Under the Biden administration, the United States is on the path toward becoming a welfare state fully entrenched in waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement. President Biden plans to expand welfare to almost half of the country’s working adults through the deceptively named American Families Plan. If passed, it will allow the federal government to meddle in Americans’ everyday lives from birth to death. Meanwhile, every year, entitlement programs are spending tens of billions of taxpayer dollars improperly—either through inaccuracies, incompetence, or fraud. Government is already too big with too much waste. Current entitlement programs are rife with abuse. Their size and lack of guardrails to protect taxpayer dollars open the door for bad actors to take advantage of the system. But rather than acknowledging and addressing these issues, the Biden administration wants to dramatically expand the welfare state, which will undoubtedly result in even more waste, fraud, and abuse.
Since 2003, when agencies were required to report these payments, the Government Accountability Office estimates $1.9 trillion in improper payments have been made. But that might just be the tip of the iceberg because the GAO maintains it is unable to “determine the full extent to which improper payments occur.”
In fiscal year 2020, more than 21% of Medicaid’s federal program spending was the result of improper spending, which means one-fifth of taxpayer dollars, intended to help roughly 77 million low-income and medically needy individuals, has been lost without helping those Americans. Medicare was similarly disastrous, with $43 billion in improper payments—money that should have helped provide health care for the 63 million elderly and disabled currently receiving Medicare benefits.
Outside of Medicare and Medicaid, three other significant sources of improper payments are for the earned income tax credit, unemployment insurance, and supplemental security income. Almost a quarter of the payments made for the earned income tax credit in FY2020 were improper.........
