Pentagon to Take Money from Military Projects to Pay for Wall.
KEILAR: The President is moving on his promise to take Department of Defense funds and repurpose them for his border wall. Defense Secretary Mark Esper has authorized $3.6 billion in military construction funds to instead be used on fencing along the southern border. And according to the Defense Department, this means 127 military construction projects will be put on hold. Paul Rieckhoff is an Iraq war veteran, he is the founder and executive director of the Iraq & Afghanistan Veterans of America. And you -- Esper has said Paul, that the money is necessary. He says, it's necessary to support, "the use of armed forces in connection with a national emergency". Is that true?</s>PAUL RIECKHOFF, FOUNDER, IRAQ & AFGHANISTAN VETERANS OF AMERICA: Well that's not what the money was authorized for. There's plenty of ways to pay for a wall and you can do it without raiding the Pentagon, it's not -- the Pentagon budget is not a political piggy bank that you can shutter when you want to fund the political project. This money was authorized for other things by Congress and bipartisan way. So it's outrageous, it's unprecedented and it's bad for our national security and bad for our troops. These are construction projects that would have been funded, that that money is now going to go toward the wall. Let's put this in realtime perspective. There are military basis in Savannah, Georgia, Hunter Army Airfield, Fort Benning, Fort Stewart. Those are going to get hit by this hurricane. And they're going to need construction costs and they're not going to have them, because the money is instead going toward the border wall. So this is really politicization of our troops in the military at its worst and it's really bad for everybody.</s>KEILAR: Well, that's the thing, is it really is -- it inserts the military into a partisan policy. I wonder what you think the long term effect of that, considering we've seen this in other places as well, including just troops being on the border. What do you think the long term impact of that is?</s>RIECKHOFF: It's terrible. It's terrible for our national security, it's terrible for our politics. You're a military spouse, you know first hand how important construction projects are, military schools. And if you can go and raid the money for that to fund the political project -- and this isn't really even about the wall, it's about the President. The President should not be allowed to dip into the Pentagon budget and fund something else. And so, you know, even if he want to fund the wall, find some royals (ph) to do it, don't snatch that money away from our troops. And construction cost when we're about to get hit by a hurricane just underscore how raid -- our radius is. My podcast always talks about issues that should make --