Joe Biden used to be fond of saying: “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I will tell you what you value.”

Of course, that was before he and his party stopped taking budgets seriously.

The general message, though, is a good one for assessing the values of politicians from across the political spectrum: Don’t pay attention to what they say; pay attention to what they do.

As for Biden’s priorities, border security certainly isn’t one of them. Not that this was ever open to serious debate. But if it were, his decision to hold a fire sale for unused sections of Donald Trump’s border wall would put the matter to rest. As the New York Post reports, “The Biden administration is quietly auctioning off millions of dollars’ worth of unused parts from former President Trump’s border wall for peanuts — in an apparent end-run around pending legislation in Congress.”

That pending legislation? A rare Republican-sponsored bill, the Finish It Act, that was taken up and passed by the Democrat-controlled Senate last month as part of the annual defense appropriations package. The GOP bill would force the federal government to use some $300 million of unused border materials on new wall construction or turn them over to someone who will — someone like Texas Governor Greg Abbott, for example, who has shown a willingness to pursue his own border enforcement projects rather than concede to the Biden administration’s willful neglect.

The Post continues: “Since April, GovPlanet, an online auction house specializing in military surplus, has sold 81 lots of steel ‘square structural tubes’ — intended for use as vertical bollards in the border barrier’s 30-foot-tall panels — hauling in about $2 million. On Tuesday, GovPlanet netted $154,200 for 729 of the 28-foot-tall hollow beams, sold in five separate lots for an average $212 apiece.”

It’s an act of equal parts insult and pettiness: insult because the American people have expressed unmistakable support for border security, and pettiness because Biden’s opposition to border security seems reflexively aimed at Trump’s support for it.

Perhaps Joe Biden could solicit the counsel of Barack Obama, who has a big wall around his DC mansion. Why have a wall if walls don’t work?

“This sale,” says Mississippi Republican Senator Roger Wicker, the bill’s sponsor, “is a wasteful and ludicrous decision by the Biden administration that only serves as further proof they have no shame.”

Said Oklahoma Republican James Lankford: “The pennies made from selling the border wall will not be enough to pay the families who suffer from a criminal act committed by someone who crossed our open borders during the Biden administration.”

To Senator Lankford’s point, we’re still waiting on a federal government database that accurately captures the crime being perpetrated across the 50 states by illegal aliens. (We’d ask why such an accounting doesn’t already exist, but the answer is obvious: Democrats and Chamber of Commerce Republicans don’t want to know.)

One lawmaker with a ground-zero view of all this is Arizona Republican Congressman Juan Ciscomani, whose district is the staging area for all these unused border wall parts. “The federal government needs to be utilizing every tool in the toolbox to secure our border,” says Ciscomani. “Instead of putting these materials to their intended use, they have been squandered, first collecting dust in the desert and now being auctioned off.”

As we noted earlier, Joe Biden’s record on our southern border is one of willful neglect. No one knows for sure, but it’s estimated that as many as 5 million illegals have crossed the border in the two-and-a-half years of his administration. In addition, Customs and Border Protection data report 1,973,092 southwest land border encounters so far in fiscal year 2023.

This is Democrat governance, and these are your tax dollars at “work.”

Updated with illegal immigration numbers to better illustrate Joe Biden’s abject failure.