Donald Trump’s border wall is getting a turbocharge thanks to the Department of Homeland Security waiving federal contracting laws to build faster. The Trump administration has previously waived environmental regulations to push wall construction forward, but now it will also waive procurement regulations—little things like open competition—to speed up construction on 177 miles of border barrier in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.
Trump has never seemed bothered by simply lying about how much border wall has been built, but it seems he now wants more actual results. His administration estimates that it can build 94 miles this year.
Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf has this authority thanks to a 2005 law—which also covered funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and standards for state-issued identification cards—passed unanimously by a Senate that included Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama. In the House, then-Rep. Bernie Sanders voted against it.
As a reminder, a section of Trump’s supposedly impregnable border wall has already been knocked down by high winds, and it will need hundreds of storm gates left open for months at a time to avoid having more knocked down by rain storms. Additionally, it can be cut through using easily available tools and has also been climbed.
The biggest problem with the wall, of course, is that it’s a symbol of Trump’s racist, divisive politics, an appeal to supporters to indulge in hate and exclusion. The next biggest problem with it is that it involves still more abusive exercises of executive authority. It just also happens to be ruinously expensive and hilariously weak.