Last year, the Pentagon diverted $6 billion of its budget to build barriers in California, Arizona and New Mexico. As of Jan. 13, according to Army Corps of Engineers figures, about $3 billion of that has been awarded for contracts to build 200 miles of barriers.
“I can’t give you any information on any future budget decisions," Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman told reporters Thursday, in response to reports of internal White House documents showing a plan to siphon another $7.2 billion from DoD accounts this year. "I’m not privy to what those decisions have been at this point.”
While $3.5 billion of that would come from counter-drug operations, the Washington Post reported, another $3.7 would come from military construction accounts.
That’s $200 million more than what the administration set aside last year, which affected more than 100 projects, from training facilities and on-base schools to Hurricane Maria relief for the Puerto Rico National Guard.
E.
Trump Has Given Contracts for the Wall to His Cronies, and the Wall Will Be Insanely Expensive
From The Atlantic
A Single Scandal Sums Up All of Trump’s Failures
The president has been intervening in the process of producing a border wall, on behalf of a favored firm.
(A major contract was given to a big Republican donor, the head of Fisher Industries.)
Fisher is a curious choice. The company is already suing the government after being rejected for any Army Corps contract for the border wall. Fisher was one of the companies that participated in a prototype exercise outside San Diego in 2017, but the company’s wall didn’t meet the specifications laid out by the Department of Homeland Security, which wanted a wall that agents could see through. Instead, Fisher pushed a more expensive, concrete wall, similar to the one that Trump promised during the 2016 presidential campaign. But the Fisher prototype was late and over budget. The CEO, Tommy Fisher, criticized the steel-bollard design that the government chose. Now Fisher is promising a steel wall, and it says it can build one cheaper and faster than any other contractor.
Fisher Industries has some assets, though. Tommy Fisher is a major GOP donor. He has North Dakota’s Republican Senator Kevin Cramer in his corner. He’s already working on a private-sector attempt to build a barrier on private land in New Mexico, which is backed by close Trump allies such as Steve Bannon, the former White House strategist; Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater and brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos; and Kris Kobach, the former vice chair of Trump’s voter-fraud commission, who was under consideration as his “immigration czar.”
And this corruption has been costly
From Mother Jones
“We need the wall more than ever!” President Trump tweeted on March 10—one day before the WHO declared the coronavirus a global pandemic—just another of his more than 400 tweets about his dream of building a wall along the US-Mexico border. According to a Mother Jones analysis of government contracts, the Trump administration has so far doled out over $9 billion to build about 585 miles of wall—285 miles of replacement fencing and 300 miles of new construction. In Trumpian fashion, the project has been characterized by cost overruns, lawsuits, sycophantic contractors, and a notoriously ineffective (and incomplete) final product.
The rising cost of a border boondoggle
Besides falsely claiming Mexico will foot the bill, Trump has consistently low-balled the price of his wall. (From Mother Jones)
F.
Much of the "Wall" is flimsy and weak.
Sad.
G.
Trump is Trying to Grab Private Property in Texas
From MarketWatch
Trump Justice Department sues to seize private property for border-wall construction
Three years into Donald Trump’s presidency, the U.S. government is ramping up its efforts to seize private land in Texas to build a border wall.
Trump’s signature campaign promise has consistently faced political, legal, and environmental obstacles in Texas, which has the largest section of the U.S.-Mexico border, most of it without fencing. And much of the land along the Rio Grande, the river that forms the border in Texas, is privately held and environmentally sensitive.
Almost no land has been taken so far. But Department of Justice lawyers have filed three lawsuits this month seeking to take property from landowners. On Tuesday, lawyers moved to seize land in one case immediately before a scheduled court hearing in February.
G.
And finally, there's this:
Steve Bannon charged with defrauding donors in private effort to raise money for Trump’s border wall
False claims, false promises, ridiculous lies, cronyism, economic damage to the United States, cost overruns, lawsuits—this is the essence of Trump.
