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By the way, as someone who spent a lifetime in construction, that cost estimate prepared by DHS “staff” is 20% to 50% inflated.

Let’s take Donald at his word and estimate that the wall is concrete. ALL OF IT. Let’s also say the wall is two and a half foot thick at the base with a 20’ wide spread footing 2.5 ‘ thick at the base. As a battered wall, or thicker at the base, the top or the wall might be 1.5 feet thick. Let’s assume the wall is 40 foot tall allowing for the footing to be 10 foot below grade in non-rock areas and cut into rock to a four foot depth where shelf rock allows. That means the wall would project about 32.5 feet on average. That means that if we allow 15% overage for ancillary structures, the wall has an estimate 5.5 cubic yards of reinforced concrete construction. Let’s assume that the wall concrete is poly-fiber reinforced as well as other security reinforcement. That means that the ready mix should cost less than $80 dollars per cubic yard as opposed to 55 you can buy it for on a large urban project. The added cost is in transport, remote batch plant cost and some amount where it is off road transport. Now lets add in security reinforcement with epoxy coating, footing excavation and prep, waste disposal, EPA approved wash-out boxes, form work, false works, and labor. So instead of 180 to 325 per cubic yard total for similar work on other federal project of this mass lets use 400 dollars per cubic yard times that 5.5 cubic yards per lineal foot.

Let’s add 8 percent for profit, 8% for design, and another ten percent for incidentals.

That’s $2822 per lineal foot at the extreme top end. That is 18.6 billion where the contractors have 1.16 billion in profit and the wall is designed and figured with the ultimately sky-is-the limit costs. Remember I have an added 10% or 1.8 billion for security, legal, drainage, electrical to guard stations etc etc.