GOP lawmaker proposes paying for Trump's border wall by raiding food stamp funding

(Image credit: Screenshot/Mediaite/CNN)

published 12 July 2017

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) wants the House to allocate an additional $5 billion for President Trump's proposed border wall and he wants to take funding from Planned Parenthood and food stamp funding to do so. Already, the House Appropriations Committee has proposed $1.6 billion in funding for Trump's wall, but King said he'd be comfortable with upping that amount. "I'd throw another five billion on the pile, and I would find half of a billion dollars of that right out of Planned Parenthood's budget. And the rest of it could come out of food stamps and the entitlements that are being spread out for people that haven't worked in three generations," King said during a Wednesday interview on CNN's New Day.

An incredulous CNN host Alisyn Camerota clarified that King was really "willing to take money" from people who rely on food stamps just to build Trump's border wall. King insisted that he was, "for a couple of reasons." "One of them would be that we will create the kind of security that would bring about 10 million new jobs in America just by enforcing immigration law," King said. "The second thing is, I wouldn't impose anything any more strict on anybody in America than what Michelle Obama did with her school lunch program. I would just say let's limit it to that — anybody who wants to have food stamps, it's up to the school lunch program, that's fine."

King noted that enrollment in the federally funded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program has gone up drastically. "And you don't think all of them need it?" Camerota asked. "Oh, I'm sure that all of them didn't need it," King said, explaining that the program was introduced to "solve the problem of malnutrition in America and now we have a problem of obesity."