Not Just Abuse, But Waste

A number of people have talked about the misallocation of resources that is ICE and DHS spending.

A friend on Facebook this morning said, "Imagine what 3,000 federal employees could do in the Twin Cities if they were here to build housing."

Another person responded with this:

The Works Progress Administration had an annual budget of $1.3B in 1935, the equivalent of about $30.6B today with inflation.

The economy was in the tank then so let’s discount the inflation a bit. This is still about HALF of the FY 2026 DHS DISCRETIONARY budget ($63.6B).

A lot of public infrastructure around Saint Paul was built with WPA dollars. A lot of public projects that we still use today as public goods.

Hard to picture any of the vast American wealth that’s been allocated to DHS today standing that test of time.

Anyone who pays attention to parks and other publicly owned places in the U.S. knows that WPA infrastructure is everywhere in this country. Money from the WPA funded a bunch of Robert Moses's ambitious, earlier Depression-era projects in New York City (documented in Robert Caro's The Power Broker). It paid for people to build park shelters all over parts of New York State where I've been. 

That's what federal money can do, and still was doing. 

Unlike the waste and abuse we are currently experiencing at the hands of Trump and Stephen Miller's personal army.