House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith said President Trump’s southern border wall was flawed in a number of ways that do not protect the United States.
“I’ve been to the border, and I’ve seen the wall,” the Democrat from Washington state told defense writers on a conference call, before rattling off a list of flaws in the estimated $20 billion-$30 billion “vanity wall.”
“A flash flood recently took out a chunk of it. They are tunneling under it, cutting through it,” he said. “I understand you’re going to spend money on things that are not perfect. But to spend this much money on something that really doesn’t slow people down very much, from a policy perspective, simply doesn’t make sense.”
Smith said national security concerns were not the president’s motivation for the wall.
“From a policy perspective, the president’s desire to build this wall is driven by politics,” he said. “It’s driven by the fact that it was one of his more dependable applause lines at his rallies.”
The congressman then joked that by building the wall, and not making Mexico pay for it, Trump was breaking a campaign promise.
“His signature campaign promise was that Mexico would pay for the wall, and yet, here we are stealing money out of the Pentagon to pay for it,” he said.
Reinstate Crozier as commander, Smith says
Smith took the opportunity to knock the president again when asked about the Department of Defense’s delay of a decision on whether to reinstate USS Theodore Roosevelt commander Capt. Brett Crozier.
Former acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly dismissed Crozier April 2 for allegedly going outside his chain of command to report a coronavirus outbreak on his carrier.
“This president has proven that he’s perfectly willing to screw up the chain of command,” said Smith.
The House Armed Services chairman recounted that Modly told the Washington Post that his decision to dismiss the captain was made in part because he thought that’s what Trump would want him to do.
“There’s no justification that Capt. Crozier is not capable of continuing his command,” Smith said, noting that he spoke to acting Navy Secretary James McPherson before the briefing with journalists and that the matter was also discussed with Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley.
“I do not want to see the Department of Defense become yet another aspect of our federal government that the Trump administration has browbeaten into the position where they view their job as solely consisting of making sure that they’re kissing up to the president of the United States,” he said.
He then added, “The single most important attribute that anybody in the federal government can have is — forgive me for the bluntness — a willingness to kiss the president’s ass, as often as possible.”
Smith also returned to a previous point he made on how the Pentagon can better support the coronavirus response, calling on the Trump administration to be more aggressive in using the Defense Production Act to address the country’s coronavirus testing shortage.
“We have not yet, to my mind, increased the domestic production to the degree that we should,” he said. “Testing, the need for swabs, the need for reagents, the need for testing kits.”
Smith highlighted the department’s unique capacity to leverage procurement and logistics relationships to meet the needs of nurses and doctors, as well as the requirement for widespread testing to further open the economy.
The Defense Logistics Agency, in coordination with the Department of Health and Human Services, is heading the Pentagon’s effort to ramp up production, but so far has not announced any contracts or investments related to increasing test kit production.
