White House Quiet on Military Cuts Because of Veto Concerns, Tim Kaine Says
Virginia senator says list would show projects ‘ransacked’.
(Bloomberg) -- The White House isn’t releasing a list of military construction projects that could have their funding diverted for Donald Trump’s border wall out of concern about the vote in Congress to override a presidential veto, Democratic Senator Tim Kaine said.
“This is the White House 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,” Kaine of Virginia said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan told senators during a March 14 hearing that he would provide the list of bases potentially affected later that day, but he didn’t. President Trump issued his first veto a day later on a congressional resolution that would block his declaration of a national emergency to shift $3.6 billion from Pentagon construction projects for his promised wall on the southern U.S. border.
The president’s proposed budget for fiscal 2020 would restore those funds for military construction and provide an additional $3.6 billion “in case additional emergency funding is needed for the border,” according to Shanahan.
While votes for the resolution fell well short of the two-thirds support needed to overcome Trump’s veto, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has scheduled a March 26 vote on the issue.
Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney questioned Kaine’s comments, saying the administration has assured Congress that no programs scheduled to start before the end of September are affected.
“There’s no list of projects that are absolutely going to not be funded so that the wall can be,” Mulvaney said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” He said the administration only has a list of construction projects that might have funds diverted. No such list has been released.
Regardless, Mulvaney said, Trump’s veto will stand.
“We fully expect the veto override to fail in the House,” he said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Mark Niquette in Columbus at mniquette@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Sara Forden at sforden@bloomberg.net, Larry Liebert, Tony Czuczka
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