Waste, fraud, abuse, and woke

[hudebnik]

We've heard a lot in the past two months about DOGE and the Trump cabinet cutting government waste, fraud, abuse, and "wokeness". These words are usually combined in the same sentence, and rarely distinguished from one another.

There really are several different things that might go wrong with a government spending program, each with a different appropriate response.

Waste and inefficiency

Any government program will inevitably waste some money. There might be duplication of effort, e.g. people hand-copying data from one form to a nearly identical one, wasting both time and money. There might be erroneous expenditures: somebody miscopied a number or approved an expenditure that shouldn't have been approved. Or the whole program might be an ineffective way to achieve its stated goals. All of these are bad things, none of them can be completely eliminated, but all of them can be reduced with careful examination. It takes bureaucratic-process expertise to identify duplication of effort and common sources of error, and recommend how to reduce those things. It takes domain expertise, outcomes analysis, and an open mind to identify approaches that are simply not working, and even more to identify better alternatives. Sometimes there are no better alternatives: based on analysis of past failures and literature review, there is no known way to actually accomplish the stated goals, in which case the program should arguably be shut down.

Vice President Al Gore's "Reinventing Government" program was a relatively-successful effort in this area: it looked at a lot of cases of error and inefficiency, took extensive input from the people actually implementing those programs, and in many cases found simple ways to improve results and save money, such as distributing the dates of payments evenly throughout the month rather than trying to process most of them on the same day.

Fraud and abuse

Any government program that hands out money will inevitably attract fraud and abuse. These are different from waste and inefficiency in that somebody intentionally got something not authorized by the enabling legislation. Fortunately, the lack of authorization means somebody is breaking a law, so the solution is obvious: file criminal charges against the individuals doing it. Shutting down a whole program is almost never an appropriate solution unless the rate of fraud is so high that it swamps the program's legitimate uses.

How many criminal charges have been filed for benefits fraud as a result of DOGE investigations? I haven't heard of any, which suggests that they haven't actually found any fraud to speak of. (Or that they'd already fired the prosecutors who would have brought those charges, or that in their haste to destroy the agency they'd already destroyed or contaminated the evidence -- neither of which is a promising way to fight fraud.)

A related question: how much does it cost to catch and stop fraud? These costs come in two forms.
First, obviously, how much bureaucratic time and paperwork (and how much ordinary-citizens' time and paperwork) is spent just trying to certify eligibility for benefits: if we spend $1,000,000 to catch $100,000 worth of fraud, that's a textbook example of "waste and inefficiency". Second, how many false-positives do we get in exchange for reducing false-negatives? If we kick ten ineligible people off Medicare, but also kick fifty eligible people off Medicare at the same time (whether because of bureaucratic error or because the added paperwork burden causes some of them to miss deadlines), do we count that as a win or a loss?

Programs no longer consistent with administration priorities

Every new administration will have different priorities than the previous one, and will inevitably want to spend more money on some things and less on others; this is perfectly legitimate, because elections have consequences. The traditional, legal way to handle this is to request, and negotiate, a different allocation of money in the next round of Congressional budget bills. If your team negotiate well, they may be able to completely eliminate a program in the next year's budget, not because of waste, inefficiency, fraud, or abuse, but simply because the Administration and a good fraction of Congress don't support it. But if most of Congress does support it, the Administration has to decide whether it's worth a veto fight that also imperils the rest of the budget.

The less-traditional, less-legal way is to unilaterally change the spending in this year's budget, which has already been passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the (then-)President and therefore has the force of law. President Nixon tried to do that (not so much on first taking office, but in implementing budgets passed later by a heavily-Democratic Congress) by refusing to spend money on things he didn't approve of, and Congress responded with the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, saying explicitly that no, the President doesn't have the power to do that. Almost every President since then has sought line-item vetoes or some kind of limited impoundment authority. The second Trump administration has gone farther than any other in this regard, unilaterally cancelling thousands of contracts, whole programs, and even whole agencies without even asking Congress.

So, three different reasons to want to save money on a program, and three different appropriate responses. The first requires careful, painstaking analysis and expertise; the second requires evidence and criminal charges; and the third requires political negotiation and waiting a few months. The Trump administration didn't like any of those requirements, so they skipped the step of identifying waste, inefficiency, fraud, and abuse and went straight to cutting programs that might conceivably contain waste, inefficiency, fraud, and abuse (which is all of them), in "shock and awe" mode, moving fast to change the reality on the ground long before the courts, the law, or the political opposition could catch up with them. Moving that fast, of course, means that even if they did care about which programs are actually problematic, they wouldn't have time to identify or analyze them. Besides, that's boring, tedious work; it's much more fun to just break things because you can and because it makes liberals cry.

Cutting things with an axe rather than a scalpel tends to waste money. If you've funded the construction of a tunnel, or a medical outcomes study, and shut down the program abruptly at 90% completion, you've already spent 90% of the money, but you'll get none of the benefit because you can't drive through 90% of a tunnel, and 90% of a medical outcomes study lacks credibility because it violates the carefully-planned study protocol the researchers selected in advance. If you cancel a signed contract and the other party sues you for breach of contract, you may end up paying court fees and fines, so you're still spending taxpayer dollars but not getting the benefit the program was supposed to provide.

But of course it's not really about saving taxpayer dollars; it's about a jihad against the whole idea of government. The people at DOGE, and some or all of the Trump cabinet, are engaged in a holy war to destroy as much of the Federal government as possible before anybody can stop them. Trump may eventually come to regret this, because if you have no government left, you can't use it to reward your friends and punish your enemies.