WASHINGTON — President Trump’s budget director said Sunday that the White House is open to removing a repeal of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate from the GOP legislation to overhaul the nation’s tax laws if it becomes a hindrance to the bill’s passage.
‘‘If we can repeal part of Obamacare as part of a tax bill and have a tax bill that is still a good tax bill, that can pass, that’s great,’’ Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, said on CNN’s ‘‘State of the Union.’’
‘‘If it becomes an impediment to getting the best tax bill we can, then we are OK with taking it out,’’ he said.
Mulvaney said he does not think it is currently an impediment. He said it would be up to House and Senate negotiators to figure out whether to include it in a final legislative package.
Asked whether Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, would be willing to remove the mandate repeal if it becomes an impediment, Don Stewart, a McConnell spokesman, called that scenario a ‘‘hypothetical’’ one.
The mandate repeal has become a point of contention in the GOP effort to pass the tax bill by the end of the year. In a strategy shift, Senate GOP leaders opted last week to include it in their legislative framework. The tax bill that passed the House last week did not include the repeal.
Mulvaney made three appearances on Sunday television news shows to push for the Republican tax proposals.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Marc Short, the White House legislative affairs director, also appeared on interview programs, reflecting the Trump administration’s full-bore attempt to sell the tax bills.
Short said the White House is ‘‘very comfortable with the House bill’’ because it achieves its top priorities.
‘‘We also, though, believe the individual mandate is a tax,’’ Short said on ABC’s ‘‘This Week.’’ ‘‘And it is harming middle-income families the most. So we like the fact that the Senate has included it in its bill.’’
Mnuchin said the individual mandate repeal has not been added to the Senate bill as a bargaining chip that could be removed later if it risked costing the votes of key Republican senators such as Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
“This isn’t a bargaining chip,’’ Mnuchin said on “Fox News Sunday.’’ “Right now our objective is to keep it in,’’ he said, adding that “we’re going to work with the Senate as we go through this.’’
The individual mandate requires most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a fine.
Including it in the Senate bill gives GOP leaders in the upper chamber more revenue to work with in their version of the legislation, because it would probably result in fewer Americans signing up for insurance and taking advantage of federal subsidies offered by the government to pay for coverage.
Critics of the maneuver say it would harm the nation’s health care system. The back-and-forth has reignited debates over the ACA, the law that Republicans spent months this year unsuccessfully trying to dismantle.
Republican leaders are hoping that passing a broad tax overhaul will help them turn the page on their failure to repeal and replace the ACA and give them a boost headed into next year’s midterm elections.
They are seeking to pass a far-reaching plan to simplify the tax code and slash taxes. The majority of the cuts would go to corporations and wealthy Americans.
Senate GOP leaders plan to bring their bill to the floor for consideration after lawmakers return from this week’s Thanksgiving recess.
It remains unclear whether they will have the votes to pass their measure, as some key Republican senators have voiced concerns. Republicans hold a narrow 52-to-48 advantage over Democrats in the Senate.
Collins, a centrist, said on ‘‘This Week’’ that the ‘‘biggest mistake’’ was including the mandate repeal. She expressed hope that it would be dropped from the proposal or that a plan to mitigate its effects that she and other senators are pushing would be adopted.
Collins did not say how she would vote on the bill.
Collins listed several other criticisms of the bill that passed the Senate Finance Committee on Friday:
■ The top individual income-tax rate, targeted for reduction in the Senate plan, should be kept at the current 39.6 percent for people making more than $1 million a year
■ Business tax rates shouldn’t be lowered to 20 percent from the current 35 percent. She suggested 22 percent to allow other deductions to be kept
■ The state and local tax deduction, targeted for elimination in the Senate bill, should be continued.
‘‘We need to restore the tax deduction for state and local taxes, the way that the House did,’’ Collins said. ‘‘That will help our middle-income taxpayers get more tax relief.’’
On corporate taxes, Collins said that a lower rate would provide an incentive for more hiring and higher wages, ‘‘but it does not need to be reduced all the way to 20 percent for large businesses.’’
Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, has said he can’t support the tax bill as written because of its treatment of taxes for small businesses and for so-called pass-through businesses.
Pass-through businesses include partnerships, limited liability companies, and “S corporations,’’ which are taxed at the individual rate.
