Eric Adams’ mishandling of migrant debit cards threatens to burden NYC taxpayers
New Yorkers should once again thank Nicole Gelinas, who just exposed yet another outrage — and this time a huge one: Mayor Adams’ bizarre plan for a favored, no-bid firm to hand out potentially billions on preloaded debit cards to illegal migrants.
The city is about to embark on a massive new social-spending program, with up to $53 million earmarked for the first year, giving migrant families more than a $1,000 a month — on top of free housing and other assistance.
Mobility Capital Finance, a newbie to projects of this scale, stands to possibly “earn” hundreds of thousands of dollars for printing out these reams of blank MasterCards.
The firm got this plum job in a no-bid deal.
Adams claims he met the president, Wole Coaxum, during his campaign.
Guess that’s enough to skip making deals that are in the best interest of the taxpayer.
The debit cards be handed off to a population with no real legal identity, no ID restrictions and no meaningful fraud-control.
That leaves the program utterly open for exploitation, either by greedy individuals or the gangs filtering into the city among the migrant waves and preying on vulnerable people with no recourse and no other resources.
The worst part: The program is totally unnecessary.
The problem it’s meant to solve is migrants not eating the meals New Yorkers already bought them from another no-bid contractor because they’ve gone bad, passed their expiration date or violate dietary requirements (or simply because they felt like eating something else).
Surely that could’ve been addressed by the vast infrastructure already in place for people eating on the public dime, like schoolkids.
Actually, the program’s worse than unnecessary: After all, word of free money for migrants isn’t going to slow the waves coming here; it’s going to put in on steroids.
Nor is spending even more on the worsening crisis going to making Washington more likely to cough up aid to help the city.
Hizzoner needs to put an end to this monstrosity pronto.
Gotham’s migrant crisis is causing enough fiscal and social chaos without dumping gasoline on the fire.
