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After bankrolling illegals, FEMA says it will run out of cash for hurricane season

By Monica Showalter

FEMA is a federal agency paid for by American taxpayers to support Americans in times of disaster they have no control over. Illegals have no claim on this money and the feds have no right to spend it. They seem to think it's their money, and they're using it to pay for Democrat policy aims of importing voters to pad congressional districts as well as replace the electorate with indigents who will always be loyal to them.

Is there a such thing as double-entry bookkeeping at the Federal Emergency Management Agency?

Or do they spend on migrants like there's no tomorrow?

According to the Miami Herald, FEMA, which got its budget topped up extra to the tune of billions just a year ago, is once again running out of money:

With a grim storm forecast ahead, the nation’s top disaster responders are in danger of running out of cash at the peak of hurricane season — again.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Disaster Relief Fund is on pace to run dry by August. Without congressional action, that could leave Florida and other states staring at massive expenses and slower recovery efforts if a major storm hits. The chances for that are high ahead of what is predicted to be the busiest season on record.

At a press conference at the National Hurricane Center last week, FEMA Deputy Administrator Erik Hooks said the agency would switch to prioritizing “life-saving, life-sustaining work” if funding dwindles. That could leave important programs like individual financial aid or reimbursements for governments cleaning up storm debris on the chopping block. By September, the agency that leads disaster response across the country projects it could be nearly $7 billion short.

The Herald noted that Florida's senators, Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, foresaw the scope of the problem a month ago, and noted its impact on Florida's hurricane season, where it's quite possible the state could be hit by the devastating disasters starting in August.

Ditto that for California and the other western states with their fire season, and the Mississippi river valley with its potential tornados and floods.

FEMA has been saying it's running out of money and it always gets what it wants from Congress, but amazingly, it always runs out of money even with the extra incoming taxpayer cash.

According to Rubio's Senate website, which published his and Scott's letter to FEMA:

It is our understanding that your agency expects the Disaster Relief Fund (DRF)
to run out of funds by August 2024 and may need to activate an immediate needs
funding designation as early as June. We cannot stress enough how devastating this
funding shortage would be to hurricane and disaster relief efforts in Florida and across
the country. FEMA’s latest monthly DRF report1, issued May 7, 2024, projects a $1.359
billion deficit in its Major Declarations fund by August, growing to $6.811 billion by
September. This is unacceptable going into hurricane season.

Among other things, they asked FEMA to explain why exactly this was happening when they always got the top-up funds they asked for from Congress.

The Herald didn't note it, but hundreds of millions are being shelled out for illegal migrants, FEMA paying for their transport, their housing, their food and other "humanitarian" services sometimes directly, but mostly through NGOs, even though many of the migrants coming in illegally have plenty of money to pay for these things themselves.

The Heritage Foundation's border expert, Simon Hankinson, certainly noticed where at least some of the problem was:

FEMA’s Emergency Food and Shelter Program is already being siphoned for over $332 million “to assist communities receiving noncitizens released from custody,” which means housing migrants here illegally at the border, then transporting them to places like New York City. New York has been promised $104 million from this pot, though at a burn rate of $8 million a day, it won’t last long. Big city mayors gripe about a few buses sent by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, but the main train delivering migrants to their sidewalks is driven by DHS, using FEMA money.

And the Biden administration is getting even more brazen. FEMA grant money, unlike its Disaster Relief and Flood Insurance programs, doesn’t require the president to declare a federal disaster—which would at least highlight the self-defeating results of his policies. So it should come as no surprise that DHS, in its fiscal 2024 budget, already asked for a directly appropriated $83.5 million for FEMA Shelter and Services Program grants to “nonprofits and local entities to provide support to noncitizens released from DHS custody.”

Furthermore, DHS asked for $800 million—$650 million more than last year—“for communities to support migrants who have been released from DHS custody pending the outcome of their immigration proceedings.” Bear in mind that with the asylum system backlogged as never before, this outcome would be far in the future in most cases. The money would come from a $4 billion “Southwest Border Contingency" fund in DHS’s proposed fiscal 2024 budget.

In plain English, this means that having created a giant magnet for illegal immigration, the Biden administration wants to continue to burn your tax dollars to sustain hundreds of thousands of people who entered the U.S. illegally, for an indefinite period.

So he's managed to pinpoint nearly a hundred million spent by FEMA itself on illegals, and nearly a billion spent on Department of Homeland Security programs, which might be NGO bankrolling, or something else for migrants. That's not all of FEMA'S shortfall, but it's definitely some of it and Hankinson notes that they are pretty good at hiding where the money comes from and goes out.

Hankinson noted that last year, the Biden administration slipped in the extra cash for FEMA in a defense bill aimed at funding Ukraine's war, and noted that the White House was pretty sneaky about it as a practice.

Federal spending is hard enough to keep track of at the best of times, but the Biden administration is highly adept at hiding how they fund their open-borders agenda. In a cynical budget negotiation tactic, the White house is now trying to push through a $40 billion “supplemental” funding bill that holds bailout money for FEMA hostage to sending billions more to Ukraine with insufficient accountability.

The Herald noted that FEMA's deputy administrator, Erik Hooks, speaking at a press conference last week, said they had never run out of money before, which must have been odd news to the people of Lahaina, Hawaii, where cash disbursements were meager while FEMA officials lived it up at some of Maui's top five-star hotels on the far north of the island. Maybe it's lavish salaries and vacay perks that are adding to the shortfalls.

But the issue of bankrolling illegals by FEMA first began to emerge as the Biden administration set up a conveyor belt for illegals to take them to their destinations of choice at Uncle Sam's expense, all expenses paid, and some of those expenses, as Howie Carr found out in his investigation, were very lavish indeed. How much of that is FEMA cash, routed through NGOs, through non-transparent means?

That's why Rubio's and Scott's letter is so important. FEMA is a federal agency paid for by American taxpayers to support Americans in times of disaster they have no control over. Illegals have no claim on this money and the feds have no right to spend it. They seem to think it's their money, and they're using it to pay for Democrat policy aims of importing voters to pad congressional districts as well as replace the electorate with indigents who will always be loyal to them.

But it's not their money, it's the American people's money. Any amount spent on them needs to be paid for or paid back, and if the current leadership can't or won't say where the money is going and why they constantly need extra bailouts, it's time to get them out of there. They shouldn't be paying for any illegally present foreign nationals at all. I would suggest no asylum hearings until illegals pay those bills and those bills are verified as paid.

Something very smelly is going on here if the federal emergency services can't figure out why it runs out of money yet constantly comes back for more from Congress even as illegals surge on through with no problems whatsoever, always the first priority.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/06/after_bankrolling_illegals_fema_says_it_will_run_out_of_cash_for_hurricane_season.html