Washington (CNN) Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said Wednesday that the Republican Party views federal deficits as "the worst thing" when Democrats are in power but are "a lot less interested" when their own party is in the White House, The Washington Post reported.

The country's deficit has continued to balloon under President Donald Trump due in part to tax cuts and a two-year budget deal that has boosted federal spending.

"My party is very interested in deficits when there is a Democrat in the White House. The worst thing in the whole world is deficits when Barack Obama was the president. Then Donald Trump became president, and we're a lot less interested as a party," Mulvaney, who previously served as director of the Office of Management and Budget, said at an event in England, according to the newspaper.

The Post, citing an audio recording of the event, said Mulvaney told attendees he found the US deficit, which surpassed $1 trillion last year, "extraordinarily disturbing," but that both Democrats and Republicans were unconcerned with the growing debt.

The deficit swelled to $984 billion at the end of the last fiscal year, up from $665 billion during his first year in office in 2017. The number reached $1.02 trillion for the calendar year ending in December, according to data released by the Treasury Department last month. That number marked the first time the country has crossed the $1 trillion threshold in a calendar year since 2012.

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