Speaking to reporters gathered Monday for a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort, President-elect Donald Trump falsely accused President Joe Biden of selling off perfectly good pieces of the border wall.
"I'm asking today for Joe Biden today to stop selling the wall," Trump said. 'What they're doing is really almost a criminal act. They know we're going to use it. "
In reality, President Biden was not the one to order the sale of excess material. It was the Defense Department, under orders from Congress.
When Trump left office four years ago, President Biden scrapped the wall project. He had campaigned not to build "another foot" of barrier and to instead rely on higher tech methods to police unauthorized crossings at the U.S-Mexico border.
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Leftover concrete and steel remained sitting at the border for years.
Then in 2023, Congress passed legislation directing the Department of Defense to "use, transfer, or donate" the supplies.
A defense official tells Scripps News the department gave away 60% of the material to other federal departments and to the state governments of California and Texas. The states were invited to take as much as they wanted, the official said.
Rather than continuing to pay to store the rest, the official said the Defense Department sold the items to the online auction site Gov Planet, where anyone could bid for the parts.
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Trump says the government should have kept it all to save costs since he plans to resume building the wall.
"If we don't have it, we're going to have to rebuild it and it will cost double what it cost years ago," Trump said.
But Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who is also a Trump supporter, says the remaining pieces of the wall weren't of much use, posting on X that "...the material for sale was mostly junk."
