Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney suggested on Monday plans for President Trump’s border wall with Mexico remain in the early stages of development, saying even basic decisions about what materials to use have not been made.
Mulvaney appeared on the Hugh Hewitt show. Asked by Hewitt how much the wall would cost, Mulvaney had no idea.
“That depends,” Mulvaney replied. “It just depends on the kind of wall that you want to build, and I don’t think we’ve settled, yet, on the actual construction. You can do steel, you could do concrete, you can do a combination of concrete and steel. You can supplement it with different types of technologies and so forth. So, it sort of depends on what you want to build.”
The “wall” will also likely be a series of different kinds of barriers, the choice of which will depend on the level of crossing activity at the location, or environmental factors.
The mixture of these barriers gives lawmakers and budget administrators numerous ways to assemble a puzzle.
“I’ve got one (estimate) that goes, starts at $8 million per mile. It goes up to about $25 million per mile. So again, it just depends on, when you’re talking about across 2,000 miles or so, what you decide to build in what areas,” Mulvaney said.
The choices are so numerous and possibly complex that Mulvaney added he didn’t think the 2017 or 2018 budgets would contain complete specificity as to what the finished product would look like. But he made clear that construction will start in some form in 2017, even if each barrier segment isn’t determined right now.
“The president wants to have the wall, wants to have new construction done on the wall before the end of the fiscal year, and we will find a way for him to do that. We will provide more details in the ’18, and then really, the big details will come in the ’19 budget,” he said.
“Before the end of the fiscal year” sound less ambitious than Trump’s own timeline announced in January, when he said construction would start within “months.”
In early February, Reuters published a report based on an internal Homeland Security document that estimated the border ‘wall’ could cost “as much as $21.6 billion,” which was significantly higher than previous estimations of $12 billion by President Trump, or $15 billion from House Speaker Paul Ryan.
Another recent report from the Government Accountability Office noted that illegal immigrants were able to cut 9,287 holes over a six-year period in portions of the border barrier that already exist, so maintenance of the types of barriers could also play a factor.
While it’s also been long-expected that environmental concerns could seriously slow down construction, Mulvaney also noted that the project faces a hurdle because legislation would be needed to go forward with a construction project across national monument lands. “And we’re already working on that,” Mulvaney stated.
The Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument shares 32 miles of the border with Mexico.
