"This is a city that voted 70 or 80 percent against the president," White House budget director Mick Mulvaney said of Washington. | Getty Images Mulvaney on canceled military parade: It wasn’t just the money

Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney said he believes President Donald Trump’s plans for a military parade were canceled for other reasons besides the cost of the event, but would not specify other “contributing factors.”

During an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Mulvaney said he was not in the room when the decision was made to cancel the parade, as he said he would have been had the cancelation been done “purely for fiscal reasons.”


“If the parade had been canceled purely for fiscal reasons, I imagine I would have been in the room when that was made, and I wasn’t,” he said. “So my guess is there were other contributing factors.”

Trump on Friday blamed local politicians, such as Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser, for the parade’s cancelation, saying they “wanted a number so ridiculously high” that he was forced to hold off on the event.

The president’s tweet came after CNBC reported Thursday that the expected cost of Trump’s planned parade was $92 million, which was much higher than previous estimates of $12 million and $30 million. After the CNBC report, the Pentagon announced the parade had been postponed but did not offer an explanation for the change of plans.

The parade was initially ordered last year to be held this year on Veterans Day in Washington, to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I.

Bowser on Friday pushed back that the White House was unwilling to accept the anticipated costs of the parade. The figure she tweeted was $21.6 million.

Mulvaney, who also oversees the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said during his interview that he thinks Bowser “seems like a nice lady” but added that he doesn’t think the D.C. City Council wants to help Trump.

“This is a city that voted 70 or 80 percent against the president,” Mulvaney said. “So I think maybe the City Council of Washington, D.C., is not trying to help the president accomplish what he wants to accomplish shouldn’t be news to anybody.”

“If the $20 million you just mentioned is a number ... that’s a number that I’m not familiar with,” he continued. “The numbers that I saw from the city were much higher than that.”

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Muriel Bowser