Half-witted Wall

Quoting from the Herald Tribune article, “Trump border wall would waste billions“:

The U.S. Government Accountability Office has just published a report saying the Trump administration has no idea how to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico and even if it did, the cost would be monumentally more than estimates.

 

The GAO provides facts on a non-partisan basis to Congress about federal spending. Obviously, nothing there to interest Trump.

 

The 49-page report issued this month was done because, in January 2017, Trump signed an executive order calling for the construction of a wall. Since then the U.S. Customs and Border Protection has built eight prototype panels that stick up in the desert in an Orwellian kind of way.

 

One major problem, says the GAO, is that the agency’s “strategy did not include analysis of the costs associated with deploying barriers in each location or segment, which can vary depending on topography, land ownership, and other factors. Without assessing costs, consistent with leading practices for capital decision making, CBP does not have complete information for prioritizing locations to use its resources in the most cost-effective manner.”

 

In other words, Trump is wasting billions — and wants to waste billions more — on a border wall because nobody involved considered the cost of building each segment or who owns the land. Possibly worse, the border protection people selected locations for barriers without assessing where they were needed to prevent illegal border crossings.

 

In other words, this is no Hoover Dam that will awe people for generations.

 

 


 

His boasting and bragging wear thin.
Trade wars are not easy to win.
And that half-witted wall,
If it rises, will fall
Like the wall that divided Berlin.

2018 Colleen Anderson

Trump’s Wall

“The true test of the wall’s feasibility may boil down to property: The government only owns about a third of the land along the nearly 2,000-mile border between Mexico and the United States, and obtaining the rest would require untying a knot of legal and ownership issues.

 

While the government can use broad eminent domain powers—the right of the government to expropriate private property for public use, with fair payment—past border security efforts have shown that tactic to be both tricky and time-consuming.”

 

Trump’s border wall: A land grab from American property owners
Curbed

 


 

With the stroke of a pen you can order
a wall they will buy– reconnoiter
and they’ll work for a song
if you build it along
the original Mexican border.

Lily Beth Baker, 5/9/17

So he’s backing away from The Wall,

“Trump has long promised that Mexico would pay for the wall along the southern border, something officials in that country have said is not going to happen.

 

Lawmakers in Congress had little interest in footing the bill — costs could be as high as $70 billion, according to one new report — and even less interest in shutting down the government over it.”

 

Trump backs off border wall fight for now, easing government shutdown threat
Los Angeles Times

 


 

So he’s backing away from The Wall,
Says he’ll put it on hold until fall.
Like most of his plans,
Just a chant for his fans,
And a stupid idea, after all.

© 2017 Colleen Anderson