Mulvaney on Using Gov’t Planes for Personal Use: ‘You’re Not Going to See It Again’

CHUCK TODD: All right, before I get to — I’ve got one more sort of administrative issue —

OMB DIR. MICK MULVANEY: Sure.

CHUCK TODD: This issue with the use of government planes or private planes, we learned more this week. In fact, since the last time you were on a Sunday show, we learned that you were on one of these flights with the secretary of Treasury. One that took, I guess you were on one leg of a flight that ended up just going to New York. Now you were only on one part of it. But you’re a part of a new policy here. Has this policy been abused?

OMB DIR. MICK MULVANEY: Actually, that’s not factually accurate. So—

CHUCK TODD: It is not? You were not on one of these Treasury flights with the secretary of Treasury?

OMB DIR. MICK MULVANEY: I was scheduled to fly on that flight, and I think we told the press—

CHUCK TODD: Because you were on the manifest?

OMB DIR. MICK MULVANEY: I was on the manifest, and I ended up flying home the next day commercial. So we’ll just straighten that out. But look, what’s the policy? My guess is, when all of these investigations are finished, and the inspectors general are looking at these and each of these agencies, every single one of these flights will be legal, right? The policy that we put out last week—

CHUCK TODD: But are they ethical?

OMB DIR. MICK MULVANEY: Exactly. What’s necessarily legal isn’t necessarily right. And I think what we did was John Kelly and I last, we got together, and came out with this statement of policy that says, “Look, you can fly it, it’s reasonable in certain circumstances, but it needs to be the hard exception.” There’s going to be times when Ryan Zinke needs to go to the Arctic Circle or Rick Perry needs to go to the middle of nowhere in the Nevada desert. Those places probably merit flying something other than commercial.

CHUCK TODD: But government planes to New York?

OMB DIR. MICK MULVANEY: You’re not going to see it again. How about that?