The Swamp and Congress Lie About Available Budget Cuts

Mark Twain once opined that there a three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics. It is the latter to which old hands in the federal bureaucracy and Congress turn most often to avoid accountability.

President Donald J. Trump has promised to take a chainsaw to the federal budget by eliminating waste, duplication and fraud. You might ask yourself why it is necessary to pursue such a goal when the federal government already has the Government Accountability Office (GAO) whose stated mission is to do precisely that. Well, it pretty simple. First, because the government and its programs are “monopolies” by nature there is no self-regulation by virtue of competition that would require attention to waste, duplication and fraud. After all it’s not the bureaucrats’ money they’re spending and there seems to be an unlimited source of taxpayer funds to paper over the effects of such waste, duplication and fraud. And second, the GAO is staffed by the same bureaucrats, belonging to the same public employee unions as the agencies over which they are supposed to exercise audit functions.

The driver then is not government efficiency, but rather government preservation – job preservation, authority preservation and power preservation. The GAO routinely puts out an annual report describing instances of waste, duplication and fraud which is then widely ignored but the other agencies of the federal government. But even at that, the GAO report identifies millions of dollars of waste, fraud and duplication. It’s not unlike former Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire who routinely published his annual Golden Fleece Award highlighting cringe worthy acts and programs involving waste, fraud and duplication. It made great headlines and was the subject for late night comedians and talk show hosts and thereafter forgotten in a news cycle. I’m unaware of a single instance in which Mr. Proxmire pursued one of his examples to its elimination and/or reimbursement. Asking the coyotes to monitor the wolves in an exercise in futility.

But Mr. Trump, as a businessman, understands both the inherent lack of self-regulation in government and monopolies and the inherent weakness of allowing government to audit itself. For that reason, Mr. Trump has enlisted the services of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to shepherd the process of reviewing every program, agency and bureau of the federal government. It’s pointless to go into the background of these two titans because if you don’t know who they are, you are not going to care what they seek to accomplish. And that is particularly true of those of you forced to endure a teachers union led education in the Portland Public Schools. Regardless Messrs. Musk and Ramaswamy have announced that they believe they can identify nearly $2 Trillion in annual savings. That is out of a $6.75 Trillion annual budget for 2024. This amounts to 29.6 percent saving in federal expenditures and would change the budget from a deficit to a surplus – a surplus that could help reduce the current national debt of $35 trillion.

Ever since Mr. Trump announced this project – now labeled the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) – the big government advocates among Republicans, Democrats and Socialists, with the ever ready mainstream media pimping for them, have taken to the microphones, the television cameras and the editorial pages to disparage and criticize the efforts. Every last one of these protectors of the status quo begins with the same bulls##t statistical admonition designed to show that the quest is futile. They all cite studies from GAO that note that only twenty-six percent of the annual budget is for “discretionary spending” and the remainder is for “mandatory” spending. (Mandatory spending being for such things as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, what’s left of Obama care, and Welfare payments.) They smugly conclude that even if you eliminated all of the discretionary spending – one hundred percent of it, including defense spending – you could not reduce the federal expenditures by $2 Trillion. In doing so they wall off “mandatory spending” as if it is written in stone and, therefore, beyond review – it’s not.

To listen to these big governments apologists you would assume that you must reduce payments to Social Security recipients if you reduce its budget. That children will lie dying in the streets or freezing in the dark if you reduce the welfare budgets. But they lie and worse yet they know they are lying. You can reduce the Social Security budget without effecting the monthly amounts distributed to our retired citizens by eliminating waste, fraud and duplication. You can reduce the welfare budget without effecting payments to recipients by eliminating waste, fraud and duplication. You can reduce Medicare and Medicaid payments by curtailing the bureaucratic blizzard of paperwork and eliminating fraud.

A June 11, 2023, story by the Associated Press concluded:

“All of it led to the greatest grift in U.S. history, with thieves plundering billions of dollars in federal COVID-19 relief aid and intended to combat the worst pandemic in a century and to stabilize an economy in free fall.

“An Associated Press analysis found that fraudsters potentially stole more than $280 billion in COVID-19 relief funding; another $123 billion was wasted or misspent. Combined, the loss represents 10% of the $4.2 trillion the U.S. government has so far disbursed in COVID relief aid. [Emphasis supplied]

“That number is certain to grow as investigators dig deeper into thousands of potential schemes.”

The article then went on to note:

“Before leaving office, former President Donald Trump approved emergency aid measures totaling $3.2 trillion, according to figures from the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee. Biden’s 2021 American Rescue Plan authorized the spending of another $1.9 trillion. About a fifth of the $5.2 trillion has yet to be paid out, according to the committee’s most recent accounting.”

And yet instead of sequestering those funds to avoid further fraud, Mr. Biden is busily trying to pledge and/or spend that money on a pandemic that ended, according to all of the legitimate medical information (meaning everybody but Dr. Anthony Fauci) at least two years ago.

So that means that three years after the initial funding nearly $1 Trillion has yet to be spent. And we learned, thereafter that a significant amount of what was authorized was used for rewarding supporters of Mr. Biden. The one that really rankles is the number of school districts who demanded payments to “retro-fit” classrooms and upgrade HVAC systems to protect against COVID, but spent the money instead on giving unwarranted raises to existing staff and hiring more teachers and administrative staff. In each instance they used non-recurring revenues – federal grants – to increase the level of recurring expenditures – salaries and benefit – and thus increased the burden on taxpayer to fund bloated budgets ad infinitum.

An April 2024 report by the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO)estimated that the annual amount lost by the federal government due only to fraud is between $231 and $521 Billion depending on which year you select between 2018 and 2022.

There are 15 federal agencies administering eighty-eight federal food welfare programs – each with their own forms and bureaucracies. The savings by consolidation and standardization of eligibility would save hundreds of millions annually.

November 18, 2024 article in American Military News:

“The U.S. Department of Defense confirmed on Friday that the Pentagon failed its seventh consecutive audit and failed to give a full account for its $824 billion budget. Despite the seventh consecutive audit failure, Pentagon officials claimed that the Department of Defense has ‘turned a corner’ and is ‘making progress’ toward a clean audit in the next few years.

A GAO report dated March 26. 2024 noted:

“The $236 billion in improper payments were reported by 14 agencies across 71 programs.” More than $175 billion (74%) of errors were overpayments—for example, payments to deceased individuals or those no longer eligible for government programs

• $11.5 billion were underpayments

• $44.6 billion were unknown payments—meaning it is unclear whether a payment was an error or not

• $4.6 billion were cases where a recipient was entitled to a payment, but the payment failed to follow proper statutes or regulations.”

You may wonder why I cite GAO reports when I am so critical of their efforts. It’s pretty simple. The average person, even some of largest watchdog groups, do not have access to or resources with which to provide more accurate and detailed information. What we see is outrageous so you can assume that the larger story is horrendous. The point is that the big government advocates are lying by using misleading statistics while we can plainly see that even a cursory review indicates billions of waste, fraud and duplication. It is the moral equivalent of Mr. Biden, Secretary Mayorkas and Vice-President Kalamata Harris telling us that the border is secure while we watch on television the tens of thousands crossing each day.

Maintaining the status quo is not going to solve the problem. It’s going to take an outside force and a resolute president. Hopefully we have both in Messrs. Trump, Musk and Ramaswamy.