Jared Kushner is now reportedly overseeing construction of Trump's border wall

(Image credit: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

published 26 November 2019

With the 2020 election less than a year away and his long-promised border wall nowhere near being completed, President Trump has turned to his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, to get things moving, current and former administration officials told The Washington Post.

Getting the wall up is one of Trump's top priorities going into 2020, officials said, and Kushner is now the point person, holding regular meetings at the White House with government officials and asking them to keep him updated on where the wall is being built and how much it is costing. He is especially concerned with the fact that the government needs to seize more than 800 pieces of private property in order to get 450 miles of barriers up by the end of next year, and he is pushing U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to hurry up and get this done, the Post reports.

 This is just the latest high-profile job for Kushner, who has also been tasked with brokering a Middle East peace deal and tackling criminal justice reform. Several officials told the Post he's in over his head, and unable to comprehend various aspects of the job, including the importance of having multiple agencies work on major projects. One official said Kushner took a "much more hands-on role in figuring out, mile by mile, how to get more wall up. It didn't help put wall up faster and cheaper. His interventions actually just created more inefficiency in the process."

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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