White House budget chief Mick Mulvaney says Trump administration officials focused on areas of the budget where they felt they could not ask taxpayers to foot the bill, specifically citing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).

"When you start looking at the places that will reduce spending, one of the questions we asked was 'Can we really continue to ask a coal miner in West Virginia or a single mom in Detroit to pay for these programs?' And the answer was no,” Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, said in a Thursday morning interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

"We can ask them to pay for defense, and we will, but we can’t ask them to continue to pay for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting."

Under Trump’s proposed budget, the funding for the CPB would be eliminated, as would the funds for the National Endowment of the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities.

CPB criticized Trump’s proposal in a statement Thursday, warning against scrapping the “essential national service.”

“There is no viable substitute for federal funding that ensures Americans have universal access to public media’s educational and informational programming and services,” the CPB said in a statement.

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When MSNBC’s Willie Geist asked Mulvaney about the high cost of projects within the defense budget, he admitted there was “waste” in the defense spending as well.

"Do we need another F-35 and not have after-school programs?” Geist asked.

"Don’t get me wrong. There’s waste in the defense department as well, the president is upset about that and has tasked Gen. Mattis to work on efficiencies in the defense department,” the budget director responded. "When you start talking about priorities, the president’s priorities for national defense, homeland security, taking care of veterans, school choice, and that’s what we have.”

Mulvaney also said Thursday that much of the budget came from policy proposals Trump outlined in speeches and interviews during his campaign.

"We went back and pulled lines from speeches, interviews and turned his words, his policies into numbers,” Mulvaney said. "So folks who voted for the president are getting exactly what they voted for. "