Where the Money Goes, No One Knows

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, July 25, 2021

 

Representative Kat Cammack has some questions about where the money goes.

 

Don’t we all?

 

From her bully pulpit on the Homeland Security Committee, whose Subcommittee on Emergency Preparedness, Response and Recovery she serves as the ranking Republican, Cammack has butted heads with the brass at the Federal Emergency Management Agency over its response to the border crisis, which she understands to be . . . a federal emergency very much in need of management.

 

Among other things, she wants to know how much the agency is spending to help relocate illegal immigrants to cities and towns around the country.

 

So far, she hasn’t gotten an answer.

 

FEMA is not the main problem on the border — the problem is federal policy more than it is the agencies that implement it — but Representative Cammack’s dispute with FEMA raises an illuminating point.

 

When illegal immigrants are processed at the border, non-governmental organizations provide them with various kinds of services, including, in some cases, land or air transportation to some forward destination. The NGOs then secure reimbursement for these expenses through FEMA, meaning that federal tax dollars are used to subsidize the resettlement of illegal immigrants around the country.

 

How much money is being spent on that? Representative Cammack would like to know and is irritated that FEMA will not say.

 

These reimbursements are paid out of FEMA’s Emergency Food and Shelter Program. That’s an interesting program in that it’s administered by United Way Worldwide and it has a board of its own, composed of representatives of NGOs ranging from Catholic Charities USA to the Salvation Army. There’s an obvious red flag there: Some of the organizations represented on the program’s board also provide services to illegals for which the government reimburses them.

 

“I’ve asked three times in committee hearings, with no response to date, for an accounting of this program,” Cammack says. “President Biden’s budget request has a 675 percent increase for this program from last year. We have asked specifically how much from this program is being spent on migrant travel.” The stonewalling, she says, is “par for the course.”

 

These reimbursements require documentation and a fair bit of paperwork — as, indeed, does commercial travel.

 

“They can’t say they don’t have the receipts,” Cammack says.

 

She plans to meet with FEMA executives again this week to try to pry a little information out of them. She says that she would ultimately like to see every federal program audited.

 

Good luck with that.

 

Members of Congress have spent decades trying to get the Office of Management and Budget to answer a simple question: How many federal programs are there, exactly? The best and brightest minds of the federal government cannot seem to figure out the answer. Congress even went so far as to pass a law in 2010 requiring an inventory of federal programs. The Obama and Trump administrations came and went without such an inventory’s being produced.

 

The Biden administration is, on this issue, off like a herd of turtles. In a March 2021 hearing, Representative Michael Cloud (R., Texas) once again asked the question of Comptroller General Gene L. Dodaro, who said only that “there is not a hard number.”

 

Complexity is a blindfold on oversight and a subsidy for special interests, including the financial interests of the bureaucracies that administer federal programs and those of the non-government parties that receive federal funds. The Emergency Food and Shelter program is only one among . . . some large but apparently unknown number of federal programs. And even a member of Congress seated on a committee with responsibility for overseeing the program can’t squeeze basic information about it out of the relevant agencies. How much chance would an independent third party or ordinary citizen have of making any kind of reasonably informed evaluation of such a program?

 

Preventing the formation of such judgments is, of course, the point.

 

The border is a serious matter. “Every town in America is a border town,” Cammack says, and she’s right. But there are a dozens of equally serious matters that remain willfully concealed by the federal bureaucracy.

 

So where does the money go?

 

At a certain level of specificity, no one knows. And no one who has any experience with the fearsome investigatory powers of the federal government as wielded by the IRS could believe that this is anything other than intentional.

 

At some point, someone with the power to do so — meaning you, President Biden — is going to have to demand not only a financial accounting but a political and moral reckoning, too.