President Donald Trump continues to receive regular updates about progress on his proposed wall on the Southern border, but he is not making the actual decisions in the contract awarding process.
“The President is not involved in the procurement process for the wall prototypes,” said DHS Press Secretary David Lapan to Breitbart News. “He does, however, receive regular updates on general development of the wall and deployment strategy and process.”
As Breitbart News reported, construction will begin on several wall prototypes, after the contracts are awarded this Summer.
A White House aide familiar with the procurement process told Breitbart News that Trump should not be involved, suggesting that it it would raise ethical questions about interference with the contracting process.
“It has to be handled without interference or even the perception of interference,” the aide explained.
But Trump happily discusses plans for the wall publicly, including some ideas about what might it might look like.
Speaking with reporters aboard Air Force One in July, Trump revealed several details about the wall that put the scale of the project in perspective.
“In a true sense, we’ve already started the wall,” Trump said, pointing out that officials were already using border security funding to replace existing border security structures.
“We’re taking wall that was good but it’s in very bad shape, and we’re making it new. We’re fixing it,” he said.
Trump also revealed that parts of the wall had to be “see-through” to allow border security officials to see what was going on on the Mexico side.
“You have to be able to see through it … it could be a steel wall with openings, but you have to have openings because you have to see what’s on the other side of the wall,” he said. He also insisted that there was still “a very good chance” that the wall could be covered with solar panels.
The president also revealed during the conversation that he does not expect the wall to stretch across the entire Southern border.
“It’s a 2,000 mile border, but you don’t need 2,000 miles of wall because you have a lot of natural barriers,” he said. “You have mountains. You have some rivers that are violent and vicious. You have some areas that are so far away that you don’t really have people crossing. So you don’t need that.”
Critics of the president’s wall use outrageous cost estimates ($70 billion) for a wall on the entire border to raise doubts about the wall’s completion.
But Trump said he expects to build “700 to 900 miles” of wall, and admitted that part of it would include existing border barriers.
The House Appropriations Committee released a proposed budget on Tuesday including $1.6 billion for a “physical barrier construction along the U.S. southern border” that included “bollards and levee improvements.”
Speaking with reporters on Tuesday, Lapan confirmed that the prototypes will include both see-through barrier or a solid wall.
“The professionals on the border obviously prefer something that they can see through in some manner, whether it’s, again, a bollard fence that you can see through directly, whether it’s cameras that allow you to see on to the other side,” he said.
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