There was some discussion of this on bluesky. What I'm not clear on is whether the payment was effectively cancelled/taken back/etc. or if they just went and took it out of the bank account. Either is a problem of course but the latter is truly disturbing.
I believe ACH transfers can be reversed for 5 business days, and I think this action was 5 business days after the initial payment, so maybe they used that mechanism?
Falling for their propaganda again, maybe intentionally.
This is congressionally appropriated money for FEMA to administer a program, by DHS.
Congress and the Supreme Court have ruled impoundment is illegal. You are supporting a sprint into fascism where an unchecked executive has no push back on anything they do, violating the courts, law or constitution.
If you can't see why this is a problem, understand that it can and will be used to harm you too.
Oh please.
Funding you disagree with isn't "waste, fraud, abuse." I don't think there's a single citizen anywhere that agrees with everything the government spends on.
Musk has yet to provide a single line item that does so. If "no need for FOIA, everything is transparent" is so transparent, let us have every single line item, why he thinks it should be removed (the real reason, not "WFA"), and a method to submitting public comments that he then goes over and actually makes decisions like how rule changes are proposed, commented, and finalized in federal registers.
Can you confirm that this money was somehow “waste” and “graft”? I am not familiar with the details. What was this money allocated for? Who was going to spend it? How was it going to be spent?
I think in this particular case, it was to help recoup some of NYC's costs for housing the 100Ks of migrants (some undocumented, some with pending asylum cases, some with humanitarian parole work authorizations) that were being bussed from TX in 2023/24. From my understanding, because NYC has a "right-to-shelter" law, they needed to house people, and apart from building a giant tent-city, once the standard homeless shelters filled up much of the housing had to be done in hotels. I think total cost to NYC was i the $5-10B range. It's unclear what the exact "fraud" or "waste" claim is. I think people are upset because they consider some hotels in NYC "luxury". Personally, I'd suggest staying in a $200/night hotel in NYC, and then staying in, e..g, the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise at $2k/night before concluding that the migrant hotels were "luxury".
Tremendous respect, btw, to the New Yorkers I met last year. Some of them were unhappy about things like, e.g., having no soccer fields or having the libraries closed on Sundays. But for the most part, the large majority of folks I talked with did not begrudge the migrant families a place to stay even though this $$ was coming mostly from NYC taxes (and only a little bit from the Federal government).
The lack of proof for any of this "waste" is what's truly staggering.
I actually agree that the democrats won't win an election any time soon... But that's because I believe the republicans will do away with free and fair elections.
There was some discussion of this on bluesky. What I'm not clear on is whether the payment was effectively cancelled/taken back/etc. or if they just went and took it out of the bank account. Either is a problem of course but the latter is truly disturbing.
I believe ACH transfers can be reversed for 5 business days, and I think this action was 5 business days after the initial payment, so maybe they used that mechanism?