Border Wall Update – What the Pentagon’s new border wall funding will do
Bottom Line: Late last week the Pentagon announced they’d re-allocated $1.5 billion additional dollars to aid the construction of the “border wall” on our southern border along with additional funds to replace exiting border barriers still in need of repair. What the heck does all this mean? Let’s look...
In February, in the wake of the budget deal that ended the partial government shutdown and provided $1.375 billion worth of new “wall”, I provided you with this update.
- The US currently has 654 miles of physical barriers on the southern border
- Work is ongoing to replace 280 miles of the existing border wall/fencing.
33.8% of the entire southern border had a physical barrier before the additional $1.4 billion. This is what that money was/is being used to do.
- 55 miles of a new “border wall” in the Rio Grande.
At the end of construction 36.6% of the southern border would have a wall. So, what’s this latest Pentagon allocation mean for the border wall? Money needed to replace the final stretch of previous border barriers (about 78 miles in Arizona), along with 63 new miles of a border wall. That’s another 3.6% of the southern border that’d have a wall. The estimate for the completion of the project is 126 days. That places us right into a September window. That’s the same timeline that the Rio Grande project is anticipated to be wrapping up and it’s also instructive because...The funding deal signed in earlier this year goes through September – the end of the federal government’s fiscal year. Putting everything that’s happened together – by the end of September we should have just over 40% of the southern border covered with a physical barrier. Just in time for a new budget battle which will likely include requests for money for the next phase of the border wall.