While speaking with Fox News this week, President Joe Biden’s former Border Patrol chief, Rodney Scott, confirmed that under Biden’s leadership, U.S. taxpayers are paying millions of dollars each day “to not” build a wall along its border with Mexico.
What did he say?
Scott told host Bret Baier that at one point, the U.S. was paying $5 million a day to contractors despite the fact that wall construction had been canceled.
“Many of those projects today are just still on hold, so we’re paying contractors. For a while, it was almost $5 million a day between [Department of Defense] and [Department of Homeland Security] to not build the border wall,” he said.
“That money is just trickling away to contractors for not doing work each day,” he added.
Scott also noted that in places where former President Donald Trump had ordered wall construction all that is left are “stacks and stacks of border wall panels,” “hundreds of miles of fiber optic cabling,” and “hundreds of cameras” that are just “sitting there.”
What else?
Scott’s claims matched the findings of a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Government Operations and Border Management report released in July.
In the report, the committee revealed that the Biden administration has spent roughly $2 billion — or $3 million per day — on costs associated with canceling wall construction inaugurated under Trump.
Contractors, instead of getting to work building the wall, are now paid primarily to guard construction materials.
“By the end of the Trump Administration, $10 billion had been transferred to U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) accounts for border wall construction and related projects. As of June 2021, the Biden Administration has wasted roughly 20 percent ($2 billion) of that $10 billion on suspension and termination costs related to border wall contracts,” the report stated.
“The Biden Administration is paying contractors at least $3 million per day to guard steel, concrete, and other materials in the desert,” the report went on to explain. “This waste of taxpayer resources threatens military readiness and national security.”
Anything else?
Scott, who described himself as nonpartisan, agreed that Biden’s approach to border security was endangering the country.
He said he was there during all of the transition briefings and made clear to the new administration that rolling back Trump’s immigration enforcement policies would cause disaster at the border. But no one listened.
“We made it very clear that if we dropped all of the initiatives that have been put in place over the last several years that we would get an influx of mass migration that we would not be able to control,” he said. “It was very clear there are people involved in this process that have been involved before, and they’re choosing not to take simple, commonsense steps to secure the border.”
Scott served in Border Patrol for nearly 30 years before stepping down in June. He was replaced by Raul L. Ortiz in August.
