Apparently making good on President Joe Biden’s pledge not to build “another foot” of former President Donald Trump’s signature border wall, the Biden administration has been quietly auctioning off wall materials, reports indicate.
Determined to plug the gaps in America’s porous southern border and stem the flow of illegal immigration into the country, President Trump erected over 450 miles of new wall during his term in the White House. Faced with funding hurdles, President Trump even notably diverted some Pentagon funds to build the wall.
President Biden, by contrast, has taken a dim view of his predecessor’s vision for a grand barrier, pledging while still a presidential candidate that “there will not be another foot of wall constructed in my administration.”
On the same day that he took office, President Biden issued a proclamation that rescinded the national emergency declaration President Trump relied on to divert some $10 billion from Pentagon coffers for border wall construction.
“It shall be the policy of my Administration that no more American taxpayer dollars be diverted to construct a border wall,” President Biden’s declaration states.
And now, further proof that President Biden meant what he said about nixing wall construction comes in the form of reports that the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), the combat logistics support branch of the Department of Defense (DOD), is disposing of border wall elements.
A DLA spokesperson confirmed to Power Corridor that a number of items up for auction on GovPlanet, an online auction marketplace, are “excess border wall materials that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers turned over to the DLA for disposition” and that these items are now “for sale.”
The auction site makes no mention of the origin of the materials, listing them generically as “steel tubing and sticks for industrial construction,” with some identified as “square structural tubes.”
Pentagon spokeswoman Raini Brunson told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) “is disposing of the excess border wall materials in accordance with the Federal Acquisition Regulation.”
Since April, the online auctioneer has sold over 80 lots of steel “square structural tubes,” which were meant for use as vertical elements in the border wall’s panels, with 13 more lots going under the hammer on Aug. 23 and Aug. 30, according to GovPlanet.
Neither the DLA nor the DOD responded to a query from The Epoch Times.
By Tom Ozimek
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