And now at the Los Angeles Times, "Budgets raided to address border crisis amid Congress' inaction":
Surveillance drones that hunt drug smugglers along the Mexican border could soon be grounded. Installation of pole-top cameras and ground sensors to intercept illegal crossings might be delayed.More at the link.
About $44 million has already been diverted from the government's health-related accounts, including the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to pay for food, beds, clothing and medical care for the crush of unaccompanied minors who have crossed the Southwestern border.
And that's just the beginning.
With the expected failure of Congress to agree Thursday on emergency funds to cope with the border crisis, the Obama administration is shifting an additional $94 million from other government programs and accounts — some far removed from the immigration debate — to meet the swelling costs of caring for the children through the summer, according to congressional aides.
Congress is scheduled to leave town Thursday for a five-week break without acting on the president's request for $3.7 billion in emergency funding or agreeing on an alternative.
But border agencies say their existing budgets — sapped by added costs from overtime, detention and transportation for the children, more than 57,000 of whom have arrived since October — will start running dry before lawmakers get back in September.
Administration officials warn that the price of congressional inaction will be steep, estimating the cost of caring for each immigrant youth runs between $250 and $1,000 a day.
"Scary," Sen. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat, said about the agencies' budget outlook.
On Wednesday, officials at the Office of Management and Budget were putting together plans to scrounge up funds. But without congressional approval, President Obama is limited to moving around money only in small amounts. That probably means the redistribution will touch many different programs — a distressing prospect for officials in vulnerable agencies.
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson has already diverted funds from immigration enforcement, and is now reviewing other programs in what he has described as a "dramatic" effort to locate money. Another casualty of the budget crunch might be new X-ray screening equipment to speed up truck cargo traffic at the border, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Gil Kerlikowske said in a recent interview.
"We have huge investments in technology to speed up people traveling lawfully into the U.S. and [for] cargo advancement," Kerlikowske said. "There is money in those programs, but we would have to reprogram to keep up with the money that is now being spent on the Southwest border."
And as I wrote earlier, "the Obama White House is mounting a demonic Alinskyite campaign of manufactured crisis, putting untold alien migrant lives at risk, to say nothing of the dozens upon dozens of American communities now fearing for their safety and trying to protect themselves from Third World diseases."
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