President Donald Trump boasts regularly about his prowess as a businessperson. And in an interview Tuesday, he suggested that government agencies might learn something by simply refusing to pay bills in full as a way of negotiating for better deals for American taxpayers.

Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity that “everybody expects to be cut” when they send a bill. He said he could pick a bill at random out of thousands that the federal government is paying, one that was dealt with “by some bureaucrat.”

He offered a negotiating strategy, musing that an official could say, “I’ll give you three, I don’t want to pay you five. It’s too high. I’ll give you three.”

“But they don’t do that,” he said. “If a guy sends in a bill for 5,000, they pay 5,000. They expect to be cut. Everybody expects to be cut. When you send in a bill, you expect to be cut.”

The comments echo Trump’s long history as a real-estate developer, when he would brag about his negotiating prowess. He also was accused of not paying contractors and lawyers, as was his longtime lawyer and mentor, Roy Cohn.

Trump appeared in Tuesday night’s interview alongside Elon Musk, who is leading an effort to carry out a radical and swift overhaul of the government. Musk has said he has identified contracts, among other costs, that were bloated or did not fit with Trump’s agenda.

The president has long been frustrated by the sclerotic pace and rules of the federal government. But negotiating smaller contracts in the way that Trump was used to in his private business would be challenging to implement on a larger scale.

He singled out legal fees as an example, he claimed, of a service in which people performing it expect to have their bills cut.

“You offer people a much lower number because you know they actually put fat. I’m not even saying — it’s like a way of business,” Trump said. “They put more on because they expect to be negotiated. When you send in a bill to the government, there’s nobody to negotiate.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Maggie Haberman
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