President Trump wants lawmakers to sign off on something his own Department of Homeland Security can’t yet provide. As Axios’s Jonathan Swan reported last week, “sources close to Trump say he’s dead serious about building an impressive wall and will go crazy when he realizes Congress has no plans to pay for it.” But as of now, there’s no “it.” DHS doesn’t even have plans for what such a wall would resemble, just weeks from a budget deadline and possible government shutdown in which border funding is a decisive issue. Notwithstanding the lack of appetite among Hill Republicans for lining the U.S.-Mexico border with concrete, it appears the president is putting the big and beautiful before the blueprints.
These matters of expectations and timing already frustrated the White House on health reform. They also apply here. In March, U.S. Customs and Border Protection issued two solicitations for wall prototypes: one made of concrete, one potentially made of alternate materials with a see-through component, both in the ballpark of 30-feet high, and both “aesthetically pleasing” on the American side. In May, the agency began inviting selected contractors to submit designs and cost estimates. The time budgeted for them to pitch their proposals and have the work reviewed by CBP was five weeks. An agency spokesman provided an update to THE WEEKLY STANDARD on Thursday: “The prototype design process is still underway where contractors will develop and build their own designs. We expect to select between four and eight for that effort.” It was immediately unclear how close CBP was to choosing. Those who are picked have 30 days to complete construction of 30-foot examples of their designs, as well as 10-by-10-foot segments used by the government for testing.
With this process ongoing, the White House has lacked the sort of visual example of a wall Sean Spicer used in May to explain other types of physical barriers already in use. During a session of show and tell, the press secretary pointed to pictures of “bollard wall” and “levee wall” authorized by a partial-year funding bill. (The legislation included $341 million to replace about 40 miles of inferior border fence with “previously deployed and operationally effective designs, such as currently deployed steel bollard designs.”) CBP provided text definitions of both to THE WEEKLY STANDARD: Bollard wall is “20 to 30 feet high utilizing 8-inch diameter, concrete filled steel bollards,” and levee wall is “a concrete wall to the height of the levee crest with 18-foot-tall bollards installed” at the top. Spicer was pressed by a reporter if this was “the wall” the president had promised over and over. Spicer objected.
“There are various types of walls that can be built. Under the legislation that was just passed, it allows us to do that,” he said, adding later: “Just to be clear … that this is the 2017 budget. This is a down payment on what the president is going to prioritize in the 2018 budget that starts October 1.”
Taking Spicer literally, a House appropriations bill passed in late-July spends on those same types of barriers. It provides $784 million for “bollard fencing” along a 32-mile stretch in the Rio Grande Valley, as well as $498 million for 28 miles of “bollard levee wall” in the same region. It also allocates $251 million for some secondary fencing in San Diego. But there’s no funding for “concrete wall” or “see-through wall” or “knock-your-socks-off solar-panel wall.” Just $38 million for “planning” such a hypothetical wall. Given the stage in the procurement process, it doesn’t appear like the president could ask for much more, anyway.
White House senior adviser Stephen Miller was asked a couple of weeks ago about the possibility that Democrats would block border funding, particularly for a wall and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He responded that they would pay “a steep political price”—but not because of anything related to the wall, per se. “If Senate Democrats try to block the funding we need to protect our nation from criminals, drug dealers, cartels, and terrorists, it will cause an uproar from the American people,” he said. Lawmakers hope they can meet such general demands with a modest package that wouldn’t anger Trump or spook the congressional minority. It might not be to the president’s political liking to accept such a deal. But now is not the time he has to worry about such a fight.
His longer-term obstacle is that key leaders—both in Congress and his administration—disapprove of an enormous, continuous wall of stone. Rep. Will Hurd, a Texas Republican who represents the longest stretch of U.S.-Mexico border of any House district, calls the idea a “3rd-century solution.” Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democratic counterpart in his delegation, says it’s a “14th-century solution.” They may be 1,100 years apart, but they agree that the wall is a dated concept. They’re co-sponsors of a bill that directs the Homeland Security secretary to deploy technology along the border and produce a border security strategy accounting for all available tools under the sun, including high-tech land- and air-based radar like one newly designed for drones. Texas Republican Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, also has proposed comprehensive legislation, though it’s direct in expressly calling for the construction of a physical barrier. “We are talking about a historic, multi-layered defense system that makes it nearly impossible for bad actors to slip through the cracks,” he argues.
This sort of holistic thinking is preferred, as well, by a retired Marine general and former Homeland Security chief. “A physical barrier in and of itself—certainly as a military person that understands defense and defenses—a physical barrier in and of itself will not do the job,” said John Kelly in January—seven months before he became the White House chief of staff.
