At the request of Reps. Jack Bergman (R-MI) and Jodey Arrington (R-TX) the Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigated what became of the taxpayer funds that were flagged for wall construction along the southern border. Did the DHS break the law?
Turns out — no. But while the DHS isn’t in any legal trouble of the reallocated wall funds, what they spent the cash on is raising eyebrows. According to the GAO’s final report, the funds went towards “environmental planning” and efforts “to remediate or mitigate environmental damage from past border wall construction.”
Sounds like more green nonsense from the Biden Administration.
While Congress previously approved funds for the wall to be built between 2018 and 2021, President Biden immediately ended all wall construction once he took office and ordered the DHS to find a use for the money that didn’t involve the wall or, apparently, a secure border.
From The Daily Caller:
In 2021, DHS released a report detailing how it would look to redirect funds meant for the wall to instead pay for things like “environmental planning,” reviewing upcoming eminent domain actions and considering environmental remediation efforts in areas that had been the site of previous construction, according to GAO’s report. The agency then changed its plans in July 2022, applying an amendment that made environmental remediation a top priority for the agency’s expenditure of the funds appropriated for fiscal years 2018-2021.
The Biden administration has made great efforts to roll back or replace many of the immigration and border policies of former President Donald Trump, but the situation at the border has deteriorated massively since 2021. There have been nearly 8 million land encounters at the southwest border since October 2021, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and the Congressional Budget Office reported in January that more than 3.3 million people came to the U.S. illegally, were released into the country via parole or overstayed their permission to remain in the country in fiscal year 2023 alone.
Meanwhile, a massive aid bill was just passed with protections for the borders of Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan — but nothing for America’s southern border. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis unloaded on Congress for surrendering the border.
“The #1 issue that our voters wanted them to address is the southern border and the massive influx of foreigners by the millions coming into this country … and they basically just surrendered on the border,” DeSantis said during a recent appearance. “[Republicans] now have no leverage to do anything on the border. They had an opportunity to insist that Biden accept the border [security] if he wanted all the foreign aid. And they decided to capitulate. So he got everything he wants. And Republican voters did not get anything with respect to stopping this problem at the southern border.”
