Donald Trump said on Thursday afternoon that he’s “overridden” his own administration officials on proposing to cut funding for the Special Olympics out of the latest federal budget proposals.
“The Special Olympics will be funded, I just told my people,” the president told reporters on the lawn at the White House as he departed to take a flight to an evening rally in Michigan.
“I’ve overridden my people,” he added.
The education secretary, Betsy DeVos, had been under fire since her department’s budget proposal for the next fiscal year did not include US funding for the Special Olympics.
“As you know, budgeting within the administration is a collaborative one. As I said then, and I’ll say again, we had to make tough choices and decisions around budget priorities,” DeVos had said earlier on Thursday.
He added: “I wanna fund the Special Olympics, and I just authorized a funding of the Special Olympics. I’ve been to the Special Olympics, I think it’s incredible ... We’re funding the Special Olympics.”
Trump’s comments came as his administration faced widespread outrage over its proposal to do away with federal funding for the Special Olympics – a 51-year-old program offering school programming and sports competitions and training for the disabled – from its 2020 budget.
Trump’s budget proposed $17.6m in cuts to the Special Olympics as part of an overall 10% reduction in the budget for the Department of Education.
DeVos struggled to explain the decision this week as lawmakers grilled her during an appearance on Capitol Hill.
“I still can’t understand why you would go after disabled children in your budget,” the congresswoman Barbara Lee, a Democrat from California, told DeVos at a hearing. “You zero that out. It’s appalling.”
DeVos subsequently defended the move in a statement that sparked its own controversy for blaming the media, without evidence, of misrepresenting the proposed cuts but then acknowledging them to be true. DeVos added that while she personally supported the Special Olympics and its mission, the federal government “cannot fund every worthy program, particularly ones that enjoy robust support from private donations”.
“There are dozens of worthy nonprofits that support students and adults with disabilities that don’t get a dime of federal grant money,” DeVos said.