Joe Biden really is a piece of sh*t.
From the New York Post, August 19, 2023:
Former president Donald Trump pledged to build “an impenetrable, physical, tall, power, beautiful southern border wall” as a cornerstone of his victorious 2016 campaign for the White House.
He spent $15 billion during his presidency to install about 450 miles of barriers, with 250 additional miles in progress at the end of his term.
But Biden, in one of his first acts in office, halted all border wall construction in an Inauguration Day presidential proclamation, dismissing Trump’s program as “a waste of money” that was “not a serious policy solution.”
Almost immediately, asylum seekers surged to the US-Mexico border to take advantage of Biden’s lax enforcement policies….
[L]ast month, as part of its annual defense appropriations package, the Democrat-led Senate passed a Republican-sponsored bill aimed at forcing Biden to stem the worsening migrant crisis at the US-Mexico border by extending the wall….
Up to $300 million worth of taxpayer-funded wall components have been left to rust since Biden came to office, Republicans have said.
The Finish It Act will make the feds use those materials on new wall construction — or hand the remaining stock over to states like Texas for use in their own border defense projects.
This is what Biden is doing to thwart Republicans from extending the border wall:
The Biden administration is quietly auctioning off millions of dollars’ worth of unused parts from former President Trump’s border wall for peanuts – in an apparent end-run around pending legislation in Congress.
Since April, GovPlanet, an online auction house specializing in military surplus, has sold 81 lots of steel “square structural tubes” — intended for use as vertical bollards in the border barrier’s 30-foot-tall panels — hauling in about $2 million.
On Tuesday, GovPlanet netted $154,200 for 729 of the 28-foot-tall hollow beams, sold in five separate lots for an average $212 apiece.
Thirteen more lots are set to be auctioned on Aug. 23 and Aug. 30….
Now, the Biden administration is rushing to get rid of the wall leftovers before the GOP-led House can pass a matching version of the bill and make it law….
“The pennies made from selling the border wall will not be enough to pay the families who suffer from a criminal act committed by someone who crossed our open borders during the Biden administration,” railed Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford….
“The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers … has already transferred approximately $154 million worth of the roughly $260 million of bollard panels and other materials,” according to Lt. Col. Devin T. Robinson, who used Defense Department lingo for the process of consigning military surplus items to commercial resellers or the trash heap.
Profits from the sale flow back to the Pentagon’s budget.
~E