President Donald Trump made the right decision to send National Guard troops to the Mexican border to help secure it, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, also the former governor of Texas, said Monday.
"One of the most important things you can do is put boots on the ground," Perry, who campaigned against Trump for the 2016 presidential nomination, told Fox News' "Fox & Friends," noting that whether there is a wall or a fence or some way to slow down people crossing the border, "you have to have boots on ground and technologies."
In California, a sanctuary state where Gov. Jerry Brown does not support moving troops in, the state itself is "great," said Perry.
"It's a great state, beautiful weather, great wine," he said. "I get all those things, but the point is that they're strangling the state taxwise, regulatory wise, and this idea of sanctuary states just deciding we're going to not live within all the rules and regulations, the rule of law is what makes America."
Perry also announced Monday the launching of a $1.8 billion investment into the super computing capacity at the Department of Energy.
"Obviously that will help in huge number of areas," he said."One of those areas is in veterans health, particularly mental health, we'll be able to put a program together where we take massive amounts of information, information, that used to take years in some cases, certainly weeks and months to analyze, and we do it in a matter of minutes now."
The system will also allow for programs to help veterans suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and other concerns, Perry said.
"We'll be able to put some programs into place to help veterans like they never have been helped before at the Department of Energy," he said. "People don't think about veterans and the DOE in the same breath."
The new capacity is not only for veterans, but for anyone experiencing traumatic brain injuries, Perry said.
In a press release, the Energy Department announced Perry had launched a Request for Proposals (RFP), potentially worth up to $1.8 billion, to deploy at least two new exascale supercomputers to be deployed at U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) National Laboratories at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and for another to be sited at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California.
"These new systems represent the next generation in supercomputing and will be critical tools both for our nation's scientists and for U.S. industry," Perry said through the press release.
"They will help ensure America's continued leadership in the vital area of high performance computing, which is an essential element of our national security, prosperity, and competitiveness as a nation."
The new systems will provide 50 to 100 times greater performance than the current fastest U.S. supercomputer and will allow for breakthroughs in science and industry to conduct high-profile data analysis, as well as artificial intelligence and machine applications.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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