Rand Paul presses Congress to vote on ending refugee welfare, forcing charities to pick up tab

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who serves as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, is drafting a transformative new bill that will return the responsibility of care for refugees to their sponsors and the charitable organizations who brought them to the United States, removing them from the tax bill of Americans. 

"They will survive the way we traditionally did. When we admitted people, if you sponsored them, they're your responsibility," Paul told Just The News.

"You have many of these church charities involved in bringing people here, and then the church charity thinks that charity involves signing them up for welfare. No. Charity is if your charity brings them here, and they can't or aren't working enough to have food, you feed them. It's charitable to give your own money. It's not charitable to take someone else's money."

Paul, along with other members of Congress in both the House and the Senate, have been sounding the alarm on a key component of welfare program eligibility, which was redefined by the Biden administration, who ushered in millions of illegal immigrants under novel parameters for eligibility.

Under U.S. law, most legal immigrants are subject to a five-year waiting period before becoming eligible for major federal means-tested public benefits like Medicaid, SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), and TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), but refugees and asylum-seekers are fully exempt from this bar and can access these programs immediately.

$1.6 trillion in wasteful spending identified

However, Paul argues, "What we have done is we've gone around the legal immigrant status, and we've added this whole other category of a special visa or refugee status, which is hundreds of thousands of people. Hundreds of thousands of people come in on this, and they're on welfare. It's supposed to be against the law."

Paul, who began publishing his annual Festivus Report to highlight examples of federal government waste through his "airing of grievances," has been a consistent voice opposing government waste and fraud. In the December 2025 edition, he identified approximately $1.6 trillion in wasteful spending, including funding for cocaine experiments on dogs, payments to influencers promoting COVID vaccines, and massive interest on the national debt. 

The name of the annual report was inspired by the TV show Seinfeld, in which Festivus was a humorous, anti-commercial holiday invented by Frank Costanza. 

The report harkens back to Senator William Proxmire, D-Wis., who awarded the "Golden Fleece Awards" on a monthly basis from 1975 to 1988, spotlighting what he deemed the most "wasteful, ridiculous or ironic use of the taxpayers' money," often targeting seemingly silly scientific studies. 

Paul went on to warn against other Senate Republicans who are inclined to keep the refugee funding as a part of the next federal budget. "I found out in the last couple of months that the refugee money, the $5 billion, is still in the appropriations process. In the Republican Senate, virtually every Republican senator voted to keep the refugee money in."

Paul is prepared to throw a wrench in the machine. As of now, that bill was slated to come up this week. "They delayed it because I think they heard that I'm going to bring an amendment to strip it, and so it'll still be in the money January 30. If there's 4, 5, 6 million in there, I will do whatever it takes to get an amendment vote. And usually if I threatened to slow the process up, I can get a vote," Paul said.

In an effort to get members of Congress on record, Paul cautioned, "I think all Republicans and Democrats ought to vote on whether we're going to look at Somali fraud and look the other way and just keep funneling the money to the refugee welfare programs."

"We can't take care of our own, much less admitting hundreds of 1000s of new people. So I'm following this closely."

Broad-stroke spending cuts to control waste

Examining the overarching issue of wasteful spending in Washington, Paul proposed a blanket reduction in spending that might be more palatable than previous approaches. 

"What I've proposed for everything is to balance the budget, you have to have 6% less spending," Paul told Just The News. "And what I like about doing it across the board, is everybody comes in and has a sad story like research money for Alzheimer's. I have family members with it. Everybody does. I have sympathy. We're a wealthy country. Can't we afford it?" Rand asked rhetorically. 

"And so if we spent 100 million last year. I'll say, could we spend 94 million? And you know, most of the families that come in say, well, that's not that unreasonable. We'll still be doing Alzheimer's research. We're just going to do 6% less so we don't bankrupt the country. But I think it's the same with refugee money. 6% would be the minimum."

Amanda Head is the White House Correspondent at Just The News. Follow her on X.