Wednesday, April 02, 2025
Cory Booker’s 25-Hour Senate Speech Strikes a Chord in New Jersey - The New York Times
‘Finally Some Fire’: Cory Booker’s 25-Hour Speech Strikes a Chord at Home
"Many Democrats, including in Mr. Booker’s home state of New Jersey, reveled in his stamina and moxie as he assailed President Trump in the longest Senate speech on record.
Senator Cory Booker’s staff members described a nagging fear as they worked for a week to fill 15 binders with enough material to cover what would soon become a history-making, 25-hour speech.
What if no one listened?
Their worry was short-lived. By 11 a.m. on Tuesday, 16 hours after Mr. Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, had begun railing against President Trump’s policies on the floor of the U.S. Senate, roughly 14,000 callers had left messages on his office hotline, aides said. Before he finally stopped speaking, the office had fielded 14,000 more.
For 25 hours and five minutes, Mr. Booker, who will turn 56 this month, did not sit or exit the Senate chambers to eat or use a bathroom. His speech broke, by nearly an hour, a record set 68 years ago by Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, a segregationist who at the time was trying to block civil rights legislation.
Americans noticed. The social-media-savvy senator streamed the speech live on his TikTok account, where it garnered more than 350 million “likes.” And more than 110,000 people were watching on YouTube when Mr. Booker ended his speech in much the same way he began: with an homage to a mentor, the civil rights pioneer John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat who spent three decades in Congress.
“Let’s get in good trouble,” he said, borrowing Mr. Lewis’s famous call to action.
Many of those watching appeared to revel in Mr. Booker’s stamina and moxie.
“New respect for New Jersey,” a YouTube viewer wrote in a live chat message two hours before the senator stopped talking.
Democrats have been mainly relegated to the sidelines since Mr. Trump was inaugurated in January and began signing a barrage of executive orders meant to reshape government, rushing to try to shut down federal agencies, fire federal employees, defang law firms he opposes and deport international students who have spoken out against Israel’s war in Gaza.
Without a majority in either the House or the Senate, congressional Democrats have few legislative options to block or implement change. Still, in polls and on social media, many frustrated Democratic voters have been agitating for them to try to do more.
“The Democrats have been acting like it’s OK what Trump is doing, and it’s not OK,” said Angel Leston, 38, who owns the Casa d’Paco restaurant in Newark, New Jersey’s largest city, where Mr. Booker was mayor before being elected to the Senate.
“Now,” he added, “there’s finally some fire.”
Vivian Cox Fraser, president of the Urban League of Essex County, based in Newark, said she found herself tuning in to Mr. Booker’s speech at several points on Monday and Tuesday, encouraged by his passion.
“Somehow you have to demonstrate opposition,” she said.
“The one thing I hope is, it will be the impetus for a lot more — for us to stand up,” said Ms. Cox Fraser, who expressed concern that any cuts to education funding, social services or Medicaid would hurt the families her organization serves.
Ryan Haygood, a New Jersey civil rights lawyer, said he found Mr. Booker’s willingness to put “his full self into it” inspirational. “We need voices everywhere, on every level, fighting for the foundation and soul of this country,” said Mr. Haygood, who leads the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice.
“Thank you, Cory, for your commitment to protecting the values our country was built on,” Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey wrote on social media.
But even some who supported Mr. Booker’s approach said they recognized that it risked angering a president who controls the federal purse strings and has shown an appetite for revenge.
“Trump is going to retaliate — 100 percent,” said Mr. Leston, whose restaurant is on a working-class, residential block in the Ironbound, a heavily Latino neighborhood where Mr. Trump drew significant support in November.
“He retaliates against anybody that says anything bad about him — what makes you think New Jersey is any different?” he said. “But that shouldn’t deter people from speaking out against his policies.”
Praise for Mr. Booker was hardly universal. At Krug’s Tavern, a Newark institution for nearly a century, most patrons Tuesday night were focused on the Yankees game, not Mr. Booker, when he officially broke Mr. Thurmond’s record at 7:19 p.m.
“The Democrats can’t come to grips with the fact that they lost,” one customer, Paul Wiener, 69, said as the grill sizzled nearby. “The work should have been done before the election, not after the election.”
“Booker is just one more mosquito in the swamp,” he added.
A spokesman for Mr. Trump, Harrison Fields, dismissed the speech with a mocking reference to a comment Mr. Booker made during the Senate confirmation hearings for Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, who now sits on the Supreme Court: “When will he realize he’s not Spartacus — he’s a spoof?”
Still, some other political opponents offered Mr. Booker ungrudging props.
“Regardless of politics, Cory is an impressive man with a good heart, lots of energy and a high-octane intellect,” said Mike DuHaime, a Republican strategist who ran former Gov. Chris Christie’s campaigns.
“You don’t have to agree with him on every policy to be proud that so many people in the country were watching the former mayor of Newark make history.”
Mr. Booker’s oratorical marathon covered plenty of turf, serious and less so. He detailed his concerns about cutting funding for education, health care and medical research and recounted moving stories about the effects the administration’s policies were having on his constituents. “This is a moral moment,” he said repeatedly.
But he also filled some of the time in other ways. He waxed poetic about M&M candies — first produced, he noted, in Newark. He resurfaced jocular grudges from his days playing football at Stanford University. And he tackled an abiding New York sports riddle.
“The Giants and the Jets play in New Jersey,” he said. “There’s only one football team in New York, and that’s the Bills.”
Mark Bonamo contributed reporting.
Tracey Tully is a reporter for The Times who covers New Jersey, where she has lived for more than 20 years."
Study finds strongest evidence yet that shingles vaccine helps cut dementia risk | Dementia | The Guardian
Study finds strongest evidence yet that shingles vaccine helps cut dementia risk
"Older adults in Wales who had the jab were 20% less likely to be diagnosed with dementia that those not vaccinated
Researchers who tracked cases of dementia in Welsh adults have uncovered the strongest evidence yet that the shingles vaccination reduces the risk of developing the devastating brain disease.
Health records of more than 280,000 older adults revealed that those who received a largely discontinued shingles vaccine called Zostavax were 20% less likely to be diagnosed with dementia over the next seven years than those who went without.
Pascal Geldsetzer, at Stanford University, said: “For the first time we are able to say much more confidently that the shingles vaccine causes a reduction in dementia risk. If this truly is a causal effect, we have a finding that’s of tremendous importance.”
The researchers took advantage of a vaccination rollout that took place in Walesmore than a decade ago. Public health policy dictated that from 1 September 2013, people born on or after 2 September 1933 became eligible for the Zostavax shot, while those who were older missed out.
The policy created a natural experiment where the older population was sharply divided into two groups depending on their access to the vaccine. This allowed the researchers to compare dementia rates in older people born weeks apart but on either side of the vaccine eligibility divide.
After accounting for the fact that not all those eligible for the vaccine received it, the researchers found vaccination led to a 20% reduction in dementia risk, with the strongest effect in women. Anupam Jena, a professor of healthcare policy at Harvard Medical School, said the implications were profound.
Dementia affects more than 55 million people globally and is the leading cause of death in the UK. One in three will develop the condition in their lifetime, and while drugs that slow the disease have recently been approved, there is no cure.
When people contract chickenpox the virus remains dormant in their nerve cells for life. But the virus can reactivate and cause shingles in older people whose immune systems are waning, or in individuals with weakened immunity.
The latest work, published in Nature, is not the first hint that shingles vaccines might shield against dementia. When Zostavax was rolled out in the US in 2006, several studies found lower rates of dementia in people who received the shots. Last year, Oxford researchers reported an even stronger protective effect in people who received Shingrix, a newer vaccine. Geldsetzer is now looking for philanthropic and private foundations to fund a randomised clinical trial to confirm any benefits.
It is unclear how shingles vaccines might protect against dementia, but one theory is that they reduce inflammation in the nervous system by preventing reactivation of the virus. Another theory is that the vaccines induce broader changes in the immune system that are protective. These wider effects are seen more often in women, potentially explaining the sex differences in the study.
In an accompanying article, Jena wrote: “Although it is still unclear precisely how herpes zoster vaccination lowers the risk of dementia, the implications of the study are profound. The vaccine could represent a cost-effective intervention that has public-health benefits strongly exceeding its intended purpose.”
Julia Dudley, the head of research at Alzheimer’s Research UK, said the study strengthened the emerging link between shingles vaccination and reduced dementia risk. “While previous studies suggested an association, this research offers stronger evidence of a direct link, with greater benefit observed in women.
“It’s unclear exactly how the shingles vaccine might influence dementia risk. It may reduce inflammation, support the immune system in ways that protect the brain or involve other mechanisms. It’s important to note that this study looked at the Zostavax vaccine rather than Shingrix, which is now more commonly used.
“Understanding this link better, including the reason for any differences between men and women, could open new avenues for dementia prevention and treatment,” she said.
Maxime Taquet, whose Oxford study found a reduced dementia risk after Shingrix vaccination, said adjuvants in that vaccine, which make the immune response more potent, may play a role. Both studies “provide strong support for the hypothesis that shingles vaccination reduces dementia risk, with the newer recombinant vaccine offering superior protection,” he said. “A key question is whether this enhanced protection is due to improved shingles prevention or the adjuvant’s immunological effects.”
Study finds strongest evidence yet that shingles vaccine helps cut dementia risk | Dementia | The GuardianN.Y. Lawmakers Fight Trump With a Proposal Targeting Elon Musk - The New York Times
N.Y. Lawmakers Fight Trump With a Proposal Targeting Elon Musk
"A bill would authorize an audit of a state deal allowing Tesla to lease a factory site near Buffalo for $1 a year, and would create a way for the state to claw back subsidies.
For weeks, New York leaders have watched President Trump issue executive orders, slash federal funding and direct Elon Musk to shrink the government work force, while trying to determine how it all may affect the state.
Now some state lawmakers are trying to strike back.
Two Democratic legislators are introducing a bill on Wednesday aimed at Mr. Musk and the so-called Buffalo Billion project, in which the state spent $959 million to build and equip a plant that Mr. Musk’s company leases for $1 a year to operate a solar panel and auto component factory.
The bill would require an audit of the state subsidy deal to “identify waste, fraud and abuse committed by private parties to the contract.” It would determine whether the company, Tesla, was meeting job creation targets, making promised investments, paying enough rent and honoring job training commitments.
If Tesla was found to be not in compliance, the state could claw back state benefits, impose penalties or terminate contracts.
“It is the height of hypocrisy that Elon Musk, the man who is dismantling federal agencies and doing enormous damage on the basis of wildly unsubstantiated claims of waste, fraud and abuse, is the beneficiary of one of the biggest, shadiest subsidy deals of all time,” the two lawmakers, Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal and Assemblyman Micah Lasher, said in a statement.
Tesla did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment.
The legislation is the latest example of how Democratic leaders in the State Capitol have looked for ways to show their constituents that they are standing up to Republicans like Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump.
Earlier this year, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed into law new protections for the state’s health care providers to help shield them from prosecution in states that ban abortion. Louisiana politicians are currently trying to extradite a New York doctor who was accused of prescribing and sending abortion pills to someone in the state.
Legislators have also introduced a bill that would let fired federal employees who are hired by the state buy pension credits in New York’s public retirements system.
Two other proposed bills would give Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, more power to pursue companies that enact “unfair and abusive business” or monopolistic practices. Former federal regulators say these bills are particularly important as President Trump and Mr. Musk “gravely weaken” federal oversight of corporations.
“We are trying to figure out what we can do as states to push back and reassert authority on behalf of working people,” said State Senator Michael Gianaris, the deputy majority leader.
“If you end up in a head-to-head battle with the federal government, you’re likely to lose,” he added. “But we can fill in the gaps that the federal government is now falling away on.”
Jessica Ramos, a state senator who is running for mayor in New York City, cited Senate Democrats’ decision in Washington to join with Republicans to prevent a government shutdown as an example of her party’s not doing enough to stand up to Mr. Trump.
She and Mr. Lasher introduced legislation that would let the state withhold funds meant for the federal government if “the federal government refuses to disburse funds to the state in contravention of a court order.”
“Democrats need to bring a gun to a gunfight,” she said. “The overwhelming feeling from constituents is, ‘We want to see Democrats have a spine. We want Democrats to fight back against the Republicans.’”
If there were any question of the underlying motivation behind the legislation being proposed by Mr. Lasher and Mr. Hoylman-Sigal, its title would put that to rest: the “New York Determining Obligations and Guaranteeing Enforcement (DOGE) in Government Contracting Act,” a somewhat strained reference to Mr. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
“The moment demands a new way of thinking about legislation,” said Mr. Lasher, who introduced several such bills. “You cannot look at what is going on and say that a normal set of responses is adequate, and you cannot talk to constituents and think they will expect business as usual.”
The bill could also prove embarrassing to former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat who is trying to stage a political comeback in the New York City mayor’s race, by reminding voters of one of the biggest controversies during his decade in Albany.
In August 2015, when the solar panel manufacturing facility was completed, Mr. Cuomo, then the governor, marveled at the transformation of an abandoned brownfield into a high-tech plant sure to revive the ailing city. The factory was being operated by SolarCity, a Musk company later absorbed by Tesla.
Mr. Cuomo claimed the project would create 5,000 jobs statewide, and Mr. Musk had predicted that by 2020 the Buffalo plant would pump out enough solar panels to outfit 1,000 roofs a week. Those rosy projections never materialized.
The plant now produces chargers and related components for Tesla cars and trucks. According to a report by the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie, an average of 21 Tesla solar roofs were produced weekly in 2022.
Amendments to the agreement that relaxed deadlines and job targets have allowed Tesla to avoid tens of millions of dollars in penalties. The state is now offering to lower the job target from 3,460 to 3,000 statewide; officials say Tesla is currently at about 2,900 jobs, with over 2,000 of them in Buffalo.
Rich Azzopardi, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, said the old steel mill replaced by the factory “would have stayed like that forever” had the former governor not intervened, and that “now it’s a plant that has employed thousands of people for years.”
The state agency overseeing the deal, Empire State Development, said it has been negotiating higher rent payments and accountability measures with Tesla, but a formal lease renewal agreement has yet to be signed. The agency’s chief operating officer, Kevin Younis, said keeping good jobs in Buffalo remains the state’s top focus.
“We’re not doing this for Elon Musk,” he said. “Our goal is to get these jobs created in Buffalo and to get them to stay here as long as possible.”
Under the proposed agreement, Tesla would start paying $2 million a year in rent instead of $1, with the payments rising over time. The new deal also requires Tesla to spend at least $500 million building a “dojo” supercomputer at the site.
Rent payments were supposed to begin last year under the proposed deal, so if Tesla and New York State sign the agreement in the coming weeks as Mr. Younis anticipates, the state soon will receive a rent check of about $3 million covering all of 2024 and half of this year, he said.
“We expect to get paid this summer,” he said.
The two Democrats behind the bill say New York should not renew its agreement with Tesla if a review shows taxpayers got snookered in the original investment, which a conservative New York think tank characterized as “the single biggest economic development boondoggle” in U.S. history. A 2020 state audit found the project had returned 54 cents of economic benefit for every $1 in public money invested, a fraction of the benefit the state set as a benchmark — $30 per $1 spent — for such projects.
“There is an opportunity for an exit here and it may be in the interest of New York’s taxpayers for the state to take it,” the lawmakers said.
Jay Root is an investigative reporter based in Albany, N.Y., covering the people and events influencing — and influenced by — state and local government"
Tuesday, April 01, 2025
Fact check: Eight ways Elon Musk has misled Americans about government spending | CNN Politics
Fact check: Eight ways Elon Musk has misled Americans about government spending
Elon Musk has repeatedly misled the public about federal spending while playing a leading role in President Donald Trump’s effort to cut that spending.
When Musk was asked earlier this month about one of the inaccurate statements he had promoted, he conceded that “some of the things that I say will be incorrect, and should be corrected.” But “some” might be an understatement. The billionaire businessman has made or amplified numerous false or misleading assertions in the past month alone, largely on the X social media platform he owns.
Here are eight examples.
This list doesn’t include erroneous cost-savings claims on the website of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. And it doesn’t include the many vague Musk assertions that he hasn’t corroborated but that also can’t be definitively debunked at this time.
The White House didn’t respond to CNN requests for comment last week.
Promoting a phony video about USAID and celebrities
As the Trump administration worked to dismantle the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Musk shared an X user’s post that claimed “USAID spent your tax dollars to fund celebrity trips to Ukraine, all to boost Zelensky’s popularity among Americans.” The post included a video, made to look as though it was from entertainment outlet E! News, that listed large sums various celebrities were supposedly paid for visits to Ukraine.
The video was a fabrication.
E! News never ran any such video. USAID never made those payments to the celebrities.
Ben Stiller, one of the actors the phony video claimed had received millions from USAID to go to Ukraine, said he “completely self-funded” his trip and received “no funding from USAID.”
Stiller attributed the “lies” to “Russian media,” and experts said the video indeed had the hallmarks of a long-running Russian deception campaign.
Misrepresenting a Pentagon contract for defense against cyberattacks
Musk took aim at the Reuters news agency he has previously criticized over its coverage of his business practices. He wrote on X: “Reuters was paid millions of dollars by the US government for ‘large scale social deception’. That is literally what it says on the purchase order! They’re a total scam. Just wow.”
Musk’s comment itself deceived the public.
The contract Musk was talking about was awarded by the Department of Defense, during the first Trump administration, to bolster the military’s defenses against “social engineering” cyberattacks that use “social deception” tactics to trick humans. The money went to a “data-driven solutions” company called Thomson Reuters Special Services, not the Reuters news agency with which it shares a corporate parent — and, more importantly, neither company was paid to engage in deceiving the public.
Musk’s post didn’t mention that the spending document he was citing prominently features the words “active social engineering defense.” And he continued to post misleadingly about the contract even after his initial comment was fact-checked by news outlets such as CNN and The Washington Post.
Casting baseless suspicion upon tax credits under Trump and Biden
Musk shared an X user’s chart that purported to show the value of federal tax credits each year from 1990 through 2021. The chart, dubiously describing the tax credits as “IRS Welfare,” depicted a big jump in 2018, another big jump in 2020, and a peak in 2021.
Musk suggested there was something inexplicable or nefarious about these recent increases. He wrote: “Such a big jump in a short time doesn’t make sense.”
It makes perfect sense. The increases are easy to explain.
Trump signed an expansion of the child tax credit in his 2017 tax law, causing the increase in 2018. His 2020 pandemic relief legislation also provided various forms of relief to Americans through tax credits, causing the increase that year. President Joe Biden then approved a short-term expansion of the child tax credit in the pandemic relief law he signed in early 2021, causing the increase that year.
“There’s no mystery why the child tax credit increased in 2018 and again during the pandemic. The growth is the direct result of child tax credit expansions signed into law by President Trump and then President Biden to increase the credit’s maximum value, refundability and availability,” Erica York, vice president of federal tax policy at the Tax Foundation think tank, told CNN.
Promoting a false claim about government spending on The New York Times
Musk, declaring that “NYT is government-funded media,” shared a post from an X user who asserted the US government “gave the New York Times tens of millions of dollars over just the past 5 years,” including $26.9 million from the Department of Health and Human Services and $19.15 million from the National Science Foundation.
But those figures were not even close to correct.
The X user who made the post, right-wing commentator Ian Miles Cheong, had done a flawed web search that was not actually limited to federal spending on The New York Times. As University of Central Arkansas economics professor Jeremy Horpedahl pointed out, Cheong’s search also brought up federal spending on other entities with “New York” in their names, such as grants to New York University.
When you limit the search to federal spending on The New York Times in the last five years, you find no Times spending at all from the HHS or National Science Foundation. This correct search shows that total federal spending committed to The Times since the beginning of 2020 was about $1.6 million, and that the biggest chunk came from subscriptions for the Department of Defense.
Promoting an invented story about condoms for Gaza
When press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced at her first White House briefing that the Trump administration had spotted and thwarted a planned $50 million expenditure “to fund condoms in Gaza,” she attributed the supposed discovery in part to Musk’s DOGE team. Musk then promoted Leavitt’s words in a post on X, writing that this was the “tip of iceberg” and that he guessed “a lot of that money ended up in the pockets [of] Hamas, not actually condoms.”
But the claim was pure nonsense; Musk and the White House never had any evidence to substantiate it. Asked two weeks later about the inaccuracy, Musk made his concession that “some of the things that I say will be incorrect, and should be corrected.”
Musk then promptly continued to say incorrect things. Seizing on an inaccurate assertion from the reporter who asked him about the tale about condoms for Gaza, he criticized the US for supposedly sending $50 million in condoms to the African country of Mozambique — though that didn’t happen either.
Promoting a false claim about DOGE savings
Musk shared an X post from conservative activist Charlie Kirk that included a brief video clip of a “DOGE Clock,” an animated counter that showed a fast-increasing total of more than $109 billion. Kirk wrote, “Projected DOGE savings now near $110 billion, or over $700 per American taxpayer. And we’re just getting started…”
“Good progress,” Musk wrote.
But the “clock” does not actually measure DOGE’s progress.
At the time of Kirk’s post, DOGE was making an inflated claim of having saved an estimated $55 billion. In other words, the figure on the “clock” was roughly double DOGE’s own flawed number.
So what is the “clock,” exactly? The website that publishes it, USDebtClock.org, makes clear it is not tracking DOGE’s actual savings; it says it is tracking DOGE’s “savings objective.” The site, which is not affiliated with the government, didn’t respond to a CNN request to explain what precisely “savings objective” means — but Horpedahl said the “clock” tracks “what DOGE would need to have saved to be on track to balance the budget. It’s not a count of actual savings. It literally just adds $4 billion per day, regardless of what is happening in the real budget situation.”
Misleading about Social Security data
Musk posted a chart on X he said showed how many people in different age brackets had a “death field set to FALSE” in a Social Security database — in other words, who were not listed as being dead. The chart included nearly 9 million people age 130 and older, who are obviously deceased. Musk joked, “Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security” — then added, “This might be the biggest fraud in the history of humanity.”
But the chart didn’t prove any fraud. It didn’t even show that millions of dead people are erroneously being sent Social Security money. Public data from the Social Security Administration shows that about 89,000 people age 99 or over were receiving Social Security benefits in December 2024, not even close to the millions Musk suggested.
That’s because of a critical fact Musk didn’t explain: Someone not having have their death listed in this Social Security database doesn’t mean they are actually getting Social Security money. Social Security already has a system in place to stop payments to people listed as being age 115 and older.
A 2023 report from the inspector general who monitors the Social Security Administration found 18.9 million people age 100 or older who were not marked as deceased on their database entry. But while the inspector general was critical of the Social Security Administration (SSA) over this issue, she also found that only 44,000 of these 18.9 million people were receiving payments.
Even those 44,000 payments were not obviously fraudulent or erroneous. The inspector general noted that a larger number of living people in the US, an estimated 86,000, were age 100 or older.
“Regarding the 44,000 figure, I’m confident that the vast majority of those are legit payments. So while there probably is some fraud, I don’t think these numbers show any evidence of it,” Andrew Biggs, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank who served as principal deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration during the George W. Bush administration, told CNN last week.
Biggs said that “while the SSA clearly should work to better ensure that Social Security numbers are deactivated when a person dies, it does not appear that this computer systems issue results in many benefits being paid out to people who should not receive them.”
The acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, Leland Dudek, who was elevated to that post by the current Trump administration, tried to set the record straight in a statement last week.
“The reported data are people in our records with a Social Security number who do not have a date of death associated with their record. These individuals are not necessarily receiving benefits,” Dudek said.
Making a false claim about FEMA spending on migrant housing
Musk claimed on X earlier this month that the DOGE team had “just discovered” that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had the previous week sent $59 million to luxury New York City hotels “to house illegal migrants.” Musk then added, “That money is meant for American disaster relief and instead is being spent on high end hotels for illegals!” He repeated the claim at a conservative conference on Thursday: “They took money from FEMA, meant for helping Americans in distress, and sent that money to luxury hotels for illegal immigrants in New York.”
The money was never meant for American disaster relief.
The cash came from a separate federal initiative, the Shelter and Services Program, in which Congress gave money to FEMA for the specific purpose of helping state and local governments and nonprofits house migrants.
Congress appropriated $650 million for this program in the 2024 fiscal year. It appropriated a much larger sum, more than $35 billion, for FEMA disaster relief in that fiscal year. These are just two distinct pots of money — as fact-checkers repeatedly noted when Trump and others made similar claims in the fall.
And there is additional context worth noting.
The Shelter and Services Program money was sent to the government of New York City, not directly to hotels, and the city said in a statement this month that of a recent allocation of about $59 million, about $19 million covered direct hotel costs for people seeking asylum; about $26 million was for services like food and security, while about $13 million was for group shelters and related services.
In addition, the city objected to the “luxury hotels” part of the claim, saying, “we have never paid luxury-hotel rates.” A report last year from the city comptroller, which studied the hotels that are part of a city contract to house people seeking asylum, found that the average daily rate paid by the city was $156 and that, of the hotels whose category class could be confirmed, none were in the highest-end “luxury” or “upper upscale” categories, while half were “economy,” 13% “midscale,” 25% “upper midscale” and 8% “upscale.”
Critics are free to make an argument that even this accommodation is overly generous. Regardless, Musk’s claim that it was paid with funds taken from disaster relief is flat wrong.
CNN’s Gloria Pazmino contributed to this article."