Immigration and Customs Enforcement has behaved monstrously while carrying out President Donald Trump’s brutal campaign against immigrants and those who support them. Now the administration has managed to pair that cruelty with staggering waste, turning billions in taxpayer money into fuel for a detention system with little evidence of serious planning.

The Government Accountability Office detailed the financial disaster in a report whose title leaves little room for subtlety: “Immigration Detention: Urgent Planning Needed to Avoid Further Waste of Taxpayer Dollars.” The findings describe an agency spending enormous sums without completing basic calculations about what its detention expansion will ultimately cost.

There is an obvious way to avoid wasting money on detention camps, which is to stop operating them. That broader moral question falls outside the report’s scope, however, leaving the GAO to document how ICE pursued its cruel project with a level of financial recklessness that borders on farce.

ICE spent $2.5 billion purchasing detention facilities, yet the agency did not calculate what those sites would cost to operate after three years. That is no minor missing detail because the enormous pool of federal money supporting the effort runs out in three years.

The failure is especially glaring because operating expenses are a basic consideration when buying facilities. ICE committed billions to detention infrastructure without determining whether it could afford to continue running what it purchased once the current funding disappeared.

The agency also spent nearly $3 million on tents at Guantanamo Bay that were never used. The tents were part of a cruel and harebrained proposal to hold 5,000 detainees there, while the current detainee population is only 16.

Then there are the warehouses. ICE purchased 11 warehouses during its spending spree and is now selling seven of them, but taxpayers will not recover the $20 million the agency burned through on administrative expenses connected to those purchases.

This waste comes from an agency within the Department of Homeland Security, where Kristi Noem decided she had to personally approve every contract worth more than $100,000. At the same time, $200 million was wasted on vanity advertising campaigns featuring Noem riding around on a horse.

That money is gone, though Noem at least emerged with fresh glamour shots. The combination of expensive self promotion and poorly planned detention spending reveals an operation willing to throw vast amounts of public money at spectacle, cruelty, and facilities it cannot coherently manage.

The GAO described the planning failure in blunt terms. “ICE pursued these detention expansion initiatives without developing a comprehensive strategic plan to guide its efforts,” the GAO wrote in its report.

“For example, ICE has not developed consistent goals or objectives for the size and characteristics of its detention bed space. ICE also has not assessed the risks and benefits of using facilities with high operating costs compared to other less costly options in ICE’s traditional detention portfolio.”

In other words, ICE expanded without establishing consistent goals for how many detention beds it needed or what characteristics those spaces should have. It also failed to weigh expensive facilities against cheaper choices already available within its traditional detention operations.

The agency is not planning to finish a strategic plan until Aug. 31, 2027. Even through the restrained language of federal oversight, the GAO made clear that waiting that long while unprecedented funding pours into detention could allow still more taxpayer money to vanish.

“Given ICE’s unprecedented multi-year detention funding and the potential for continued waste of taxpayer dollars, more timely completion may be warranted,” the report said. That is bureaucratic language for an alarm bell about an agency spending first and planning much, much later.

The financial incompetence does not soften the underlying cruelty of the detention system. Instead, it adds another indictment: ICE is pursuing an immoral enterprise while failing to perform even the basic planning needed to keep billions in public funds from being squandered.

The GAO wants urgent planning to prevent additional waste, but the evidence already shows the cost of ICE’s approach. Billions went toward facilities with uncertain operating costs, millions went toward unused tents and abandoned warehouse purchases, and the agency’s strategic plan remains years away.