America's Talking - Feds Report About $2.7 Trillion in Improper Payments in Two Decades

Episode Date: April 6, 2024

The federal government reported hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars in improper payments last fiscal year and trillions over the last two decades. According to a new report from the Government Accountability Office, the federal government reported $236 billion in improper payments in fiscal year 2023. The true number, though, is actually much higher, but federal reporting is often lacking. “GAO has found that these payments represent a material deficiency or weakness in internal controls,” GAO said. “Specifically, GAO has noted that the federal government is unable to determine the full extent of its improper payments or to reasonably assure that appropriate actions are taken to reduce them.” Full Story: https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/article_e0f897fc-f137-11ee-811d-5b4aa35ab139.html Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/america-in-focus/support Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hello and welcome to America in Focus powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAleb, chief content officer at Franklin News Foundation, publisher of the Center Square Newswire Service. We are recording this on Thursday, April 6th. With the U.S. debt barreling towards $35 trillion, a new report from the government accountability office this week shows that the federal government has misspent more than $2 trillion over two decades. Joining me to discuss this is Casey Harper, Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief for the Center Square. Casey, you reported on this government waste and fraud this week. Tell us more about it. Yeah, Dan. So what we found is, believe it or not, Dan, the government waste money. I don't know if you knew that. Shocking. It's shocking. Shocking. Right. Yeah. Hope you didn't. Just spit out your morning coffee there. So, yeah, so we look at, you know, there's something called the government accountability office. They are a federal group. that does audits of agencies. They're like a federal watchdog.

They do reports. The reports are very long. They're dense. But here at the center square.com, we read them and break them down for you, the listeners. And what we find is in fiscal year, 2023, the federal government had $236 billion in improper payments. Now, improper payments are usually when the federal government has some kind of payment like Medicaid or Medicare, and they pay too much. much. Right. And so that money, there's also examples, for instance, with a lot of the COVID relief funds,

which was, you know, a huge pot of money, of course, in the COVID era where you pretty much just show up with a driver's license and get, you know, a million dollars for your business or whatever. It was kind of a crazy wild, wild west of government funding time. And, you know, an uncalculated number of dollars was lost during that time, just obscene waste during that COVID-era money. And a lot of it was to fraudsters who just set up maybe a fake business or fake names and they applied and they got millions, billions of dollars. And they've never been found. Most of that money is not going to be recovered, totally stolen and wasted. And so $236 billion in fiscal year, 2023 alone. This is no small number. I mean, you know,

right now, Dan, and we can talk about this if we want. But Congress is arguing and battling over whether we should send, you know, $60 billion to Ukraine. or $14 billion to Israel. And here we're talking about something four or five times higher, you know, in improper payments than just one fiscal year. So it's a very large number. And when you look at it over the last, you know, a couple of decades, that number for improper payments rises into the trillions.

In fact, it rises to $2.7 trillion in improper payments. And so this is a big problem. It's been going on for a long time. And the number is not insignificant. We're starting to get into like Iraq war numbers. when we talk about these improper payments. And we saw it even at its worst, at its peak during the COVID pandemic. Casey, a graphic from the government accountability office that you included with your story,

I guess the best way I can describe it is alarming at best shows the improper payments over these two decades. And just as recently as 2006, they reported that there was 41. billion in waste. That in and of itself seems inexcusable to me, but that's $41 billion in 2006. That ballooned from $46 billion in 2006 to $291 billion in 2021 billion in 2021, which is, of course, a COVID pandemic year when Congress was just giving money away, essentially. And this past fiscal year, it came down a little bit, but it remains above that $200 billion mark. That just, you know, this is that American taxpayer money. Government has, we've talked about this before. Federal government spends more and more money every year, but it seems to waste more and more money every year.

Yeah, it's true. I mean, it's almost like the bigger the government gets, the more unwieldy it is, the harder it is to really have true oversight. to know where the money is going, and especially during things like COVID, where the money is rushed out or something like an omnibus where all this money comes all at once in a flood and it has to be spent in a certain amount of time. That's where you see, I think, getting worse when the government tries to spend money really quickly. And the federal agencies are incentivized to spend money really quickly because if they don't spend all their money, then Congress has a reason to say, hey, we're not going to give you as much money. You still have money left over. So they're

desperate to get all the money out the door so they can go back and increase their budgets every year or say, hey, we didn't have enough funding. They always want to say, we don't have enough money, we don't have enough funding, but they can't do that if they got all these reserves. So they try to spend the money quickly. But to your point, Dan, about the increase, right? So from you picked 2006, $41 billion to $2023, $2.35 billion. That's about, you know, very roughly a six times increase in about 20 years. We'll say, you know, it's not quite 20 years. But if you just kept that, use those numbers and project it out. This is a very rough projection, just to give you an idea.

If you projected out 20 years and that same rate of growth, that would mean by 2043, we would have, you know, about $1.3 trillion in improper payments a year, right? Well, that number sounds crazy. But that level, that scale of growth is exactly what happened over the last, you know, about 20 years. So, you know, imagine, you know, Dan, you and I, of course, are still here doing the show in 20 years. I hope. Right. But we're going to be talking about $1.3 trillion in one year alone and improper payments, much of which could go to fraudsters. The government has no real plan to get this money back.

They say they do. They say that's not the case. I've heard them out. But when it comes down to it, they talk about losing billions of dollars as if it's just the cost to do in business. Like when you work at a restaurant, sometimes glasses break. This is just how it is. But this isn't just glasses. This isn't small amounts of money. This is billions and billions, hundreds of billions. And when you look over decades, you're getting into the trillions. So I think it's something to think about when you hear these lawmakers talk about some new program. We talk about stimulus checks, for instance, just as listeners have to know, okay, what percentage of those checks is going to end up in the hands of some mobsters or organized crime that organized a way to steal all this money? Because it's definitely

going to happen. And it's probably, we know now, going to be to the tune of billions of dollars. And Casey, these numbers that we're talking about, too, that's what the government accountability office has been able to find and track. Right, right. There's an unknown amount of federal taxpayer dollars that have spent that we don't know about that have been spent improperly, right? I mean, actually, most, you know, all the federal agencies are supposed to report it, but there's still several agencies that don't even report their waste data.

So this is not even over the whole federal government. That's a great point. Well, thank you for joining me today. Casey listeners can keep up with all stories related to government spending and waste at thecentersquare.com.