Musk and DOGE Accuse FEMA of Spending $59 Million on Illegal Migrant Hotels in NYC

By Matis Glenn

A federal agency tasked with providing Americans with disaster relief spent $59 million on housing illegal NYC migrants in fancy hotels, Trump ally and head of Department of Government Efficiency Elon Musk said Monday.

The world’s richest man says that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) violated the law in the payments, which were made last week, according to the DOGE report.

The funds’ transfer was “just discovered,” Musk wrote. President Donald Trump has stated previously that he intends to overhaul FEMA, along with many other government agencies, and floated closing the branch, along with the Department of Education and others.

“Sending this money violated the law and is in gross insubordination to the President’s executive order,” Musk wrote.“That money is meant for American disaster relief and instead is being spent on high-end hotels for illegals,” continued Musk.

“A clawback demand will be made today to recoup those funds.”

According to City Comptroller Brad Lander’s office, NYC spent $1.47 billion for asylum seeker shelter and services in 2023, with $438 million covered by the State. The City spent more than twice that amount in 2024, with a total expenditure of $3.75 billion, $1.31 billion of which was covered by the State.

On Saturday, Musk took aim at other large government spending on illegal immigrants, tweeting: “Yesterday, I was told that there are currently over $100B/year of entitlements payments to individuals with no [Social Security Number] or even a temporary ID number,” Musk posted.

“If accurate, this is extremely suspicious. When I asked if anyone at Treasury had a rough guess for what percentage of that number is unequivocal and obvious fraud, the consensus in the room was about half, so $50B/year or $1B/week!!”

Trump says the national debt can be slashed by eliminating wasteful spending and fraud.

The President spoke of Musk and more DOGE investigations in a Sunday interview with Fox News.”He’s not gaining anything. In fact, I wonder how he can devote the time to it,” Trump said.”

“I’m going to tell him very soon… to go check the Department of Education. He’s going to find the same thing. Then I’m going to go into the military. Let’s check the military. We’re going to find billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse, and the people elected me on that.”