Musk Fumes After DOGE Team Discovers ‘FEMA Sent $59 Million LAST WEEK to Luxury Hotels in NYC’ to House Illegals By Debra Heine
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was still sending millions of taxpayer dollars to luxury hotels in New York City to house illegal aliens as recently as last week, according to DOGE chief Elon Musk.
In a post on X early Monday morning, an irate Musk wrote that his team had just discovered that “FEMA sent $59 million LAST WEEK to luxury hotels in New York City to house illegal migrants.”
Trump signed an executive order on January 24 to create a council to review FEMA, address the agency’s failed responses to recent disasters and come up with a plan “to drastically improve the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (“FEMA’s) efficacy, priorities, and competence.”
Trump also signed an executive order requiring all federal agencies to “temporarily pause all activities related to…disbursement of all Federal financial assistance, and other relevant agency activities.”
The freeze affected funding on thousands of federal programs, pending review by the administration, but a federal judge put that action on hold late last month.
Musk said FEMA’s transfer of funds to the luxury hotels “violated the law and is in gross insubordination to the President’s executive order.”
He added: “That money is meant for American disaster relief and instead is being spent on high end hotels for illegals! A clawback demand will be made today to recoup those funds.”
Acting FEMA Director Cameron Hamilton quickly responded that the payments have been stopped and those responsible “will be held accountable.”
“I want to thank the @DOGE team for making me aware of this,” Hamilton wrote on X. “Effective yesterday these payments have all been suspended from FEMA. Personnel will be held accountable.”
Hamilton added in a subsequent post that the U.S. Congress “should never have passed laws in 2023 and 2024 asking FEMA to do this work.”
In 2023, Congress passed the Consolidated Appropriations Act funding the Shelter and Services Program (SSP) to be administered by FEMA in partnership with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
In Fiscal Year 2024, Congress appropriated $650,000,000 for SSP to provide “financial support to non-federal entities to provide sheltering and related activities to noncitizen migrants following their release from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).”
“This stops now,” Hamilton declared.
Amid the onslaught of reports in the fall of 2024 that FEMA was neglecting hurricane-ravaged areas, the Biden White House falsely claimed that no FEMA funds had been diverted to non-federal entities to provide sheltering and related activities to noncitizen migrants.
Musk said Monday called out that “huge lie by the Biden administration.”
“Funds were diverted from almost every part of the federal government to maximize the number of illegals in America,” Musk said in a pinned post on X. “There also appear to be significant funds siphoned from Social Security to pay for illegals.”
Trump has made straightening out FEMA one of his top priorities.
The president visited storm-ravaged North Carolina on January 24 in the first stop of a multi-leg disaster tour before heading out to fire-ravaged Southern California.
“We’re going to fix it, and we’re going to fix it as fast as you can,” Trump told reporters after stepping off Air Force One at Asheville Airport. “It’s a massive amount of damage. FEMA has really let us down. Let the country down. And I don’t know if that’s Biden’s fault or whose fault it is, but we’re going to take over. We’re going to do a good job.”
Trump later told a roundtable of federal and local officials that he would be “signing an executive order to begin the process of fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA — or maybe getting rid of FEMA. I think, frankly, that FEMA’s not good.”
The president asked his FEMA council to have its first meeting within 90 days and to issue a report of the findings on his desk within 180 days of it’s first meeting.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in an interview Sunday that she supports getting rid of FEMA “the way it exists today.”
In an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union, Noem told CNN’s Dana Bash that President Trump has every right to shut the agency down, if, upon inspection, the agency proves irredeemable.
“I believe that he will do that evaluation with his team,” Noem said. “And he’s talking about it, which I’m grateful for. He’ll work with Congress, though, to make sure that it’s done correctly and that we’re still there to help folks who have a terrible disaster or a crisis in their life. He’s been very clear that he still believes there’s a role for the federal government to come in and help people get back up on their feet. But there’s a lot of fraud and waste and abuse out there. And since President Trump has taken over and come back into this administration, we’ve seen incredible change.”
Asked what she would tell Trump if he asked her to get rid of FEMA, Noem replied, “I would say yes, get rid of FEMA the way it exists today.”
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