A billion dollars and many blown deadlines later, the take-home message from the government’s high-tech electronic border fence project is clear: It’s a mess, and it ought to be killed.
The Secure Border Initiative, in broad strokes, was a good idea. It was designed to use technology to detect tens of thousands of people trying to sneak across the border.
Because of management problems, and also because of how it was initially designed, it’s just not going to work.
It’s a money pit.
The job now is for Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano to figure out an alternative. When she visited with the Denver Post editorial board recently, she was quite circumspect on the fate of the project, telling us only that a report was due soon.
However, several published reports have suggested she is on the verge of shelving the project, which would be a wise but frankly painful move.
Since 2006, the federal government has spent some $1.1 billion on the virtual fence project. It was supposed to include a vast network of ground sensors, radar and cameras to watch much of a 2,000-mile stretch of border and give agents information they need to deploy personnel and catch people trying to cross the border illegally.
Instead, the project has been plagued by management shortcomings and technical problems. What we’ve ended up with is about 53 miles of protected border between Arizona and Mexico, which cost at least $15 million a mile.
A Government Accountability Office report released this month says the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has failed to effectively manage the program, known as SBInet.
“All told, DHS has not effectively managed and overseen its SBInet prime contractor, thus resulting in costly rework and contributing to SBInet’s well-chronicled history of not delivering promised capabilities and benefits on time and within budget,” the report said.
Before anyone goes all crazy partisan, let’s keep in mind this boondoggle was started in 2006 by the Bush administration and managed for almost two years by the Obama administration. Part of the problem, according to the GAO, was that, initially, the government accepted a project design that relied on existing technologies, such as police dispatching software, that couldn’t handle the job.
There is enough blame to go around for the program’s failure. It’s a bipartisan money pit.
Napolitano froze project spending in January, and diverted some money to conventional border security technology. We hope the secretary finds a way forward on border security that includes a technical component in monitoring the miles of rugged terrain on the border.
It’s important to find a cost-effective way to secure the border, and building an expensive fence of bricks and mortar just isn’t going to do the job.
Technology has to be part of the solution to border security, which is an integral part of any effort to pass immigration reform.
