Topline: The Biden-Harris administration is eclipsing the $1 trillion mark in improper payments, a new record for wasted money in a four-year term, according to a recent report from OpenTheBooks.com.
Key facts: Improper payments — money sent by the federal government to the wrong person, for the wrong reason or in the wrong amount — totaled over $800 billion from 2021 to 2023, adjusted for inflation.
That’s $450,000 every minute. In the roughly five seconds it takes to read this very sentence, the government will have wasted $37,500 on mistaken payments.
Medicaid and Medicare accounted for 43% of improper payments last year, but problems were found across the board. Dead people received $295 million, mostly from pension benefits the Office of Personnel Management sent to former federal workers who had passed away. Prisoners were paid $171 million.
The Internal Revenue Service spent $25 billion doling out fraudulent and mistaken tax credits, with some IRS programs reporting mistake rates above 30%.
The issue is not new, but it is getting progressively worse. Barack Obama wasted roughly 4% of his spending on improper payments in his second term. Donald Trump wasted roughly 5%, and Biden is approaching 6%.
Delusions of Adequacy 