Atlanta (AP) – Defenders of the good government, anti -fiscal conservatives, politicians of various stripes and everyday Americans “Waste, fraud and abuse” through the United States government.
President Donald Trump and the government’s ministry of efficiency, led by the richest man in the worldElon Musk, opened the last chapter for a sentence praised as common sense and was dried like propaganda.
“It’s a very wide idea,” said Matt Weidinger of the American Enterprise Institute on the right. “But this phrase” Gushing, fraud and abuse “obviously means different things for different people.”
Here is an overview of this rhetorical cake and the way it relates to the start of Trump’s second administration.
The apparently distant government has always been a scarecrow
It is difficult to determine the genesis of “waste, fraud and abuse” as a political rhetoric. But the resulting concept and battles are older than the nation: think of “taxation without representation” and the rupture of Great Britain.
After winning independence, the first American Republic resumed the arguments.
Two generations fought on the National Bank of Alexander Hamilton – a philosophical precursor to everything, from the federal system of reserve to loans in small businesses, mortgage securities and banking insurance support supported by the federal government .
Trump’s populist hero, Andrew Jackson, launched the second national bank as a SOP to his wealthy shareholders. “There are no ailments necessary for the government,” wrote the seventh president in a veto message. “His ills only exist in his abuses.”
Many Jackson compatriots have opposed the related “internal improvements” of the American system of Henry Clay. The Servised Plaiste Class has seen expenses for roads, bridges and navigable navigable routes – long before Washington was “infrastructure weeks” – as an unconstitutional federal surpassing which has transferred their wealth indirectly to owners of ‘factories, bankers and magnates sent to more industrialized northern states.
Ronald Reagan cemented the approach of modern conservatives in his first inaugural speech. “The government is not the solution to our problem,” he said in 1981. “The government is the problem.”
He kept “the queen of well-being” as a public face of an ineffective social security net and an inexplicable federal government. Reagan based the attack, which criticisms castigated as a racist trope, on a case of criminal fraud of a woman to obtain hundreds of thousands of dollars in aid.
In a DOGE precursor, Reagan has imposed a group of CEO in the private sector to identify waste. The “Grace Commission”, named in name of its president, the businessman J. Peter Grace, has moved more deliberately than Doge, and his recommendations have not been implemented on a large scale. Reagan and Congress have increased retirement age for social security eligibility.
The federal pie is massive
The federal government spent around 6.7 dollars in the year 2023.
The libertarian Cato Institute has the largest articles in this way: 3.19 billions of dollars in transfer payments; 1.15 billion of dollars of states aid; $ 950 billion in interest payments on national debt; 840 billion dollars in goods and services purchases; and $ 560 billion to pay federal workers.
Social security and health insurance include most of the CATO transfer category, as well as programs such as food assistance and income tax credit for low-income households. Medicaid represents most state aid, which also include education, transport and other infrastructure.
The problem for Musk, or perhaps for Trump and the republican majority at the Congress, is that the Americans have contradictory opinions on details.
March 2023 survey of The Associated Press-Noc Center for Public Affairs Research found that 6 out of 10 American adults said the US government spent “too” overall. Yet an AP-Noc survey Taken in January 2025 noted that around two thirds of American adults say that the American government spends “too little” for social security and education. About 6 and 10 said the same thing about Medicare, the government health insurance program for older Americans and help the poor Americans.
Most adults also say that Medicaid, the Health Insurance Program for American Americans opening the poorest and low-income children, is underfunded. Medicare and Medicaid payments do not go directly to patients but health care providers – doctors, hospitals, clinics, pharmaceutical societies and medical supplies in communities across the country.
How much is really lost for waste and fraud?
The government of government responsibility and other agencies produce regular reports identifying ineffectiveness and other problems. The GAO said in 2024 that its promulgated recommendations had saved around $ 667 billion since 2011.
Vivek Ramaswamy, another Trump ally, initially involved with Doge, has seized hundreds of billions of dollars in contracts and programs that Congress may not be explicitly re-authorized. However, unlike the characterization of Ramaswamy, most are ongoing programs, medical veterans as NASA.
Trump did not address another potential money pool: the so-called “tax gap”. It is not a question of republican and democratic debate on rates and gaps. This is the estimated gap between what the federal government should perceive under the existing law and what is really paid in time. Like “inappropriate payments”, it is a mixture of desktop error and intentional fraud.
The IRS estimate for the 2022 taxation year: $ 696 billion.
Other government reports identify “inappropriate payments” – Social Security, Maladie, Medicaid, unemployment insurance – which total several hundred typical billion years.
Weidinger, the AEI budgetary expert, said that this includes certain fraudulent expenses, but is mainly overpayed or payments that require more documentation. Errors could include a payment from social security a month after the death of a beneficiary, an error in calculating the government of someone’s service, someone obtaining an unemployment check after obtaining a new job or a insufficiently documented complaint of a health care provider.
But WeIDINGER also noted that special government programs, such as unemployment during the cocvid pandemic, transported a much higher pure and simple level of fraud – identity thieves, including foreign nations, system game for get money.
“We will never recover all of this,” he said.
And, he added, government estimates on fraud and inappropriate payments are probably too low even if they hardly reach the levels of Musk savings and Trump has promised.
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