Pentagon Chief Sees Risks as Trump Siphons Funds for Border Wall

(Bloomberg) -- Shifting military funds to build President Donald Trump’s wall at the southern border will undermine the Pentagon in the future, Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan acknowledged, yet he said he was following an order from his commander-in-chief.

“We said, ‘Here are the risks longer-term to the department’ and those risks were weighed,”’ Shanahan said Tuesday at a House Armed Services Committee hearing. “Given a legal order from the commander-in-chief, we are executing on that order.”

Shanahan gave approval on Monday for the Army Corps of Engineers to use as much as $1 billion in military funds to bolster security at the U.S.-Mexico border. In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, he 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 Trump’s push to fulfill a central promise of his 2016 campaign and a key plank in his 2020 reelection effort: building a wall along the border with Mexico. After previous attempts to get Congress to approve billions in wall funding repeatedly failed, sparking two government shutdowns, Trump moved to tap Defense Department funds.

That left Shanahan, who was deputy defense secretary under former Secretary Jim Mattis, defending a policy he knows will come with long-term costs for the Defense Department. And it comes amid questions about whether the 56-year-old former Boeing Co. executive will ever be nominated by Trump to fill the Pentagon’s top job.

Democratic lawmakers in the House and Senate have said the Pentagon’s move all but ensures they’ll push for legislation to restrict the department’s ability to unilaterally shift funds in the future, requiring congressional approval for all such transfers. That’s been an informal policy until now.

‘Piggy Bank’

“To look at the Pentagon as sort of a piggy bank/slush fund, where you can simply go in and grab money for something when you need it, really undermines the credibility of the entire” defense budget, Representative Adam Smith, the committee’s Democratic chairman, said.

Even as lawmakers acknowledged they don’t now have veto power over such “reprogramming,” Smith sent a letter to the Pentagon Tuesday saying that his committee “does not approve the proposed use of Department of Defense funds to construct additional physical barriers and roads or install lighting in the vicinity of the United States border.”

The $1 billion was taken from military personnel funds and shifted to the Defense Department’s account to combat illegal drugs. Acting Deputy Defense Secretary David Norquist told the House panel the money was available because the Army fell more than 9,000 recruits short of its goal.

A group of Democratic senators also criticized the funding shift 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.

Traditional Approval

The annual defense authorization bill and defense spending bill give the Pentagon authority to move funds between programs. Traditionally, the Defense Department has sought agreement on such reprogramming from the leaders of the Armed Services and Appropriations panels in the House and Senate.

While conceding that the funding shift for the wall could come back to haunt the Pentagon if Congress limits authority for such moves, Shanahan said he was trying to be transparent about issue, “fully knowing that there are downsides that will hamper us.”

“By unilaterally reprogramming, it was going to affect our ability long-term to be able to do discretionary reprogramming that we had traditionally done in coordination,” Shanahan said. “We understand the significant downsides of losing what amounts to a privilege.”

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