The Biden administration has upended the Trump border wall construction effort to the point that substantial quantities of unused materials that would have otherwise been put up as part of the wall are now sitting in the desert in a few border states, a new report in The Atlantic shares. Biden issued a proclamation on his first day in power that it “shall be the policy of my Administration that no more American taxpayer dollars be diverted to construct a border wall,” and that move has left these materials just sitting there — showing, in effect, the vapidity of the initial effort, since it was so easily derailed.
As explained in The Atlantic, the wall that was already put up is “easily sawed through,” “has holes and gaps, and needs near-constant repairs and monitoring.” It’s truly a lot of unused border wall components that have been left behind — steel bollards that are currently laying on the ground were estimated in The Atlantic to be worth upwards of a quarter of a billion dollars (if not more than that). All of those resources were expended for something that was never going to be a suddenly sweeping solution to immigration-related issues.
John B. Washington wrote for that publication that he recently found “a fortress of bollards: 30 huge stacks forming a ring, in the center of which were piles of light poles, PVC piping, electrical wires, prefab concrete, tangles of steel mesh, and long snakes of steel rebar—all just sitting there” at an Arizona location. As he recapped, besides the steel, “contractors have left light poles, electrical supplies, crushed aggregate, processed riprap rock, sand, culvert materials, and piping—altogether worth about $350 million, according to a spokesperson for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—sitting unused in the desert.”
"Tens of thousands of heavy steel slats, once destined to become part of Trump’s border wall, are slowly rusting in the open air in the southwestern borderlands. The 18- or 33-foot-long hollow posts are worth at least a quarter of a billion dollars."https://t.co/WQtjxH4Lzc
— Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) December 23, 2021
So what’s to be done with all of it? Washington noted the “complicating” factor that a significant portion of the steel bollards have been filled with concrete and rebar, although Jay Field of the Army Corps of Engineers told him that the “government will seek to transfer usable material to other federal agencies before considering material for donation or sale,” adding that authorities “have no plans for separating the concrete from the excess bollards for disposition.” In other words, they’re not going to try and cut out the concrete before dealing with the left behind steel. It’s what could be considered a fittingly ignoble end for Trump’s billions of dollars worth of wall construction efforts — steel sitting in the sun and slated to be passed between federal agencies, sold off, or given away. Read more from Washington at this link.
Money originally designated for the Trump Wall will now go toward environmental cleanup as well as fixing nonfunctioning gates and small patches in the current wall.
NEW for @Newsweek: https://t.co/QDwJBUzHLG
— Alex J. Rouhandeh (@AlexRouhandeh) December 21, 2021
