Biden Admin Scrambling to Dispute Gaza Aid Pier's $320M Price Tag

Village of Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York

I have learned that the Biden administration is circulating proposals to publicly dispute the $320 million dollar cost figure for the failed Gaza aid pier as a way of making it appear less of a disaster. 

State Department officials in particular are discussing revising the cost downward to as little as $80 million or so, a Department official told me. The ridiculous proposition offered to stem the criticism of the pier would dispute the Pentagon’s most recent estimate, which is almost double what it originally estimated.

That the government seeks to change the narrative says a lot about the Biden camp’s priorities, but it should also be a reminder: If the Pentagon builds it, it will often cost double, triple, or ten times the original estimate, a truth that is plain to any thinking American.

Consider some facts: the administration originally estimated the Gaza aid pier to cost $180 million, which is almost half of its current estimated price tag of $320 million. Only after pressure from Congress did the Pentagon, which constructed and oversees the pier, update its original estimate.

“The cost has not just risen,” Senator Roger Wicker of the Armed Services Committee said a month into the project. “It has exploded.”

What’s more, the price tag for the pier is not finished growing. We were reminded of this yesterday when rough seas damaged the pier, prompting the Pentagon to suspend its operations as it undergoes repairs. And while the administration has said that the pier would only operate for three months, there’s no reason to think the need to get more aid to Gaza won’t last longer, justifying a longer-term project. Today, Israel’s national security adviser threw cold water on hopes that the war might resolve in the coming weeks, saying that “we expect another seven months of fighting.” 

U.S. military programs routinely overrun their budget estimates, as anyone who’s ever watched the Pentagon testify to Congress can tell you. 

It would be one thing if the administration produced evidence that the aid pier has improved the lives of Gazans, who account for a stunning 80 percent of all people in the world currently experiencing famine or catastrophic hunger, according to the UN. The administration itself concedes that Gazans are living in worse conditions than they were the month before the pier was constructed, as I reported yesterday.

“The amount of assistance that U.N. has been able to collect from border points was higher in April than it is now,” the Director of USAID's Levant Response Management Team, Daniel Dieckhaus, said in a press briefing last week.

Because it cannot justify the two-month effort to build the pier, the administration sticks to context-free figures that sound impressive, like the total metric tonnage of aid that has passed through the pier.

“To date, over 1,000 metric tons have been delivered from the pier to the marshaling area for onward delivery by humanitarian organizations and into the hands of Palestinians,” Pentagon Deputy Press Secretary Sabrina Singh said during a Tuesday press briefing.

But when asked what percentage of that 1,000 tons actually reached the Palestinian people, Singh declined to comment. Instead, she played the patriotism card, focusing on the sailors and soldiers involved in the project, saying she wanted to “push back” on claims that the pier is a failure. 

“At the end of the day, you have, you know, men and women out there separated from their families who are putting themselves first — who are putting others first — to try and be part of a lifesaving humanitarian mission that has seen over 1,000 metric tons of aid come in, and I think that is commendable,” Singh said. “If you want to characterize it as a failure, I leave it to you.”

So what could the Washington purveyors of happy talk be trying to say here? First, the administration wants to mollify the members of Congress who are now questioning the cost and the value of the pier, a Congress that is already questioning the open American checkbook on Ukraine and Israel. Second, by matching food for bombs, the administration hopes to change the narrative and salvage some support from student protestors and others critical of their foreign policy. And third, these messaging games are busy work for the army of bureaucrats who run the public affairs-industrial complex.

— Edited by William M. Arkin