Elon Musk’s DOGE, HHS ended $18 million contract with San Antonio nonprofit over empty migrant housing facility — but organization calls claims of corruption ‘baseless’

Nonprofit paid millions to operate empty facility

According to the DOGE post, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) was paying around $18 million per month to Endeavors to run a facility in Pecos, Texas, that was intended for use housing unaccompanied migrant children. However, at the time, the facility was sitting empty.

DOGE officials felt that paying millions per month for an unused shelter wasn’t the best use of taxpayer money — especially as it noted the occupancy of national licensed facilities is now below 20% — so it ended the contract.

Endeavors, however, believes it was acting within the scope of its obligations and that the service it was providing was a valuable one that was in line with its obligations. In an interview with News 4 San Antonio, a source from Endeavors shared that the shelter had been occupied from March 2021 to March 2023, and again from September 2023 to February 2024, over which time it served 40,000 unaccompanied minors.

When the government stopped using the shelter in March 2024, Endeavors said funding was still needed to pay all the expenses associated with keeping the shelter ready to be used again at any time — like its lease, medical facilities, vaccine refrigeration and the hundreds of cameras required for security.

It also said federal officials were on site daily, and that the federal government decided which locations should be used as shelters for migrants and not the nonprofit itself.

Regardless, the contract has now come to an end so Endeavors’ work with the government on this issue is halted, at least for now, along with payments to the nonprofit.

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Is there a conflict of interest?

The DOGE post on X didn’t just focus on the emptiness of the facility. It also aimed to highlight the connections Endeavors had with the Biden administration in order to cast doubt on whether the contract was on the up-and-up in the first place.

The X post stated that, “A former ICE employee and Biden transition team member joined Family Endeavors in early 2021 and helped secure a sole-source HHS contract for overflow housing from licensed care facilities. As a result, Family Endeavors’ cash and portfolio of investments grew from $8.3M in 2020 to $520.4M in 2023.”

While this might seem like a conflict of interest, Endeavors’ statement indicated the nonprofit had been serving migrant families under contracts with the government since 2012 and that it was just one of 15 organizations contracting with the government in 2021 to try to help house migrants.

“Our selection was based on our proven experience, capacity, and more than a decade of performance,” the nonprofit stated.

Evidence of a connection with former government officials alone isn't, by itself, evidence of corruption or wrongdoing, so readers of DOGE and Endeavors’ statements can draw their own conclusions from the competing facts.

It's worth noting, though, that Musk's companies SpaceX and Tesla have been awarded $18 billion in federal contracts since 2015 — although those contracts were largely awarded under the Biden administration. Still, some have questioned whether Musk himself may have a conflict of interest in determining what contracts will be cut as they believe it's unlikely his own company’s contracts will be on the chopping block — unlike the contract with Endeavor.