I find it hard to believe the Pentagon stopped a project for cost. This may be a first.
Yes, this is what as known as malicious compliance. It means the budget bureaucrats in, I suspect the Army Budget Office, were told to use bureaucratic noncompliance by ‘working to rule’ on those projects. It is another shot across the bow from inside the Puzzle Palace to DJT to make it clear a significant part of the higher bureaucracy and general officers want no part of the immigration war. Funds are being reallocated from the civil version of Afghanistan to fund the border wall. Lots of rice bowls are dependent on the ludicrously baroque and dysfunction operation derisively known as ‘the War on Drugs’ and the possibility as the wall goes forward that the military, even in a noncombatant support role , might actually be deployed in the interests of the vast straight, patriotic, hardworking and mostly white middle class is just unacceptable. We have to be taught that the only times and places where the US will send people in harms way and trash the country is somewhere 8-10,000 thousand miles away in some place such as Bhutan or Nagaland that 98 out of 100 middle Americans never heard of, where the conflict is vicious but unintelligible and devoid of any significant, let alone vital US interest.
Just the excuse. Real reason is someone told them to pull the plug.
So much for border security. Smoke and mirrors
If a wall of 1000 to 2000 miles in length has been estimated as costing 20 billion dollars, wall cost per mile is of the order of 10 to 20 million per mile.
The project as quoted was 2.5 billion for 20 miles, which would be roughly 10 times as much per mile. Sure, there’s variation in cost depending on terrain, auxiliary features such as road and surveillance gear, but the state number sounds excessive relative to the overall average costs.