Hundreds of billions missing

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. 

I’m Myrna Brown.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

With tax day coming next month, Americans are once again reminded how much money flows into Washington.

And that raises an old question: how much of it is being lost to fraud and abuse?

WORLD commentator Cal Thomas now on the problem—and why it proves so difficult to fix.

CAL THOMAS: President Trump has signed an executive order creating a new task force to crack down on fraud in federal programs. It will be chaired by Vice President JD Vance.

The administration says the effort could recover billions of dollars for taxpayers.

At the White House, the president made it official with the stroke of a pen.

TRUMP: So I’ll sign, and then we’ll take some nice questions from our wonderful media.

And if the numbers are anywhere close to accurate, the problem he’s trying to tackle is staggering.

According to the Government Accountability Office, the federal government loses somewhere between $233 billion and $521 billion every year to fraud and improper payments.

That is not a typo. Hundreds of billions of dollars.

The GAO admits it cannot provide a precise figure because many losses are never reported. Even the confirmed cases are remarkable.

Sixteen federal agencies reported $162 billion in improper payments across sixty-eight programs in fiscal year 2024 alone. Medicare and Medicaid account for more than half of that total.

And yet meaningful reform has proven politically radioactive.

Politicians know that touching entitlement programs invites attacks from the opposition party—and possibly from voters who benefit from the system.

So the money keeps flowing.

The administration says the new task force will try to change that.

VANCE: This is a very important whole-of-government approach to tackle the fraud problem.

At the White House, Vance pointed to one example investigators say they uncovered in Minnesota.

VANCE: We saw evidence that in Minneapolis there were Somalis… defrauding a Medicaid program meant for autistic children… people getting rich off the fraud while American citizens got poor.

According to the White House, fraud in Minnesota alone may have totaled $19 billion.

And officials believe similar vulnerabilities exist in several other states.

President Trump says eliminating fraud could even balance the federal budget.

TRUMP: If we found half of the fraud that’s taking place in this country… we would have much more than a balanced budget.

That sounds appealing.

But it is almost certainly optimistic.

Even if every dollar of fraud disappeared tomorrow, it would not erase a national debt that now exceeds $38 trillion.

Balancing the budget would still require something Washington has not shown much appetite for: spending discipline.

There is also another problem.

Fraud is not just a financial issue.

It is a moral one.

Government programs contain large sums of money, distributed through complicated systems, often with weak oversight.

Where those conditions exist, corruption tends to follow.

Which means eliminating fraud may prove about as easy as eliminating sin.

Still, the effort is worth making.

Taxpayers—roughly half the country—are about to send another round of payments to Washington by April 15.

They have every reason to hope someone is finally paying attention to where that money goes.

There was a time in America when living within one’s means was considered a virtue.

The old Puritan ethic emphasized thrift, honesty, and responsibility.

Those values may sound quaint today.

But recovering even a portion of them might do more for the federal budget than any task force ever could.

For WORLD, I’m Cal Thomas.

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