The failures of the Biden-Harris regime are well documented. Yet it’s even worse than we thought.
Because this investigation into Biden and Harris has turned up something truly horrid.
Stop us if you’ve heard this one; politicians playing fast and loose with taxpayer dollars. Yeah, we thought you might be familiar with this idea. It seems to be getting worse and worse as every year passes by. Americans watch their government grow fatter and fatter, asking for more taxpayer dollars, all while it gets thrown down the drain.
That’s not really an exaggeration, either. Apparently the Biden-Harris administration really enjoys quite literally wasting taxpayer dollars. When we say waste, we mean you may as well have burned it on camera as Americans watch in horror, because a new report suggests the Biden-Harris admin has improperly paid out nearly $1 trillion to the wrong sources.
The Biden-Harris administration is projected to oversee more than $1 trillion in improper payments by the end of President Joe Biden’s term, according to a recent report by watchdog organization Open The Books. Improper payments, defined by federal guidelines as disbursements made “to the wrong person, in the wrong amount or for the wrong reason,” have totaled $801.4 billion between 2021 and 2023 when adjusted for inflation.
Open The Books reports that the administration has already exceeded $200 billion in improper payments annually since taking office. Although the total amount of improper payments made in 2024 will not be revealed until after the November election, the watchdog estimates that the $1 trillion threshold will be surpassed “barring something unprecedented.”
Christopher Neefus, director of communications for Open The Books, highlighted the scale of the issue. “President Biden and his successors must take more action to address the proliferation of improper payments, beyond mere rhetoric,” he said in an interview with reporters.
“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.”
Improper payments are not new in federal government operations. However, the Biden-Harris administration has seen levels that surpass its predecessor. During Donald Trump’s presidency, improper payments amounted to $814 billion over four years, a figure the current administration is expected to surpass in just three years. According to Open The Books, the Biden-Harris administration’s improper payments amount to roughly $7,500 per second.
The percentage of improper federal disbursements did decline during Biden’s term, falling from 7.16% in 2021 to 5.4% in 2023. Nevertheless, these figures may still understate the problem, as the Government Accountability Office has noted that not all federal programs are required to report improper payments, and many fraudulent schemes likely go undetected.
The largest sources of improper payments in 2023 were the Medicaid and Medicare systems, which collectively accounted for $101.5 billion in erroneous disbursements. COVID-19 relief programs also paid out tens of billions improperly, and fraud related to pandemic aid has been a major issue. LexisNexis Risk Management estimates that COVID-19 aid fraud amounts to $1 trillion.
Additionally, Open The Books found that the Office of Personnel Management made hundreds of millions of dollars in payments to deceased individuals and prisoners, while the Internal Revenue Service incorrectly awarded $25 billion in tax credits.
While not all improperly spent money is lost permanently, the government manages to recover only a fraction of it. In 2023, for instance, the Biden-Harris administration recovered about $51 billion of the $235.7 billion improperly spent.
The scale of government waste has drawn bipartisan attention. In May, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced the Improper Payments Transparency Act in the House of Representatives. The bill aims to require the president’s budget to identify common sources of payment errors and propose strategies to prevent them.
This wasteful spending is contributing to the country’s escalating national debt, which surpassed $35 trillion for the first time in July. Despite President Biden’s claims of reducing the deficit, a Congressional Budget Office report from June found that policies related to foreign aid and student loans were adding to the budget deficit rather than reducing it.
100 Years Of U.S. Federal Government’s Bad Spending Habits
According to estimates, since 1930 the U.S. federal government has only been able to balance its budget for a particular year twelve times. It has not been done since the Clinton administration. The previous balancing of the budget before that was in 1969.
Interestingly, right before the FDR era of big government spending that has led to the situation the United States is in right now, U.S. President Calvin Coolidge balanced the budget every year he was President. Coolidge brought surplus revenue to pay down the U.S. federal debt at the time, with some years bringing in a surplus as high as $1 billion.
Economists and political historians agree that the next political party in America to successfully balance the budget with a sitting President in office will earn a ton of goodwill from the American people for this feat that hasn’t been done in over twenty years. On the part of the Democrats, they don’t seem remotely interested in accomplishing that.
Stay tuned to the DC Daily Journal.
