(Photo by Lorie Shaull)

(Photo by Lorie Shaull)

By Natalie Delgadillo, Rachel Sadon, and Carmel Delshad

Mayor Muriel Bowser is refuting claims claims from President Donald Trump that D.C. officials provided a “ridiculously high” estimate of the costs for a now-cancelled military parade.

“The president may have been in fact reacting to numbers that he heard circulating yesterday that would make the cost of the parade upwards of $90 million. I don’t know what the federal cost would be—the Pentagon, moving equipment, moving personnel, setup and the like,” she said in an interview on Friday. “It sounds like the type of event that they want would be in order of our inaugural planning.”

Officials with the D.C. government say the city isn’t to blame for high costs associated with the parade. According to one source, specific details of what the parade would entail were never shared with the city, so the $21.6 million D.C. provided recently in a projected budget is a pretty rough estimate.

Still, it reflects what the Trump administration was planning for November and other events of that scale, according to the mayor.

“It’s exactly in line with the type of preparation and support we would give the president in an inauguration. Costs for the most recent inauguration were $29 million,” Bowser said.

The president set off the firestorm this morning, when he tweeted some choice words about the D.C. government.

He’s referring, of course, to the Veteran’s Day military parade he said would be “great for the country” back in February. The Department of Defense announced yesterday that it would postpone the parade another year, shortly after CNBC reported that the cost estimates for the parade had skyrocketed to $92 million—about $80 million more than originally reported.

Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Secretary of Defense James Mattis said he’d never seen that $92 million number, and whoever reported that was “smoking something that’s legal in my state but not in most states, OK?”

Still, the parade was “postponed,” and per his tweets, Trump pinned the blame on local officials.

D.C.’s elected leaders didn’t hold back in a series of withering responses. Bowser first chose to respond on Trump’s preferred medium, in something of his own vernacular:

The mayor’s office said that all told, the parade would cost the city $21,644,813, with the largest costs going toward police presence and security. The federal government typically reimburses the city for events related to being in the nation’s capital, like inaugurations and major first amendment demonstrations. The estimated $2.6 million cost for the recent white supremacist rally, for example, is expected to come out of the federal fund.

“I do not believe the President will proceed with the parade, but if he does, for sure I will seek an advance federal payment to the District, as I do every year, to ensure our local jurisdiction is not left holding the bag for a purely federal event,” Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton said in a release Friday.

When asked about why D.C. may have been the subject of President Trump’s blame, the mayor said that “he has to be familiar with the facts of what it takes to support a national security event. Maybe he’s angry with his own team that they can’t pull off the parade by November, and he made the target Washington, D.C., and its taxpayers.”

D.C. council chairman Phil Mendelson, meanwhile, pointed to D.C.’s record of financial management in recent years. “Mr. Trump should run his federal government as well as we are running ours! We have surpluses. We have cut taxes without incurring deficits. We just got a bond rating increase from Wall Street,” he said on Twitter. “A great celebratory parade costs money, Mr Trump, and it’s YOUR Pentagon that’s suggesting more than $90 million. Don’t blame others.”

For good measure, he sent a third tweet: “Mr. Trump, have you no shame? Creating whipping boys out of fake news!”

Added At-large Councilmember David Grosso in response to Trump’s tweet: “In the words of a much more qualified woman: ‘Delete your account.'”

Speaking on the Kojo Nnamdi Show, Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh said that “the president is famous for blaming others for mistaken views that he has. The whole idea of having this military parade was ill-conceived…It was a bad idea from the beginning.”

This story has been updated.

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