I‘m writing this blog post in response to Greg Ortiz’ post: Trump now wants to take $1.5 billion in defense funding to throw at his stupid border wall
I wanted to point out that this is much worse than it even appears in this post. If you specifically look at Trump’s Defense department request for the Overseas Contingency Operations funding it includes funding for the wall. Trump thinks the easiest way to get funding for his wall is to include it in Defense Department appropriations and is encouraging the use of the OCO as basically a slush fund for whatever he wants to spend it on.
In fact, in his budget request for the 2020 FY Defense Department includes a provision for Emergency Requirements, mentioned in the enclosed budget request: FY 2020 Defense Budget Overview
These appropriations are specified as:
“unspecified military construction to build border barriers, backfill funding allocated in FY 2019 to build border barriers and rebuild facilities damaged by Hurricanes Florence and Michael.”
These Emergency Requirements mentioned in Chapters 1-3 and 6-1 and detailed in Chapter 6-9 are not subject to Budget Sequestration as is the rest of the Defense Budget.
So, basically, Trump is using a backdoor method of funding his wall by using Defense Dept discretionary funding as a political football instead. It’s a backdoor means of getting the funding he wants.
If you look backward at previous OCO requests, which can be found at the top of the page HERE, you’ll also notice that Trump is also including $95 Billion for Base Requirements. An amount that is not specified for any particular overseas operation has not been evident in any previous OCO request and many military budget critics have basically called a slush fund for Trump to spend on whatever overseas military operation he has decided to embroil us in were it to pass.
You should read chapter 6 in this document to get the full flavor of the Trump Administrations chicanery.
And the budget request also includes $75 Million for an actual space force (Ch. 5-2 through 5-6). Facepalm.