Way back in 2011, then-House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) cited expert estimates that the federal government lost an estimated $228 billion, or about 7 percent of the $3.26 trillion total federal spending for 2010.
Now fast forward to 2020, when the federal budget reached nearly $6.6 trillion. If we assume the same seven percent loss to waste, fraud and corruption, then $459 billion of the hard-earned dollars of the American people never made it to the intended purposes. Experts were still saying it was difficult, if not impossible, to know the actual total lost to waste, fraud and corruption, just as they had cautioned in 2010.
Come 2024, and the experts still didn’t know the actual total losses! A frequently cited 2024 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimated that losses to improper payments range anywhere from $223 billion to $521 billion between 2018 and 2022. That is, for example, excessive or wholly fake Medicare reimbursement outlays, Social Security checks to long-dead people, and Small Business Administration (SBA) loans going to con artists.
The same GAO report cautioned that its “fraud estimate’s range represents 3 to 7 percent of average federal obligations. These percentages should not be applied at the agency or program level,” and noted that “no area of the federal government is immune to fraud.”
And then came 2025 with Minnesota, Nick Sorley and Somalian fraudsters; much the same in Ohio; billions of dollars worth of Medicare fraud exposed in California; and perhaps the most revealing fact of them all in the war against waste, fraud and corruption: