Mexico isn’t paying for it
Those eager to help President Trump spend $5 billion girding the southern frontier against largely imaginary threats, and perhaps shut down part of the government to do it, should consider the administration’s stewardship of border security funds so far.
Take, for example, its attempt to dramatically expand the Border Patrol, which has produced a spasm of spending to no apparent avail.
A border surge was such a priority for the president that he made it part of an executive order within a week of his inauguration. The same order that called for the construction of Trump’s oft-promised “big, beautiful” border wall — never mind that, two years later, he has yet to get Congress (or Mexico) to pay for it — also called for adding 5,000 agents to the Border Patrol, a roughly 25 percent increase. And yet a new internal investigation finds that the agency hasn’t begun to effect a hiring spree.
Last year, in a panicked response to Trump’s executive order, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agreed to pay the consulting firm Accenture nearly $300 million over five years to add 7,500 to the payrolls of the Border Patrol and two other agencies. Members of Congress and others soon raised concerns that have now been substantiated by the Homeland Security Department’s inspector general.
Calling for officials’ “immediate attention,” the inspector general’s report says that 10 months into the contract, the government had paid Accenture more than $13 million to complete a grand total of two hires. Moreover, according to the report, the agency was doing much of the work that the company had agreed to do. While Customs and Border Protection maintains that Accenture did put in place a “hiring structure” and lay other important groundwork for recruitment, the time allotted for the startup phase of the contract was only three months, later extended to six months.
The results, or lack thereof, reflect on the administration’s dubious goals as well as its incompetence in implementing them. Even at its current complement, Customs and Border Protection is the largest federal law enforcement agency, having more than doubled in size since 2000 at a time when illegal immigration from Mexico has generally ebbed. The agency also suffers from longstanding hiring and retention difficulties that have left it perpetually lagging the staffing level previously mandated by Congress, let alone exceeding it by 5,000.
Even without wasting another dime on Trump’s multibillion-dollar monument, the federal government has spent lavishly on border security with diminishing returns.