Waste of the Day: ICE Can’t Stay Under Budget — Spent More Than Congress Appropriated

Topline: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spent nearly $1.8 billion more than was allocated in its annual budgets between 2014 and 2023, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office.

ICE can’t seem to manage a budget

Key facts: ICE’s poor budget execution forced the Department of Homeland Security to transfer in $1.4 billion meant for other programs such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Coast Guard, including over $400 million last year.

ICE — the federal agency tasked with protecting the border and stopping illegal immigration — has also received $365 million in supplemental funding from Congress since 2014, according to the GAO report.

ICE holds monthly meetings to review its spending with the House and Senate appropriations committees, but auditors said the dollar figures it presents are often outdated or incomplete. Congress members said they can’t “fully understand” how ICE spends its money.

Some ICE programs didn’t even submit “spend plans” at the beginning of each year to prevent overspending. When plans were submitted, they were not always updated quarterly as required, the GAO report said.

ICE’s budget office is supposed to approve the spend plans and remind officials to update them, but auditors said it was “unclear” whether that actually happened.

ICE also uses several models to project its spending needs, but auditors said ICE does not check to see if the models are accurate. Its budget team “does not currently have the resources to regularly perform” required reviews.

Budget office understaffed

The budget office is supposed to have 48 employees, but 12 positions were unfilled as of last year.

Homeland Security is supposed to perform a separate review of ICE’s budget models, but they’ve only evaluated four of the 16 models since 2018, GAO said.

Background: ICE has a budget of $9.8 billion this year, $1.5 billion more than the program actually requested from Congress. It had a $3.3 billion budget when it was created in 2003.

Encounters at the border have also increased. ICE arrested nearly 171,000 people in 2023, more than double the arrests from 2021.

The budget doesn’t include the $20 billion the Administration for Children and Families spent in 2022 and 2023 on “refugee and entrant assistance.” Previous reporting from OpenTheBooks.com showed that the federal government spent funds to provide cultural orientation, mental health referrals and more to refugees.

Summary: If our federal government can’t stop illegal immigration, it should at least be able to project how much money it will take to secure our border.

The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com.

This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.