Negotiations over President Trump's "America-first" budget are just beginning, said Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget.
During a Tuesday interview on CBS News, Mulvaney reiterated that the plans he laid out Monday during the White House press briefing are a "budget blueprint."
Delays by Democrats led to the full budget not being finished yet, Mulvaney said.
"Ordinarily in an administration you wouldn't even see the budget until we were much farther along in the process. Because of the delay in my confirmation and other confirmations, because of the obstruction the Senate, we decided to come out and say, 'Here's where we are,'" the former South Carolina congressman told CBS.
The blueprint was created based on Trump's plans.
"You have an America-first candidate, you have an America-first budget,” Mulvaney said. "We looked at his speeches, what he believed, what he told people when he was running for office. We took those policies and turned them into numbers.
"What you see is increase in defense, increase in border security, and increase in enforcing laws that are already on the book, an increase in school choice, and decreases, for example, in money sent to other countries," Mulvaney said.
Trump does not want to make the deficit worse, Mulvaney said.
"His charge to me was, 'Do what I said I would do, but don't impact the deficit.'"
Negotiations about the budget will take place over the next two weeks, and budget cuts could take place at any government agency, Mulvaney said.
"We look at everything. That's our job. We look at every single program. We know the agencies as well as they know themselves. That's what the professionals at OMB do. People go line-by-line through all the programs and say this is effective, that one is not," Mulvaney said.
The budget sends an important message from the president, Mulvaney said.
"This president is doing what he said he'd do when he ran," the budget director said in another interview Tuesday on ABC News.
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