DC Council blasts Mulvaney for claiming they inflated cost of military parade

The Washington, D.C. city council on Monday slammed White House budget director Mick Mulvaney for suggesting that the heavily Democratic city inflated the costs of President Trump’s military parade to prevent it from happening.

“Opposition to a $92 million tax-funded parade is nonpartisan,” The DC Council’s official Twitter account wrote. “We’d have opposed a $92 million parade led by the Obamas & Chuck Brown, with statehood floats made of hemp”

1) Actually, it was 95.91% of DC that voted for candidates other than the President
2) But that’s irrelevant. Opposition to a $92 million tax-funded parade is nonpartisan. We’d have opposed a $92 million parade led by the Obamas & Chuck Brown, with statehood floats made of hemp pic.twitter.com/gZcVkWCP4k

— Council of DC (@councilofdc) August 20, 2018

{mosads}

The statement came just a day after Mulvaney said on “Fox News Sunday” that he thinks D.C.’s city council “is not trying to help the president accomplish what he wants to accomplish.”

He also cited the fact that a majority of voters in Washington, D.C. opposed Trump to back his claim.  

The back-and-forth comes just days after Trump canceled plans for a military parade. Trump blamed both high costs and local politicians in the city for the cancellation. 

“The local politicians who run Washington, D.C. (poorly) know a windfall when they see it,” Trump said. “When asked to give us a price for holding a great celebratory military parade, they wanted a number so ridiculously high that I cancelled it. Never let someone hold you up!” 

Trump did not share any evidence of the high costs he claimed the city quoted.

Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) responded to the statement by saying she got through to the “reality star” president that a military parade was a bad idea. Bowser in her tweet floated a $26.1 million figure for the cost of “parades/events/demonstrations in Trump America.”

Mulvaney said he was “not familiar” with that figure.

“The numbers that I saw from the city were much higher than that,” he said.

High costs were a particular concern for many lawmakers when it came to Trump’s much-desired military parade.

On Monday, a Defense Department spokesman appeared to contradict Trump by saying that the president canceled the military parade before being briefed on the cost estimates.

“The president was not briefed by any member of the Department of Defense on any cost associated with the parade,” Col. Rob Manning told reporters at the Pentagon.