Unused border wall materials sold at auction by the Biden administration are likely structurally unsound, several sources told The Center Square.
President-elect Donad Trump, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and others criticized the Biden administration over reports that it was trying to sell off unused border wall materials ahead of Trump taking office.
But the materials being sold at auction aren’t state-of-the-art, high-quality steel but instead are scrap metal and not structurally sound, Texas-based officials and former federal employees who’ve worked on border wall construction for years told The Center Square. They spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
Texas has not purchased them and doesn’t have plans to purchase them, the officials said.
“The ones being listed are scrap. We don’t want them. They are faulty panels, incomplete. The ones we want, the good ones, aren’t listed for auction,” one official said.
Usable and structurally sound border wall panels are still lying on the ground in the Rio Grande Valley, for example, one source involved in border wall construction told The Center Square. “The materials we want are still sitting on the ground. The ones being shown online don’t pass a stress test,” the official said.
“There are completed panels in the Rio Grande Valley that fill two city blocks laying on the ground. They reach 15-feet-high stacked flat. These are not for sale. We would take those,” the official said.
The Department of Defense confirmed that the border wall materials were redistributed according to the National Defense Authorization Act, which Congress passed last year, with Republican support. The law required the Secretary of Defense to submit detailed information to Congress about how it was using, donating or selling excess border wall materials purchased between fiscal years 2017 through 2022, KGW8 News reported.
Before any federal materials are listed by a private auction, they are first listed on federal auction websites, one Texas-based official told The Center Square. “Every company that uses steel tracks these sales. The panels being sold at auction, no one wants them. No one wants scrap metal. We can’t use them to build the wall.”
“I understand the narrative that people are pushing against the Biden administration to make it seem like they are trying to prevent the Trump administration from putting up border wall but it’s a faulty narrative. Those materials won’t do us any good. We can’t use them. We’re not in the scrap metal business. It makes a good story but it’s not accurate,” the source added.
Sources also explained that if the materials were structurally sound, Texas would have already purchased them to build its own border wall.
The issue of the Biden administration selling border wall materials is not new and prompted several lawsuits. In 2020 and 2021, Congress allocated roughly $1.4 billion to fund the construction of a barrier system along the southwest border. On his first day in office, President Joe Biden halted it. Because contracts had already been implemented, it cost taxpayers an initial $6 million, then $3 million a day, for the border wall not to be built.
Materials that had already been paid to build the wall were left to rust on the ground, The Center Square reported.
In October 2021, Missouri and Texas sued, requesting the court to order the administration to complete border wall construction. The Texas General Land Office also sued. The cases were consolidated and in May, a federal judge ruled the administration violated the law and instructed the administration to use the funds appropriated by Congress for their intended purpose, The Center Square reported.
After the recent reports, Texas and Missouri filed a complaint with the court requesting it to enforce the injunction previously issued. Trump also filed an amicus brief with the case.
“The Biden Administration cannot auction off sections of the border wall. If these reports are true, the Biden Administration is violating a federal court order,” Texas AG Ken Paxton said.
The administration isn’t auctioning off the materials. They were sold to a private auction site in accordance with the NDAA, a DOD official said. Because the materials no longer belong to the federal government, it has “no legal authority to recall the material or stop further resale of material it no longer owns,” the official said, KGW8 News reported.
Paxton’s filing asks the court “to prevent any border security materials from being unlawfully sold and to find out the truth about what the federal government may be doing.”
