The Numbers Are Staggering — And Real

According to a report from the watchdog group Open The Books, the Biden-Harris administration oversaw $801.4 billion in improper payments between 2021 and 2023 alone — adjusted for inflation. The House Budget Committee flagged this in September 2024, citing a Daily Caller report by Robert Schmad.

Open The Books projected that Biden would cross the $1 trillion threshold in improper payments before leaving office. That didn't happen.

An improper payment, per federal guidelines, is money "made by the government to the wrong person, in the wrong amount, or for the wrong reason." Not a rounding error. Not a paperwork glitch. Wrong recipient, wrong amount, wrong reason — with your money.

Since the federal government began tracking these figures in 2003, the cumulative total has hit $2.7 trillion, according to the Government Accountability Office.

COVID Fraud: The Greatest Grift in U.S. History

Separate from the broader improper payments problem, COVID relief fraud is its own catastrophe.

An Associated Press analysis — published June 14, 2023 — found that fraudsters potentially stole more than $280 billion in COVID-19 relief funds. Another $123 billion was wasted or misspent. Combined, that's roughly 10 percent of the $4.2 trillion the federal government disbursed in COVID relief.

According to PBS NewsHour and the AP, most of the looted money came from three large pandemic-relief programs launched under the Trump administration and later administered by the Biden administration. Both names matter here. Neither gets to walk away clean.

The mechanics of the theft were embarrassingly basic. Fraudsters used Social Security numbers of dead people and federal prisoners to collect unemployment checks. People collected benefits in multiple states simultaneously. And federal loan applicants were NOT cross-checked against a Treasury Department database that would have flagged suspicious borrowers.

"Here was this sort of endless pot of money that anyone could access," said Dan Fruchter, chief of the fraud and white-collar crime unit at the U.S. Attorney's office in the Eastern District of Washington.

The thieves weren't all shadowy criminal masterminds. The AP identified a U.S. soldier in Georgia, pastors of a defunct Texas church, a former Missouri state lawmaker, and a Montana roofing contractor among those who grabbed the cash. The U.S. government has charged more than 2,230 defendants with pandemic-related fraud and is running thousands of additional investigations.

What Fox and the Biden White House Both Got Wrong

Fox News framed this primarily as a Biden failure — "Biden's relaxed controls" opening the door to fraud, per the State Financial Officers Foundation CEO. That's partially true but conveniently ignores that the programs being pilfered were designed and launched under Trump.

Meanwhile, the Biden White House's own archived fact sheet boasted about its FY 2025 budget "cracking down on systemic fraud" while simultaneously presiding over one of the worst improper payment records in modern history. The White House claimed its budget would reduce the deficit by $3 trillion over the next decade. That's a projection, NOT a result.

Talking about cracking down on fraud while running up nearly a trillion dollars in improper payments contradicts the administration's stated priorities.

The Systemic Problem Nobody Wants to Fix

The deeper issue isn't Republican or Democrat. It's institutional rot.

The federal government has known about the improper payments problem since at least 2003 — that's when reporting began. Twenty-plus years and $2.7 trillion later, Congress holds hearings, watchdogs publish reports, and the money keeps flowing to the wrong places.

Open The Books director of compliance, in the same Daily Caller report flagged by the House Budget Committee, stated plainly: "President Biden and his successors must take more action to address the proliferation of improper payments, beyond mere rhetoric."

The oversight failures during COVID weren't a surprise either. Investigators and outside experts told the AP that the government "conducted too little oversight during the pandemic's early stages and instituted too few restrictions on applicants." This was a known risk. Officials pushed money out the door anyway.

The Bottom Line

Every dollar sent to a dead person, a scammer with a dead man's Social Security number, or an ineligible entity came out of the economy in taxes or was added to a $35 trillion national debt that every working American is on the hook for.

Nearly $1 trillion in improper payments in four years. $280 billion stolen outright from COVID relief. The federal government is not a well-oiled machine that occasionally makes mistakes. It is a system with ZERO structural incentive to protect taxpayer money — because the people spending it aren't spending their own.

Until there are real consequences for the bureaucrats who design these programs without oversight, the watchdogs will keep publishing reports and the money will keep walking out the door.