A leading preoccupation of the first Trump administration has all but slipped from view. Except when ostensible conservatives speak out against it, the major media have scarcely breathed a word on the subject. But it’s still there, 30 feet tall, aspirationally 1,952 miles long, obliterating habitats, dividing families, and sucking down public funds faster than a carrier-based air squadron.

The media’s lack of attention is understandable. All-too-real wars of choice and metaphorical wars against science, universities, and the environment have dominated our airtime and the headlines. The rise of a new medievalism in medicine and the abrogation of international trade and security agreements have also won attention. Add to all of that a federal paramilitary kidnapping people, even from what still passes for the halls of justice, while murdering the occasional protester, and one’s journalistic cup runneth over.

The meta story of the US government’s comprehensive abandonment of its Enlightenment heritage needs telling, too. Goodbye to empiricism and the troublesome scientific discourse it produces. Goodbye as well to empiricism’s political collaterals, including the “created equal” credo of the Declaration of Independence, which the current regime finds distinctly irritating. There is simply too much to report on as the new monarchy, as if in a sped-up nature film, blossoms flowerlike, its palace under renovation, the king’s signature being prepared to grace the currency, and myriad kickback mechanisms whirring like gold-plated turbines to enrich an aristocracy of tech bros and oil emirs.

So, dear reader, it’s not just logical but inevitable that Donald Trump’s border wall, a major story during his first administration, has essentially fallen out of the news. Rest assured, though, that the world’s least pragmatic and most performative construction project continues to prosper.

Spend Now, Think Later

Modern border management relies on three tools: human patrols, remote detection backed by quick response teams, and the construction of physical obstacles. Smart gatekeepers coordinate those tools to maximize effectiveness and minimize cost. But there’s no need for thrift in Trumpworld. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or OBBBA, which Trump signed into law last July 4, negated all need for fiscal restraint. Among other things, it appropriated $46.55 billion for border wall construction, $7.8 billion for US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents and their vehicles, $6.2 billion for high-tech border surveillance, and a hefty $10 billion for anything else border-related. The total: $70.55 billion. Those funds will be available through Fiscal Year 2029. By comparison, the government will spend about $10 billion less over that same period to fund the entire Department of the Interior, which manages half a billion acres of surface land as well as the continental shelf and vast subsurface mineral deposits.

Such border largesse means that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) can go all out on all three tactical approaches at the US-Mexico border—patrol, surveillance, and a wall—simultaneously, without troubling to eliminate redundancies, tailor tactics to the environment, or streamline coordination. Daddy has proudly given DHS his credit card.

In addition to bifurcating the wildlife habitat and scarring a gemlike landscape, the wall builders will extract large amounts of groundwater to make concrete for the wall’s foundation, almost certainly desiccating wetlands that are hotspots of biodiversity.

In a victory-lap cabinet meeting four days after enacting the OBBBA, Trump told Kristi Noem, then still his DHS secretary, “You’re loaded up on the border.” He essentially admitted that the bill’s munificence demonstrated power, not budgetary acumen, simultaneously adding, “We had zero [migrants] come in last month, so I am not sure how much of it we want to spend. You may actually think about saving a lot of money because the wall is largely built.” The president then continued with fact-free claims that the migrant population abounded with murderers and mental defectives.

Notwithstanding Trump’s comments, DHS administrators and the contractors who are their most immediate constituents show no sign of leaving money on the table. At the border, their blank-check funding meets a matching regulatory void—the most extensive waiver of laws and regulations in American history. In addition to suspending laws intended to protect the environment, wildlife, national parks, national wildlife refuges, lands sacred to Native Americans, and historic and cultural sites, the Trump administration has also waived more than 60 contracting and procurement regulations. In the name of a national emergency, which is no emergency at all—illegal border crossings (as measured by apprehensions) have indeed plunged—the president has stripped the playing field of all boundaries and opened the door to cronyism and corruption.

Under showers of money and in the absence of restraint, a single border wall is no longer viewed as adequate. Double-walling has become the norm and certain select areas now boast triple walls. With no cap on costs, whole mountaintops, rugged and unvisited, have been sheared apart to make way for the standard 30-foot-tall, steel-bollard wall, even at costs exceeding $41 million per mile, or almost $8,000 per foot. Meanwhile, the Border Patrol’s terminally bored agents (giving new meaning to bored-er) sit behind the wall in white trucks, looking at their phones and incubating their hemorrhoids.

The Non-Monetary Costs Are No Less Astronomical

It’s easy to think of the mostly arid US-Mexico border zone as empty, but biologically it’s a busy place. The grasslands of the San Rafael Valley in Arizona, for instance, are home to 17 threatened and endangered species. For years, existing vehicle barriers, bolstered by remote detection technology, have allowed jaguars, ocelots, mountain lions, mule deer, and other wildlife to move back and forth across the valley’s 30 miles of border and disperse according to their ancient ways. A network of 60 remote cameras along that stretch, monitored by the Sky Island Alliance, recorded just one possible migrant per camera every 20 months. Besides being easily patrolled, the valley is also heart-stoppingly beautiful. Nonetheless, DHS intends to double wall all of it. In addition to bifurcating the wildlife habitat and scarring a gemlike landscape, the wall builders will extract large amounts of groundwater to make concrete for the wall’s foundation, almost certainly desiccating wetlands that are hotspots of biodiversity. And for nothing, save symbolism, bragging rights, and contractor profits.

No detail illuminates the mentality behind border enforcement better than this: In cooperation with US Customs and Border Protection, military elements at Fort Huachuca, Arizona are now engaged in “the largest Concertina wire (C-wire) emplacement in US territorial history.” “C-wire,” or “razor wire,” is designed to lacerate any flesh, human or animal, that comes in contact with it. Fort Huachuca soldiers are deploying 43,000 rolls of it, the largest single purchase ever.

Usually C-wire is used atop a wall or fence to prevent people from climbing over. Ominously, it’s now being spread on the ground, sometimes in areas where there is no wall, but also in front of the wall and between double walls—a policy of pure viciousness, not necessity. Someone should explain this deployment to the bighorn sheep of California’s Jacumba Mountains, which are now separated from their key Mexican waterhole by thickets of the nasty stuff, which will become ever more camouflaged and treacherous as grass and brush grow through it.

Buoy, Oh, Buoy, What a Wall!

For treachery, however, it’s hard to top CBP’s plans to “secure” 536 miles of the border in Texas by mooring a chain of cylindrical buoys, linked end to end, down the middle of the Rio Grande. Once in place, the array will look like an orange sausage, five feet in diameter, floating on the river. The anchors and mooring lines, of course, will be invisible. What could possibly go wrong?

This ill-conceived plan offers a retro-snapshot of American life before the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) became law in 1970, back when strip mines and other land-wrecking ventures could be launched with no evaluation of their impact, no public involvement, and no second opinions as to their necessity. The waiver of NEPA and every other environmental constraint means that no modeling of the “Buoy Wall’s” hydrodynamics (that is, its reaction to........

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