Hurricane Dorian isn’t doing any damage to the state of Alabama—but Donald Trump is. Alabama is just one state that’s losing money for military projects as Trump swipes the funds to build his purposely ugly matte-black fence. All thanks to Trump’s Sharpie, and his signature on an emergency declaration.
NPR has the full list of 127 projects that are being raided by Trump to install more barbed wire on the border. It includes not just a new elementary school for U.S. troops stationed in Germany, but a facility for injured veterans in North Carolina and a base fire department in South Carolina. It also includes a lot of facilities that sound as if they might be really nice for soldiers, sailors, and airmen expected to put their lives at risk. Facilities such as an aircraft repair center in Texas and a shipyard in Virginia.
In fact, Trump’s hit list takes a little something from a lot of people. An engineering building at West Point. A weapons maintenance shop in Alabama. Even the headquarters for Space Command that was to be built in Ohio.
And it’s not just the definitely-not-hurricane-ravaged state of Alabama that’s giving up dollars, jobs, and facilities so Trump can pump up his ego in advance of 2020. Bases in South Carolina and North Carolina that are actually feeling the passage of Dorian are having their funds blown away by Trump’s emergency need to build a fence.
The Defense Department is asking Congress to “backfill” funds so that these military projects can be completed, but there are members in both the House and the Senate who strenuously object to that idea, not because they don’t want to see military kids get new schools and military families protected by new fire stations, but because Congress already voted to support those things. It already provided the funds for those things.
But Donald Trump stole those funds, and putting the money back is just inviting Trump to do it again.
The whole point of the National Emergencies Act is that it should only be used in emergencies. Back-filling the gaps created by Trump’s thievery would transform emergency declarations into a back door for the White House to create a line-item veto, allowing it to put funds where it likes, no matter how Congress allocated those dollars.
That’s not just a distortion of the NEA; it’s an unconstitutional override of Congress’ funding authority.
Some of the items that are being plucked away from the Defense Department were likely just selected by the luck of the draw—it would be hard to think that even Trump would target a parachute-packing facility. But others don’t seem so coincidental. That’s certainly true in the case of the $400 million Trump is taking away from facilities in Puerto Rico.
It’s also strange to see that Trump is stealing $10 million that was supposed to go to creating a cyber operations facility in Virginia. That almost makes it seem that, while Trump is creating his fence, he wants some doors to remain wide open.