At Thursday's White House press briefing Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney said spending money on climate change is a waste of money.



"Regarding the question as to climate change, I think the President was fairly straightforward -- we're not spending money on that anymore; we consider that to be a waste of your money to go out and do that. So that is a specific tie to his campaign," Mulvaney told reporters.



From Thursday's briefing:





QUESTION: Can you explain a little bit more about what message the President is trying to send by eliminating a lot of funding for science and climate change research, as you mentioned earlier? And just a follow-up later when you get a chance.



DIRECTOR MULVANEY: Sure. A couple different messages. When we talked about science and climate change, let's deal with them separately. On science, we're going to function -- we're going to focus on the core function. There's reductions, for example, I think, in the NIH -- the National Institutes of Health. Why? Because we think there's been mission creep, we think they do things that are outside their core functions. We think there's tremendous opportunity for savings. We recommend, for example, that a couple of facilities be combined; there would be cost savings from that.



Again, this comes back to the President's business person view of government, which is if you took over this as a CEO, and you’d look at this on a spreadsheet and go, why do we have all of these facilities -- why do we have seven when we can do the same job with three, won't that save money? And the answer is, yes. So part of your answer is focusing on efficiencies and focusing on doing what we do better.



Regarding the question as to climate change, I think the President was fairly straightforward -- we're not spending money on that anymore; we consider that to be a waste of your money to go out and do that. So that is a specific tie to his campaign.