As recently as this month, impeached president Donald Trump was still claiming that Mexico was paying for his stupid border fencing, more than five years after the lie first passed through his gross lips as a 2016 presidential candidate. Back here in reality, not only has the U.S. taxpayer been stuck with the bill, initial agreements with private contractors building the monstrosity have ballooned into the billions of dollars, The Texas Tribune and ProPublica report.
“On the same day in May 2019, the Army Corps of Engineers awarded a pair of contracts worth $788 million to replace 83 miles of fence along the southwest border,” the report said. But just barely a year later, contract modifications had inflated that number to well over $3 billion. Overall, Trump’s racist vanity project has cost us “about five times more per mile than fencing built under the Bush and Obama administrations.” But that doesn’t quite make for a good rally chant, does it?
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The Texas Tribune and ProPublica report that “[w]hile adding work to a contract is not unusual on its own,” this is also the Trump administration we’re talking about, and massive federal contracts have been awarded to contractors based on the simple fact that the impeached president liked what they said while he was watching cable news during executive time (remember that?).
That was the case with Fisher Sand and Gravel, which also built the multimillion-dollar privately funded border fencing through financial backing from the We Build the Wall scam. Engineers say that private fencing was so shoddily built that it’s now on the verge of collapse. But when the company should have been laughed out the door and crossed off a list of businesses the federal government does business with, the Trump administration awarded Fisher Sand and Gravel over $2 billion to build more fencing, this time paid for by us.
“Experts say the frequent use of so-called supplemental agreements to add work or increase the price has amounted to giving no-bid contracts to a small group of pre-selected construction firms,” the reports said, “many with executives who have donated to Trump or other Republicans.” The leaders of contractor SLSCO, which the report said has tacked on another $500 million to its initial agreements, have given thousands to Republican candidates. SLSCO’s $2.2 billion in federal contracts? Paid for by us.
Congress has funded some money for border security but not the billions upon billions Trump has demanded for a wall, so he’s just pilfered it from the rest of the government (with the help of feckless Republicans like Texas’ Sen. John Cornyn). That money grab was blocked by lower courts but then allowed to continue by the Supreme Court. Litigation will now be heard by the high court early next year. While Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has pledged to stop construction should he win the 2020 election, “[t]he ACLU, which represents the Sierra Club and Southern Border Communities Coalition in the lawsuit, has said it would seek to tear down sections of the wall if it wins the case,” USA Today reported.
Trump’s getting an assist in promoting his stupid wall in the final days of voting from political appointees like unlawfully appointed acting Department of Homeland Security Sec. Chad Wolf, who’s set to visit it this week to “celebrate” 400 miles of what’s mostly new replacement fencing. But nevertheless, this wall that has devastated communities including Indigenous peoples, the land, entire ways of being—has all been paid for by us.