On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president of the United States. Introducing what soon became his signature campaign promise, Trump vowed that, if elected, he would “build a great, great wall on our southern border,” and that he would do so “very inexpensively.”
On Thursday, however, Reuters obtained a U.S. Department of Homeland Security internal report revealing that the Trump administration’s plan to construct the 1,250-mile wall will come at over four times the cost that Trump had originally promised. According to the report, DHS anticipates that the wall will cost taxpayers — not the Mexican people as previously promised — $21.6 billion. Moreover, it will take three and a half years to complete.
The wall’s projected price tag and construction time have increased drastically over the past 20 months since Trump’s presidential campaign began. During his first eight months on the trail, Trump suggested Mexico would pay for the estimated $5 billion wall, relieving U.S. taxpayers of bearing the cost for such a major project. At the New Hampshire Republican primary in early February 2016, Trump altered his story; Mexico would still bear the cost of the wall, but it would now be an $8 billion project. One week after emerging as the winner of New Hampshire’s primary, Trump told MSNBC in a town hall that “the wall is going to cost a fraction of that, maybe 10 (billion dollars) or $12 billion.” Now, the estimate is double that.
The timeframe, too, seems to be slipping. Throughout the campaign, Trump promised that his wall “would be complete within two years from the time we start.” Indeed, DHS secretary John Kelly reiterated as late as last week that he hopes “to have [the wall] done within the next two years.” And now, according to Reuters, it will “take more than three years to construct.”
Which is to say that the promise has gone from a two-year, $5 billion project funded by Mexico, to a three-and-a-half-year, $21.6 billion project funded by U.S. taxpayers. Such a transformation places Trump’s wall in an entirely different category of government funding. The Department of Interior, which manages federal land, only received $13.4 billion in fiscal year 2017. If Bernstein Research, an investment research group, is correct in that the real cost of the wall will be $25 billion, U.S. taxpayers will have spent nearly double the amount on the wall than an entire federal department spends in a year.
The Trump administration may have a plan to build the wall with taxpayer dollars, but the fate of such a project remains where it belongs: in the hands of Congress. Lawmakers ought to consider whether Trump’s campaign promise is worth such a heavy price tag.