Taxpayer Money, and Can It Be Stopped?
While Congress spent early September negotiating a continuing resolution to keep the
government funded through December 11, a quieter and more persistent number sat untouched in
the background: $186 billion. That’s what 15 federal agencies reported in improper payments for
fiscal year 2025 alone — money that shouldn’t have gone out the door, or went out in the wrong
amount. It is not a one-year anomaly. It is the latest entry in a ledger that now totals roughly $3
trillion in payment errors since 2003, and it raises the harder question a stopgap funding bill never
answers: which parts of the government keep failing to control their own money, and does anyone
actually have a plan to fix it?
What “Improper Payments” Actually Means
It’s worth being precise, because the term gets used loosely. GAO’s improper payment figures are
not necessarily allegations of corruption or theft — they capture overpayments, underpayments,
and payments made without adequate documentation to verify eligibility. Roughly 82% of the
FY2025 total came from overpayments. Some of that is outright fraud; a large share is
administrative failure — eligibility checks skipped, income verification not run, payments issued
before required paperwork was confirmed. GAO tracks a separate, broader fraud estimate:
government-wide losses to fraud specifically run between $233 billion and $521 billion a year, a
range wide enough to reflect how much fraud goes undetected rather than simply unreported.
Who’s Actually Failing to Comply
This is where accountability gets specific. Under the Payment Integrity Information Act of 2019,
each agency’s inspector general must certify annual compliance with federal payment-integrity
criteria. For fiscal year 2024, half of the 24 agencies responsible for 99% of government-wide
improper payment estimates were fully compliant. The other 12 were not. Four agencies — the
Department of Labor, the Treasury Department, the Department of Agriculture, and the
Department of Veterans Affairs — have now failed to comply for four consecutive years, the
threshold GAO uses to flag a program as a persistent, unresolved risk rather than a one-off lapse.
Inspectors general found inadequate risk assessments at five agencies and unreliable payment
estimates at seven others — meaning in some cases, the government doesn’t fully know how bad
its own numbers are.
Where the Money Concentrates
Health care programs dominate the total. Medicare and Medicaid together account for roughly $94
billion of the FY2025 estimate — about $57 billion and $37 billion, respectively — spread across
overpayments, underpayments, and documentation failures. The Earned Income Tax Credit and
unemployment insurance programs round out the list of chronic offenders, both flagged in GAO
reporting for years without resolution. These four programs alone illustrate the pattern: the
improper-payments problem isn’t diffuse across dozens of obscure line items. It concentrates in a
handful of large, well-known programs that have appeared on GAO’s radar for the better part of
two decades.
Can It Actually Be Stopped?
The honest answer is: partially, and slowly. GAO’s High-Risk List — 38 federal programs identified
as seriously vulnerable to waste, fraud, and mismanagement — has produced $759 billion in
documented savings since the list’s creation, proof that sustained oversight and follow-through on
recommendations does work. The Treasury Department’s Do Not Pay system, designed to
cross-check eligibility data before funds go out, is a working tool that already reduces errors where
agencies fully integrate it. The problem is adoption: GAO has repeatedly found that not every
risk-susceptible program uses available data-matching resources, even when the infrastructure to
do so already exists and doesn’t require new legislation.
The structural obstacle is enforcement, not ideas. GAO’s own recommendations pipeline is full of
fixes agencies haven’t implemented — five agencies need better risk assessments, seven need
more reliable estimation methods, and the four chronic noncompliers need documented policies
and procedures they still lack after four years on notice. None of that requires a new law. It
requires agencies to act on findings that are already public, and requires Congress to treat
compliance as a funding condition rather than an annual footnote. The federal government also
distributed an estimated $1.2 trillion to state and local governments in fiscal 2025 for
transportation, education, and other services — funding that carries its own layer of fraud risk
precisely because a non-federal agency, not GAO or the paying federal department, controls
day-to-day disbursement and eligibility checks. That pass-through money rarely appears in the
same headlines as agency-level improper payments, but it draws from the same taxpayer well and
is subject to even less direct federal oversight.
The Real Cost of Looking Away
That’s the connective tissue back to the funding fight consuming Washington’s attention this
month. Lawmakers can spend weeks negotiating a continuing resolution over a few billion dollars
in disputed line items while $186 billion in known, documented, annually recurring payment errors
sits one government report away from public view — and largely outside the political conversation.
The GAO’s work returns an average of $76 to $123 for every dollar Congress spends funding it,
one of the highest-yield investments in the federal budget. The question this fiscal accountability
outlet keeps returning to isn’t whether the fixes exist. They do, and GAO has published them in
detail for years. The question is whether Congress is willing to make oversight compliance
non-negotiable the next time an agency shows up on the noncompliant list for a fifth straight year.
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