Elon Musk is targeting what he says is out-of-control spending by the Federal Emergency Management Agency on migrants.
He has plenty of places to start. Federal spending on migrants skyrocketed under President Joe Biden, often in obscure ways.
The current crisis started in 2019, when President Trump — then in his first term — asked Congress for additional money to handle the influx of migrant children.
Democrats, who falsely claimed Trump was “caging kids,” took their time giving him the money to help. In summer 2019, $30 million was added to FEMA’s Emergency Food and Shelter Program.
Trump asked for EFSP to be ended in his FY 2020 and FY 2021 budget requests as duplicative of other federal activities, but as Ronald Reagan explained, “a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.”
Consequently, EFSP received $125 million in FY 2020 and $130 million in FY 2021.
Money pit
After taking office, President Biden pushed for legislation called the American Rescue Plan.
ARP appropriated $400 million for EFSP, plus an additional $110 million for “humanitarian relief,” which became a separate line item, EFSP-H.
Already a money pit, this is where things start getting ridiculous.
With millions of migrants flooding over the border, by 2023 the ESFP-H line item had morphed into the FEMA Shelter and Services Program. As a fact sheet explained:
“SSP bolsters the capacity of states, localities, tribes and nonprofit organizations to receive noncitizens after they have been processed by DHS. It also ensures appropriate coordination with and support for state, local and community leaders to help mitigate increased impacts to their communities.”
Note the use of “mitigate” and “impacts” in that passage, and couple it with the fact that this is administered by the emergency agency, and you’ll realize it’s all a tacit admission that the Biden-Harris migrant surge has been a disaster, both for the country as a whole and for the cities and states that are struggling to keep up.
Some $363.8 million was made available for SSP in FY 2023, broken up into two tranches, one of more than $291 million and a second of $77.3 million-plus.
Beginning in April 2024, that was increased to $640.9 million, administered through two separate programs.
Monstrous growth
Nearly all of that money is headed to states (Arizona alone received $19 million in FY 2024), cities (Los Angeles got more than $21 million in last fiscal year), and counties (El Paso hauled in $16.69 million for FY 2024), who were happy to get another federal gusher.
When you hear critics say that the Biden-Harris FEMA has “spent more than $1.4 billion since the fall of 2022 to address the migrant crisis,” you’ll know where the figures are coming from.
What began as a $30 million allocation to solve a temporary problem in 2019 now has its own program, its own bureaucracy and its own $640 million budget.
This monster must be tamed.
Andrew Arthur is the fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies.
