This is an adapted excerpt from the Feb. 13 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
Here’s a question: Where does a city keep all of its money? The answer is — just like everyone else — the city keeps it in a bank. Even the biggest city in the country, New York City, has accounts at a regular bank. And Wednesday morning, when city officials checked the balance, they noticed $80 million was missing.
For a time, it wasn’t clear where it went or who took it. But then later that afternoon, there was a break in the case, a confession from President Donald Trump’s secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem.
“I have clawed back the full payment that FEMA deep state activists unilaterally gave to [New York City] migrant hotels,” Noem wrote on social media. That’s MAGA-speak for: “I took New York’s money.”
This is the newest, lawless gambit by Trump and his unelected co-president, Elon Musk, an attempt to detonate constitutional governance from within by doing two things both men allegedly have lots of practice at: reneging on contracts and refusing to pay people who perform services for them.
The whole thing starts, as so many of these stories do now, with a social media post from Musk. Early Monday morning, the world’s richest person posted:
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! A clawback demand will be made today to recoup those funds.
Almost all of that was complete bunk, as city officials were quick to point out. The $59 million Musk is talking about was part of the larger $80 million outlay to the city. Only a fraction of it was used to house migrants and not a single penny of it came at the expense of any disaster relief.
In fact, as The New York Times reports, that payment was issued through a grant from the Shelter and Services Program, a separate part of the government “administrated by FEMA and initiated by Congress in 2023 to issue grants to cities and organizations providing services to migrants who had been released from federal custody after crossing the border.”
This was money appropriated by a vote in Congress and approved by then-President Joe Biden to house migrants during an upswing in immigration to the United States. It was not to house them in luxury. It was to convert an old Manhattan hotel into a modern-day Ellis Island, where migrants are processed, given a health check, connected with a case manager and offered temporary shelter.
When migrants do get a place to sleep, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander says, the city observes the federal program’s cap on hotel and shelter prices. That cap is currently set at $12.50 a night.
Despite those facts, within hours of Musk’s post, the Trump White House fired FEMA’s chief financial officer and three others for their roles in disbursing those funds to New York City, which — again — were congressionally appropriated funds to cover an ongoing, approved activity.
Based on their lies, Musk and Trump used the powers of the federal government to reach into New York City’s bank account to pluck back $80 million Congress authorized. They are taking money out of other people’s bank accounts and calling it a “clawback” of taxpayer money. A lot of other people call it stealing $80 million.