![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/83788442007-20250521-t-125821-z-1232940336-rc-28-leapcov-8-rtrmadp-3-usaeconomypoll.JPG\"\/)
![\"play\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/icon-play-alt-white.svg.svg+xml\"){kind=icon}
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
House passes President Donald Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’<\/p>\n
The House passed President Donald Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill.’ It will now move onto the Senate.<\/p>\n
The Trump administration’s claim to the “most secure border in history” has some Senate Republicans asking why DHS needs billions for a border wall.<\/p>\n
The Department of Homeland Security has asked Congress for $45.6 billion to build hundreds more miles of fencing at the southern border as part of a sweeping tax and spending bill <\/a>that passed the House and is being debated in the Senate.<\/p>\n “The border is the most secure border we’ve had in the history of the United States of America,” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem<\/a> told the Senate Homeland Security Committee on May 20. “But what we need to do is address the areas that are still vulnerable.”<\/p>\n President Donald Trump<\/a> faces challenges as he looks to push his policy agenda <\/a>in the Senate, where Republicans have a narrow majority and GOP senators are working to balance their support for border security with concerns about rising national debt.<\/p>\n The House version of the funding bill is predicted to add an estimated $3.8 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years.<\/p>\n Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, said during the committee hearing that at an estimated $14 million a mile, DHS could build more than 3,000 miles of border fence.<\/p>\n The U.S.-Mexico border only runs 1,950 miles from California to Texas; roughly 700 miles of the border is already fenced off.<\/p>\n “I’m asking you and the department to sharpen your pencil on that wall request,” he told Noem. “It’s more than you need.”<\/p>\n Noem suggested to the committee that the cost-per-mile was less, roughly $12 million per mile.<\/p>\n Committee chairman Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, said even if DHS wanted to wall off another 1,000 miles \u2013 unlikely due to extremely rugged and mountainous terrain in some parts \u2013 the agency would need $12 billion, not $45.6 billion.<\/p>\n “We’re off here by a factor of three or four,” Paul told Noem, asking for more detail. “We can’t just throw another $30 billion out there and say, ‘Things cost a lot.'”<\/p>\n