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Push Back on Musk and MAGA Lies about FEMA [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-02-12

As public outcry rose up against the illegal actions of acting president Musk and his reckless crew of hackers, a positive story praising their work was needed, stat! Cue the latest lie, first tweeted out by Musk himself, that FEMA was paying for migrants to stay in “luxury hotels” in NYC. The story was repeated around mainstream outlets (see this version in the Independent) as well as the usual MAGA media ecosystem, and followed up the next day with “results” — the firing of four employees, including FEMA’s chief financial officer.

These lies are meant to give the false impression the intrepid doge team is hard at work, sussing out terrible examples of waste and fraud. The abject failure of reporters to cover the story in detail only helps further the effect.

The quickest internet search reveals Congress has for years now allocated to FEMA a fund dedicated to addressing basic emergency needs of migrants, the Shelter and Services Program:

The Shelter and Services Program (SSP), as directed by Congress in the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023, is administered by FEMA in partnership with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). In Fiscal Year 2024, Congress appropriated $650,000,000 for SSP. SSP provides 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). The intent is to support CBP in the safe, orderly, and humane release of noncitizen migrants from short-term holding facilities.

In other words, CBP needs help with migrants, and Congress gave FEMA the money to help offset costs that otherwise would be borne by local charities, municipalities, and county governments. It prevents the federal government from imposing an “unfunded mandate” to address the basic food, housing, and medical needs of migrants released from CBP, and any agency that offers these services is eligible to apply, including Catholic Charities, the Salvation Army, local Food Banks, and cities to which Governors like Abbott in Texas and DeSantis in Florida have made a public circus of deliberately transporting migrants.

Yet is Musk tweeting about how Catholic Charities needs to be stopped from receiving tens of millions in FEMA dollars to provide emergency food and shelter? Of course not. And did it require a team of unvetted, racist hackers to discover exactly where every dollar of the allocated SSP budget was spent? Of course not: review it for yourself here.

Share these details with others spouting and repeating these MAGA doge lies, including the dozens of major media outlets covering the story without including the obvious facts. Most of the money goes to Texas and other border states, unsurprisingly, and because NYC receives so many migrants (over 229,000 people since spring of 2022, and as of Jan. 2025, 51,000 currently receiving services) and is a particularly expensive location for the basics like food and shelter, the NYC Office of Management and Budget received over $38 million of the $641 million total.

The moral of the story is familiar by now: MAGA lies, doge lies, we cannot believe anything they say, particularly anything on xitter, and media reporters gobble this stuff down without a second thought, helping to support the maga agenda. Hold them accountable: contact them with easily-located facts when they spread the lies. Ask why they aren’t doing a story about how any person with internet access could find out the truth about the SSP, so what were the doge hackers REALLY up to? Don’t let lies control the public discourse if you can help prevent it — not an easy task but we can keep chipping away at it.

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