Image by Alec Favale.
Between Elon Musk’s brief, disastrous tenure with the misnamed “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) and the Republicans’ mad rush to gut health care and food assistance for millions of lower-income Americans, you’d think they’d just discovered a massive cabal of diehard leftist criminals committing “fraud, waste, and abuse” in the federal budget. Of course, any pretext that all this was in the interest of reducing the deficit was belied when Trump’s Big Ugly Bill handed the giant corporations and the richest among us billions in tax cuts they don’t need.
A quick look back, though, shows that there’s nothing new in the Republican charge that our government is awash in fraud, waste, and abuse. That verbal triumvirate has been standard fodder with so-called conservatives since at least the 1980s and the Reagan administration. And strangely enough, those little words always seem to mean tax cuts that increase deficits while undercutting needed services.
Not surprisingly, the quest to eliminate fraud, waste and abuse is never aimed at the actual source of those three evils. In fact, among Donald Trump’s first actions in his second term was to fire most of the government’s Inspectors General, whose job it is to ferret out such misuse of taxpayers’ funds. As DOGE went to work slashing and burning through one agency after another, there was no sign that they had identified even the hint of bad behavior or poor management in those agencies.
In fact, the biggest fraud in this whole charade is the unproven accusation that fraud, waste, and abuse are rampant within the government. How else can anyone justify throwing millions of people off Medicaid when its money goes not to patients but to healthcare providers? If the Republicans in Congress really wanted to take on fraud, waste, and abuse in Medicaid, why didn’t they look for misuse of funds where the money actually goes? Why didn’t they insist on detailed audits and investigations to find the culprits? All they accomplished by denying health care to all those millions was to reduce the pool of money that the fraudsters could go after – that, and causing thousands more preventable deaths every year.
As for waste, isn’t it curious that DOGE and the Republicans have done nothing to rein in spending at the Pentagon? As Republican Senator Everett Dirksen reportedly said back in the day, “A billion here, a billion there – pretty soon you’re talking real money.” Republicans never seem to see a weapons system that they don’t like, and they like to throw money at it. And how is it that the response to the Department of Homeland Security’s overspent their current budget is to give them more money without even a cursory look at why that happened? Where’s the oversight?
Then there’s abuse. I’m not sure what the deficit hawks mean by this, but they sure seem to like paying for it. How else to explain the huge increase in funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as they continue their raids, detentions and deportations unchecked by any semblance of due process or common decency? Is the Congress happy to see billions of dollars flowing to what is now the country’s largest supposed law enforcement agency with no hearings, no accountability, no recourse for the harm they cause?
I’m all for going after fraud, waste, and abuse in our government. But if we’re going to do that, let’s look at where those are actually happening and who is responsible. We probably won’t reduce waste as much as some would like, but then again we don’t need to give huge tax cuts to those who don’t need or deserve them.
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