What business do luxury hotels, illegal immigrants, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have with one another? Approximately $59 million too much, in only a single week, according to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). But that turns out to be only one string in a tale so bizarre it would make P.T. Barnum blush.

“The @DOGE team just discovered that FEMA sent $59M LAST WEEK to luxury hotels in New York City to house illegal migrants,” DOGE chief Elon Musk announced on Monday. “Sending this money violated the law and is in gross insubordination to the President’s executive order. That money is meant for American disaster relief and instead is being spent on high end hotels for illegals! A clawback demand will be made today to recoup those funds.”

Acting FEMA Director Cameron Hamilton responded speedily, “I want to thank the [DOGE] team for making me aware of this. Effective yesterday these payments have all been suspended from FEMA. Personnel will be held accountable.” Hamilton previously worked at the Department of Homeland Security as director of Emergency Medical Services but most recently headed a conservative nonprofit critical of the Biden administration’s emergency response.

A DHS official reported later the same day, “As Secretary [Kristi] Noem said yesterday, we must get rid of FEMA the way it exists today. This is yet another egregious example. Individuals who circumvented leadership and unilaterally made this payment will be fired and held accountable.”

In summary, over the past 48 hours, DOGE identified suspicious spending on illegal immigrant hotels by FEMA, and Trump officials at the agency promptly acted to stop the payments and plan to fire those responsible. On the surface, this is a cut-and-dried example to add to the growing pile of government waste slashed by DOGE.

But it’s worth asking more probing questions. Musk’s tweet claimed that “[s]ending this money violated the law and is in gross insubordination to the President’s executive order.” Indeed, Trump officials at FEMA would likely not be able to stop the payments and fire those responsible unless this were true. But it’s not entirely clear which law and which executive order were violated or how they were violated. For that matter, no one knows which “luxury hotels” were paid or how FEMA paid them.

It’s possible the executive order Musk had in mind was the January 20 order “Protecting the American People against Invasion.” This order made it “the policy of the United States to faithfully execute the immigration laws against all inadmissible and removable aliens,” and “to achieve the total and efficient enforcement of those laws, including through lawful incentives and detention capabilities.” It directed all executive agencies to “employ all lawful means to ensure the faithful execution of the immigration laws of the United States” and authorized the DHS Secretary (who oversees FEMA) to “allocate all legally available resources … to detain removable aliens.”

There’s a good argument to make that paying for illegal immigrants’ luxury hotel stay violates at least the spirit of this order, even if it is not directly addressed.

Nor is it clear what law Musk had in mind. Last fall, FEMA drew intense criticism for spending $1.4 billion on shelter and services for illegal immigrants since December 2022, even while then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas warned that “FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the [hurricane] season” and demanded that Congress appropriate more money for disaster relief.

In response to this criticism, the Biden administration DHS responded, “The Shelter and Services Program (SSP) is a completely separate, appropriated grant program that was authorized and funded by Congress and is not associated in any way with FEMA’s disaster-related authorities or funding streams.”

Though scandalous, this does appear to be true. In late December 2022, Congress passed a Christmas tree spending package titled the Consolidated Appropriations Act for (fiscal year) 2023 (H.R.2617). This bill transferred “up to $785,000,000” from the operational budget of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to FEMA, and it required FEMA to dispense the funds “for the emergency food and shelter program under title II of the McKinney Vento Homeless Assistance Act (42 U.S.C. 11331) for the purposes of providing shelter and other services to families and individuals encountered by the Department of Homeland Security.”

In other words, the lame-duck Democratic majority in Congress used a year-end spending package to depower CBP’s border operations and divert the funds to housing the flood of illegal immigrants crossing the border. Instead of openly declaring this purpose, the bill placed this mass housing program under the purview of a 1987 law providing for federal homeless assistance — even though the millions of foreign nationals illegally crossing into our country were not “homeless persons” in any ordinary sense. This legislation was a final, parting gift to Americans from the ousted Democratic majority.

Accordingly, FEMA dispensed $363.8 million in Fiscal Year 2023 and $640.9 million in Fiscal Year 2024 (after Congress allocated additional funds).

Among other grants, FEMA doled out more than $20 million to the “NYC Office of Management and Budget” in Fiscal Year 2024 (which began October 1, 2023). The FEMA website does not detail what the grant was for, but it likely subsidized existing New York City programs that fit the mission of sheltering illegal immigrants.

In the summer of 2023, New York City announced plans to house illegal immigrants in hotels, including the 1,250-room Roosevelt Hotel, which is owned by the state-run Pakistan International Airlines. In a June 2023 article, then-Pakistani Minister of Railways Khawaja Saad Rafique announced that New York City had leased the entire hotel for three years, in a deal he said would generate up to $220 million in revenues “for the Pakistani government.” Leasing 1,250 rooms every night for three years for $220 million comes out to roughly $160 per night.

By October 2024, residents of the Roosevelt Hotel were complaining about crimes perpetrated by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which terrorized the surrounding, high-profile city streets with repeated and brazen crimes.

More recent information on FEMA grants — such as payments made over the past three weeks — are not publicly available. But it seems possible, perhaps even likely, that FEMA grants to cities housing migrants have continued (until someone stops them, or until the congressional authorized money runs out).

If such payments are what Musk’s unspecific tweet was talking about, they are justly a cause of outrage. U.S. federal taxpayers are subsidizing a U.S. city that pays a foreign government to house violent criminals in a historic hotel with a prime location. Worse, these dollars are going out through an agency that is supposed to help Americans in emergency situations under an authority that is supposed to deal with homelessness.

What makes this situation so bizarre is, first, the number of issues that have mashed together into one terrible policy outcome. Second, the situation is so bizarre because it is the type of outcome that gets to stick around in Washington, because the Washington elites accept it as normal. “Well,” they might say, “Congress allocated the money, so the agencies should spend it.”

This is where DOGE can perform an invaluable service by looking at the big picture, collecting examples of waste and abuse from multiple agencies. It’s much harder to countenance such actions if daylight is allowed to shine on them. But creating permanent change will take more long-term action than DOGE can bring to bear. In his first week, President Trump created a FEMA reform council, which is a good next step. Ultimately, however, Congress must act to help fix a terrible situation that, at least in part, they created.