President Trump will ask Congress on Monday for an additional $8.6 billion to fund his proposed wall on the U.S. southern border with Mexico.
Officials familiar with the fiscal 2020 budget proposal, to be rolled out Monday morning, say the additional money is six percent more than what the president has gotten by invoking emergency powers, and six times more than what he has received from Congress over the last two fiscal years.
The additional $8.6 billion the president is requesting from Congress would be used to build or replace barriers along 722 miles of the border, not its entire length.
The request is based on a two-year-old plan from Customs and Border Protection officials that will ultimately cost $18 billion to implement. Administration officials say that, to date, just 111 miles of barrier have been constructed, or are in some phase of being built.
On Saturday, it was reported Trump also wants $750 billion in defense spending and cuts to non-defense discretionary spending by 5 percent that will keep the budget under strict statutory spending caps.
Trump will likely not get exactly what he’s looking for in his budget proposal.
Asked if Trump will get what he wants in border wall funding in an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., chairman of the Senate Republican Conference and Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, replied, “Well no president gets exactly what they want.”
But Barrasso added that his colleague, Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., who is the chairman of the budget panel, is “committed to border security.”
Getting the money has been an uphill struggle for Trump, resulting in a partial government shutdown earlier this year, the longest in modern history, after the president refused to sign a long-term spending bill without the $5.7 billion in border wall funding he was demanding at the time.
Trump did end up signing a bill passed by Congress that only gave him $1.375 billion for border fencing, ending the shutdown. But he then declared a national emergency at the border, which would divert funds from military construction projects, which was promptly challenged in court by 16 states, led by California.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., warned of a shutdown “repeat” in reacting to reports of Trump’s border proposal.
CNBC reports Trump’s budget request includes $3.6 billion to pay the Defense Department back for the money he hoped to divert for the wall in his emergency declaration.
