According to sources Congress didn’t give President Donald Trump money for his border wall and Mexico certainly isn’t paying for it so now he’s asking his administration to go to legally questionable lengths to fund it anyway. Meanwhile Pentagon spokesperson Dana White confirmed that the president reportedly noted that the Pentagon was getting so much money in Congress’s $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill that it could surely afford the border wall.
Accordingly Pentagon received $700 billion as part of Congress’s government funding package, putting funding for the military at historic levels, that’s not a blank check to the Pentagon. Sources reported that money is appropriated to specific programs and spending it for the border wall instead could be illegal.
Furthermore Trump can’t simply call on the Department of Defense to use
its excess money for his border wall. Moreover even the Overseas Contingency
Operations fund, the Pentagon’s emergency fund which can be used for “a future
event or circumstance that is possible but cannot be predicted with certainty,”
often derided as a “slush fund,” isn’t a blank check. Some amounts can be
shifted, but like appropriations bill, all of that funding is also regulated
and authorized by Congress.
