Way back in 2011, then-House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) cited expert estimates that the federal government lost an estimated $228 billion, or about 7 percent of the $3.26 trillion total federal spending for 2010.
Now fast forward to 2020, when the federal budget reached nearly $6.6 trillion. If we assume the same seven percent loss to waste, fraud and corruption, then $459 billion of the hard-earned dollars of the American people never made it to the intended purposes. Experts were still saying it was difficult, if not impossible, to know the actual total lost to waste, fraud and corruption, just as they had cautioned in 2010.
Come 2024, and the experts still didn't know the actual total losses! A frequently cited 2024 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimated that losses to improper payments range anywhere from $223 billion to $521 billion between 2018 and 2022. That is, for example, excessive or wholly fake Medicare reimbursement outlays, Social Security checks to long-dead people, and Small Business Administration (SBA) loans going to con artists.
The same GAO report cautioned that its "fraud estimate's range represents 3 to 7 percent of average federal obligations. These percentages should not be applied at the agency or program level," and noted that "no area of the federal government is immune to fraud."
And then came 2025 with Minnesota, Nick Sorley and Somalian fraudsters; much the same in Ohio; billions of dollars worth of Medicare fraud exposed in California; and perhaps the most revealing fact of them all in the war against waste, fraud and corruption:
"The Treasury Access Symbol (TAS) is an identification code linking a Treasury payment to a budget line item (standard financial process).In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible. As of Saturday, this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going. Thanks to @USTreasury for the great work," DOGE announced on X in Feb. 2025.
More than half of all federal spending in a year cannot be tracked to ensure it went to the right recipient! The TAS designation became no longer optional as a result of the revelation, but it still puts — finally — the issue of multiple decades of waste, fraud and corruption in proper context. Even if there had been a genuine total commitment at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue to expose and end all of it, it was indeed impossible to know with certainty how much waste, fraud and corruption there was, because trillions of dollars could not be verified as having gone where Congress intended.
The TAS designation being made mandatory also puts the issue in context for the future. Despite the ultimate folly of the DOGE endeavor, President Donald Trump in 2026 has kept fighting, with the appointment of Colin McDonald as Assistant Attorney General for Fraud Enforcement in the Department of Justice (DOJ), and Trump installed Vice-President J.D. Vance to head the White House Task Force on Fraud. DOGE is still around, too, though it is rarely in the headlines these days, owing to the absence of Elon Musk as its head.
These are not merely symbolic or half-hearted efforts to clean up Trump's image in the wake of last year's DOGE controversies. Romina Boccia, Cato Institute's Director of Budget and Entitlement Policy, lays out the history and the new hope:
“We’ve had episodic anti-waste crusades before, like the Grace Commission in the Reagan years, post-Katrina oversight, Great Recession stimulus failures, and COVID-relief fraud investigations. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has brought broad public attention to the possibility that weak financial controls are a government-wide problem rather than a program-specific one. What makes this moment different is that the conversation is moving beyond isolated scandals toward questioning whether the federal government actually has the systems and incentives necessary to track taxpayer dollars in real time,” Boccia told me in a news piece for The Washington Stand.
In April, McDonald and DOJ announced in a lengthy statement multiple indictments and convictions, including in the benefits fraud arena:
A federal jury found a tax preparer guilty for operating an unemployment insurance fraud scheme to defraud the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance Program out of over $11 million in fraudulent unemployment benefits.
A former employee of the U.S. Department of Labor pleaded guilty in Boston to fraudulently obtaining over $40,000 in pandemic unemployment assistance benefits.
In Massachusetts, a woman pleaded guilty to fraudulently receiving Social Security disability benefits after failing to notify Social Security that her husband, whose income exceeded the program’s limits, became part of the household.
A judge in the Middle District of Florida sentenced a defendant to 63 months in federal prison for submitting a fraudulent Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan application. The court ordered forfeiture in the amount of $739,582.
A grand jury returned an indictment charging a defendant with wire fraud and theft of government money for concealing the death of her aunt in order to obtain Social Security benefits and City of New York pension benefits that did not belong to her. The indictment seeks forfeiture of more than $75,000.
And in four other fraud areas:
A federal grand jury returned an indictment charging a podiatrist and two nurses for allegedly submitting fraudulent claims to Mediare for skin substitute services, resulting in Medicare paying $29 million in claims.
Government Fraud
A Danish researcher—and HHS-OIG top ten most wanted fugitive—was arraigned on wire fraud and money laundering charges. The defendant allegedly stole more than $1 million of CDC grant money by submitting fraudulent documents to the Danish government and a Danish hospital where scientists performed research under the CDC grant.
Tax Fraud
A founder and CEO of a Hong Kong financial services firm pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the United States by helping high-value U.S. taxpayer-clients conceal more than $60 million in income and assets held in offshore bank accounts and evade U.S. taxes.
In the Middle District of Tennessee, a licensed attorney pleaded guilty to filing false tax returns that failed to report millions of dollars in income from cryptocurrency sales and from his consulting business. In total, the defendant caused a tax loss of more than $550,000.
And there are common sense policy and management changes being implemented within the federal bureaucracy that has done such a horrendous job of preventing waste, fraud and corruption. As Baseline Policy President and Founder Matthew Dickerson explains in another of my news stories for The Washington Stand:
"Thanks to the Trump administration’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is finally requiring state Medicaid Fraud Control Units to comply fully with all the federal requirements or else lose federal funding. Just yesterday [June 4], HHS decertified Hawaii’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit due to its lack of enforcement. This sends a signal to states who administer the federal program: Start taking the fraud problem seriously.”
Minnesota, California, Ohio, Washington state, Oregon, Illinois, are you listening?
These actions are no mere frosting on the cake, but represent a tangible slice of the whole rotten scene of waste, fraud and corruption in government spending. We will never know for sure how much there was, but odds are looking better that we're going to know vastly more — and do far more to end it — in the future.
Editor’s Note: Help us continue to report the truth about corrupt politicians.
Join PJ Media VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member