Fifty years from now. an obscure academic from an obscure college will write an obscure paper about "The Total Waste, Fraud, Abuse, and Mismanagement of $4 Trillion in COVID-19 Relief Funds During the 2020 Pandemic."
Three people will read it and immediately forget it. It will end up being filed away, never to be seen or heard of again.
That's a shame for several reasons. First is accountability. The dozens and dozens of government managers responsible for wasting hundreds of billions of dollars or doing nothing while hundreds of billions more were stolen, misused, or flat-out lost will go unidentified. In many nations, such as Japan, this kind of incompetence is severely punished. In America, you get promoted.
Secondly, without learning the lessons from wasted pandemic spending, we're certain to repeat the same mistakes, hire the same kinds of idiots and morons to disburse the money, and then frantically try to hide their incompetence to avoid responsibility.
A recent Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG) report reveals some incredible examples of waste, fraud, and abuse at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) during the pandemic. What was FEMA doing issuing billions of aid during the non-disaster COVID-19 pandemic? I don't think anyone's gotten a satisfactory answer to that question.
Like all federal departments during the pandemic, FEMA developed "streamlined" procedures to dole out money. What did that mean? Basically, it meant that most of the guardrails put in place to prevent fraud and other abuses were dropped in favor of shoveling money out the door with as little oversight as could be managed.
FEMA might as well have sent engraved invitations to fraudsters to help themselves to some cash, not only in the U.S., but also around the world.
The state, which the OIG does not name, received about $853 million from FEMA in September 2020 to address staffing shortages at over 200 health care facilities statewide. Over the next year, FEMA incrementally increased funding, eventually awarding over $9 billion, which the state did not need. From May 2021 to April 2023, unspent grant funds reached $4 billion, before falling to $1.5 billion. FEMA was unaware of this until April 2023, when an OIG investigation was conducted. The agency subsequently de-obligated $500 million of the state's funding.
FEMA did not "validate cost estimates or determine cost reasonableness before obligating funds," according to the OIG. One of the cost estimates, which totaled $1.1 billion, was supported by one sheet of paper, which did not include itemized costs and was not conducted by a "cost-estimating professional" (which is required under FEMA guidelines).
How could they be so clueless? Tracking the money, asking if it was being well-spent, checking to see that the expenditures were justified — the normal, day-to-day duties of any manager anywhere — were simply not followed.
On top of the billions of dollars in unsupported spending, the OIG investigated a random sample of 20 other FEMA grants and found the agency awarded over $32 million worth of improper payments. Six of these projects "did not have the required supporting documentation to validate completion of the work and actual costs incurred before project award and reimbursement," according to OIG. The report also found three FEMA staff members were instructed in 2020 to not conduct "deep dives" when reviewing project eligibility.
Does this kind of mismanagement rise to the level of criminality? The people responsible for this mess knew damn well that there was going to be a lot of fraud and waste. How could they not, when the very procedures put in place to prevent fraud had been deliberately removed?
If there isn't a criminal statute that covers this kind of shocking lack of care for the public purse, there should be.
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