Mulvaney justifies budget: We can't ask a coal miner to pay for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting

As they fleshed out the budget blueprint released Thursday morning by the White House, Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney said officials from the administration of President Donald Trump asked themselves: Can we ask the taxpayer to pay for this?

For a dramatic uptick in military funding, Mulvaney said, the answer was yes. For a wide array of domestic programs, it turns out, the answer was no.


Trump’s budget, which Mulvaney said was assembled in part by examining excerpts from the president’s speeches and media interviews, delivers on his campaign promise to build up the military, designating an additional $54 billion in defense spending. The budget pays for that additional spending by cutting funding to nearly every other department, including 21 percent budget cuts at the departments of Labor and Agriculture, 28 percent at the State Department and 31 percent at the Environmental Protection Agency.

“When you start looking at places that we 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? The answer was no,” Mulvaney said Thursday morning 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 for Public Broadcasting.”

Federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be cut entirely under Trump’s budget blueprint, which also reduces spending on the Coast Guard by 14 percent and FEMA by 11 percent.

Asked how cuts to the State Department’s budget might affect the U.S. military and its activities around the globe, Mulvaney said “make no mistake about it, this is a hard-power budget, not a soft-power budget. That is what the president wanted and that’s what we gave him.”

And asked about cuts to educational programs, including aid to low-income students, teacher training and after-school and summer programs, Mulvaney said that they, by and large, are ineffective and cannot justify their existence.

“A lot of those programs that we target, they sound great, don't they? They always do. We don't put a bad name on a program. Programs are always wonderful. It’s always small business or whatever. They don't work. A lot of them simply don't work,” he said. “I can't justify them to the folks who are paying the taxes. I can't go to the autoworker in Ohio and say ‘please give me some of your money so that I can do this program over here, someplace else, that really isn't helping anybody. I can ask them to help pay for defense. But I can’t do it anymore. I can’t go to them and say ‘I need your money to go help this program.’”