Somewhere in drawing up the blueprint for making America great again, Donald Trump forgot about America's Best Idea. We can only hope it's a temporary oversight. As for Congress, well, the Republican leadership should know better. But at the moment, the inaugural blush is still fresh and House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are more than happy to kowtow to President Trump.

While the National Park Service's maintenance backlog only goes up, up, and up higher - it was a relatively modest $4.9 billion when President George W. Bush in 2001 said he would wipe it out in five years, and now is on the brink of $12 billion - President Trump this past week promised to build, at an estimated cost of $12 billion-$15 billion or more, a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border in a bid to keep illegal immigrants out. Messieurs Ryan and McConnell, who the past eight years hated the mere thought of increasing the deficit and raising taxes, quickly jumped on board, even though there's no realistic plan for paying for the wall.

"We are moving ahead, as the speaker pointed out to our group yesterday, with a [supplemental bill of] roughly $12 [billion] to $15 billion," Sen. McConnell said Thursday. "So we intend to address the wall issue ourselves, and the president can deal with his relations with other countries."

And after that initial down payment, it's been estimated it will take about $500 million a year, or more, to maintain the wall.

Forgotten, ignored, or overlooked by the president and his Congressional supporters is that illegal immigration along the United States' southern border has been flat or declining, that Americans as a whole could care less about building said wall, and that one proposed solution to pay for the wall would be a 20 percent tax on Mexican goods ... that U.S. residents, not Mexico, would end up paying even though the president has said Mexico would pay for the wall.

According to the Pew Research Center, "(T)he number of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. has stabilized in recent years after decades of rapid growth." More so, the researchers found, in recent years the most growth of illegal immigrants has come from Asia and Central America, while there also has been an increase from sub-Saharan Africa. And while the president's wall would run along the Texas and California borders with Mexico, in 2014 California, Florida, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and Texas accounted for 59 percent of illegal immigrants.

You're going to need a bigger wall, Mr. President (with apologies to Steven Spielberg and "Jaws").

That $12 billion-$15 billion (plus a half-billion or so on annual maintenance) that the president wants to toss at a construction project that isn't needed or supported by John F. Kelly, his Homeland Security secretary, could be much better spent addressing health care here in the United States, bolstering education of our youth, fighting poverty or, yes, repairing the weary, aging infrastructure of the National Park System.

Economic studies have shown that $1 invested in the national parks generates $10 worth of economic activity. Think how many additional jobs and how much more economic growth would be created in every state of the nation by spending $15 billion on the National Park System's ailing infrastructure. Safety in the parks would be enhanced, too, and the Park Service finally could get on top of the maintenance backlog.

"Think what that $500 million a year could mean for the National Park Service,” Theresa Pierno, president and CEO of the National Parks Conservation Association, told me with that annual wall maintenance figure in mind. "These (parks) belong to all of us, so everybody could enjoy the benefits of that."

Would Messieurs Ryan and McConnell jump as high if President Trump announced he was going to wipe out the Park Service's maintenance backlog rather than build a wall?

We can only dream.