How Mexico will pay for the wall.

Who’s going to pay for the wall?

Mexico!

Among the 127 military construction projects that are being delayed as the Department of Defense moves $3.6 billion from inside the United States and from military facilities around the globe for constructing 175 miles of “The Wall” at 11 locations in California, Texas and Arizona for the cost of $20 million per mile, $400 million will be coming from ten construction projects on the Puerto Rico that was meant to go to building such things as a power substation and a National Guard readiness center.

A senior Defense official explained that this was all right because most of the projects on the island weren’t slated to begin work until September 2020 anyway.

Guam, a U,S. territory, will lose  $250 million in construction projects, with the remainder of the funds coming from projects in 23 states.

The $95 million for an engineering center and the $65 million for a parking structure at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, a total of $160 million, will be moved.

The $85 million for an operations facility at Holloman Air Force Base, which supports training for 100% of the Air Force’s MQ-9 crews, and $40 million for an information systems facility at White Sands Missile Facility in New Mexico will go too.

That means that of the 23 states losing military projects, these two states, Democratically run states, lose the most.

Mitt Romney is not happy that Utah will lose $54 million in funding for two projects at Hill Air Force Base, and has said,

“Funding the border wall is an important priority, and the Executive Branch should use the appropriate channels in Congress, rather than divert already appropriated funding away from military construction projects and therefore undermining military readiness.”

In North Carolina, a state hit hard by Hurricane Florence in 2018, is losing over $40 million in funding for two projects at The Marine Corps base in Camp Lejeune.

Internationally, installations in Germany are losing over $550 million that was supposed to go to hardening air hangars, squadron operations, and building an elementary school, bases in Japan are losing about $450 million, and bases in South Korea will see $17.5 million diverted from a command and control facility and $53 million from an unmanned aerial vehicle hangar, and, because of this, the Pentagon reached out to European allies to see if they could contribute to the costs of the delayed overseas projects.

As a senior Defense official said,

“I can tell you that we have, you know, routine conversations with our allies and partners about burden sharing in general and we reached out to all of them today to talk specifically about the list.”

Officials at the Pentagon are hopeful that Congress would “backfill” the money that’s being taken from the projects, but they also acknowledged there were no guarantees the projects would be funded in the future.

And that is how Mexico will pay for the wall.

 

 

Leave a Reply