By now we know that President Donald Trump is a petulant man baby. He’s so impulsive that if a celebrity or politician bad mouths him, he takes the bait and tweets absurdities. It’s this same hastiness that told him that building a border wall would be easy. But as a new Government Accountability Office report found that couldn’t be further from the truth.
It turns out the Trump Administration may end up wasting billions of dollar on the border wall because it wasn’t equipped to take on all the challenges that come with the structure. Customs and Border Protection, the agency charged with the construction, didn’t take terrain or property ownership into consideration. This is especially astonishing considering that outlets brought these points up regularly. “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,” the report reads, according to The New York Times.
Additionally, the report shows that the wall would cost more than previously estimated (a 2017 Brookings piece noted that Trump put the figure at $12 billion and an internal DHS report estimated the cost at $21.6 billion, which was still a “major underestimate”).
Basically the report confirms that the Trump border wall is a terrible waste of time and resources. Already those opposed to this divider between the US and Mexico are speaking out. Representative Filemón Vela stated, “The report shows us what we already knew: the Trump Administration put almost zero thought into the construction of this wall other than how it will play in the news cycle.”