contributions." Government shutdown According to The New York Times, Mulvaney took "a hard line on spending during President Obama's term, vowing not to raise the nation's debt limit and embracing the term 'Shutdown Caucus' because of his willingness to shut the government down instead." In 2015, Mulvaney voted against a government-funding resolution, which would have prevented a government shutdown, in part because it included funding for Planned Parenthood. Explaining his vote, Mulvaney said, "This is not about women's health. It's about trafficking in pieces of dead children." After his appointment as head of the OMB in 2017, he reiterated his conditional position of support for a shutdown. Regulations Mulvaney supported the Regulatory Improvement Act of 2015, which would have "[created] a commission tasked with eliminating and revising outdated and redundant federal regulations". Fiscal year 2014 budget On December 10, 2013, Republican Representative Paul Ryan and Democratic Senator Patty Murray announced that they had negotiated the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013, a proposed two-year budget deal. The budget deal capped the federal government's spending for Fiscal Year 2014 at $1.012 trillion and for Fiscal Year 2015 at $1.014. The proposed deal eliminated some of the spending cuts required by the sequester by $45 billion of the cuts scheduled to happen in January and $18 billion of the cuts scheduled to happen in 2015. This did not decrease federal spending; instead, by reducing the amount of spending cuts the government was going to be forced to make by the sequester, it actually increased government spending by $45 billion and $18 billion over what would have been spent had the sequester remained in place. Some Republicans wanted Speaker John Boehner to pursue a temporary measure that would cover the rest of Fiscal Year 2014 at the level set by the sequester – $967 billion, rather than pass this budget deal, which would have $45 billion in additional spending. The deal was designed to make up for this increase in spending by raising airline fees and changing the pension contribution requirements of new federal workers. According to The Hill, Mulvaney spearheaded opposition to the bill. He did not blame Ryan for the budget deal, instead saying the problem was that too few conservatives had been elected to Congress to pass a budget with a greater focus on debt reduction. Mulvaney said he expected the budget deal to pass because "it was designed to get