This week the House Committee on Appropriations took up the Fiscal Year (FY) 2016 funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Floor activity on the appropriations bill has ground to a halt amid intra-party acrimony regarding the proper status for the Confederate flag. So this may be the last we hear of funding for DHS for quite a while.

But, because this is what we do at Taxpayers for Common Sense, we rooted through the details of the bill to look for any truffles of truth we might find on the perennially hot issue of border security. Devoted readers will remember our particular scorn for previous attempts to militarize the U.S. border with Mexico. We strongly believe that spending billions on “border security” will do nothing to make us safer and is unlikely to stem the flow of illegal activity at the border. We produced this infographic to illustrate the basic points of that argument.

So we always approach the DHS appropriations bill with our green eyeshade firmly in place and a magnifying glass in our hand. With an overall discretionary budget of roughly $39 billion, there is plenty of room to tuck programs that will, allegedly, make the border more impervious to illegal activity.

Let’s pause for just a moment to point out that the entire DHS budget is only slightly more than the additional funds the Defense subcommittee added to the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account for the Pentagon — $38.3 billion on top of the $50.9 billion the President requested in OCO. So just that little something extra for the Pentagon in OCO, what our friends in New Orleans would call a lagniappe, is only a smidge smaller than the House deems appropriate for the entire Department of Homeland Security. We’ll probably be writing more about that irony in another “Our Take.”

In the bill, “Border Security and Control Between Ports of Entry” is given $3.8 billion in FY16. This is about $120 million less than the Administration requested. And while the House report has a lot of verbiage about the custody and control of minors in this section, there is no line by line description of how this $3.8 billion is to be allocated.

For “Border Security Fencing, Infrastructure, and Technology” the report recommends a spending level of $382.4 million which is $65.9 million more than was requested by the Administration. Again, there is very little detail on how this money will be spent. But while the Appropriations Committee giveth with one hand, they taketh away with another. “…CBP has engaged in a practice of carrying over significant amounts of unobligated funds from prior years while simultaneously requesting significant amounts of new funding. … The Committee cannot allow appropriations to remain unused for multiple fiscal years. Therefore, the recommendation includes a reduction of $96,040,000, which corresponds to the amount planned for carryover in the fiscal year 2016 request. Additionally, $98,550,000 is rescinded from prior year appropriations that will not be obligated in fiscal year 2016 and is re-appropriated for near-term execution priorities.”

In other words, Border Patrol, you can’t spend your money fast enough so we’re taking it back. And on the one hand, we’re glad it’s not going to be spent on another useless fence. On the other hand, we wish some of this fiscal discipline was also applied at the Pentagon.