Congress Must Do More To Curb Improper Payments

Washington, D.C. is one of the few places where pocket change is measured in billions of dollars. The city that brought the nation a $35-trillion national debt funds itself on money that is not its own. It also fails to confine its profligacy to overspending the money of today’s taxpayers. Instead, deficit spending and borrowing reach into the future’s pockets, seizing funds from America’s children, and Americans yet unborn, to support current operations.

This problem is driven primarily by entitlement spending, to which most politicians intentionally and conveniently blind themselves. It has metastasized, unimpeded, for long enough that it has spread far through the American body politic. Eager to save their own pet projects, however, too many politicians convince themselves, their colleagues, and their constituents that trimming and pairing back the edges of federal spending will suffice. But it isn’t true. Remedying America’s fiscal maladies will require an appropriately comprehensive package of reform. When one is very sick, the proper cure often requires some discomfort.

That said, Washington’s tolerance for waste, fraud, and abuse nonetheless approaches the scandalous. The simple mathematical fact is that solving the gigantism of America’s budgets, deficits, and debt requires more than half measures. But this fact shouldn’t free legislators and bureaucrats to ignore the hundreds of billions of dollars in improper payments that Washington dispenses ­– yearly.

Righting America’s careening fiscal ship will require far more than checking waste, fraud, and abuse. Nonetheless, checking rampant waste, fraud, and abuse is badly needed to restore better fiscal, political, and civic hygiene. While billions represent small fractions of each federal budget, lawmakers cannot forget that each individual dollar comes from individual taxpayers. Each dollar misspent is one that cannot fund a new business, support a local economy, pay a worker’s wage, or cover rent and groceries.

As reported by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 saw an estimated $236 billion in improper payments. “[C]umulative federal improper payment estimates have totaled about $2.7 trillion since FY 2003,” GAO adds. FY23’s figure includes $51.1 billion from Medicare, $50.3 billion from Medicaid, $43.6 billion from pandemic unemployment assistance, $21.9 billion from the Earned Income Tax Credit, $18.7 billion from the notoriously troubled Payment Protection Program, and more.

In July, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for the Social Security Administration (SSA) found that, from FY2015 through FY2022, the agency improperly paid out $71.8 billion. “As of February 2024,” the OIG reported in August, “SSA’s pending actions backlog reached an all-time high of 5.2 million pending actions, resulting in $1.1 billion in improper payments.”

In 2021 and 2021, Congress rushed to provide the Covid-stricken American economy with stimulus. Note, however, that much of this spending, although termed “Covid relief,” will not reach grantees for years yet. Haste in appropriating usually yields wasteful spending and poorly crafted programs, and Covid-justified spending did not defy the rule. The Associated Press (AP) in 2023 “found that fraudsters potentially stole more than $280 billion in COVID-19 relief funding; another $123 billion was wasted or misspent.” This amounts to roughly one tenth of all Covid-era “relief.”

A lesson emerges. When government spends money, some will fall victim to graft. The larger the expenditure, the more hurried and slapdash the spending program, the fewer the accountability mechanisms, the more money will fall to the bad guys.

Members of Congress bear a fiduciary responsibility to their constituents. They are, at the present, failing in that duty. Surely, the bureaucrats dispensing payments must make reforms where necessary. But in the American system, the buck stops on Capitol Hill.