Editor:  This is the seventh in my ‘Knowledge is Power’ series. Although there is a lot of knowledge provided here daily my goal with this series is to supply readers with sources of information so that (LOL!) I don’t have to continually answer basic questions and you can get to work where you live to help educate your friends, neighbors, elected officials and the media about the expensive, dysfunctional program that is changing America by changing the people!

Stop reading here if you don’t want to know more!  If you do, then read this post, check out the 2017 annual report and go to the category specifically set up to archive this series of posts for more information—Knowledge is Power.

The Refugee Act of 1980 requires the HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement to submit an annual report to Congress within three months of the close of the previous fiscal year (fiscal years close on September 30 of the previous year), but they perennially seem incapable of producing the document on time and often don’t publish one for years.

The Trump ORR hasn’t gotten it done on time either!

Well hallelujah, the 2017 report came out just about a week ago. 

If they followed the law we should be seeing the 2019 report by now.  By the way, I once did an analysis of those reports and when they were submitted and learned that during the Reagan and George HW Bush administrations the ORR followed the law, but when Clinton came in and Lavinia Limon (see post yesterday) became the head of the office they went off track and have never been on time since.

In FY17 the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s funding was $1.6 BILLION! 

And no where in the report did I find the cost of the US State Department’s share of the budgetary burden or the Dept. of Homeland Security share (it could be there, it usually is reported in the annual reports, but I didn’t see it).

 

Again, I haven’t analyzed it carefully yet, but did have a look at the pages on welfare use and as usual it’s an eye-opener.

Of those who willingly reported in a survey for FY16 (page 20) here are some examples:

35% were on some form of cash assistance

14% TANF

16%  SSI (Supplemental Security Income, Social Security)

67% Food Stamps

24% Housing Assistance

Go to the report to see how much federal boodle the contractors get for myriad projects.

See a list of all of the annual reports.

I found them all useful when I wanted to find out how many Somalis we admitted since the program began, because, as you know if you have been using the Refugee Processing Center data (Knowledge is Power IV), that data only extends back to 2002.  Before 2002 you can do the laborious work of looking at the data provided on admissions in each annual report before 2002.

See that 2008 post about Somali numbers since the Refugee Admissions Program began. I used annual reports to find the numbers for much of it.  I was updating for awhile and I guess I better not be lazy and add 2017, 2018, and 2019 one of these days!

Again, today’s post is archived in a category set up for only this series of posts I call—Knowledge is Power.