White House budget director predicts Trump's military parade will cost up to $30 million

Apparently, a military parade through the nation's capital is not cheap.

White House budget director Mick Mulvaney predicted Wednesday that the cost of parading America's colors and munitions through Washington, D.C. — as President Trump apparently desires — could be as low as $10 million and as high as $30 million. The price tag hinges on the "scope" of the parade, Mulvaney told the House Budget Committee.

"Obviously an hour parade is different than a five-hour parade in terms of the cost and the equipment," he explained. The cost of the parade would not be folded separately into any budget proposal, Mulvaney said, but rather the White House would "have to find funds for it that [Congress] already appropriated."

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The president's dream of a military parade was apparently spurred by a July 2017 visit to France, when French President Emmanuel Macron treated Trump to a display of tanks crawling down the streets of Paris and fighter jets soaring in the sky. Trump reportedly asked the Pentagon last year to create a plan for a parade that would be "grander than the one he saw in Paris."

Municipal officials in D.C. are not fans of Trump's parade idea, however. The city's mayor told The Washington Post last week that she was "concerned about the impact on the city, the impact on safety … and quite frankly, the attention it would attract."