, choosing not to alter president’s routine or daily schedule, which typically does not include public events until 11 a.m. or later.

“This is what the president wants. He wants a chief of staff who isn’t in charge of anything. Mulvaney is the right man for the job,” said a second Republican close to the White House.

Mulvaney faces a tough road ahead as Trump’s third chief of staff in just over two years. The president’s relationships with his previous chiefs — Reince Priebus, a GOP political operative, and Kelly, a longtime military general — soured quickly and publicly, in part, because the president prefers the White House action to revolve around him. Trump has been loath to delegate authority in the past to anyone who might attempt to control his schedule, curb access to his friends or outside advisers, or simply tell him, “no.”

“Being the third White House chief in this administration is a watershed moment. The time is running out on this president and presidency to try to get things right,” said Chris Whipple, author of “The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency.”

Mulvaney is trying to avoid the pitfalls that felled Priebus and Kelly by building his own power base within the West Wing. So far, he has brought seven aides to the White House from the Office of Management and Budget and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — the two agencies he led before becoming acting chief of staff. The most recent addition is Joe Grogan , a former drug lobbyist and senior adviser at the Food and Drug Administration, who will lead the Domestic Policy Council, a small White House policy shop that helps develop strategy on issues like immigration, health care and education. Kushner had been pushing to fill that slot with one of his staffers, Brooke Rollins.

Overall, the West Wing has started to feel like it did under Priebus, said several former and current administration officials and close White House advisers. There is no discipline and little structure or emphasis on process — and Mulvaney, like Priebus, keeps on hiring his own loyal aides.

Without Kelly as an impediment, Kushner is back to doing whatever he wants and taking on as broad a portfolio as he sees fit, even if current and former administration officials question his Washington knowledge. Under Mulvaney, Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, has essentially become the shadow chief of staff.

One White House official disputed the notion that the West Wing now feels like the Priebus days. The official said Trump is pleased with Mulvaney, who is doing very well in his new role. Other administration aides praised Mulvaney’s accessibility and affable attitude even as he is working long days in a White House where roughly two-thirds of the staff has been furloughed.

“A shutdown that began before he took on the role, an overworked skeleton crew in the West Wing, and a newly empowered Democratic majority — people can try their best to blame these things on Mick, but he cares about one thing: executing the president’s agenda,” said Jonathan Slemrod, one of Mulvaney’s former top aides at the Office of Management and Budget who now works for Harbinger Strategies.

Staying out of Trump’s way was part of Mulvaney’s pitch to the president when he sought out the chief of staff job during an Oval Office meeting in June.

In that session, Mulvaney promised the president if he landed the top job, he would not try to rein him in, manage his schedule, or set any meetings too early in the morning, said a third close White House adviser. The president relishes those mornings of watching “Fox and Friends,” sending out tweets, dialing up friends and close advisers, and reading The New York Times and New York Post in his residence. Mulvaney views that “executive time” as key to keeping the president happy, the Republican said.

No one inside the White House or close to it is certain how long Mulvaney can last in his current role — or even if he’ll last until the summer — especially under a mercurial president who is not afraid to belittle staffers or publicly undercut them. Trump has already dressed down Mulvaney over his handling of the shutdown at least once, according to reports .

Prior to accepting the acting chief of staff role, Mulvaney was quietly letting administration officials know he would be interested in becoming the Commerce secretary if Wilbur Ross retired or resigned. He also had conversations in December with the University of South Carolina about becoming its next president.

But for now, Mulvaney appears to understand that Trump conceives of the chief of staff as his gatekeeper in name only, say White House aides and close advisers. The shutdown has exacerbated that dynamic, leaving federal agencies unmoored and policy agenda items within the White House undone as the shutdown drags on. Morale has plummeted as White House aides are either furloughed or working long hours without pay in an environment that feels increasingly chaotic.

“I was flattered that Mulvaney was reportedly waving a copy of the “Gatekeepers” around the White House, but it’s almost as if he read the lessons in the book and is doing the exact opposite,” Whipple added. “Mulvaney has perpetuated this notion of John Kelly’s that he is not there to manage the president, just the White House staff. But that is the most important duty of any chief of staff: To tell the president what he does not want to hear.”