If current trends persist, the Biden-Harris administration will have made over $1 trillion in improper payments by the time President Joe Biden leaves office, according to a report released by the watchdog organization Open The Books on Thursday.
An improper payment is a disbursement “made by the government to the wrong person, in the wrong amount or for the wrong reason,” per federal guidelines. The Biden-Harris administration, between 2021 and 2023, oversaw $801.4 billion in such payments after adjusting for inflation, according to the report.
The amount of improper payments made by the administration in 2024 won’t be disclosed until after November’s election. Biden’s administration, however, has made well over $200 billion in erroneous payments each year since it has been in power, according to Open The Books.
The Biden-Harris administration will cross the $1 trillion threshold “barring something unprecedented,” according to the watchdog.
“President Biden and his successors must take more action to address the proliferation of improper payments, beyond mere rhetoric,” Open The Books director of communications Christopher Neefus told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The sheer magnitude of misspent taxpayer dollars is tough to comprehend. Put into perspective, the most recent Pentagon funding bill cost $883 billion; that means the Biden administration will have misspent more than it takes to fund our national defense for a whole year.”
High levels of waste are nothing new for the federal government, however, the Biden-Harris administration has taken it to the next level. Former President Donald Trump’s administration, for instance, disclosed $814 billion in inflation-adjusted improper payments during his four years in office, slightly over what the Biden-Harris administration erroneously disbursed in just three years.
The Biden-Harris administration’s improper spending works out to roughly $7,500 incorrectly spent each second, according to Open The Book’s calculations. In 2021, 7.16% of federal disbursements were made improperly, a figure that fell to 5.4% in 2023.
Improper payment reports provided by the federal government are likely underestimates as the Government Accountability Office points out that Congress hasn’t given all federal programs the authority to estimate erroneous payments and because there are probably fraud schemes that go undetected by federal authorities.
The plurality of the Biden-Harris administration’s erroneous disbursements in 2023 came from the Medicaid and Medicare systems, which dolled out $101.5 billion in improper payments that year, according to the report. Ongoing COVID-19 programs paid out tens of billions in improper payments as well.
LexisNexis Risk Management estimates that there has been $1 trillion in COVID-19 aid fraud, The National Desk reported. Additionally, the Office of Personnel Management made hundreds of millions of dollars in benefit payments to dead people and prisoners, according to Open The Books. The Internal Revenue Service, meanwhile, incorrectly awarded $25 billion worth of tax credits.
Money incorrectly paid out by the government isn’t always lost forever, though much of it is. Of the $235.7 billion the Biden-Harris administration erroneously spent in 2023, it managed to recover about $51 billion, according to the report.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are aware of the massive amounts of waste and are seeking to rectify it. A bipartisan group of legislators in the House are pushing the Improper Payments Transparency Act, a bill introduced in May that would require the president’s budget request to identify common payment errors and formulate ways to address them.
Government waste is contributing to the United States’ increasing national debt, which surpassed $35 trillion for the first time in July. Biden has bragged about cutting the deficit, however, a June Congressional Budget Office report found that his foreign aid and student loan policies were actually increasing America’s budgetary shortfall.
The White House did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
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