Melissa Dalton, the Pentagon official currently tasked with overseeing homeland defenses, said during a Tuesday Senate hearing that wall construction along the U.S. southern border would help slow the flow of people coming into the United States.
Ms. Dalton, who is the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Hemispheric Affairs and has been performing the duties of the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, is currently under consideration to be the next Under Secretary of the Air Force. While Ms. Dalton appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday to testify about her nomination, Republicans on the panel repeatedly asked her questions about her current roles and responsibilities, especially regarding U.S. border security.
“Regrettably, her performance in her position gives me pause,” Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) said near the start of the hearing.
“I’m also concerned about Ms. Dalton’s handling of the Pentagon’s responsibilities at our southwestern border,” Mr. Wicker said.
“At one point, the Department of Defense was spending $130,000 every day to store instead of using border wall construction materials that had already been manufactured. They were ready and yet we were spending $130,000 every day to store them, meanwhile, illegal immigration broke records,” he said.
“Later, we found out that the Department of Defense had initiated a process in which these panels would be auctioned for pennies on the dollar.”
Wall Construction Halted
President Joe Biden had halted Trump-era border wall construction efforts and halted the use of defense funds for the project as one of his first acts as president. With wall construction at a standstill, the military instead used funds to pay to store the construction materials, at a cost Mr. Wicker determined last year to have been more than $47 million annually.
In August, Department of Defense officials admitted to news organizations that the military had begun auctioning off “excess border wall materials” that the Army Corps of Engineers had turned over to the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA).
As the hearing went on, Sen. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) said Ms. Dalton had said in a prior meeting that there would be some utility in having a wall at the U.S. southern border. Mr. Budd asked Ms. Dalton to once again attest to that view during the open Senate hearing.
“As part of a system of border security management, in my personal view, I believe a border barrier can help mitigate the flow,” Ms. Dalton said, amid crosstalk as Mr. Budd pressed her to give a “yes” or “no” response.
During the hearing, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) said the unused wall materials the Department of Defense sold off were originally valued at about $4.4 million but that these materials were sold for about $156,000, a discount of about 96 percent off the original price.
Ms. Ernst then asserted some private buyers turned around and sold off the materials for as much as 10 times what they spent at government auction.
“These materials have been sold for pennies on the dollar, about three cents for every dollar that the federal government spent on it, and yet we have some additional auctions that are coming up where people are reselling the materials that they just bought from DLA, and they have been receiving 10 times as much as what they paid,” Ms. Ernst said.
Ms. Ernst asserted there is a “scheme” going on where some people “are making a ton of money off of the taxpayers.”
Bad Deal for US Taxpayers
Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) went on to ask Ms. Dalton if the government’s original purchase price for the wall materials and the eventual auction prices represented a good deal for the U.S. taxpayer.
“No,” Ms. Dalton replied.
Mr. Schmitt also noted an alleged memo for the auction of the wall materials, which told government sellers to avoid using terms like “Trump,” “Mexico,” or other references to “the controversial border wall.” He asked Ms. Dalton if she felt there was an effort to conceal the sale of the wall materials from the general public.
“Senator, I did not write the way that that was described, so I would have to defer to those that did,” Ms. Dalton said. “I believe that we need to provide transparency certainly to Congress and to the American people on all matters related to national defense.”
Throughout the hearing, Ms. Dalton said the disposition of the border wall materials was not specifically part of her portfolio at the Pentagon. Mr. Schmitt accused her of avoiding responsibility and not being forthcoming.