The White House apparently plans to fund a border wall through accounting tricks. This won’t end well.
White House press briefings, which used to be daily events, have largely disappeared in the Trump era, though Sarah Huckabee Sanders occasionally agrees to briefly field reporters’ questions in the briefing room. There was, for example, one interesting exchange yesterday:
There are a couple of important problems with this. The first is Sanders’ apparent confusion about the federal appropriations process: if Congress approves spending for a project, that money comes from American taxpayers. If the money is redirected from “other agencies,” that’s also money from American taxpayers – because we fund practically every office, department, agency, and bureau.
The second problem is with the White House’s plan to fund a border wall through accounting tricks.
Donald Trump declared this morning, for example, that Mexico is “indirectly” paying for a border wall through the recently tweaked NAFTA trade deal. The president added, “Because of the tremendous dangers at the Border, including large scale criminal and drug inflow, the United States Military will build the Wall!”
The idea that the new NAFTA will produce billions of dollars in revenue that the administration can apply to wall construction is obviously ridiculous, but just as importantly, Trump doesn’t have the legal authority to simply redirect money from the Pentagon budget because he feels like it.
