On Monday, President Trump discovered a real emergency — he tweeted about flooding and other severe weather that had devastated the parts of the Plains states and the Midwest. In this light, the fallacy of his non-emergency border emergency should have been obvious: Plundering the piggy bank for his wall means that when it comes time to fix real damage across the region, the money won’t be there.
Take, for example, Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. The flooding that ransacked much of the state inundated the base’s runway and dozens of buildings, leaving about a third of the base waterlogged.
Offutt is also home of the U.S. Strategic Command with the weighty and quite important responsibility of overseeing air defense and the country’s nuclear arsenal. It also hosts the planes that make up the airborne command center for use in case of a nuclear war. Those operations are vital to U.S. interests.
Although the base seems to have been able to maintain essential operations, the extent of the damage to facilities won’t be clear until the water recedes and will likely cost billions of dollars to repair. But funds from the military construction budget — the pot of money slated for such repairs — are being diverted for Trump’s wall at the southern border. That has already sparked concerns that efforts to rebuild other bases after previous storms would be stalled.
Despite those concerns, Trump is bent on pulling what money he can get for the wall with acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan providing a proposed “hit list” of Pentagon projects to Congress on Monday.
Seizure of these funds from the military might seem like a quick fix for the problem of congressional unwillingness to support the border wall. In the long run, however, the loss of construction funds leaves the military unprepared to meet real threats from rogue nations like North Korea and rival world powers like China. At least in theory, it leaves little wiggle room when real emergencies arise.
Of course, in the sad, cynical world of Washington budgeting, that could be the whole point. Congress will now be forced to provide money to deal with a real emergency, because the money originally dedicated to that purpose has been diverted to a phony one.
