There is no crisis so bad that government contracting can’t make it worse. Case in point, in addition to providing hotel rooms for thousands of migrants, New York is also providing these same migrants with three meals per day. At least that’s what the $432 million contract says. But in reality, many of those meals, possible even most of them, just wind up in a dumpster because the migrants don’t want to eat them. New York may be paying close to $1 million a month for food that goes into the garbage.

The meals are provided by DocGo, a medical services company that won a no-bid, $432 million contract from the city to provide broad migrant care, despite having had no experience in doing so.

DocGo receives up to $33 a day per migrant for providing three meals a day for each of the roughly 4,000 migrants in its care. From Oct. 22 to Nov. 10, more than 70,000 meals were recorded by DocGo as being “wasted,” according to internal company records obtained by The Times.

At $11 a meal, the maximum rate allowed by the contract, the wasted food for that 20-day period would cost taxpayers about $776,000, or about $39,000 a day. At that rate, the bill for the tossed food would exceed $1 million a month…

DocGo has apparently cut the price of the meals to just under $8 each which brings the loss of taxpayer dollars down somewhat, but the number of uneaten meals hasn’t changed. The company claims that 93% of the meals it prepares are eaten, but the NY Times got hold of reports from individual hotels where the meals are distributed and those reports tell a very different story.

“24 Chicken Alfredo & 24 Spaghetti Chicken Dinner Wasted From Friday,” says one recent shift report from a hotel in Western New York. Another report reviewed by The Times called it a “normal night” when 110 dinner meals — at a hotel with a reported total population of about 230 — were trashed at the Holiday Inn in downtown Albany on Nov. 12.

A DocGo supervisor at the Brooklyn Vybe Hotel, which records say houses about 200 migrants, wrote in an Oct. 31 shift report that 184 meals were wasted at lunch alone.

So if the migrants aren’t eating the food prepared for them, what are they eating? It turns out that many of them are making their own food in their rooms using hot plates, something which is considered a fire hazard.

Kudos to the NY Times for getting its hands on the reports from various hotels but the general pattern of tossing lots of uneaten food is something local news outlets in New York were reporting back in January.

NBC did its own version of the same basic report but included interviews with some of the migrants who said the food was often inedible and was making people sick.

I have no idea who is telling the truth here. On the one hand fresh fruit seems like something that almost everyone ought to be able to eat. And they are also getting bottled water when tap water would probably do. On the other hand, some of the prepared meals in that report above look like bad airplane food.

As several of the commenters pointed out, this looks like a case where the city could have saved a lot of money by just giving people a fraction of the cost of the food in cash rather than paying DocGo to prepare food people don’t want to eat.

So $33 per person, per day. That’s $132 a day for a family of four, which comes out to $924 a week, and $3696 per month. I spend about $1000 per month on groceries for my four person household. Why not give the migrants $1000 worth of vouchers for groceries, and use the remaining $2696 towards their housing and other needs?

On the other hand, some commenters point out that giving migrants a free lunch, even a bad one, is only going to encourage more migrants to come to the US, making the problem worse.

We should not be providing food or benefits to people who aren’t citizens and can’t pay their own way and who are only here because they think they’d have a better life here. The result is what we see now: a huge problem with no end in sight, budget cuts that impact tax paying new yorkers.

At some point the cost of all of this to Americans really should matter. This is exactly why we need to stem the flow of migrants across the border. It’s also why Gov. Abbott’s busing of migrants to blue cities like New York was such a brilliant idea. Now that these sanctuary cities have some skin in the game they seem to understand, in a way they didn’t before, that this can’t go on forever.

When in the history of our country have immigrants been given housing, food, and medical care, all on the backs of the taxpayers’ dime, many of whom struggle to afford housing, food, and medical care? I’m no ‘xenophobic hateful bigot,’ as many on the far-left would call those who believe immigration should be fair and legal.

So far in New York City we’ve seen cuts to NYFD, NYC schools and libraries and god knows what all, so we can pay for those who have come to our city without the means to live in our city. How long is this sustainable, and how many services can you yank away from the middle-class New Yorkers who are just trying to get by?

He’s right about the budget cuts. Mayor Adams announced last month that the budget cuts were coming, thanks in part to the cost of caring for migrants. New Yorkers are going to take a hit in terms of services (including police) because of these ongoing costs. That doesn’t seem fair.

Generally speaking NYC should get out of the business of paying for millions of dollars of food migrants don’t want. People who came here as economic migrants should be expected to work for their own needs just like everyone else. The one caveat here is that you can’t ask migrants to pay their own way if they are simultaneously forbidden by the federal government from working. This is something that Mayor Adams has been complaining about for months. Ultimately, we just need fewer people coming across the border to make this problem more manageable. That’s a problem that only congress and the Biden administration can solve.