House Committee GOP’r Publicly Chastises Trump

0
1460

Even at least some Congressional Republicans are upset at the Trump administration’s latest power grab in service of President Donald Trump’s long ambition to wall off Mexico. At a hearing this week held by the House Armed Services Committee, both the panel’s top Republican and Democrat publicly chastised top Trump officials over their redirection of $3.8 billion from other Pentagon programs for the border wall project. Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) and ranking member Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) each condemned the transfer, which includes taking more than $1 billion from the National Guard, among other sources.

Smith commented:

‘This is an enormous problem. It undercuts any argument about the need for resources within the Department of Defense. And it also undercuts the congressional process.’

And Thornberry added:

‘There have been decades, literally decades of practice where if there are changing needs money can be moved within the department budget with the approval of Congress. I’m afraid that the result of this will be greater restrictions on the department’s ability to move money around to meet changing needs, and the country will suffer as a result.

The hearing featured Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley. Besides the National Guard, programs affected by the latest funding shift — which the Trump administration says they carried out right when they notified Congress, failing to give the body a chance to intervene — include various plane and ship programs.

Thornberry pointed out, specifically singling out the billions that the Trump administration commandeered this year:

‘This is not taking excess funds. It is substituting the judgment of the administration for the judgment of Congress by reducing specific weapons that had been authorized and appropriated. We made a different judgment call than the administration’s budget request.’

Smith, in turn, criticized the transfer considering a laundry list of “unfunded priorities” that the administration had just recently sent to Congress. He commented, referring to the sum total of sought funds according to that list:

‘It was somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 to $30 billion of ‘unfunded’ requirements and at the same time — meh, we found $3.8 billion just sitting in a corner that can go to a purpose that was not intended.’

Esper defended the administration by claiming that actually, they do value Congressional partnership with their work, although their actions tell an entirely different story. Meanwhile, Milley chimed in with the insistence that the funding transfers would not affect the military’s overall ability to fulfill its opportunities — although some of the military construction projects that have already been affected by past wall transfers even involved European allies. That meant that they got left out in the metaphorical cold too.

Trump has remained so attached to his convoluted concept of so-called border security that he’s even floated closing the southern border as a preemptive measure against the Coronavirus. The problem is that the virus doesn’t even have anything to do with the southern border. It originated in China, and there’s barely been any presence of the virus anywhere in Central or South America so far. Trump just likes the opportunity for his racism.