The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) uncovered a $59 million FEMA payment from just last week to house illegal aliens in “luxury hotels in New York City,” Elon Musk announced Monday.
The payment comes after the Biden administration had claimed FEMA was not using funds to support illegal aliens. “It’s just categorically false. It is not true,” former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters in October.
Republicans argued FEMA did not have enough money in the fall to help victims of the hurricane in North Carolina, but President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security claimed those reports were “completely false” and noted the agency had enough money to fund relief efforts and the FEMA Emergency Food and Shelter Program, which the Biden administration authorized in late 2022 to respond to the migrant crisis.
Musk, who is leading the DOGE initiative to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, said the FEMA payment violated the law and a “clawback demand will be made today to recoup those funds”:
The @DOGE team just discovered that FEMA sent $59M LAST WEEK to luxury hotels in New York City to house illegal migrants.
Sending this money violated the law and is in gross insubordination to the President’s executive order.
That money is meant for American disaster relief and instead is being spent on high end hotels for illegals!
President Donald Trump announced an executive order (EO) to improve FEMA’s “efficacy, priorities, and competence, including evaluating whether FEMA’s bureaucracy in disaster response ultimately harms the agency’s ability to successfully respond,” the EO reads: “[I]t has lost mission focus, diverting limited staff and resources to support missions beyond its scope and authority, spending well over a billion dollars to welcome illegal aliens,” the order added.
Trump suggested on January 24 “maybe getting rid of FEMA” and instead permitting the federal government to send funds to the states to deploy disaster relief.
“I’ll also be signing an executive order to begin the process of fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA or maybe getting rid of FEMA,” Trump said. “I think, frankly, FEMA is not good”:
I think when you have a problem like this, I think you want to go and — whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican governor, you want to use your state to fix it and not waste time calling FEMA. And then FEMA gets here, and they don’t know the area, they’ve never been to the area, and they want to give you rules that you’ve never heard about, they want to bring people that aren’t as good as the people you already have.
