by Jack Lee
Have you been following the progress of the “Virtual Fence” on the US border? It seems we’ve spent a gazillion dollars on this high tech project and now it will never be finished.
It’s been problem after problem, the engineers would solve one problem and two more would pop up and so it went, some 2800 major design flaws and problems that were completely unexpected. Homeland’s Janet Napolitano said, “The system of sensors and cameras along the Southwest border . . . has been plagued with cost overruns and missed deadlines.” Talk about an understatement! This high-tech system is years behind schedule and was far more expensive than predicted and it’s been notoriously unreliable.
Of course there seems nobody to blame for wasting the taxpayers money again. In these kind of massive boondoggles nobody ever gets fired or held accountable, have you ever noticed that? Why, why is that, I really want to know? How could so much money be wasted before we finally called a halt to it and now there is nobody to blame?
The remaining $50 mil set aside for more fence building is going to be used in other ways for border security. But, what assurances do we have that won’t be wasted too? We don’t and it probably will.
What gets me is how could we have spent all those millions for a security fence only to find out at this late date… that it won’t work? Wasn’t there anyone who did their homework, some sort of feasibility studies, before we started throwing money at this massive project? This is just mind-blowing stupid and it started during the Bush administration in response to a flood of illegal immigrants and drug smugglers coming across the Rio Grande and other entry points.