The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently announced that the 2024 fiscal-year federal budget deficit — the amount the government spent over and above what it received in total revenue — was $1.8 trillion. That makes the Biden-Harris administration by far the biggest deficit spenders in modern history. Worse yet, Biden-Harris also wasted more money than any other administration, roughly $1 trillion, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
The Biden-Harris four-year deficit total was $7.65 trillion — roughly 50 percent more than Donald Trump’s four-year deficit total of $5.56 trillion, and that figure included $3.13 trillion spent in FY2020, the first year of the pandemic. Had Trump’s fourth year deficit been in the general range of his first three years, his total deficit spending would have been about $3.25 trillion, less than half of Biden-Harris’s actual four-year deficit.
To be sure, some of the Biden-Harris deficit spending was also because of the pandemic, but then Biden used the pandemic as a catch-all excuse to ladle out money he was eager to spend anyway.
But with great spending should come increased efforts to minimize fraud and waste. And that’s where Biden-Harris really failed. Last April the GAO released its “improper payments” assessment, and Team Biden has the dubious distinction of wasting more taxpayer money than any previous administration.
“Improper payments” aren’t all fraud, though fraud makes up a significant portion. The GAO defines improper payments as “those [payments] that should not have been made or were made in the incorrect amount.” So, for example, if Medicare overpaid a hospital for its services, that would be an improper overpayment. But there is also a lot of outright fraud in health care and several other federal programs, areas where payments “should not have been made.”
The GAO says that in FY2023, Medicare and Medicaid together accounted for more than $100 billion in improper payments. Another $43.6 billion in improper payments went to Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, $21.9 billion was for the Earned Income Tax Credit, and $18.7 billion was for the Paycheck Protection loan forgiveness program.
But it’s when we compare the Biden and the Trump years that we get a sense of the magnitude of the improper payments. Trump’s four-year tally of improper payments (using the government’s fiscal year of Oct. 31 to Sept. 30) was $672.8 billion — which was unacceptably high but included the gusher of money Congress spent in the 2020 pandemic year. Biden’s, by contrast, is about $1 trillion. (Note: Since the GAO hasn’t updated its document to include FY2024, I used Biden’s 2023 number again for 2024).
Here are some of the recent health care fraud stories that could make you sick.
- “Scammers ripped off NY’s controversial Medicaid homecare program to the tune of $68M: feds,” the New York Post reports.
- Here’s one from September: “Scammers have taken more than $100 million meant for senior citizens’ Medicare bills, …” according to CBS News.
- From last August: “At a recent federal conference Operations Officer Mike Cohen, with the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) announced that urinary catheter scams have now cost Medicare over $4 billion in losses in 2024.”
- This is from the Department of Justice last year in Detroit: “Twenty-Three individuals charged in $61.5 million Medicare fraud schemes.”
And these are only some of the scams law enforcement caught. Had these scammers kept the dollar amounts down, they might have been able to continue flying under the radar.
The important point is whether the government overpaid some group or individual or it was the result of fraud or some other type of scam, either way the government has wasted the money — your money. While the government has been trying to claw back some of those funds by finding and prosecuting the crooks, most of it will be unrecoverable.
The fact is, the more taxpayer money the government hands out to individuals, organizations and businesses, the more fraud and improper payments there will be. And the government has never been very good at catching or stopping it. So the very first step in addressing the improper-payment problem is for the government to stop spending so much.
Second point, and related to the first, is that government handouts should be targeted and limited to those most in need. But instead, the Biden-Harris administration has vastly expanded the number of people and businesses getting taxpayer money. And as president, Kamala Harris wants to hand out even more.
Politicians like to claim they will save taxpayer money by reducing waste, fraud and abuse, but virtually no one ever does. And these days they don’t even try. Certainly, President Joe Biden and Kamala Harris haven’t tried, and the $1 trillion wasted in improper payments is all the proof we need.
Merrill Matthews is a public policy and political analyst and the co-author of “On the Edge: America Faces the Entitlements Cliff.” Follow him on X@MerrillMatthews