New White House estimates for the paint job led by Jared Kushner range from $500 million to $3 billion
“I see the steel slat barrier and I want it painted black.” Photo: Bloomberg via Getty Images Last May, President Trump reportedly told administration officials that he wanted the metal slats that make up new sections of the border wall to be painted “flat black” so that they would absorb heat in the summer and become impossible to climb.
Other far-fetched and cruel ideas that Trump reportedly proposed, like shooting migrants in the legs and building a moat, have fallen by the wayside, but the president still wants to paint the border wall black. According to a new report from the Washington Post, in a meeting in April — a month in which almost 60,000 Americans died in the coronavirus pandemic — Trump told senior adviser Jared Kushner to seek out estimates for the paint job.
Either cost would be an egregious waste of taxpayer dollars, not to mention the wall budget. The White House has allocated $15 billion for the border wall, two-thirds of which comes from the Defense Department budget for construction; if the administration considers something closer to the high end estimate, that could eat up as much as a fifth of the total funds obtained for the barrier, even though the project is less than half finished.
One official with knowledge of the plans told the Post that the administration doesn’t have a policy for the obvious challenge of painting the slats already in place on the Mexican side of the wall. And a materials engineer, Rick Duncan, who spoke with the paper said that Trump’s black wall would only increase the steel barrier’s ability to retain heat by less 10 percent.
In the meeting in which Trump reportedly called for an estimate, Jared Kushner — now in charge of the wall project on top of other duties like managing a pandemic, finding a COVID-19 vaccine, and ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — was not thrilled. According to the Post, the president’s son-in-law “expressed frustration at this role during the meeting, telling others the wall was not his favorite project but that he is the only one who can get it done.
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