Musk and Rogan’s shutdown fantasy

On Friday, Elon Musk appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast and falsely claimed that the government shutdown was a dispute over blue states diverting billions of dollars in fraudulent federal payments to undocumented immigrants. Musk claimed that states like California and New York would be bankrupt without federal aid and that they depend on such funding to secure votes from undocumented immigrants.

“The entire basis for the government shutdown is that… the Trump administration correctly does not want to send massive amounts of, like, hundreds of billions of dollars to fund illegal immigrants in the blue states, in all the states really,” Musk said to host Joe Rogan.

What went unmentioned, however, was the actual dispute at the heart of the shutdown: the expiration of subsidies that will dramatically increase health insurance costs for millions of Americans.

Musk is the wealthiest person in the world, and made these false claims on the number one podcast in the United States. Rogan did not push back on Musk’s claims and accepted Musk’s version of reality.

FACT: California and New York send more money to the federal government than they get back

Musk claimed that “New York and California would be bankrupt… without the massive fraudulent federal payments that go to those states to pay for illegals, to create a massive financial incentive for illegals.” When Rogan asked how, Musk responded that these states “wouldn’t be able to balance their state budgets, and they can’t issue currency like the Federal Reserve can.”

Contrary to Musk’s claims, California and New York would not “be bankrupt” without funding from the federal government. Both states pay significantly more in taxes to the federal government than they receive back in federal funding. The federal government relies on states like California and New York to subsidize states that are less wealthy.

According to a report by the Rockefeller Institute of Government, California paid more in federal taxes than it received in federal funding in six of the nine fiscal years between 2015 and 2023. The only exceptions were due to federal assistance related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The same is true for New York, which paid more in federal taxes than it received back in six out of the nine years between 2015 and 2023. Excluding COVID spending, New York paid more in federal taxes than it received in federal funding every year from 2015 to 2023 except for 2020. From 2015 to 2019, “New York taxpayers contributed $164.3 billion more to the Federal government than the state received back in Federal spending.”

FACT: Federal health care spending on undocumented immigrants is minimal

Musk repeatedly claimed that Democrats are spending hundreds of billions to “fund illegal immigrants in the blue states,” citing Medicaid in particular. In reality, Medicaid spending on immigrants, documented or undocumented, across all states is very limited.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, eligible documented immigrants make up just 6% of all people enrolled in Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and not all immigrants with legal status are eligible for these programs. For example, immigrants with temporary protected status and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients are ineligible for Medicaid or CHIP.

The undocumented immigrants that Musk claimed are lured to the U.S. by the healthcare “money spigot” are not eligible for Medicaid, except in the case of an emergency. Musk claimed that this emergency spending amounted to a “slush fund” for blue states. But the emergency spending actually makes up a tiny portion of the Medicaid budget. From 2017 to 2023, emergency spending accounted for less than 1% of the total Medicaid budget. In 2023, the emergency spending budget was about $15 million.

Medicaid spending on documented and undocumented immigrants is not hundreds of billions of dollars, as Musk claimed. Because immigrants pay taxes yet are often ineligible for Medicaid, their tax dollars actually subsidize healthcare for U.S. citizens.

Musk also suggested that the federal government was handing out $10,000 prepaid debit cards to undocumented immigrants, calling it a Democratic ploy to attract illegal voters. Musk appears to be referencing a New York City program, paid with local tax dollars, which ended last year. It provided migrant families in city-funded hotels with about $350 per week to buy their own food. The city estimated that this program halved the cost of providing food to these families.

FACT: Undocumented immigrants cannot and do not vote

Musk also argued that Democrats are using the government as leverage to maintain the flow of federal dollars they use to secure fraudulent votes from undocumented immigrants.

“And the reason you have this standoff is because if the… hundreds of billions of dollars, to create a financial incentive to, like, to have this giant magnet to attract illegals from every part of Earth to these states, if that is turned off, the illegals will leave, because they’re no longer being paid to come to the United States and stay here,” Musk said, stating that this would cause Democrats to “lose a lot of voters.”

“In a nutshell, the Democratic party wants to destroy democracy by importing voters, and… the Republican party disagrees with that,” Musk said.

Musk’s assertion that Democrats use welfare programs to entice undocumented immigrants to illegally vote for them has been proven false numerous times — even by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. A database of U.S. election fraud created by the Heritage Foundation has documented only 57 cases of votes cast by “ineligible alien” voters since 2015. Of those 57 cases, only one occurred in California, and none occurred in New York.

In a study of the 2016 election, the Brennan Center for Justice found that 40 of 42 surveyed jurisdictions had no instances of voting by noncitizens. The instances they did find accounted for 0.0001% of votes cast across those 42 jurisdictions.

A 2022 audit of Georgia’s election rolls found that of the roughly 2,000 noncitizens who attempted to register to vote in the last 25 years, none were successful. Noncitizen voting has also been found to be exceedingly rare in other states, such as Arizona and Oregon.