Pentagon chief suggests European allies replace funds diverted to border wall

[Swordsmyth]

U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said that European nations should consider funding projects in their countries after the Pentagon diverted money to pay for a border wall with Mexico.

The Pentagon said on Wednesday it would pull funding from 127 Defense Department projects abroad and at home, including schools and daycare centers for military families, as it diverts $3.6 billion to pay for President Donald Trump’s wall along the U.S. border.
Trump has made immigration a signature issue of his presidency. He declared a national emergency over the issue earlier this year in an effort to redirect funding from Congress to build a wall along the U.S. southern border, which he originally said would be paid for by Mexico.
“The message that I’ve been carrying, since when I was acting secretary to today, has been about the increase in burden sharing,” Esper told reporters in London late on Thursday.
“So part of the message will be ‘Look, if you’re really concerned then maybe you should look to cover those projects for us’ because that’s going to build infrastructure in many cases in their countries,” he added.
“Part of the message is burden sharing, ‘Maybe pick up that tab.’”
Some of the projects affected are in Europe, like $21.6 million for port operation facilities in Spain and $59 million for munitions storage in Slovakia.
The defunded projects also include schools for the children of military personnel in Germany and the United Kingdom.

More at: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-pentagon-europe/pentagon-chief-suggests-european-allies-replace-funds-diverted-to-border-wall-idUSKCN1VQ2WT

[Zippyjuan]

Is Mexico a European ally? I thought they were supposed to pay for it.

Rand Paul's Kentucky is slated to lose $63 million.


https://thehill.com/policy/defense/460181-republicans-grumble-over-trump-delaying-military-projects-for-wall


Republicans grumble over Trump shifting military funds to wall

GOP lawmakers are grumbling over President Trump’s redirection of funds from military construction projects in their states and districts to his promised wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Their uneasiness stems from this week’s announcement by Secretary of Defense Mark Esper that $3.6 billion will be stripped from 127 projects at U.S. bases, including some in states where GOP senators are up for reelection.

Congressional Republicans now face the fraught task of assuring their constituents that the projects won’t be canceled while also working with the Defense Department and Democrats to craft legislation that will replenish or “backfill” the funding — all while not coming across as publicly rebuking President Trump.

Many GOP lawmakers are upset that Trump issued an emergency declaration in February to carry out the cash shift.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who is up for reelection, said she doesn’t believe the president has the constitutional authority to divert the money.

“Each of these projects was recommended by the administration, passed by both the Senate and the House, signed into law by the president, and while there is some discretion that he has to move money around, I think that his executive order exceeds his discretion,” she said during an event Wednesday in Maine.

Congress voted this year to block Trump’s emergency declaration, but lawmakers fell short of the votes needed to override the president’s subsequent veto.

Trump’s emergency declaration prompted Esper to inform congressional leaders this week that in order to build 175 miles of the wall on the southern border, some $1.1 billion would need to be cut from projects across 23 states, according to a letter to congressional leaders.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), whose state is set to lose a combined $54 million for two military projects, said he was “disappointed” by the decision, while noting that “funding the border wall is an important priority.”

“The Executive Branch should use the appropriate channels in Congress, rather than divert already appropriated funding away from military construction projects and therefore undermining military readiness," he said in a statement Wednesday.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) added to that sentiment by saying, "Congress has been ceding far too much powers to the executive branch for decades and it is far past time for Congress to restore the proper balance of power between the three branches."

He also called for Congress to “correct the imbalances caused by the National Emergencies Act.”

But other Republicans have been muted in their criticism, even if their states are getting hit.

“We continue to face a very real crisis at the southern border,” House Armed Services Committee ranking member Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) said in a statement Wednesday. “I regret that the president has been forced to divert funding for our troops to address the crisis.”

Sen. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.), who faces a tough reelection campaign, downplayed the effect on her home state, saying a project at Ft. Huachuca had already been delayed because of an "ongoing environmental cleanup that is taking longer than expected."

Her office initially said only $30,000 would be deferred from Arizona, but later said it was $30 million.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R), whose home state of Kentucky will be hit by the funding shuffle to the tune of nearly $63 million, recently talked to Esper regarding the issue “and is committed to protecting funding for the Ft. Campbell Middle School project,” a spokesman for McConnell told The Hill.




Ten Republican senators who are up for reelection next year voted in support of Trump’s emergency declaration but will have funding diverted from their state: Bill Cassidy (La.), Cornyn, Cory Gardner (Colo.), Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Cindy Hyde-Smith (Miss.), James Inhofe (Okla.), McConnell, McSally, Dan Sullivan (Alaska) and Thom Tillis (N.C.).

McSally, Gardner and Tillis are among those viewed as vulnerable heading into their reelection campaigns.


The House and Senate will soon face the challenge of coming together to figure out a solution in the annual defense policy bill, known as the National Defense Authorization Act.

The GOP-controlled Senate already agreed to fund the deferred military projects in its bill, but the Democratic-led House said it won’t agree to do the same.

“I think it’s going to be difficult with members of the House to try to get them to backfill the money. This is a showdown that we’ve seen coming for a long time,” said Todd Harrison, a defense budget expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

If House Democrats refuse to authorize the backfilled money, affected military construction projects might be terminated.

But giving the administration the money it has requested, Harrison said, is “basically giving the president the green light to do this again.”


Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Esper told him some of the money will come from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in his home state of New York.

[Zippyjuan]

Rand Paul voted against Trump declaring an emergency to seize/ transfer money to build his wall.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/03/politics/rand-paul-trump-national-emergency-declaration/index.html


Rand Paul's vote likely gives Senate enough to oppose national emergency declaration


The Senate likely now has enough votes to pass a measure blocking President Donald Trump's national emergency declaration after Sen. Rand Paul signaled his support for the resolution of disapproval.

"I can't vote to give extraconstitutional powers to the President," the Kentucky Republican said Saturday, according to the Bowling Green Daily News.

"I can't vote to give the President the power to spend money that hasn't been appropriated by Congress," Paul said at a Warren County Republican Party fundraising dinner, according to the newspaper. "We may want more money for border security, but Congress didn't authorize it. If we take away those checks and balances, it's a dangerous thing."

[Stratovarious]

Speaking of replacing funds;
The Pentagon lost 21 trillion, why not replace that?

[Zippyjuan]

Speaking of replacing funds;
The Pentagon lost 21 trillion, why not replace that?

They lost $21 trillion out of $9 trillion in spending.

https://www.metabunk.org/debunked-missing-21-trillion-6-5-trillion-2-3-trillion-journal-vouchers.t9718/


A comedy show on Russia Today starring Lee Camp (stand-up comedian and former writer for The Onion) has become the latest outlet to push an old debunked story - the idea that there are trillions of dollars missing from the Pentagon. This myth arose because the the Pentagon (i.e. the Department of Defense) has multiple different accounting systems across multiple departments. These systems have a serious problem: they are not "interoperable". This means that entries on one system do not automatically flow to another system.

So when the military has to make quarterly or year-end financial statements, some entries, like the value of certain assets (like aircraft carriers) or liabilities (like pensions), have to be transferred either manually or by an automated but uncertified system. Because of this it's marked as "unsupported" because it lacks a rigorous audit trail. But it's not missing. It's just a long list of entries, like the value of the Navy's ships, that don't meet proper accounting standards. Since these things don't go away, the same entries can be made year after year, and you can add the numbers up to get bigger and bigger amounts. But it's not missing money or undocumented spending.

This can be a difficult thing to understand. On a House Armed Services Committee hearing held on Jan 10 2018, Representative Walter Jones raised the issue, reading from a Reuter's article. Jones seem to have thought that the money was missing. Defense Department Comptroller, David L. Norquist, explained it to him.



REP. WALTER JONES
Of all the articles I've seen about waste in the 22 years that I've been here, probably this is in the top four or five. It's from two years ago [reading] "US Army fudged its accounts by trillions of dollars, auditors find. The Defense Department Inspector General, in a June report, two years ago, said the army made a $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015 and $6.5 trillion for the year, yet the Army lacks receipts and invoices to support these numbers, or simply made them up." This would be something, I would think, would be under your department's jurisdiction. [...]

DAVID NORQUIST:
Let me address that, that's a very important one. One of the issues you're talking about related to journal vouchers, which occurs after the money is spent. So when you see in the article it says trillions of dollars and you realize we only receive about $600 billion in a year, there's a mismatch in the story. What this refers to is: we have systems that do not automatically pass data from one to the other. The army [and others] goes in at the end of their financial statements, finds the number from their property book and writes it into their general ledger. That is called a journal voucher entry. Depending on the property it could be hundreds of billions of dollars. Because they don't have adequate support for that journal voucher, the whole entry is considered unsupported. Now from a management point of view this is bad. It's not the same as not being able to account for money that the Congress has given you to spend, but it's still a problem that needs to be fixed. Part of that relates to systems that were built as "stove-pipes", and in private sector they don't talk to each other, you wouldn't let them field a system that wouldn't automatically pass up its data. So we are addressing exactly that type of challenge and one of my concerns is — only by eliminating the types of ones that are just an entry issue can you find underlying issues that are hidden among inaccurate data. So it's important, I wouldn't want the taxpayer to confuse that with something like the loss of trillion of dollars, that wouldn't be accurate. But it's an accounting problem that does need to be solved because it can help hide other underlying issues.


More at link.

[Stratovarious]

They lost $21 trillion out of $9 trillion in spending.

https://www.metabunk.org/debunked-missing-21-trillion-6-5-trillion-2-3-trillion-journal-vouchers.t9718/



More at link.

It's all mumbo jumbo double speak, their own lexicon of blsht, which could be better
explained this way;

''We are the gobt, we do what we do , and we are not held to any standards but
the ones we write for ourselves, we are completely unaccountable to anyone.''