The federal government sent out roughly $186 billion last year that it should not have. That’s not my number or a think tank’s number. It’s from the Government Accountability Office, which is the government auditing itself and not enjoying the results.
Do the math with me. $186 billion over 365 days is about $510 million a day. Every day, including weekends and holidays, somebody in Washington could have stood at a window and handed out half a billion dollars to the wrong people or in the wrong amounts, and the total would still come out about the same.
The GAO’s fiscal 2025 estimate covers 64 programs at 15 agencies, and it’s up about $24 billion from the year before. Roughly 73% of the errors came from five areas: Medicare, Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, SNAP, and a pandemic-era SBA grant program for shuttered venues. Medicare and Medicaid alone make up about half of the whole pile. The GAO also says as much as $3 trillion has leaked out this way since 2003. Trillion, with a T. Twenty-three years of the same mistake.
Fair warning, because I’d rather be accurate than loud: “improper” does not mean “stolen.” A lot of it is overpayments, paperwork errors and people who got money they weren’t eligible for. Some of it is fraud, and some of it nobody can even classify. Fine. That makes it worse, in my book. If a business cut checks with this error rate, it would be out of business or in handcuffs.
Here’s what really gets me. Thirteen programs across seven agencies have had error rates of 10% or higher two years running, and six of those have been over 10% for at least four years in a row. That’s not a surprise anymore. That’s a business model.
There’s also a hole in the count. Welfare money that flows through the states under TANF, about $16.5 billion a year, isn’t even in the government-wide estimate, because the federal government can’t make the states hand over the data. The GAO has asked Congress to fix that. As of the latest reporting I could find, Congress hasn’t.
I’ve said before that we don’t have a tax problem, we have a spending problem, and this is the plain version of it. I’m happy to pay for roads and firefighters. I’m not happy to learn that $186 billion goes out the door wrong in a single year while politicians tell me the answer is more revenue. The same Congress that won’t close this gap also passed a stock-trading bill that doesn’t stop the stock trading, so excuse me if I’m not holding my breath.
The fixes aren’t glamorous, which is probably why nobody campaigns on them. Verify who’s eligible before the money goes out. Make agencies report honestly. Make the states share their data. Audit like it’s your own wallet. Nobody gets a ribbon-cutting for that.
My two cents: before anyone asks for another dime of your money, make them find the half-billion they misplace every single day.
Photo: U.S. Capitol building, public domain (CC0) via Wikimedia Commons and Openverse.