Silent Drain: An Ignored Emergency

Trillions worth of our tax money is being wasted while our leaders pretend not to see

Every day, we hand over part of our hard-earned paychecks to the federal government. We’re offered no choice when it comes to the amount or ultimate destination. We’re told to trust that the money will fund supposedly essential services like national defense, infrastructure, education, healthcare, and aid for those in genuine need.

But what if you knew that a veteran government auditor once told me he’d be shocked if more than 15 cents of every taxpayer dollar reaches its intended purpose? The remaining 85 cents, he said, is lost to bureaucratic inefficiency, duplicative programs, weak oversight, political favoritism, or outright fraud.

This isn’t conspiracy or exaggeration. It’s a pattern documented for decades by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), inspectors general, congressional watchdogs and analysts.

This scandal quietly inflates the cost of government to epic proportion, deepens the national debt, drives indirect tax burdens and inflation, and erodes faith in our government.

Although we may not make the connection in our daily lives, we regularly experience the effects of systemic waste, fraud, and abuse. It could be high prices we pay for goods and services because government contracts are awarded to political favorites rather than to those who will do the best and most efficient job. It could be higher-than-warranted taxes we’re forced to pay to build roads and bridges because our leaders aren’t making sure our money is spent wisely or that the job is done correctly the first time. It could be cash lost to rampant fraud in Medicare and Medicaid that the government hasn’t bothered to prevent. There are thousands of ways we’re being sold a bill of goods. And it’s costing us dearly.

As of this month, our gross national debt tops $39 trillion. That’s money we owe. Annual deficits hover near $2 trillion. That’s how much more our government is spending each year than it’s gathering through taxes that most already consider too high. The interest payments alone on what we owe exceed major budget items.

One of the least painful, most straightforward ways to bend this trajectory would be through an attitude adjustment: our political leaders roundly getting behind rigorous auditing, eligibility enforcement, greater care before the money is spent, and better oversight once it leaves the government’s accounts.

Yet, until recently, our leaders have given little to no attention to this. And when crackdowns on waste, fraud, and abuse are launched, they are often met with a strange backlash to try to stop them.

Why?

It could be that real crackdowns create real losers: bureaucrats whose empires shrink, contractors losing lucrative no-bid deals, nonprofits seeing their fat grants dry up, and political donors whose allies feel the pinch.

It turns out it’s easier to let the silent drain continue.

Read on for details.

The General Accountability Office’s (GAO’s) FY 2025 improper payments estimate reached $186 billion across 64 programs in 15 agencies. As wildly unimaginable as that number it, it’s up $24 billion from the prior year. “Improper payments” of our tax dollars made since 2003 is nearing the $3 trillion mark. Written out with all the zeroes, that’s 3,000,000,000,000.

These improper payments include overpayments, money sent to ineligible recipients, failures in documentation, mistakes, and fraud. The GAO estimates government-wide fraud losses between $233 billion and $521 billion tax dollars every single year.

One major problem is that many programs, especially grants to nonprofits and states, get minimal audits before or after the money is given. Another is duplication. GAO has flagged 163 fragmented science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education efforts across 13 agencies amounting to nearly $3 billion, with no effort to consolidate or restrict duplicative efforts. There’s also no meaningful effort to measure true effectiveness of the programs so that the good ones are funded but the bad ones don’t continue wasting funds. There are dozens of separate disability employment programs that do the same thing. There are more than 160 housing initiatives that aren’t coordinated with one another. The list seems endless.

Covid relief proved to be a case study in vulnerability. Roughly $4.2–$5 trillion tax dollars were disbursed. Believe it or not, waste, fraud, and abuse estimates exceed a mind-boggling $400 billion overall. And with some exceptions, our leaders don’t seem all that bothered by it. After all, it’s not coming out of their pockets. Surely if the money were being taken from their personal bank accounts, they’d take every measure to stop it and prosecute any crimes.

What’s worse, thousands of programs preceding Covid relief told the same story. Yet our leaders seemed to lean little from it.

The Covid Small Business Administration loan programs alone documented $200 billion (around 17%) potentially stolen via recipients who made up fake companies, whose claims weren’t checked, who turned out to be foreigner who were ineligible, or who engaged in identity theft and other forms of fraud. Unemployment insurance fraud associated with Covid relief ranged from at least $100 to $135 billion or more and involved prisoners, dead claimants, and foreign criminal rings such as Somalis in Minnesota.

More recently, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins reported removing 4.3 million people from food stamps as part of a fraud crackdown. That implies untold amounts of money lost over the decades as millions improperly collected. Some states refused to cooperate in the effort. Audits from cooperating states, mostly led by Republicans, at least 186,000 dead people still receiving benefits, 500,000 people illegally collecting in multiple states (as many as six), and organized skimming rings stealing hundreds of millions. Imagine what couldn’t be found because some of the worst states won’t show their numbers.

Rollins highlighted over 226,000 fraudulent claims in partial data and threatened funding cuts to non-compliant states that have refused to share data.

Leaders Benefit from Waste, Fraud, and Abuse

Clamping down on waste, fraud, and abuse is always popular among the public. One survey by Cato Institute found Americans believe the federal government wastes 59 cents of every dollar, and 89% favor comprehensive audits to root out waste, fraud, and abuse. And it’s a bipartisan cause. Majorities across parties back efficiency reforms. So why do so many of our federal and state leaders resist the efforts or look the other way?

It turns out these problems sustain bureaucracies. Inflated budgets— some of it inevitably due to waste, fraud, and abuse— mean more power. Money going to favored nonprofits and contractors delivers on economic promises even if they misspend or steal some of the funds. The cash flow creates lucrative alliances, and secures political goodwill, donations, and votes.

Both parties benefit. For example defense contractors donate to the members of Congress sitting on armed services committees. University researchers or social service providers wrangle votes and donations to send to Washington DC politicians in return for the tax money they receive. When oversight tightens, concentrated interests lose money and lobby fiercely to stop it.

The DOGE Experiment

Launched in early 2025 under President Trump and initially led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) represented the most high-profile, systematic assault on this rot in modern history.

The public strongly supported the effort. By early this year, DOGE reported an impressive $215 billion in savings. That amounts to about $1,335 per taxpayer. The savings were made by cancelling wasteful contracts, terminating fraudulent or duplicative grants, renegotiation leases, eliminating fraud, dialing back on a bloated workforce, and easing up on expensive regulations.

But DOGE faced an immediate, organized and well-funded effort to controversialize and stop its work. Opponents, beneficiaries, agencies, and advocacy groups lobbied hard. The media was effectively used as a propaganda tool in the campaign to block DOGE’s work and change the public’s mind about it. News coverage emphasized supposed chaos and sad job losses. While the savings and successes were minimized, the news media parroted DOGE opponents’ propaganda claiming the savings were overstated or cuts were unjustified.

By late 2025, DOGE’s centralized high-profile phase diminished. Some declared it “dissolved” and took a victory lap. However, efficiency principles, Vice President-led initiatives, and ongoing work continue.

Even if DOGE fell victim to a campaign to halt its work, the fact that the effort was so high-profile and successful for a time stands in sharp contrast to decades of indifference. DOGE managed to force the issue into the spotlight for the first time at scale, provoking exactly the resistance expected when threatening entrenched streams.

One Standout

Few elected officials have made waste, fraud, and abuse their defining mission. But one who did was the late Sen. Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma. I often turned to him for interviews on government waste, fraud, and abuse. He and his office spent a lot of time unearthing problems nobody else cared to face.

Elected to the House of Representatives in 1995 and the Senate later, Coburn didn’t just oppose big spending bills — he dissected them. He also took steps to publicize absurdities. He offered amendments to kill projects—which were rarely adopted by his colleagues. And he issued detailed oversight reports.

At times, his work transcended party lines. He collaborated with then-Sen. Barack Obama on the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, creating USAspending.gov, a tool still vital when it comes to public scrutiny. It’s an official open data source of federal spending information, including federal contracts, grants, and loans.

But it was Coburn’s annual Wastebooks that became legendary. I profiled a number of projects he focused on. In 2013, his Wastebook highlighted nearly $30 billion in low-priority or ridiculous items. There was a $914,000 award for a National Endowment for the Humanities project exploring “popular romance” in novels, films, and fan fiction across history. There were millions for robotic squirrels to study rattlesnake behavior. There was funding for “World of Warcraft” as senior memory therapy. There was a “Prom Week” video game simulator. And the Pentagon spending $1 billion to destroy $16 billion in unneeded ammunition rather than repurpose or sell it. Other entries included $856,000 training mountain lions on treadmills, $10,000 for an Oregon children’s theater “Zombie in Love” production, rabbit massages, and an Iron Man-style suit prototype.

Over the years, Coburn’s Wastebook exposed $19 million in paid administrative leave for misbehaving bureaucrats and $18 million upgrading a low-traffic airport serving a luxury Idaho ski resort. He documented 47 separate federal job training programs across nine agencies costing $18 billion annually, many overlapping in the same towns with poor coordination.

While his projects got a decent amount of attention— no small amount from my regular Follow the Money reports at CBS News— Coburn often faced isolation and criticism. Colleagues on both sides grumbled quietly when Coburn exposed their district goodies or ideological priorities. They labeled him obstructive or grandstanding. As he pointed out to me on more than one occasion, on Capitol Hill, it’s always popular to give away taxpayer money. It’s never popular to take it away.

What change we would have if our politicians treated taxpayer dollars with the care families apply to their own budget! This means making a wise choice with research and information upfront before cash goes out the door, spending only what you can afford, getting estimates from different competing providers to make sure you’re getting the best deal, auditing carefully after-the-fact, and eliminating what fails. Basic, obvious steps most of us take. Yet our leaders feel comfortable skipping these crucial safeguards.

Americans deserve leaders who prioritize stewardship over patronage. Savings, accountability, and reduced debt and deficit are the reward. Decades of indifference have cost us trillions. Today, low-hanging fruit of waste, fraud, and abuse hangs ripe, accessible, and rotting.