Pentagon bean counters reveal strategy to get border wall built quickly

For years, the President has been working to secure our southern border with his “big, beautiful wall”.

Seeing as the wall itself was a major focal point of the 2016 campaign cycle, the President is as keen as ever to get the ball rolling before 2020’s contest comes into full swing and he’ll face the ire of voters who want to know why the project hasn’t been completed.

Of course, democratic resistance to the idea of a border wall has been much of the issue, with Congressional progressives stymying the President at every turn.

A new plan from the Pentagon may have finally found a way to get cracking, however.

The Pentagon has told Congress that it will build 11 sections of the southern border wall with $3.6 billion in funds allocated by Congress to other construction projects.

“On February 15, 2019, the President issued a proclamation declaring that a national emergency exists along the southern border of the United States,” Secretary of Defense Mark Esper wrote to Congress. He continued:

I have authorized and directed the Acting Secretary of the Army to undertake these 11 projects expeditiously, and, as authorized by Section 2808 [of the National Emergencies Act], to do so without regard to any other provision of law that may impede the expeditious construction of such projects in response to the national emergency. A description of and the estimated cost for each project, including the cost of any associated real estate actions, can be found in the enclosure.

The letter does not describe the planned projects or the miles of extra wall. The announcement implements President Donald Trump’s earlier order to move the funds following Congress’s 2019 refusal to fund his 2016 campaign promise.

Predictably, prominent democratic congressman Chuck Schumer had a tawdry retort.

“It is a slap in the face to the members of the Armed Forces who serve our country that @realDonaldTrump is willing to cannibalize already allocated military funding to boost his own ego, and for a wall he promised Mexico would pay to build,” said in a tweet from Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer.

Given the glut of challenges faced by the President in this pursuit, it seems likely that this attempt to fund the wall’s construction could find itself in some sort of litigation in the coming weeks.