Pentagon stuck with bill for ballooning border mission

If the Pentagon keeps thousands of active-duty troops deployed to the U.S.-Mexico border for several more months -- as the Department of Homeland Security requested Friday -- it faces a growing challenge: how to pay for it all.

The military commonly gets reimbursed when called on to support domestic emergencies like hurricane cleanup, either by the Federal Emergency Management Agency or through special disaster appropriations.

But President Donald Trump's snap decision before the mid term elections to dispatch nearly 6,000 troops to California, Arizona, and Texas was so out of the ordinary that the Department of Defense is being left with the bill -- which by Thanksgiving had already reached $72 million.

While Trump has described caravans of unarmed migrants coming from Central America a "national crisis," there’s no mechanism in place to fund his military deployment besides dipping into the Pentagon’s regular operations and training funds.

Read the full article and more in Politico.