White House Budget Office director Mick Mulvaney said yesterday that the federal government is going to help Puerto Rico get out of the humanitarian burden that Hurricane Maria has caused but that its financial problems must be solved by themselves. Mulvaney’s expressions, made on CNN, sought to soften the expressions of President Donald Trump in the sense that Puerto Rico’s public debt – which is about $ 72 BILLION – should be erased.
“The President knows that for Puerto Rico to fix itself, he’s going to have to deal directly with that debt situation,” said Mulvaney, a former congressman who was part of the more conservative group of federal Republican lawmakers, the Freedom Caucus.
Mulvaney said that “the country .. sorry … the territory was poorly managed for a long time”. Former top Treasury Department official Brian Setser said that most likely “there will be significant debt reduction in the process, but it’s not something the President can make happen.”
