The GAO (U.S Government Accountability Office) issued a new report that the U.S President Donald Trump and White House have failed to calculate that how much it will cost U.S taxpayers to construct a wall along the Mexican border. The watchdog group said that the final and complete analysis of the costs for a barrier stretching along the U.S-Mexico border is required to track the costs of the project and measure its overall success. The researchers fear the project poses without a comprehensive analysis and considered it as an increased risk that the Border Wall System Program will cost more than projected, take longer than planned, or not fully perform as expected. GAO wrote in a Monday tweet that the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is planning physical barriers along the southwest border, but discovered that it didn’t analyze costs when prioritizing locations for future barriers.
The CBP is unable to ensure cost-effectiveness without this information. The report goes on to list numerous issues with the federal government’s proposals to build Trump’s wall. The CBP didn’t determine where the wall would need to be built along the border in order to effectively reduce illegal immigration. The agency also failed to consider the costs for building physical structures along various regions, including mountains, rivers and other difficult terrains to navigate and build construction upon. If the project goes on as is, GAO predicts it could potentially waste billions of U.S dollars in government spending. Perhaps part of the problem is that Trump never expected taxpayers to foot the bill for his campaign promise. The U.S President Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed that the Mexican government should pay for the construction costs of the proposed wall, continuing to recite the pledge even after leaders from the neighboring country said that they would not fund his project whatsoever.