Mulvaney: Proposed cuts to Meals on Wheels are compassionate to taxpayers

White House budget chief Mick Mulvaney on Thursday defended the Trump administration’s proposed deep cuts to social welfare programs such as Meals on Wheels and after-school services, saying it’s unfair to taxpayers if such programs don’t show hard results.

“Meals on Wheels sounds great,” Mulvaney said during the White House news briefing, adding that “we're not going to spend [money] on programs that cannot show that they actually deliver the promises that we’ve made to people.”


Mulvaney described the budget blueprint, which calls for dramatic cuts to domestic spending programs in favor of increased funding for the military, as “one of the most compassionate things we can do.”

He explained that the budget proposal is compassionate to the taxpayer because it stops government spending on programs that he said have been ineffective.

“You're only focusing on half of the equation, right? You’re focusing on recipients of the money. We’re trying to focus on both the recipients of the money and the folks who give us the money in the first place,” Mulvaney told reporters. “And I think it's fairly compassionate to go to them and say, ‘Look, we're not going to ask you for your hard-earned money anymore … unless we can guarantee to you that that money is actually going to be used in a proper function. And I think that is about as compassionate as you can get.”

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On cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Mulvaney said the savings there would be funneled into Trump’s long-promised infrastructure spending package, which has yet to be fleshed out publicly. The system of building public housing through HUD “doesn’t work very well,” Mulvaney said, although he promised that “nobody's going to get kicked out of their houses.”

Asked about Meals on Wheels, Mulvaney noted that the food delivery service is not a federal program but is funded by states using money from the federal government.

On after-school programs, Mulvaney said services intended to help feed hungry students in order to improve their academic performance deserve to be cut because proof of that progress has not materialized.

“They're supposed to be educational programs, right? I mean, that’s what they’re supposed to do. They're supposed to help kids who don't get fed at home get fed so they do better in school,” Mulvaney said. “Guess what? There's no demonstrable evidence they're actually doing that. There's no demonstrable evidence they're actually helping results, helping kids do better in school… the way we justified it was, these programs are going to help these kids do better in school and get better jobs. And we can’t prove that that’s happening.”

