The Fraud Hits Just Keep Coming

Greetings! Glad to see you survived the weekend. Today is Monday, Dec. 22, 2025.

Today in History:

1885: Samurai Itō Hirobumi becomes the first Prime Minister of Japan

1989: Romania ousts communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu

1990: Labor activist Lech Wałęsa is sworn in as Poland's first popularly elected president.

Birthdays today include: Composer Giacomo Puccini, baseball’s Steve Garvey, Maurice and Robin Gibb, Actor Ralph Fiennes, and Sen. Ted Cruz.

I wrote about Minnesota fraud and mismanagement the other day. I suggested in that piece that they were not alone. Ohio and Colorado were following suit. I note that Fox is chasing the story in Colorado. I probably should have mentioned Gov. Gavin Newsom’s California.

California is the Fraud Capital of America:

$32 billion in unemployment fraud
$24 billion in homeless funds "lost"
$18 billion on nonexistent bullet train
$650 million on scrapped 911 system.

A scathing report from the State Auditor just identified 8 separate state agencies as…

— Kevin Kiley (@KevinKileyCA) December 21, 2025

In a sane world, those kinds of numbers would drop a cartoonish anvil on any hope of a successful presidential run at the very least. More likely, the response would involve jail time. But of course, this is California, we’re talking about, where the trick apparently is turning revelations of fraud into a political advantage. The whole thing gets treated like a series of "minor" accounting errors.  That's a sleight of hand they've gotten all too efficient at of late. The Los Angeles Daily News reports in a syndicated column: 

The bad report card is California’s abysmal record of waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement. The full-ride scholarship is the continued employment, even re-election, of everyone responsible for it.

The California State Auditor has just released a report on its “state high-risk government agency audit program.” To land on the high-risk list, an agency or statewide issue must meet four conditions, starting with “waste, fraud, abuse or mismanagement” or “impaired economy, efficiency or effectiveness” that may result in “serious detriment” to the state or its residents.

The other conditions are the “likelihood” of waste, fraud, etc., the lack of corrective action, and the potential for corrective action to fix the problem.

Guess how many agencies and statewide issues meet the “high-risk” conditions. If you guessed all of them, you may be psychic, but it’s currently seven. At least it was seven until this latest report. Now it’s eight.

The new “high-risk” agency is the California Department of Social Services. It joins the list because the One Big Beautiful Bill signed into law earlier this year holds states accountable for a high “payment error rate” by making them pay a portion of the cost of benefits, in this case CalFresh benefits, that previously had been covered entirely by the federal government.

We’re talking about SNAP again, which is in this case administered by California under the CalFresh name. 

There was no particular accounting for the federal money feeding that program until the Big Beautiful Bill’s passage. We never would have known the extent of the fraud. Do you understand now why the Democrats were working so hard against passing the Big Beautiful Bill? Well, that’s one reason anyway. 

We're talking about a group of people to whom accountability is a larger problem than fraud. I mean, how much of the fraud we're seeing at the state level is being covered by federal grants because the state funding wasn't there to get the job done, having spent it, shall we say, on "personal projects"?
 
 I hasten to point out that the article falls a little short, listing the amounts for only four agencies when eight are indicated. The total tab, as I can determine, totals in the area of $75 billion. In case you don't know, the state’s entire budget is currently listed at $322 billion. That means a quarter of that huge budget is up for fraud.
  
 But now the gig is up.

States with high payment error rates have to “shoulder part of the cost of the program’s benefits,” as the auditor put it. Shouldering the cost will run California $1.2 billion if the state can get the payment error rate down to the range of 8-10 percent. It has been as high as 13.4 percent. Currently it’s almost 11 percent, and that means the state’s share of the program cost will be $2.5 billion.

There are still (!) concerns about misspent COVID-19 funds in California — some $285 billion over two years, of which about $2 billion remains totally unaccounted for. 

To the shock and amazement of nobody, Healthcare fraud is high on the list of concerns in California, as well. Mostly, they seem to be having a problem determining who is and is not qualified for Medi-Cal. You’ll recall Newsom bragging he was covering the medical bills for illegals, as Catherine so ably described last week.

At this point, the last number I heard was that California has an $18 billion deficit. And that's on paper. I expect the actual number will be MUCH higher. 

There’s going to be rough times ahead for California’s state government as its officials, Newsom included, attempt to spin all this like it’s all Donald Trump’s fault.

And that brings up a theoretical point. Change the name from Newsom to Trump. Do you suppose under those conditions, the coverage on this stuff wouldn't be wall-to-wall, 24/7? Finding info on it would be as easy as finding socialists at a DNC convention. As it is, my research this morning took several hours. It's not hard to see that someone would rather this stuff not get placed in front of the voters.

I observe this is why our founders wrote the concept of LIMITED government into our Constitution. The opportunities for fraud and abuse are far too great when the government is not limited. The evidence of this is all around us, and I suspect it will play a large role in the upcoming elections.   

Thought for the day: If you're facing the right direction, you've got it halfway beat. All you need to do then is keep walking.

By the way, I have a couple of special columns for you on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day as well.  Be sure to check back here over the holidays. I promise you won't be sorry.

I'll see you here tomorrow as well.

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