The Biden administration is paying contractors $3 million per day to guard construction materials that were to be used to build the border wall but are sitting idle after Joe Biden's executive order in January halting wall construction, Republicans say.
Team Biden has spent roughly $2 billion thus far for the contractors to "guard steel, concrete, and other materials in the desert," according to a report from the Senate’s Subcommittee on Government Operations and Border Management.
"For years I have called out federal waste, but the Biden administration is literally ‘going for broke’ with this nonsense," subcommittee chair Sen. James Lankford said.
The Oklahoma Republican noted: "Our border patrol agents are doing their best to secure our border, but they need additional barriers, roads, and technology to help keep us safe." Instead, Lankford added, Biden "is paying professional construction contractors to babysit metal to the tune of $2 billion and counting, while at the same time we’ve seen a 20-year high number of migrants crossing our open border."
Lankford said that Biden is paying "not to build the border wall."
The $2 billion figure, Lankford said, is roughly 20 percent of the $10 billion transferred to the Department of Defense during the Trump administration to build the border wall.
After he order wall construction halted, Biden commissioned a 60-day study of the construction process. Republican leaders say that neither the Department of Homeland Security nor senior figures in the administration have released details of the study.
"The public needs to have access to the findings, data, and methodology of the Biden administration’s border wall study," the subcommittee's report said.
Lankford also slammed Team Biden for the lack of transparency.
“It is absolutely absurd that Americans are paying contractors to guard metal gates" that Biden "refuses to install because he wants to ‘study’ the wall,” Lankford said. “Stubbornly refusing to spend money approved for the wall is not ‘executing’ the law. It’s ignoring the law and ignoring the very real national security concerns posed by illegal entry across our very open southern border."
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