OPINION:
A top Federal Emergency Management Agency official was fired, along with three fellow employees, for paying out $59.3 million of tax dollars to house migrants in New York City.
Meanwhile, a caravan of FEMA trucks carting blocks of cheese and plastic cutting knives has been spotted making its way from the agency’s D.C. headquarters to North Carolina.
Best these FEMA four could do, it seems.
And all the Democrat fawners in the media go — that’s not true!
From The New York Times: “The [FEMA] firings capped a startling chain of events that began on Monday with an early-morning social media post by Elon Musk who claimed, misleadingly, that FEMA had recently sent $59 million meant for disaster relief to New York City to pay for ‘high end hotels’ for migrants, and who called the expenditure unlawful. New York City officials raced to clarify that the federal money had been properly allocated by FEMA under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. last year, adding that it was not a disaster relief grant and had not been spent on luxury hotels.”
It was four-star, at the most.
Come on, open border lovers. You’ve been busted. Just because the money was allocated under a previous corrupt administration, by a Democrat-controlled corrupt Congress and a puppet, brain-dead corrupt president, doesn’t mean the expenditure isn’t corrupt. It means the present administration and the mass of American voters who voted into office this presidential administration have decided it’s time to put a stop to the corrupt pay-out — and to get back the money that never should have been spent on the corrupt operation in the first place.
Why should U.S. tax dollars be spent to house illegals in New York City hotels in the first place; in any amount; in any congressionally approved pay-out? Luxury or otherwise?
Here’s how the story’s playing: Homeland Security, under Secretary Kristi Noem, has recovered $59 million of FEMA funds that were scheduled to pay hotels that housed migrants in the Big Apple. That action came after FEMA’s chief financial officer, two analysts and a grant specialist were fired for “circumventing leadership to unilaterally make egregious payments for luxury N.Y.C. hotels for migrants,” according to Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for Homeland Security.
Other Homeland Security personnel told Fox News that “Noem has clawed back the full payment that FEMA deep state activists unilaterally gave to NTC migrant hotels” and “there will not be a single penny spent that goes against the interest and safety of the American people.”
Seems a sound plan.
Seems a sound policy.
But Democrats and deep staters and Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferers and open-border advocates and all their partners in a very anti-MAGA media say stopping these payments is unfair. And unkind. And they’re getting very sad at all of this Department of Government Efficiency bulls—- (their word, not mine) and are very upset at the very rude Republicans who are outing their corrupt, even criminal, ways. It’s tattle telling, to the 10th degree, they say. More than that, it’s a constitutional crisis, they say.
FEMA’s food and shelter program surged from $130 million in fiscal 2021 to nearly $364 million in fiscal 2023 to almost $641 million in fiscal 2024 — all under Biden’s open-border watch, a four-year span of time known by illegals as The Golden Years.
For Joe and Jane Q. Taxpayer, it’s called The Criminal Years.
Taking back $59 million is just a drop in the bucket of what’s likely to come. And that’s just FEMA.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter and podcast by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “God-Given Or Bust: Defeating Marxism and Saving America With Biblical Truths,” is available by clicking HERE.
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