The administration’s expanding border wall troubles have infected President Biden’s nominee for undersecretary of the Air Force, who encountered trouble on Capitol Hill this week over her role in the Pentagon’s hasty and wasteful sell-off of the construction materials.
Republican senators pummeled Melissa G. Dalton over her job as the Pentagon’s top homeland defense official. She presided over the fire sale of wall materials at a 97% discount while misleading lawmakers.
Under intense questioning Tuesday, Ms. Dalton broke with Mr. Biden. She said a wall could effectively “mitigate” the flow of migrants and acknowledged that the Pentagon wasted money by selling the materials so hastily.
Senators said the Defense Department, which was roped into border wall construction by the Army Corps of Engineers and President Trump’s use of emergency powers, was sitting on massive stockpiles of material after Mr. Biden halted all the work on Inauguration Day in 2021.
The government was paying $130,000 a day to store the construction material. When lawmakers started writing legislation to force the Pentagon to either use the material or donate it to states, the Defense Department quietly began selling it to the public through an auction site.
Sen. Roger F. Wicker of Mississippi, the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee, told Ms. Dalton that the auctioning was “a clear effort to circumvent congressional intent.”
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It was also poor budgeting. The department collected just 3 cents on the dollar, he said.
Making matters worse, the buyers turned around and resold the steel tubing for 10 times that amount, said Sen. Joni Ernst, Iowa Republican.
“There’s a big scheme going on here where people are making a ton of money off of the taxpayers,” Ms. Ernst said.
Ms. Dalton acknowledged as much under questioning from Sen. Eric Schmitt. The Missouri Republican asked her whether selling the wall materials was a “good deal for taxpayers.”
“No,” she responded flatly.
Ms. Dalton said she has made routine trips to the southern border. In her view, she said, a border wall can stop illegal immigrants if it is “part of a system of border security management.”
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“I believe a border barrier can mitigate the flow,” she said.
She said she had no authority to make big decisions on the border wall. As a member of the administration, she said, she had to follow Mr. Biden’s decision to halt construction.
As the wall issue heated up last year, Ms. Dalton signed a letter saying the Defense Department was devising plans for the construction materials. Mr. Wicker said the Pentagon was auctioning off the steel.
Ms. Dalton this week blamed colleagues. She said she only transmitted the responses from “a number of components.”
“It was the best available information we had at the time,” said Ms. Dalton, currently the assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense and hemispheric affairs and acting deputy undersecretary for policy.
Republican senators indicated opposition to her promotion to the second-highest civilian job in the Air Force.
“We’ve established that you don’t take responsibility,” Mr. Schmitt said.
The wall has been a thorn for the Biden administration since before he took office. Mr. Biden’s promise not to build “another foot” of wall led to his Day One construction halt, not just on the barrier but also the sensors, lights and roads that constitute the wall system.
Local authorities say illegal immigrants and drugs pour through those unfinished sections.
Border Patrol agents are vocal in their support of the wall. They say the barrier helps shape the flow of people and gives them a better chance at intercepting illegal immigrants when they cross the border.
Mr. Biden has rejected their expertise and insisted the wall is ineffective.
Sitting on the materials to build the wall while record numbers of illegal immigrants poured into the U.S. proved to be embarrassing, so the sell-off began.
The procedures call for the material to be sent to the Defense Logistics Agency, which works with an auction company.
The agency said it stopped sales last year after lawmakers made their displeasure clear. The agency said the materials have since been doled out elsewhere in federal or state government but did not say who claimed it.
The Army Corps of Engineers did not respond to an inquiry for this report.
Part of the embarrassment for the administration is that it sold off the materials just months before Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas reversed himself and said he would build miles of new wall.
Mr. Mayorkas said his hands were tied by congressional allocations approved during the Trump administration, and he had to spend money building more border wall.
It was tough to square that explanation with his official statement on the renewed wall building, published in the Federal Register, where he declared an “immediate” need for the wall and waived more than two dozen laws to speed construction. Among them were iconic environmental laws such as the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act and the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act.