The Trump administration’s proposed budget would actually weaken the agencies responsible for securing the country:

The Trump administration wants to gut the Coast Guard and make deep cuts in airport and rail security to help pay for its crackdown on illegal immigration, according to internal budget documents reviewed by POLITICO — a move that lawmakers and security experts say defies logic if the White House is serious about defending against terrorism and keeping out undocumented foreigners.

Reducing the Coast Guard’s budget is remarkably irresponsible, since they are already poorly funded and overstretched with the resources they currently have. Whatever one thinks of Trump’s other immigration policies, these cuts make no sense, and they make even less sense if one thinks that there needs to be more border security. In fact, the Coast Guard would need a significant increase in its funding if it is going to be able to cope with the effects of more enforcement on land:

“As you harden the land border you open up the maritime border,” argued Stephen Flynn, a retired Coast Guard commander who is director of the Global Resilience Institute at Northeastern University. “It makes no sense. You are going to have this balloon effect.”

Cannibalizing the Coast Guard at the same time that the administration wants to send tens of billions more to the Pentagon is even harder to justify, since the Coast Guard is the branch that is focused solely on protecting the United States. For an administration that supposedly wants to put America first, its budget priorities are almost as backwards as can be. The administration’s budget is likely to be rejected in its current form, but it shows that they care more about making a big show of their commitment to national security while going out of their way to weaken it.