Let's Cut Some Spending: $17 million on unused hotel rooms for migrants

Remember the absolutely critical Omnibus spending bill Congress muscled through at the end of last year? It was 4,000 pages that no one read and cost taxpayers $1.7 trillion.

In our Let's Cut Some Spending series, ForAmerica will chronicle parts of the 2021 and 2022 spending bills from a variety of sources that you probably don't know about - programs, grants and spending of all kinds that should have never happened in the first place and many that are still happening.

Today’s offering: $17 million on unused hotel rooms for migrants!

The New York Post reports:

Immigration officials wasted $17 million dollars on unused hotels for migrants last year, after hiring a politically connected contractor that failed to meet COVID-19 protocols, a government watchdog found.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement entered into the $87 million contract with the nonprofit company Endeavors to provide services for the surge of migrants at the southern border, the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General said in a Tuesday report.

ICE should have sought multiple bids for the work, instead of signing onto the “sole source” deal with Endeavors, which required the agency to pay for a block of more than 1,200 hotel rooms, no matter how many were used, the watchdog found.

As a result of the alleged blunder, the government was contractually obligated to pay Endeavors $17 million for hotel rooms that were mostly empty between April and June of 2021, according to the report.

Your tax dollars to house people who were illegally here, who weren't even in the hotels. What a waste.