The Bobster
Senior News Editor since 2004
Inside Mayor Adams’ migrant debit card boondoggle — no-bid bank gets $50 million, border crossers up to $10,000 each
Mayor Adams’ debit-card program for migrants has the potential to become an open-ended, multi-billion-dollar Bermuda Triangle of disappearing, untraceable cash, used for any purpose.
nypost.com
Inside Mayor Adams’ migrant debit card boondoggle — no-bid bank gets $50 million, border crossers up to $10,000 each
By
Social Links for Nicole Gelinas
Published Feb. 19, 2024, 6:11 p.m. ET
It takes money to make money, as the old saying goes, and apparently, it also takes money — as much as $53 million — to give money away.
Earlier this month, The Post broke the story that Mayor Eric Adams is giving out pre-paid cash cards to migrants.
Unusually for the mayor, Adams didn’t publicize this story himself, and his administration for nearly a month has failed to correct several public misperceptions about it.
One misperception is that the program allows the city to give out just $50 million to migrants.
No wonder the mayor has been reticent.
This debit card program — if you read the actual contract — has the potential to become an open-ended, multibillion-dollar Bermuda Triangle of disappearing, untraceable cash, used for any purpose.
It will give migrants up to $10,000 each in taxpayer money with no ID check, no restrictions and no fraud control.
Why give out debit cards?
When The Post exposed the mayor’s debit card program earlier this month, the mayor’s office spun it as a money-saving program, to solve a problem: Migrants staying in hotels don’t eat all their food.
5 The Adams administration will start handing out pre-paid debit cards to migrant families. ZUMAPRESS.com / MEGA
DocGo, the city’s no-bid “emergency” contractor to provide migrants with three meals a day, throws away up to 5,000 meals daily, wasting $7.2 million a year.
Some food is inedible — expired or rotten — and other food doesn’t meet migrants’ dietary needs.
Providing mass-scale meals competently and with options for specific needs — halal, kosher, vegan, non-gluten — isn’t that hard: The school system does it, airlines do it, hospitals and jails do it.
It wouldn’t be that difficult for the city to solve this problem: On-site city auditors could refuse to pay for meals that are objectively inedible, with visible mold, for example, or with expired labeling.
Solving the old boondoggle with a new boondoggle
Instead of assuring that its existing no-bid “emergency” contractor fulfills its duty to provide edible food, however, the Adams administration has solved its problem by retaining a new no-bid “emergency” contractor — to provide a service with far more scope for waste, fraud and abuse than stale sandwiches: giving out potentially billions of dollars of hard cash, few questions asked.
Which vendors did the city’s Housing Preservation & Development consider for this contract, as qualified to provide this complex financial service?
New York City is home to hundreds of top-tier financial services and public benefits providers, a dream of a competitive bidding pool, to ensure that the city gets a good price, as well as strong protections against fraud and abuse.
But HPD considered only one: Newark-based Mobility Capital Finance, which also has an office in Harlem.
MoCaFi was founded by Wole Coaxum, a former managing director at JPMorgan Chase, who said the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 inspired him to serve the “underbanked” and “narrow the racial wealth gap.”
How did HPD choose Mobility Capital? The contract makes it quite clear: MoCaFi was “referred to HPD by City Hall.”
What kind of experience did MoCaFi bring to this complex endeavor?
Where did City Hall find MoCaFi?
The only clue is from a stray off-the-cuff comment Adams made at a reception earlier this month, calling MoCaFi a minority business “that we met on the campaign trail … Little did we know that God is going to say, ‘There’s going to be a crisis, you’re going to have to meet them’ … And it’s going to cost us money” to “put investment … in our community.”
A year ago, the Adams administration was already eager to find something for MoCaFi to do.
Last year, the director of the mayor’s fund to advance New York City — a slush fund powered by anonymous private donors — raised at one of the fund’s board meetings the concept of “an upcoming partnership with the mayor’s office … and MoCaFi … on a universal basic income project”: that is, giving poorer New Yorkers (not migrants) cash.
Coaxum seems to have become part of the mayor’s orbit, and even provided a quote to an official City Hall press release praising Adams’ founding of a new “Office of Engagement.”
How much city cash will MoCaFi give out — and how much will MoCaFi be paid?
Since doing its migrant deal with MoCaFi, Adams has been content to allow a public misperception: that this program is small and focused, with 500 migrant families at the Roosevelt Hotel receiving debit cards of about $1,000 a month, allowing them to buy necessities at grocery and convenience stores.
As the mayor said in February in response to a press question, “We’re doing on a pilot project with 500 people.”
It’s easy to conclude — and the mayor has not disabused anyone of this thought — that that’s how this will all cost $53 million or thereabouts, the headline figure reported in the press.
Nope. A thousand dollars a month for 500 families for a year — a good time frame for a pilot — would cost $6 million.
The city could have written and signed a contract for about that amount — a contract that allowed for a well-defined pilot program with such well-defined costs, and a way to judge its results.