That's the Sound of Puckering in SoCal After DOJ Says It Will Find Where Homeless Billions Went

Twenty-four billion dollars. Can you fathom how much money that is? Me neither, which is why I asked Perplexity AI to show me what $24 billion looks like in $100 bills: 

 ≈16,536,000cubic inches

Which is the equivalent to—take a breath—

~10 standard 20-foot shipping containers (each ~1,170 ft³) 

Or:

Roughly half the volume of an Olympic swimming pool (50m × 25m × 2m ≈ 2,500 m³)

Or:

16.3 miles high if stacked on top of each other

If you had to “lose” ten 20-foot-long containers full of $100 bills, how would you do it? Well, somebody figured it out because it’s gone. And all California got for all the spending was a 32% increase in homeless people. 

Last week, the Department of Justice (DoJ) in Central California announced a full-on, no-holds-barred task force investigation to determine who got the money. 

Related: No Wonder Gavin Newsom Didn't Want an Audit to Track $24 Billion in Homeless Spending

The investigation by U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli will look into all aspects of how that money was spent in the Central District of California. That area, sadly, does not include San Francisco, but it does include an area covering 20 million Californians in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, and Ventura Counties. 

To give you an idea of how serious this is, the announcement of the criminal investigation into the missing billions is listed under the Public Corruption area of the DoJ website. 

This is a criminal investigation, so we’re led to believe that, contrary to the audit, which resulted in no consequences, people could go to jail for this. 

This time the pucker factor is high:

This task force will be comprised of federal prosecutors from the Major Frauds Section, the Public Corruption and Civil Rights Section, and the Civil Division’s Civil Fraud Section of the United States Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California. Assisting the U.S. Attorney’s Office will be the FBI, the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development Office of Inspector General (HUD-OIG), and IRS Criminal Investigation. [emphasis added]

Oh, snap. They brought in the IRS. 

Exactly one year ago, I reported on the audit of the state’s homeless expenditures. It honed in on two areas. I wrote: 

Meanwhile, back at the audit, the bean counters looked at two cities to determine how they spent the money. San Diego and San José (they're putting the accent over the 'e' these days — equity, you understand) accounts were examined:

[N]either city could definitively identify all its revenues and expenditures related to its homelessness efforts because neither has an established mechanism, such as a spending plan, to track and report its spending. 

Although both cities provide tens of millions of dollars for homelessness programs and services through agreements with external service providers, such as nonprofits, neither city evaluated the effectiveness of its agreements.

So, I concluded that the town, once known for naval efficiency and the tech maestros in Silicon Valley, couldn’t count. 

Related: Video: L.A. Fire Official Pleads With Homeless to Stop Setting Fires

Statewide, the audit found that the California Interagency Council on Homelessness stopped tracking spending and failed to evaluate whether all that spending was helping actual homeless people. Indeed, homelessness increased in those seven areas.  

Essayli says there’s plenty to investigate. 

Los Angeles County alone contains a homeless population of more than 75,000, of which more than 45,000 are within the city limits of Los Angeles. The total homeless population of the remaining six counties of the district exceeds 20,000.

Despite voter approved initiatives and billions of dollars spent on tackling this issue, homelessness remains a crisis, especially in Los Angeles County. Last month, a court ordered audit found  that homelessness services provided by the city and county of Los Angeles were “disjointed” and contained “poor data quality and integration” and lacked financial controls to monitor contracts for compliance and performance. 

That court-ordered audit showed that nothing had changed from the previous year. 

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass said she “welcomed” this new DOJ investigation. But she doesn’t want it used as a “fishing expedition.” Too late. That last audit was bad enough. 

It turns out that the latest audit found you didn’t even have to stick your pole in the water to find any “fish.” You could bring those crazy catfishermen in, and all they’d have to do is stick their hands in the water and bring up big fat ones. Over and over. 

That audit found that L.A. County and City didn't keep track of the money, didn't know where it was being spent, and had no way to check it. Furthermore, they didn't have a strategy. It turns out that the throw-everything-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks methodology doesn't work. 

It was utter chaos. Was this actually intentional chaos to hide payoffs to friends’ newly created nonprofits/NGOs?

“California has spent more than $24 billion over the past five years to address homelessness,” said United States Attorney Bill Essayli. “But officials have been unable to account for all the expenditures and outcomes, and the homeless crisis has only gotten worse. Taxpayers deserve answers for where and how their hard-earned money has been spent. If state and local officials cannot provide proper oversight and accountability, we will do it for them. If we discover any federal laws were violated, we will make arrests.” [emphasis added]

I’ve seen close up how California has biffed the homeless issue. State regulations have changed in the past ten years that require fewer accomplishments from drug addicted and criminal homeless. Indeed, you get what you pay for. If you don’t require addicts (which most of them are) to go to meetings or give community service to receive services, then you get more drug tourists who come for the freedom to enjoy the weather and free stuff, all without having to work for it. 

Related: Remember the 'Homeless' Addict Who Said Portland 'Was Loving Them to Death'? We've Got an Update

I had a guy tell me one time that his homeless counselor in New York gave him a bus ticket to California. She told him that it was much better to be homeless in the winter in California than in New York. Can't argue with the logic, but this is what explains California being home to more than 24% of the nation's homeless and growing.

We hope somebody who pilfered this money for self-serving reasons will go to jail. We hope the DoJ punishes people for what they did. We also hope the de facto excuse we’ve been hearing recently, the “oopsie, we’re incompetents,” isn’t an excuse for the very real graft likely going on here. Somebody needs to be locked up and their faces need to be on the front pages of every newspaper, splayed on nationwide TV, and overwhelming the algos on all social media. 

Bring on those crazy DoJ catfishermen.

And finally, here's a reminder: Burning a 16.3-mile-high stack of $100 bills under the pretext of “helping” isn’t actually helping. It’s — what’s that phrase again? Oh, yes, “public corruption.”