As a government shutdown looms ever closer, the office tasked with coordinating the actual protocols a shutdown would trigger still does not have a full-time director at its helm.
As The Daily Beast noted Thursday night, The White House Office of Management and Budget is supposed to coordinate "administration-wide shutdown procedures" and sort through each agency's contingency plans "in the event of a lapse in federal appropriations."
The only problem? The OMB is currently run by a Mick Mulvaney, who also directs the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and splits his time between the two large agencies. Leadership of the OMB was supposed to go to Leandra English, the person named acting director by the department's former head — but Mulvaney staged a strange semi-coup, instructing staffers to "disregard" English and installing Trump loyalists in response to dissent among the office's ranks.
In addition to the situation at the OMB, the Beast noted that another office critical to shutdown procedure, The Office of Personnel Management, also lacks a permanent director. The OPM "oversees a federal workforce that would be hit with large furloughs" in the case of the shutdown.
