The US Government spent $247 billion on waste, fraud, abuse, or just plain mismanagement in FY2022.
According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Federal agencies made an estimated $247 billion in improper payments in FY 2022.
GAO reports that cumulative federal improper payment estimates totaled about $2.4 trillion since FY 2003. That money could have gone to lower our debt.
Approximately 78% of the FY 2022 total (about $194 billion) was reported by five program areas.
There is no accountability beyond these reports, largely because the wild spending doesn’t come with any accountability, and politicians must buy votes with waste. The fraud is rarely found in any meaningful way. Mismanagement is the collective voters’ fault for not holding them accountable by voting them out. However, politicians do lie and media often backs them up.
Improper payments are “those that should not have been made or were made in the incorrect amount.”
National Review reports that the GAO’s findings are underestimated since not all federal agencies provided information on improper payments.
Improper payments have increased over time. In 2003, $35 billion was spent on improper payments. The number first broke $100 billion in 2009. It increased each year from 2017 to 2021, rising from $141 billion to the peak of $281 billion, writes National Review.
Rep. Bob Good says the “government is broken.”
“This is just more evidence that Washington is broken, and too many career politicians and bureaucrats don’t care about how they waste taxpayer dollars,” he said. “We are $34 trillion in debt and will be over $36 trillion in debt before the current debt limit deal ends next January. We cannot afford to wait any longer to stop the runaway spending train and get our fiscal house in order.”
You’d think, but we won’t. We’ll vote the grifters back into office for a rerun of the past four years.
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