Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said Sunday that the President’s emergency order to fund the U.S.-Mexico border wall would not pull money away from programs that are funded through fiscal year 2019, and added that there wasn’t a list of projects “that are absolutely going to not be funded so that the wall can be.”
“Here’s what’s happening is that we’ve already told Congress this, which is that none of the programs that were scheduled to be started, or what we call obligated, in 2019, so between now and the end of September, will be impacted at all,” Mulvaney said during an interview on CBS.
The chief of staff added that “it could be a while” before the administration releases to Congress the list detailing where they intend to take money from to fund the construction of the wall.
“I know of the universe of things that might be delayed or reduced or cut in a very extreme circumstance that could be used to fund the wall, but a list of a decision that’s already been made saying, ‘This money is going to be cut and spent over there’, that’s not been made yet,” he noted.
Last month, President Donald Trump issued an emergency order in order to unlock billions of more dollars from the existing budget in order to pay for a wall along the southern border and last week he vetoed a congressional resolution aimed at blocking his declaration, saying that the measure “put countless Americans in danger.”
Democratic Senator Tim Kain, who also appeared on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” accused the Trump administration of “wanting to hold the list back because they worry that if senators and House members saw the potential projects that were going to be ransacked to pay for the president’s wall, they would lose votes.”
He also said that until Trump’s veto was overridden in both chambers of Congress, the White House was “going to try to hide the list.”
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