Yes. The problem is real. The conversation about it is mostly not.
I'm going to give you the numbers. Not the talking points — the audited numbers. If you identify right of center and you care about fiscal responsibility, you deserve to know where the waste actually lives, because it is not where most of the political conversation puts it.
The federal government made $186 billion in improper payments in FY 2025, across 64 programs at 15 agencies. Since 2003, the cumulative total is roughly $3 trillion. GAO estimates actual fraud exposure at $233 to $521 billion annually. The spread is wide because measuring fraud requires distinguishing intentional theft from paperwork errors, and most federal systems cannot do that well.
These are real numbers. They should make you angry. The question is what you do with the anger.
The Pentagon has failed its audit for eight consecutive years. It is the only major federal agency that has never received a clean audit opinion. Auditors are not saying money is missing — they are saying the accounting systems cannot confirm what exists. $4.1 trillion in assets. $4.3 trillion in liabilities. 26 material weaknesses. The F-35 program — projected lifetime cost of $2 trillion — has assets the auditors could not verify the existence of. Senators Grassley and Sanders co-sponsored a bill requiring DOD to pass a full audit. That bipartisan pairing tells you something about where the consensus is.
Federal office space: 17 of 24 agency headquarters buildings are used at 25% capacity or less. The government spends roughly $2 billion per year operating buildings and $5 billion per year on leases regardless of how many people are in them. This is indefensible and has been documented by GAO for years.
Legacy IT: The federal government spends over $100 billion per year on information technology, most of it maintaining systems that don't work well rather than building ones that do.
COVID pandemic fraud: The SBA's pandemic loan programs lost an estimated $200 billion or more to fraud. That is verified, documented, and the subject of ongoing prosecutions.
Medicare billing fraud: Healthcare fraud is a $60 to $90 billion per year problem, predominantly on the provider side — hospitals and clinics overbilling, not patients gaming the system.
This is the part that requires honesty with a right-of-center audience, and I'm going to be direct about it.
SNAP — food stamps — has an improper payment rate of roughly 8–9%. But its administrative overhead is under 8% of total spending. Over 92 cents of every dollar reaches the intended recipient. Medicaid: 95% of spending reaches beneficiaries. The Earned Income Tax Credit has less than 1% administrative overhead — it is one of the most efficiently run programs in the federal government. Its high "improper payment" rate is driven largely by documentation errors in a complex tax code, not by people stealing money.
Calling SNAP "waste" because you object to the policy is a values disagreement. Calling the Pentagon's inability to account for $4 trillion in assets "waste" is a management failure. Both are legitimate political conversations. They are not the same conversation, and conflating them is how the real waste survives.
DOGE claimed $214 billion in savings. Independent analysts — Brookings, the Penn Wharton Budget Model, Treasury outflow data — verified between $20 and $40 billion. Federal spending rose, not fell, during DOGE's peak activity. The largest peacetime workforce reduction on record — roughly 249,000 federal employees — did not reduce federal spending.
The collateral damage is measurable. IRS enforcement cuts are projected to lose over $500 billion in uncollected revenue — auditors who generate $6 to $12 for every $1 spent were eliminated. Inspector General offices — which return $18 for every $1 invested and identified $71 billion in savings in FY 2024 alone — had their budgets cut. Cutting the people who find the waste does not reduce waste. It hides it.
If you are right of center and you care about results rather than theater, this should concern you. DOGE identified a real problem. It produced a performance of solving it. The performance cost more than the problem.
The evidence is consistent and unglamorous.
Inspector General offices. $18 returned for every $1 invested. The most cost-effective anti-waste tool the government has. Fund them, don't cut them.
Pre-payment verification. Most federal programs catch fraud after the money is gone. Programs that verify before paying — using cross-agency data matching — stop fraud at the source. The "Do Not Pay" system exists. It is underfunded and not universally implemented.
The GAO High Risk List. 38 programs flagged as vulnerable to waste. Sustained attention to that list has produced $759 billion in documented savings over its history. The key word is sustained — it requires unglamorous follow-through over multiple Congresses, not a single dramatic intervention.
Require the Pentagon to pass its audit. The FY 2024 NDAA set a deadline of December 31, 2028. Hold it. No more extensions. No more excuses. If a private company failed its audit for eight years, it would not receive government contracts. The Pentagon should face the same standard.
The plank this lives under is I: Read the Whole Thing Before You Respond. The waste is real. The fraud is real. But the conversation about them is dominated by people who haven't read the GAO reports, haven't looked at which programs actually lose money and which don't, and haven't noticed that the most expensive single line item in the federal budget — defense — is the one that cannot account for its own spending. A right-of-center voter who cares about fiscal responsibility deserves better than theater. They deserve the spreadsheet.