White House budget director Mick Mulvaney said he’s not surprised Democrats are threatening to shut down the government in April over President Trump’s request for $1.5 billion to build a wall along the southern border.
Mulvaney said on ABC Thursday that the budget proposal introduced Thursday morning works to fulfill the president’s campaign promises and his agenda. The wall along the border with Mexico was his signature policy proposal, with getting Mexico to pay for that wall, and it was going to be in the budget.
Democrats in Congress have threatened to force a government shutdown by refusing to pay for the wall when the government runs out of money to operate April 28. Mulvaney said that seems about right.
“It doesn’t surprise me the Democrats are threatening that, but in the greater scheme of things the president promised a wall and he’s going to deliver that,” Mulvaney said.
WATCH: W.H. budget director Mick Mulvaney one-on-one with @GStephanopoulos on newly released budget proposal: https://t.co/Dtkx7DFbz5 pic.twitter.com/Q0xfYwRmbV— Good Morning America (@GMA) March 16, 2017
Trump promised repeatedly on the campaign trail that Mexico was going to pay for the wall, but that promise seems impossible to fulfill in the near term given the lack of cooperation from the Mexican government. Trump has proposed other ways of making the Mexican people pay for the wall, through increased fees at the border and taxing remittances sent to the country from the United States, among other ideas.
Mulvaney brushed off that promise when reminded of it Thursday.
“I’m responsible for getting the money together to build the wall, and that’s what I’m doing,” he said.
The budget proposal shows Trump’s lack of connection to entrenched Washington, Mulvaney said.
It includes cuts to a number of programs that are valued by many lawmakers, but Mulvaney chalked that up to the influence of special interest groups in the Capitol.
“The president is not beholden to any of those,” he said. “The president wrote a budget for the nation, the president wrote a budget based upon his campaign promises, and that’s what you see in the budget. We took his words and turned them into numbers.”
