iowa underground blog

... to protect falling approval ratings?

While we’re going through this “temporary” deployment – keep in mind that one of the requirements of the Dec. 17 2005 National Intelligence Reform Act was to bolster the Border Patrol by an additional 10,000 agents over the course of five years.

Officially approved by Bush on Dec. 17 after extensive bickering in Congress, the National Intelligence Reform Act included the requirement to add 10,000 border patrol agents in the five years beginning with 2006. Roughly 80 percent of the agents were to patrol the southern U.S. border from Texas to California, along which thousands of people cross into the United States illegally every year.

So – what happened in the 2006 budget?

But Bush’s proposed 2006 budget, revealed Monday, funds only 210 new border agents.

The shrunken increase reflects the lack of money for an army of border guards and the capacity to train them, officials said.

Retired Adm. James Loy, acting head of the Department of Homeland Security until nominee Michael Chertoff takes over, said funding only 210 new agents was a “recognition that we need to balance those things as we go on down the road with other priorities.”

The White House referred questions about the border agents to the Homeland Security Department.

The law signed by Bush had a caveat that went virtually unreported at the time. A summary, published by the Senate Government Affairs Committee, required the government to increase the number of border patrol agents by at least 2,000 per year, “subject to available appropriations.”

Democrats were unhappy that the proposed budget used the escape clause so soon after the president approved the huge boost in border agents.

Keep this in mind: this sudden emergency on the southern border was not an emergency in January 2006, when the President submitted his budget to the Congress for approval. Now, we’re going to pay for National Guard deployment on a temporary basis until “civilian contractors” can be put in place.

Why civilian contractors instead of following the requirements of the law passed in December, 2006? The answer, of course, has six letters:

AFL-CIO

The Bush Administration wouldn’t actually want to hire people with the ability to organize, after all.

• Sousy

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 16th, 2006 at 12:29 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.