Shanahan Approves $1 Billion in Pentagon Funds for Trump's Wall

(Bloomberg) -- Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan gave the green light for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to use as much as $1 billion in military funds to build a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Shanahan, in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, said the money would be used to support her agency’s request to build 57 miles of “18-foot-high pedestrian fencing, constructing and improving roads, and installing lighting within the Yuma and El Paso Sectors of the border.”

The decision marked the latest development in President Donald Trump’s push to shift funds to build the border wall that was a central promise of his 2016 campaign after Congress wouldn’t provide the money.

A group of Democratic senators criticized the move as a violation of congressional appropriations. In a letter to Shanahan on Monday, senators led by Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Dick Durbin of Illinois said they had “serious concerns that the department has allowed political interference and pet projects to come ahead of many near-term, critical readiness issues facing our military.”

The senators said they strongly objected to the funding transfer from the “military personnel funding to the Drug Interdiction and Counter-Narcotics Activities account.”

“The $1 billion reprogramming that the department is implementing without congressional approval constitutes a dollar-for-dollar theft from other readiness needs of our Armed Forces,” the senators wrote.

To contact the reporter on this story: Chelsea Mes in Sydney at cmes@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Kasia Klimasinska at kklimasinska@bloomberg.net, John Harney

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