FEMA can't verify $425 million in humanitarian aid it awarded
Summary
A DHS Inspector General audit found FEMA and the nonprofit board that administers its Emergency Food and Shelter Program-Humanitarian Relief grants never collected a single required quarterly spending report on $425 million awarded for fiscal 2023 -- leaving the entire amount unverified. A related program, the Shelter and Services Program, had $16.5 million in questioned costs within just the payments auditors sampled. FEMA agreed to fix its oversight process, but disputed part of the math -- and this is the second time in three years OIG has flagged the same underlying gap.
Two programs, nearly $1.4 billion, minimal oversight
's Emergency Food and Shelter Program-Humanitarian Relief (EFSP-H)⧉ and its successor, the Shelter and Services Program (SSP), reimburse organizations assisting aliens encountered and released by . Congress appropriated $290 million for EFSP-H across 2019-2022, then shifted to funding SSP directly -- $800 million in FY2023 and $650 million in FY2024, with allowed to route up to $785 million of the FY2023 amount back into EFSP-H. Altogether, awarded nearly $1.4 billion through both programs in fiscal 2023 and 2024 combined.
View data as table
| FY2023 EFSP-H funding awarded | 425,000,000 |
|---|---|
| Amount verified as properly spent | 0 |
FEMA required reports. Then never collected them.
After a 2023 audit found $7.4 million in questioned EFSP-H costs, and its National Board partner issued new guidance requiring grant recipients to file quarterly spending reports. They then never enforced it⧉ -- collecting zero quarterly reports on the $425 million awarded for FY2023. The Board disbursed the money directly into recipients' bank accounts it had no access to, meaning won't have real expenditure data until the program's closeout process finishes, currently scheduled for September 2026. The same underlying gap flagged in 2023 recurred at more than 57 times the dollar scale.
The smaller program had its own $16.5 million problem
SSP fared somewhat better, but not by much. Auditors sampled⧉ 7 payments worth $48.2 million -- 87% of all the SSP payments had made as of September 2024 -- and found $16.5 million, or 34%, didn't hold up: documentation never uploaded, eligibility-verification results requested but then didn't actually use to calculate costs, and invoices for services like laundry and medical care that listed only flat dollar amounts with no itemized detail.
View data as table
| Missing required documentation | 7,800,000 |
|---|---|
| Eligibility checks not used to calculate costs | 5,600,000 |
| Invoices lacked sufficient detail | 3,100,000 |
No check for double-dipping, and a fight over the data
and the National Board relied entirely on self-certifications from grant recipients, with no independent check to stop the same costs being billed to both EFSP-H and SSP during their overlapping spending periods -- despite federal rules barring exactly that, and despite having already found 's self-certification approach unreliable in prior reviews covering more than $3 billion in improper home-repair-assistance payments and $3.7 billion in improper pandemic-era Lost Wages Assistance payments. Separately, denied auditors direct access to its grants database, providing only raw data and delayed front-end access instead.
terminated all SSP grant awards on March 31, 2025, stating the program didn't align with the Department's immigration-enforcement and border-security priorities -- part of a broader freeze on NGO grants a Secretary memo had ordered two months earlier, citing concerns about potential financing of illegal activity, discriminatory grant language, and resource efficiency. That decision came after 's audit fieldwork was already underway (it began in June 2024) and well before this report's findings were finalized -- the termination wasn't a response to this audit, and finished its review anyway since the findings could still guide the program's closeout.
FEMA agreed to fix it. It disputes some of the math.
concurred with all five of 's recommendations, including resolving both the $425 million and $16.5 million in questioned costs. But it formally disputed⧉ two specific pieces of the SSP finding -- the $5.6 million tied to calculation errors and the $3.1 million tied to thin invoice detail -- arguing its numbers were right. reviewed the objection and didn't budge, saying its analysis showed 's costs weren't always calculated correctly and its invoice-documentation requirements weren't consistently met.
The takeaway
- This is a documentation failure at scale, not a fraud finding. never alleges the $425 million was misspent -- only that nobody checked. That distinction matters, but it also means nobody can currently say how much of it was actually proper.
- wrote its own fix, then didn't follow it. The quarterly-reporting requirement that would have prevented this exists because of the agency's own 2023 response to an earlier audit -- it just was never enforced.
- The program most in question is already being closed out. ended SSP grant awards in March 2025, before this audit finished. The oversight gaps it found now shape how that closeout -- and the still-open EFSP-H accounting -- gets resolved.
This piece describes a grant-oversight and documentation failure identified by 's independent Inspector General -- it takes no position on humanitarian relief funding or immigration policy, which are separate questions from whether the money was properly tracked. 'Alien,' used throughout this piece, is the report's defined statutory term (8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(3): any person who is not a U.S. citizen or national), not editorializing language. 'Questioned costs' is an audit term for spending that could not be verified as allowable, not a finding that funds were definitely misused -- 's own appendix categorizes the full $441.5 million as 'unsupported,' with $0 categorized as confirmed 'ineligible,' meaning this audit did not identify proven improper spending, only spending nobody can currently verify. The SSP sample was a judgmental (targeted) sample rather than a fully random one, so its 34% questioned-cost rate should not be read as a precise, statistically representative rate for all SSP spending. No independent news coverage or congressional reaction to this specific report was found as of publication.
Sources(1) ▾
- DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG), FEMA Cannot Ensure Humanitarian Funding for Aliens Complied with Laws and Regulations (OIG-26-04) (2026-04-22) — A audit of 's Emergency Food and Shelter Program-Humanitarian Relief (EFSP-H) and Shelter and Services Program (SSP) grant spending in fiscal years 2023-2024, including 's formal written response and 's reply. Fetched directly and converted with pdftotext -layout. oig.dhs.gov · original document
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has two grant programs that reimburse state and local governments and nonprofits for feeding, sheltering, and providing medical care to people released by while their immigration cases proceed. A DHS Inspector General audit⧉ found cannot verify that $425 million awarded through one of those programs in fiscal 2023 was spent on anything allowable at all -- because neither nor the nonprofit board it works with ever collected the spending reports required to check.