Consider President Joe Biden’s latest boondoggle your tax dollars at work – or maybe not at work.
Last month the public learned that the Biden administration had awarded an $87 million contract to a Texas nonprofit group to house 1,200 illegal immigrants in hotel rooms for the next six months. That comes out to roughly $400 a night for each one.
But after tossing taxpayers’ money down that hole, Biden has come up with a new way to waste even more of our cash.
The New York Times reported on Saturday that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is literally begging federal employees to give up their day jobs, yet still be paid at taxpayers’ expense, to help care for the tidal wave of undocumented minors flowing across the border.
“The desperate plea landed this week in the email inboxes of employees in government agencies like the Department of Homeland Security and NASA: Will you consider taking a four-month paid leave from your job to help care for migrant children in government-run shelters packed with new arrivals at the border?” the Times reported.
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The Times noted that some federal shelters are already at 103 percent capacity with 20,000 illegal minors in custody. That number is expected to swell to 35,000 by June.
Interestingly, the Times pointed out that about 4,000 of them are housed in “jail-like detention facilities” – finally, an admission from the left that Biden is putting “kids in cages.” The Times further noted – thus torpedoing another Biden administration narrative that all we face on the border is a challenge – that the “latest surge, on pace to be larger than those that prompted crises for President Barack Obama in 2014 and 2016 and for President Donald J. Trump in 2019, has administration officials racing to erect facilities and recruit staff for them.”
Part of that staff are “volunteers” from other federal posts taking leave from their normal duties for a trip to the border.
Per the Times: “A briefing memo sent to administration officials this week directed the health department to ‘identify and deploy all available federal volunteers to support the effort to address the increase of minors, a drive reflected by the email seeking government workers to help.”
“As of Friday, 2,722 employees across the government have volunteered, in most cases with their salaries being picked up by the health department. Some are caring for children at shelters. Others are helping with case management, I.T. services, food delivery, transportation, and other logistics.”
Meanwhile, Vice President Kamala Harris apparently won’t even do her day job, which is to manage the crisis at the border.
Biden put her in charge of the situation nearly three weeks ago, and as of Sunday, she has not bothered to visit any site along the border for even a cursory look at the rapidly unfolding disaster.
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Well if those government agencies can afford to have a large number of employees furloughed for that amount of time, maybe we really need to consider just how essential those agencies are? Take a good long hard look at them and make cuts as needed.