Good going by Mayor Adams in hauling Donald Trump and his administration into federal court for stealing $80 million from New York City. On Feb. 11, we suffered a theft. Comptroller Brad Lander saw that $80,481,861.42 had disappeared from a city account overnight, except that instead of the culprits being hackers or scammers or any of the other usual suspects, the trail led back to the White House.
Elon Musk, who’s barreling through government spending data he doesn’t understand to find fraud and waste, had become convinced, erroneously, that the bulk of the money — allocated by Congress through FEMA to support local migrant shelter efforts — had gone to luxury hotels and pushed the government to seize it. Now Adams is suing Trump, FEMA over the illegal seizure as Lander probes city officials about how they can prevent something like this from happening again.
This suit is about this specific pot of money, but it’s also about the relationship between the cities, states and feds. What is sovereignty if the federal government can help itself to millions of dollars in city funds? And no, it’s not federal money even if it was disbursed by the feds, in the same way that cash you pay for a service doesn’t make it still your cash.
These are taxpayer dollars properly allocated for legitimate purposes, not to mention that it wasn’t nearly enough for how much the federal government should have supported NYC’s migrant services programs.
Let’s take the hypothetical — unsupported by any evidence presented by anyone, including the erratic Musk — that the city somehow was misallocating these funds or otherwise using them in a way other than their approved purpose. Fine; there are ways for the federal government to audit that sort of thing and ensure the integrity of public funds.
None of those ways involve a federal agency just reaching into a city bank account and taking the money because some members of a department of government efficiency — which is neither a real department nor particularly efficient — decided that they didn’t want us to have the money.
There is, of course, no legal mechanism for this to occur. The Trump administration seemed to have leaned on a procedural banking tool for mistakenly sent funds to enact a political clawback, which in itself may have been illegal. That alone could diminish trust in the U.S. financial and banking systems, which is really not something the administration should be interested in doing.
It’s part and parcel with DOGE’s efforts to constrict already-allocated federal funding via the Treasury systems: go to the underlying payment systems to try to sidestep the illegality of the moves.
We can’t imagine what counterargument the Trump administration lawyers will advance in response. We do know that whatever they roll out would have been savaged by the very same MAGA political movement had it been presented by the Biden administration in an effort to suddenly strip funds from Republican states or localities that had already received them. We’d be hearing about executive tyranny and the end of federalism at the hands of an out-of-control White House.
Pointing out hypocrisy would only help if these people had the capacity for shame, but at least a federal judge can slap them down.