The self-described “king of debt” is about to get religion.

In the next several months, the Trump administration faces several big spending and budget showdowns with Congress. And after mostly brushing off deficit concerns while pushing through a costly tax-cut plan, the White House now plans to reposition itself as an unlikely enforcer of fiscal responsibility led by its new top budget official, a veteran of the conservative group Heritage Action.

Story Continued Below

The series of budget fights will come into focus on Saturday, when the U.S. government hits its debt limit, already at a record of roughly $22 trillion. That won’t cause an immediate crisis, thanks to Treasury’s ability to keep paying the bills for a limited amount of time using power known as “extraordinary measures.”

Still, Saturday marks the beginning of a series of budget challenges for the Trump White House. The next marker comes on March 11, when the White House is scheduled to release the president’s broad budget priorities, which will feature a call for deep spending cuts — and be dead on arrival in the Democratic-led House. Administration officials have been meeting for weeks to devise a strategy to dramatically boost defense spending, fulfilling a promise to Trump’s base, while at the same time placing a strong new rhetorical emphasis on deficit concerns in a bid to undermine Democratic demands for more spending on non-defense programs like foreign aid, education and environmental protection.

It’s a long-shot plan certain to face accusations of hypocrisy — especially since it’s coming from Trump, who once boasted, “I’ve made a fortune by using debt.” Privately, many White House officials also dismiss the notion that the federal debt is a major problem.

The approach will also touch off another fierce, months-long fight with newly empowered Democrats in Congress, who have railed for two years now that the Trump administration is recklessly exploding the deficit.

But administration officials insist they’ve got the upper hand this time around. They think they’ve found a way to fund their defense spending increase — and they contend Democrats have more to lose from the automatic spending cuts triggered by sequestration.

Russ Vought, acting head of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, sent the opening salvo in a recent op-ed lamenting Washington’s spending problem and warning of sky-high annual deficits and the national debt. Some D.C. budget wonks scoffed, previewing the reaction that is sure to become more pronounced as the battle heats up and politicians begin examining Trump’s blueprint.

The president’s critics countered that the Trump administration backed a tax-cut plan that will cost an estimated $2.3 trillion over 10 years and add $1.9 trillion to the debt. And after much consternation, Trump agreed to sign a massive $1.3 trillion spending bill last year — though afterwards, he told aides he’d regretted it apart from the boost it gave to the military.

“It rightly identifies the problem and then is totally wrong on the solutions,” said Marc Goldwein, senior policy Director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, of Vought’s op-ed.

And if the Trump administration was really serious about tackling spending, these critics said, they’d take on politically treacherous issues like entitlements. One senior administration official said the president’s upcoming budget proposal would not offer any new cuts to mandatory spending and would track with what they’ve proposed in past budgets.

“The core structural problems remains and have not been addressed,” said Michael Peterson, the CEO of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. Those problems include the growing share of the federal budget taken up by spending on Medicare and Social Security, two programs for the elderly, disabled and children that politicians have been loath to touch. Peterson warned that the United States is on a “very unsustainable, dangerous and damaging fiscal path.”

Trump’s plan to raise defense spending without allowing the traditionally reciprocal increase in non-defense discretionary spending requires some tricky math. Among the tools the administration plans to use to cut spending: raiding the Overseas Contingency Operations fund, which has not been subject to the sequestration budget caps Congress put in place earlier this decade.

Such a move has long come under fire from fiscal conservatives, including Mulvaney himself, who once sponsored legislation to prevent the OCO from being used in that way and has called the move a “gimmick.” Democrats also oppose the tactic.

But administration officials said Mulvaney is now embracing use of the OCO, though they privately acknowledge the tricky politics of his abrupt shift. Even some in the administration are hesitant about the approach, reluctantly going along with it because it’s seen as the only option. “I don’t like it, personally,” one senior administration official told POLITICO.

The release of the president’s budget will kick off a series of deadlines for the administration, which should last through the fall of 2019.

Even though the U.S. will officially reach its debt limit on Saturday, the Congressional Budget Office estimates the country won’t run out of money to pay its bills until late summer or early fall, during which Congress will negotiate over a deal to raise the debt ceiling.

Congress must also strike an agreement by Oct. 1 to raise the sequestration budget caps.

In the wake of the bruising government shutdown, budget experts say appropriators and Republican congressional leadership have little appetite for any type of budget showdown this fall — just as the funding bills for the government also must get passed. Republicans saw their approval ratings tank during the 35-day partial federal shutdown over border wall funding, with the majority of Americans in poll after poll saying they blamed both Trump and congressional Republicans.

“Similar to last year, I think they will work out the agreement on the debt limit and an agreement to adjust the caps for 2020 and 2021. There will be pressure to try to make sure they don’t have to deal with it in an election year,” said William G. Hoagland, former Republican staff director of Senate Budget Committee.

Still, that sentiment hasn’t stopped the Trump administration and new acting director of the budget office from attempting to make demands — even in this new era of divided government. Vought’s op-ed called on Congress to adhere to the 5 percent spending cuts for major swaths of the federal government and then boost military spending by taking cash from the overseas fund.

One senior administration official defended the idea, saying that raiding the OCO fund has never been used as an opportunity to cut spending and therefore is a new, valid idea.

“That is what different this time around,” the official said. “We are saying: we are in divided government.”

Just as the administration now views OCO as a legitimate vehicle for cutting spending, some administration officials are also now expressing deep concern about the deficit — hence, the expected proposal of deep spending cuts in the upcoming budget.

Aides said the Treasury Department will take point on debt limit talks, while the Office of Management and Budget is driving the budget proposal.

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has said he would like Congress to raise the debt ceiling without any political showdowns, or attempts to extract additional policy concessions — a move that could anger some House Republicans.

One of the senior administration officials dismissed concerns that the debt limit fight will become a political nightmare, calling the issue, “much sound and fury signifying nothing.”

But the debt limit and budget cap negotiations will force the White House to help congressional leadership deliver votes on a key issue, all while keeping the president — the king of debt — on message.

President Donald Trump’s reelection team is backing a controversial plan to give the government a role in managing America’s next-generation 5G wireless networks — bucking the free market consensus view of his own administration and sparking wireless industry fears of nationalization.

The plan — embraced by Trump 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale and adviser Newt Gingrich — would involve the government taking 5G airwaves and designing a system to allow for sharing them on a wholesale basis with wireless providers. The idea is also being pushed by a politically connected wireless company backed by venture capitalist Peter Thiel that could stand to benefit.

Story Continued Below

It’s already getting pushback from industry, which dismisses the concept as untested and unworkable.

But the Trump campaign is now fully embracing the model in a bid to woo rural voters who have long lacked decent internet service because wireless companies don’t have a financial incentive to offer affordable broadband to all Americans, including those outside the biggest cities.

“A 5G wholesale market would drive down costs and provide access to millions of Americans who are currently underserved,” Kayleigh McEnany, national press secretary for Trump’s 2020 campaign, told POLITICO. “This is in line with President Trump’s agenda to benefit all Americans, regardless of geography.”

Trump campaign advisers aren’t offering an explanation for why their position is so different from the one embraced by the Trump administration, and they say they have no financial motivations for their stance.

But the campaign’s position sets up a likely policy fight with key Trump administration figures who preach an industry-led 5G vision, including White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow and members of the FCC.

The issue of government’s potential role in 5G — which promises super-fast internet speeds seen as critical to U.S. economic and technology development — has already proven to be an explosive one.

At the beginning of 2018, a leaked memo from the National Security Council, which envisioned the Trump administration building a nationwide 5G network to compete with China, faced immediate rejection from the wireless industry, every FCC commissioner and lawmakers of both parties, who were alarmed at the prospect of a heavy government hand in the sector.

The White House at the time never explicitly ruled out the nationalization concept, with press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders saying “there are a lot of things on the table.” But administration officials still scrambled to reassure the powerful wireless sector, holding a conference on 5G later in the year where Kudlow said “the White House is officially behind this free-enterprise, free-market approach.”

The Trump campaign is now touting a different flavor of potential government intervention into 5G, one championed by a wireless company known as Rivada Networks.

Rivada, which counts Trump ally Thiel among its investors, is lobbying for the administration to take wireless spectrum from the Defense Department and use a third-party operator — ideally Rivada — to make those airwaves available to users who need it on a rolling wholesale basis, much like in the electricity market.

This model would differ from the current system where wireless carriers like AT&T and Verizon typically hold long-term spectrum leases secured at FCC auctions. Veteran GOP operative Karl Rove, a Rivada adviser, is helping to cultivate an informal network of advocates to push the concept.

Rivada’s influence operation has sparked speculation about its role in the Trump campaign’s thinking. But Parscale, one of the most vocal Trump surrogates backing the government-managed 5G plan, has no financial interest in Rivada or 5G, according to the campaign. Gingrich, who wrote an op-ed praising the “public-private” 5G model, also said he’s not getting paid by the company, but finds what it wants to do “fascinating.”

Rivada has requested meetings with Michael Kratsios, deputy assistant to the president for technology policy, which he has declined, according to an administration official. Kratsios previously worked for Thiel.

Trump himself issued a pair of enigmatic tweets on 5G in late February, which failed to clear up where he stands on the government’s role in the next-generation networks.

“I want 5G, and even 6G, technology in the United States as soon as possible,” Trump said. “It is far more powerful, faster, and smarter than the current standard. American companies must step up their efforts, or get left behind.”

Asked about the Trump campaign’s views on 5G, the White House Office of Science and Technology policy said it stands behind the current, industry-led approach. “The Trump Administration embraces any and all private sector-driven efforts to boost innovation in the United States for deploying secure 5G networks,” a spokesperson said.

The FCC declined to comment.

CTIA, which represents wireless heavyweights like AT&T and Verizon, has already sought to counter the growing talk of government involvement in 5G.

“Instead of trying to ‘out-China, China’, as some proponents of a nationalized ‘wholesale’ network monopoly suggested, we reaffirmed our faith in that most American of principles — competition in a free and open market,” the trade group wrote in a blog post last month.

Rivada has fallen short in its efforts to shape government policy before, despite attracting high-profile advocates including Rove and former Govs. Jeb Bush and Martin O’Malley, who serve on the board. The company failed to make inroads with the multibillion-dollar U.S. public safety communications network FirstNet, first losing the government contract to build the network to AT&T and then failing to convince states to defect to Rivada’s version of the project.

But Rivada CEO Declan Ganley is maintaining a combative message when it comes to the 5G plan his company backs, blasting incumbent telecom giants as “parasites” bilking the American public.

“America should have some of the cheapest bandwidth and data available in the world and instead it’s got the most expensive pricing in the world,” he said in an interview. Of the big wireless companies, he added: “They are the ninjas of regulatory capture. … They can hire 20,000 lobbyists to our one. We’ll never out-lobby them, but the numbers don’t lie. Americans are being hosed.”

Robert Spalding, the former National Security Council official who drafted the White House memo on 5G nationalization and is now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, sees benefits in the 5G model championed by the Trump campaign. But while it may be useful as messaging to rural voters, he said, the idea as a practical matter is dead on arrival because it would require the military to share its airwaves.

“I just don’t see it actually coming to fruition because at the end of the day, an agency like the Department of Defense would have to step up and say this is absolutely required for national security,” he said. “I know that DoD has no interest in using any kind of department resources in making this a priority.”