Honestly, you need to look at the bright side of this. It's estimated that up to 50% of the COVID loans the Feds made during the pandemic were fraudulent. So compared to that FEMA is fricken awesome!
BTW, pandemic loans disbursed under the Biden Administration's SBA, PPP, and EISL programs were a modest $1.2 billion. Oops...typo. I meant trillion. Oh well.
Inside FEMA’s sickening history of misspending billions of taxpayers’ dollars — and going largely unchecked
By Isabel Vincent, NY Post
Published Feb. 11, 2025, 4:02 p.m. ET
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has mismanaged tens of billions of dollars over the years, according to numerous government reports on its spending.
The government agency’s response to COVID, hurricanes, floods and housing migrants have all come under fire for being wasteful and going largely unchecked — and the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been sent in to analyze its spending.
The most recent audit of the embattled disaster response agency claimed it mismanaged nearly $10 billion during the COVID pandemic between 2020 and 2023.
FEMA even approved a grant of $1.1 billion despite it only being supported by only a single piece of paper with no itemized costs, a Jan. 30 audit by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General found.
The request was also “not prepared by a licensed professional engineer or cost-estimating professional,” according to the 36-page report.
The Trump administration has called for a complete overhaul of FEMA, which has a slated budget of $65 billion for fiscal year 2025.
During the pandemic, $1.5 billion was doled out “for one state’s medical staffing” without the proper vetting and “could have been put to better use for other disasters,” the January audit found.
“These issues occurred due to the unprecedented circumstances surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and FEMA not following established requirements when delivering public assistance funding,” said the report, which did not name the states that received the FEMA pandemic payments.
It also cited $8.1 billion distributed by FEMA for “costs that have yet to be determined allowable,” according to the report.
A leading FEMA critic said there is “no doubt” the agency made a mess of COVID disaster relief.
FEMA is part of the Department of Homeland Security, previously headed by Alejandro Mayorkas, who warned last year the agency didn’t have enough funds to make it through hurricane season.
“What we sometimes fail to remember is that in the aftermath of a disaster, there are victims, and this bureaucracy has just continued to revictimize those victims,” said Garret Graves, a former Republican congressman from Louisiana who is a favorite to lead the agency — a job he told The Post Monday he does not want.
“I appreciate the gesture, but it’s such a dysfunctional bureaucracy that I don’t think I would last a month,” he said, adding that he supports DOGE boss Elon Musk’s plans to streamline the agency.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in an interview with CNN Sunday she is in favor of getting rid of FEMA “the way it exists today.”
On Monday, Musk announced that DOGE “just discovered” that FEMA doled out $59 million to house migrants in luxury hotels in New York City.
Elon Musk said his Department of Government Efficiency found that FEMA sent out millions in cash to house migrants in New York City hotels, despite President Trump’s order to overhaul the federal disaster response agency.
@elonmusk/X
“Sending this money violated the law and is in gross insubordination to the President’s executive order,” Musk wrote in an X post.
On Tuesday, four FEMA employees were fired over the payment including the chief financial officer, two program analysts and a grant specialist, according to the Department of Homeland Security. A request was also made to send the money back.
FEMA has handed out more than $1.4 billion in housing and aid for migrants over the last two years, according to earlier audits.
A 2023 report by the DHS Office of the Inspector General investigated $110 million in humanitarian relief funds given to local organizations. It concluded those organizations didn’t use the funds in the way they were required to, couldn’t provide required receipts or documentation and that some of the aid went to illegal migrants.
In October last year, Alejandro Mayorkas, then secretary of Homeland Security, came under fire when he said FEMA did not have enough money to make it through the Atlantic hurricane season after Hurricane Helene surged through Southeastern states, followed days later by Hurricane Milton hitting Florida, causing up to $60 billion in damage.
In the midst of the back-to-back hurricanes, an additional $20 billion in funds were approved for FEMA by Congress. The agency spent $9 billion of that money in a little over a week, according to CNN.
In a letter to Mayorkas criticizing the response to the Helene and Milton disasters, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) claimed: “FEMA has wasted taxpayer funds, misappropriated funds and left other federal, state and local responders without deployment orders on the ground.”
The letter cited “whistleblowers in numerous emergency-management functions” as its sources.
An August 2024 audit of the agency found it wasted $7 billion in “unliquidated funds that could potentially be returned to the Disaster Relief Fund” because FEMA agents did not follow the proper processes.
Kristi Noem is the new Homeland Security secretary in President Trump’s administration. She has said she supports getting rid of FEMA “the way it exists today.”
AP
“Also, federal regulations and FEMA guidance provide no incentive to close out grants in a timely manner or consequences for failure to do so,” said the summer 2024 audit, meaning money was in the accounts of states that did not need it.
“Without improved oversight and stronger policies, billions of dollars of unliquidated funds that could otherwise be returned … will remain obligated to state, territorial, tribal or local governments and unavailable for use in providing relief in connection with current disasters,” the audit said.
And the waste doesn’t end there, as the report said it had also “reviewed a sample of 20 other grants and identified approximately $32.8 billion in improper payments.”
FEMA’s lack of transparency and spending waste was previously documented by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in 2017.
The congressional committee found the agency wasted millions on the purchase of mobile homes for temporarily displaced victims of floods and hurricanes.
The homes cost up to $150,000 each to build and maintain for a year and a half. But after their use, the agency typically gave them away or sold them, the committee found.
FEMA deactivated 4,350 such homes after a flood in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 2016, according to the committee.
FEMA was established in an executive order by President Jimmy Carter in 1979.
The agency works with counterpart emergency management organizations in state and local governments. It also provides grants to victims of natural disasters, to help them with temporary housing, funeral and medical expenses.
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