WASHINGTON — The Trump administration took solace Tuesday in funds it secured to replace roughly 40 miles of border fencing with a taller, sturdier steel barrier.

But Trump aides also sent mixed signals, blaming Democrats for delaying construction of the "big beautiful wall" the president promised, even as they boasted that the project remains on schedule.

Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly conceded that the $1 trillion budget deal struck early Monday to keep the government open through September included no funds for new wall construction - a clear setback for President Donald Trump and a win for Democrats.

Kelly accused wall critics of "celebrating how they've managed to reduce the amount of money for our border wall, a wall that will make us more secure, that will prevent drug smuggling."

"They're rejoicing in the fact that the wall will be slower to be built," he said at the White House.

Moments later, Mick Mulvaney, the White House budget director, insisted that the $1.5 billion boost for homeland security funding included in the five-month spending deal is plenty to start shoring up the border.

The deal includes $341 million to replace about 40 miles of fencing. Mulvaney displayed photos from Sunland Park, N.M., just west of El Paso and across the border from Ciudad Juarez, where 20-foot steel barriers replaced cyclone fencing in the last few months.

That comes to $8.5 million per mile.

"We are building this now," Mulvaney said, adding, "That's what we got in this deal and that's what the Democrats don't want you to know. This stuff is going up now. Why? Because the president wants to make the country more safe."

The barrier in Sunland Park was erected well before the deal struck this weekend, a deal Mulvaney depicting as a full win for Trump, regardless of the lack of wall funding.

"There are several hundreds of millions of dollars for us to replace cyclone fencing with 20-foot high steel wall," Mulvaney said. "You can call it new wall, you can call it replacement, you can call it maintenance, call it whatever you want to. The president's priority was to secure the southern border and that's what this does."

He noted that replacing existing fencing is far cheaper than the hundreds of new miles of barrier Trump

plans along the border, much of it in places that lack roads and other infrastructure, and where the federal government doesn't yet have land rights.

"We haven't done the math yet on how many miles we can build and where it will be," he said.