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The absolute mountains of money being wasted by our government officials is unconscionable. It should be criminal. It seems that wherever you find government programs there is mismanagement, graft, and outright theft. The waste is rampant because the perpetrators are rarely apprehended. When they are caught, there are rarely any consequences levied against the abusers.

Until a few years ago the Social Security Administration (SSA) didn’t bother with those who willingly stole from the fund. (Because of that, one could make the case that those of us who didn’t defraud the SSA were saps). It has only been over the last 8-10 years that those who defrauded the American people were prosecuted. In 2018, SSA Inspector General audits found that $40 million dollars in benefit checks were sent to 500 dead people in just 3 states, Texas, Maryland, and Michigan. Sadly, metro Detroit was rife with these thieves. Over the last 5 years U.S. Attorneys in Southeast Michigan have prosecuted at least 40 people. They are investigating another 125 who were flagged in the 2018 audit. While there are more prosecutions resulting in an increase in convictions, the Courts are spineless when it comes to punishing the guilty. U.S. Attorney Matthew Schneider reports that of the most recent 41 defendants, 31 were convicted and sentenced, 6 are awaiting sentencing, and 4 are pending. Of the 31 who were convicted, only 7 actually did any jail time. The longest sentence was for 3 years, even though most of the convictions involved hundreds of thousands of dollars stolen over multiple decades of fraud. In 2022, the SSA estimates it made $8.3 billion of what it calls “improper payments” in fiscal year 2020. The $8.3 billion is equal to the annual budget of the state of Oklahoma! The number was $3 billion in 2016. That is not a good trend in a fund that is heading toward bankruptcy. The only way to slow the fraud is to replace the people who continue to mismanage disbursements, and be sure the bad guys go to jail for a lot of years.

Although on a lesser scale, a similar mismanagement occurs in the two retirement plans established for government employees. The Civil Service Retirement System, and the Federal Employees Retirement System, estimated that payments were made to deceased federal employees in the amount of $326 million in fiscal 2022. If the people responsible for sending benefits to the proper beneficiaries are not capable of doing so, they should be replaced forthwith. Those cashing the checks of deceased employees, usually relatives, must see serious prison time.

You may remember the $1,200 stimulus checks that were mailed to Americans during the COVID pandemic. The checks were meant for American citizens. Of course the people responsible for sending the checks couldn’t be bothered to check things like citizenship. Therefore, they also ended up in the hands of non-citizen residents. To make things worse, 85,000 prison inmates reportedly received the checks totaling around $100 million before the government changed course. It is amazing how careless bureaucrats are about dispensing “other people’s money”.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has a system it uses to measure the vulnerability for waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement, in government programs. It rates the U.S. Unemployment Insurance Office as high risk. During the COVID pandemic, this department was responsible for reimbursing $60 billion in fraudulent claims. Keeping with my theme of comparisons, $60 billion is equal to the annual budgets of Illinois and Iowa. If you think the government is doing a better job of shepherding our tax dollars, there’s this. The number of government programs rated as high risk by the GAO has doubled since 1990. That we have an office warning of fiscal vulnerability, and the number of vulnerable programs has doubled, tells you that government leaders don’t care.

Then there is this. Our government has doled out an estimated $5 trillion, across several programs, in relief funds since the beginning of COVID. In a recently released report the Inspector General of the Small Business Association (SBA) made a breathtaking statement. He said the SBA was responsible for disseminating more than $200 billion in potentially fraudulent funds. Those funds were made available to help prop up small businesses that were struggling, or forced to close, during the pandemic shutdown. About $1.2 trillion funded two programs, the Paycheck Protection Plan, and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan. That means that nearly 1 of the 5 dollars allotted to the programs were misspent. (In the sake of full and fair disclosure, the government has recouped about $30 billion of those funds. At what cost we don’t know). The $200 billion our government pissed away is equal to the annual budget of Norway! It is a lot of money.

It isn’t that those responsible for getting the funds into the correct hands don’t know how to avoid fraud. They didn’t care enough to prioritize the safe keeping of taxpayer dollars. Inspector General “Mike” Ware said, “To expedite the process, the SBA ‘lowered the guardrails’ or relaxed internal controls, which significantly increased the risk of program fraud”. He said in an ABC News interview, “In terms of the monetary value, the amount of fraud in these COVID relief programs is going to be larger than any government program that came before it.” He was correct. Michael Horowitz was named Chairman of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee. His committee was charged with measuring how much money was defrauded from the government during the pandemic. Horowitz was quoted as telling ABC News, “A decision was made at the outset of the pandemic: speed was the key. It was a bad choice. It was the wrong choice. It never should have happened.” It is clear from these quotes that a conscious decision was made to deal with massive fraud as opposed to limiting it. Their decisions should have cost them, and anyone pushing them from above, their jobs. We can see, yet again, how easy it is to waste other people’s money. Especially when there are no consequences.

The future of this great nation depends on our replacing those leaders who aren’t responsible enough to make wise decisions for their constituents. Next November we must commit to forgetting about our political affiliations and vote together as Americans. We must rid ourselves of those who would spend us into oblivion. It would be the epitome of stupidity for us to put those who created our problems in charge of fixing them. Traditional Liberals and Conservatives are more alike than the press and the Progressive Left would have us believe. We must stand together and do what is right for the future of our children, grandchildren, and country. It is up to us.

I hope you found this post interesting and informative. If so, please share it with your friends. Thank you, Bob