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
