The United States Border Patrol (BP) has a long record of failure to adequately plan a major project, to provide the fiscal oversight, and to see the project through to completion. Take, for example, how surprised administrators at the University of Texas Brownsville were in 2005 when they discovered that the border fence as planned by the Border Patrol actually would split their Brownsville, Texas, campus into two halves.
Or the Border Patrol’s organizational inability when tasked by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 1998 to monitor contractor L-3 Communications in the $250 million construction of a high tech border wall in Texas.
Or when the same DHS tasked the BP in 2006 to keep a close eye on contractor Boeing, Inc., and the $1 billion development of the virtual wall along the Mexican border. Unfortunately under a program called SBI-net, Boeing managed for the price of $1 billion to build only 25 communications towers covering 53 miles of the Arizona border before it was fired from the project by DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano.
A more recent egregious example of BP planning is the border wall in Cameron and Hidalgo Counties in south Texas. Notice there are broad openings in the expanse of the twenty-foot wall about every quarter to half mile, openings designed to allow farmers access to their land between the Rio Grande River and the wall? Notice anything is missing? They forgot the gates.
In fact, two years after completion of the wall more than 50 gates in Hidalgo County are missing-in-action. No reason to go over the wall or under it when you literally can walk through it at more than 50 different spots in one county. BP representatives told me in 2005 that the gates would be completed and in place by 2007. In October, 2011, I received several different and inconsistent answers from BP representatives when I visited the sector. One BP agent told me the gates were still being designed while another told me, “We hope to have them in place within a year and a half.”
Now the Border Patrol has been tasked by DHS to develop and build the Arizona Border Surveillance Technology Plan (Plan), a massive effort that Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) estimates over the next ten years will cost $1.5 billion with $242 million already scheduled for fiscal year 2012. The purpose of this new $1.5 billion dollar effort is to place surveillance technology along the several hundred miles of remaining border between Arizona and Mexico that SBI-net never managed to cover.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) just completed a study of the CBP’s planning of this massive project. In short the GAO found that the CBP failed to reasonably justify the purposed surveillance technologies, that the mission benefits of the Plan were not justified, that their was no post-evaluation of the massive project, and that the estimate of the cost of the Plan, $1.5 billion, failed to consider a number of factors which could substantially increase the CBP cost estimate.
According to this GAO report, DHS fully agreed with these findings which in detail document that the CBP planning for this massive project is far from ready. (One might, of course, seriously question why for more than a decade DHS has tasked CBP with projects it continues to bungle.)
The GAO report’s conclusion is well summarized in the study’s subtitle: “More Information on Plans and Costs is Needed before Proceeding”.
So before Customs and Border Patrol begins to supervise another massive project doomed to failure, isn’t it time for DHS to put another agency in charge, or designate a panel of experts to guide CBP, or otherwise somehow seek to avoid another fiscal and security disaster like SBI-net?
If not, then the Arizona Border Surveillance Technology Plan has every possibility of failing just like ISIS, the American Shield Initiative, SBI, SBI-net, and the other named border wall derivatives advertised by Boeing, Inc., in 2009 and 2010. The only difference this time is that this boondoggle may in the end prove to be much, much costlier, on the order of $2 billion or more.
CBP should not commence this proposed project until all the issues raised by the new GAO report have been satisfactorily addressed. In lean times like these, we do not need to be wasting billions of taxpayer dollars in the name of national security.
References:
United States Government Accountability Office, “Arizona Border Surveillance Technology: More Information on Plans and Costs Is Needed before Proceeding”, November, 2011, GAO-12-12.
Robert Lee Maril, The Fence: National Security, Public Safety, and Illegal Immigration along the U.S.-Mexico Border, Texas Tech University Press, 2010.
