Roll Call points out that a good amount of the money that Trump & Co. wants to steal from some departments of the federal government to go for the guys border wall isn’t there , having been spent……
The Pentagon is reporting the status of projects that Trump’s people seem to want to stop in their tracks….
That isn’t gonna make congressional lawmakers happy around the country….
Their district would lose funding and jobs and THAT would come back at them politically be they Democrats of Republicans….
The long game on this?
A President Donald Trump would essentially be changing the concept of the Congress appropriating money for the executive brach….
As he has in the Real Estate business?
Donald Trump would be borrowing other people’s (The American Taxpayers) money to build his own Real Estate project…
More than one-third of the money President Donald Trump wants to redirect from other federal programs to build a border barrier is likely to be unavailable from the sources he has identified.
As a result, it may be difficult for the president to circumvent Congress, even if a resolution disapproving of his “emergency” moves is never enacted.
Trump announced Feb. 15 that, using emergency powers, he wants to divert as much as $6.7 billion from other programs to finance the construction of barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border. That includes $3.6 billion from unspent military construction money, $2.5 billion in unspent Pentagon counterdrug funds and $600 million from a Treasury Department asset forfeiture account.
But the Defense Department has told lawmakers that only $85 million remains unspent in the counterdrug account, a House Appropriations spokesman said Thursday.
The Pentagon is planning to ask Congress for authority to reprogram more than $2.4 billion from other military programs into the counterdrug account in order to then take it right back out and move it to the wall project.
“The Department would need to reprogram additional funding into the account to reach the up to $2.5 billion that may be required for border security support,” said Christopher Sherwood, a Defense Department spokesman…..