The U.S. government has been losing up to half a trillion taxpayer dollars just to fraud for the past five years, according to a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report.
America’s national debt as of Saturday morning is $39.13 trillion and climbing every second. Democrats have spent decades deliberately encouraging as much reckless spending and fraud as possible, but even most Republicans are content to overlook a vast amount of fraud and overspending if they secure the pet projects they want. Robert Westbrooks, former federal inspector general, gave April 15 testimony to the House Oversight Committee, exposing the gargantuan financial crisis.
State-run programs that the federal government funds constitute a major source of the fraud and waste. That ties in with the huge healthcare, childcare, and food fraud exposed under the Trump administration in recent months. Not only did the federal government under the Biden administration remove fraud guardrails, but Democrat states such as California and Minnesota are also encouraging and complicit in covering up the fraud.
Westbrooks testified that GAO found that for fiscal years 2018 through 2022, the U.S. government lost annually somewhere between $233 billion and $521 billion to fraud.
The Epoch Times explained that the billions in fraud over the five years is “enough to employ a million people for seven years or purchase a million homes.” Our federal government has enough money to spend if it would only slash unconstitutional and useless programs, or even simply keep to a budget and implement more fraud guardrails. Our national debt truly is a deliberate choice on the part of incompetent, irresponsible, and willfully dishonest government officials.
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Seto J. Bagdoyan, director of forensic audits and investigative service, pointed to COVID-19 relief as a huge opportunity for fraudsters during the Biden administration. The Epoch Times broke down some of the numbers from the testimony:
An estimated $300 billion was lost to fraud in three pandemic relief programs over three years.
Fraud in Unemployment Insurance during the COVID-19 pandemic was estimated between $100 billion and $135 billion, about 11 percent to 15 percent of unemployment benefits paid during the national health emergency… Fraud in the Paycheck Protection Program and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program totaled about $200 billion…From 2023 through March 2025, taxpayers lost more than $600 million to food stamp theft, with an average of $267 million in benefits stolen per year, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data.
As for improper payments, that is, payments to ineligible recipients or overpayments, those accounted for about $162 billion across 68 programs. For context, that amount of money is the equivalent of over 13% of federal grants to state and local governments. The Medicaid program all by itself represented $31 billion in improper payments for FY2024. In just one state, Kentucky State Auditor Allison Ball identified $836 million in wasted Medicaid payments. That is how much taxpayer money is going down the drain thanks to waste and fraud.
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