Treasury Employees Estimate Fraud in Entitlement Payments at $50 Billion Annually
“Yesterday, I was told that there are currently over $100B/year of entitlements payments to individuals with no SSN or even a temporary ID number.”
Last week was a rough week for the Democrats. Already reeling from the deluge of President Donald Trump’s executive orders that reversed every far-left policy implemented by his predecessor, they were rocked by reports that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had revealed the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to be little more than a global slush fund for progressive causes.
For Democrats, the tipping point came when they discovered that Musk’s team had set its sights on the Treasury Department.
Likely well aware of what was about to be exposed, the party pulled out all the stops to halt the process — including enlisting a highly partisan New York district court judge to issue an emergency order on Friday night to block DOGE’s access to the Treasury payment system. Professor William Jacobson provided his analysis of the ruling here.
This was a tactic of desperation. It was designed to slow Musk down. While none of us can predict the outcome of this case and the others that are sure to follow, I would be pretty surprised if Musk were stopped for good.
Musk is confident that he and his team of tech wizards will find fraud and waste inside the Treasury Department. In fact, in a Saturday post on X, he wrote:
Yesterday, I was told that there are currently over $100B/year of entitlements payments to individuals with no SSN or even a temporary ID number. If accurate, this is extremely suspicious.
When I asked if anyone at Treasury had a rough guess for what percentage of that number is unequivocal and obvious fraud, the consensus in the room was about half, so $50B/year or $1B/week!! This is utterly insane and must be addressed immediately.
This raises two immediate questions: Why would any employee disburse funds without proper documentation? And why, if roughly half of the staffers present believed that at least $50 billion a year was “unequivocal and obvious fraud,” did no one try to stop it?
To be clear, what the @DOGE team and @USTreasury have jointly agreed makes sense is the following:
– Require that all outgoing government payments have a payment categorization code, which is necessary in order to pass financial audits. This is frequently left blank, making…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 8, 2025
That was the first question Musk was asked. He replied, “Nobody in Treasury management cared enough before. I do want to credit the working-level people in the Treasury who have wanted to do this for many years but have been stopped by prior management.
“Everything at Treasury was geared towards complaint minimization. People we receive money don’t complain, but people who don’t receive money (especially fraudsters) complain very loudly, so the fraud was allowed to continue.”
So they designed treasury payments the same way they designed the voting system. Impossible to audit.
— MAZE (@mazemoore) February 8, 2025
The best way to understand the system is that it is designed for complaint minimization: people don’t complain if they receive money, but do complain loudly (especially fraudsters!) if they don’t receive money.
Therefore, everything is geared towards sending out the money, even…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 9, 2025
The magnitude of the fraud in government payments (your tax dollars being spent) is MUCH higher than you think! https://t.co/umnT8Zm4Mb
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 8, 2025
In his original post, Musk reported that DOGE and Treasury have agreed on several “super obvious” changes going forward.
– Require that all outgoing government payments have a payment categorization code, which is necessary in order to pass financial audits. This is frequently left blank, making audits almost impossible.
– All payments must also include a rationale for the payment in the comment field, which is currently left blank. Importantly, we are not yet applying ANY judgment to this rationale, but simply requiring that SOME attempt be made to explain the payment more than NOTHING!
– The DO-NOT-PAY list of entities known to be fraudulent or people who are dead or are probable fronts for terrorist organizations or do not match Congressional appropriations must actually be implemented and not ignored. Also, it can currently take up to a year to get on this list, which is far too long. This list should be updated at least weekly, if not daily.
Lest anyone accuse him of overstepping his boundaries, Musk noted that these changes “are being implemented by existing, long-time career government employees, not anyone from @DOGE.”
I’m not quite sure if the Democrats are aware that the majority of Americans fully support an audit of the government. After all, who wouldn’t want to know where their tax dollars are going?
Last week, Musk conducted a poll of his own on X. He asked his 216 million followers if DOGE should audit the IRS. Of the nearly 1.9 million people who responded to the poll, 51% said yes; another 41% replied “F Yes,” and just 8% said no.
JUST IN: Elon Musk's poll asking if the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) should audit the IRS ends with 1.9 million votes. pic.twitter.com/gOxswsz4kV
— Watcher.Guru (@WatcherGuru) February 6, 2025
Elizabeth writes commentary for The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a member of the Editorial Board at The Sixteenth Council, a London think tank. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
You know, pretty soon we will be talking about real money.
This looting the Republic has gone on too long, is this the beginning of the end or a bump in their road?
Do we have enough prisons and mental institutions to hold 8% of Americans?
No, we will need more incarceration space, and we should look a minimalizing costs. No more TV, AC, etc. Their being miserable is a feature.
No, but we don’t have to incarcerate them. All we have to do is stop giving them free money. The only people who don’t want the audit are people who benefit from an audit not happening. How might someone benefit from information NOT coming to light?
One billion per week?
Dr Evil is so embarassed!
50 Billion over 20 years is a Trillion dollars. Thats just Treasury, what about the others.
A little here, a little there…..
I think we will continue to be astounded as DOGE moves through the government.
And that’s just Treasury employees believe just from eyeballing the claims. Wait until DOGE really digs in.
The Democrats are going to FIGHT to keep their waste, fraud and abuse going!
They are no match for Musk and his four coders.
Dems have backed themselves in to a corner where they can do nothing other than automatically oppose anything Trump and Musk are doing…even if that thing Trump and Musk is doing is actually common sense and something Government should ALWAYS have been doing!!
Now, get that message out there without distortion.
there aare people who, under several different names, have been receiving multiple payments for many years
It’s a known fact that when illegals go to the emergency room they never use the same name twice.
It is entirely plausible and very likely that many do so, but it can’t possibly be a “known fact”, let alone one about the whole class. How could anyone possibly know it? All it can ever be is informed speculation.
I will not downvote your comment, but you are 100% entirely incorrect.
go work in an emergency room (checking people in) for one year (late shift) and then come back and make the same statement
it’ll help if you’re fluent in several dialects of Spanish as spoken south of the Rio Grande
Go easy on Millhouse. He is a pettifogging, legal autodidact who will always assert that nothing can be known until its having been finally adjudicated. An entertaining buffoon.
How could doing so possibly let anyone “know” that? It’s literally impossible. You may speculate that it is so, and such experience may or may not fail to disprove it, but nothing can ever make it a known fact.
“ackshully…….”
I will bet that Medicare/Medicaid fraud far exceeds that $50B, given that the total spent on the two is around $2T.
Remember. The stuff they’ve exposed in the last 3 weeks?
That’s just the OBVIOUS stuff. The stuff where you can literally tell after glancing at the header for what the payment is for that its a complete waste even if the dollars are going to EXACTLY what they say.
We haven’t even gotten to the REAL fraud of them lying about where the money was going.
But if the last 3 weeks demonstrated anything, its just how insanely EASY it is to find rampant fraud and waste, and that for the last 20 years every single RINO spewing about controlling it never even bothered to start.
I’ve worked in and around entities that are funded by DoD, DHS, and the Intelligence Community for over 30 years. I’d be SHOCKED if the amount of fraudulent payments by DoD and DHS is as small as your table indicates; I would expect the rate to be about an order of magnitude higher at DHS (i.e., 8-10%) and half an order of magnitude higher at DoD (i.e., around 6-8%).
DoD and CIA have enormous “black” budgets, which are not included in the graph.
Yeah if it is less than your estimates I’d be surprised as well. Just expanding the definition of ‘fraud’ to funding not specifically authorized by Congress would do it. There’s all sorts of spending on things without an explicit authorization to use funding for broad goals. The real issue is the lack of consistent scrutiny of the spending. I suspect that as more of this is made public the bureaucracy, their media allies and the various recipient groups will lash out in a frenzy to try and paint any reform as apocalyptic.
It’s one thing to uncover the rampant fraud and abuse that was obviously going on and had been for generations but it’s another thing entirely to keep it from happening again.
It’s imperative that during the next two years that Trump switch to tackling election fraud to ensure that we have free, fair and secure elections. I am quite convinced at this point that Obama was just as fraudulent as Biden, especially his second term which made no sense to me.
Bottom line: return as much as possible to the states from DC. Close as many federal agencies as possible. We do not need them. (Read that again for emphasis)
Everything within the beltway is parasitic. The huge salaries, palatial homes, soaring skyscrapers, all feeding off the government teat. All of it funded by us.
It’s all a disgusting and traitorous betrayal of our god-given rights as Americans. It’s well past time tear it all down.
All this fear about Trump becoming a dictator. My fear is he won’t become one. Because only a benevolent dictator can take an axe and broom to this mess.
Oh my, the president’s trying to take control of the country. Why can’t he be like Joe Biden and stay out of the deep state’s hair?
It’s appalling, but, unsurprising, that the federal government, over decades, could not (or, more aptly, would not) adhere to the most basic strictures, guidelines and rules adhered to by private sector corporations and entities, in order to prevent fraud, waste and abuse, and, be able to conduct an effective audit.
The entire federal system, as mismanaged by Dhimmi-crat crime family members, has been willfully established to facilitate, enable and whitewash fraud; not to prevent it. That’s obvious.
A SDNY federal judge issued a ruling on Saturday …
1) 16 “democrat” state attorney generals
b) stop access of DOGE
c) demand that all previously obtained Treasury scans be deleted
d) based on EX PARTE hearing (i.e. government not represented)
… this sounded way too much like a “Star Chamber” proceeding
Is there any #FACTUAL# basis for these numbers???
……….
When I was an auditor for the IG, we had to back up our findings with factual evidence, not ‘spectral evidence’.
“When I was an auditor for the IG…”
LOL. Assumes facts not in evidence.
“…we had to back up our findings with factual evidence, not ‘spectral evidence’.”
LOL. Assumes facts not in evidence.
tjv1956 was one of the first .gov workers doing so from home, in its mommies basement.
My measure is standing in line at the store and seeing how many around me are paying with .gov ebt cards, and IMHO, buying items that an ebt should not cover. For a long time, feral humans would use an ebt to buy (6) 24-packs of bottled water, dump them and the packaging in the paking lot, and then return the 144 plastic bottles to buy two packs of cheap smokes. It stopped when they reduced the number of daily returns to 24, but now they do that to get two fentanyl pills to smoke in the parking lot. As my dad used to say, “if you don’t want rats, stop feeding them.”
oh really? provide proof of this , redhat?
Ork! Ork! Ork!
Shut up, Johnny.
Here you go.
Proof coming as we speak.
Save yourself time, stay bent over.