Speaker 1: And we are back with another edition of the Federalist
Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle, Senior Elections correspondent at the
Federalist and your experienced Shirpa on today's quest for Knowledge.
As always, you can email the show at radio at
the Federalist dot com, follow us on x at FDR LST,
make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast, and
of course to the premium version of our website as well.
Our guest today is Rachel O'Brien, deputy public policy editor
for openthebooks dot com. If you want to know what
is going on in the name of your tax dollars,
where those tax dollars are going, you need to take
a look at openthebooks dot com. Let's start here. Seventy
five one hundred dollars per second. The federal government has
wasted seventy five hundred dollars per second of taxpayer money
and improper payments on President Joe Biden and Vice President
Kamala Harris's watch. The administration is looking or at least
on pace, to crack the one trillion dollar mark, a
new wasteful record, according to a new report by Open
the Books. Rachel this is perhaps not surprising, but it's
still stunning on the leves.
Speaker 2: Yes, thanks Matt for having me, and it is stunning.
All Americans should be stune by this. So, you know,
an improper payment for people who don't know is exactly
what it sounds like. It's the government paying either the
wrong person or in the wrong amount or for the
wrong reason. Federal agencies have to have wrong information sometimes
or they can't access information they need. It is really
stunning what you would think the federal government would have
access to and be able to do. And they simply
can't make these payments properly. So, like you mentioned, seventy
five hundred dollars every second is wasted. That translates to
four hundred and fifty thousand dollars every minute. That is
the cost of an out of house in the United States. Yeah,
so we yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 1: I was just going to say, I mean that number
right off top is amazing. As you head to the
one trillion dollar mark, how did you I mean exhaustive
report here? How did you go through and identify these expenditures?
Speaker 2: So federal agencies are required to report their improper payments
every year. Actually, and we just calculated the total. So
last fiscal year there were two hundred and thirty five
billion dollars in improper payments. That is more than the
entire budget of every state except for California. So we
went and said, we wonder how much during the Biden
administration has been wasted. And we did the pretty simple
math and found that by the time he's out of office,
his administration will have overseen more than a trillion dollars
in improper payments, and that is an unfortunate record. During
the Trump administration it was about two hundred billion dollars
less than that. So every administration is wasting money. They're
all they all need to do better. The federal agencies
are wasting money. They're the ones that are writing these checks. Right.
It's not President Biden or President Trump. It is bureaucrats
who are unfortunately wasting taxpayer.
Speaker 1: Funds, and it's Congress not holding them accountable. And we'll
delve into that in just a bit. But I think
it's interesting and a bit on the ironic side that
Joe Biden is heading to Howard this massive, dubious record.
Of course, but he's being hit in many ways by
his own overspending and Congress is penshon for overspending in
his lead and what has driven up inflation in this country.
A lot of this stuff has to be adjusted for inflation,
and it has to be more so adjusted for Biden inflation,
does it not right?
Speaker 2: So actually, when you talk about inflation, our figures, I
believe are so when we compare to President Trump's four
years in office, that the figure that I mentioned that
so Biden's administration has wasted thirty four percent more money
in his first three years in office than Trump did
in his first three years in office, even adjusted for inflation.
So we recognize that inflation is a big factor here.
Even adjusting for inflation, Trump in his four years he
saw two hundred billion dollars fewer and improper payments. And obviously,
you know, Biden's not done with his administration yet. So
that's why that one trillion dollar plus figure is so high,
because just even in three years alone, he has his agencies,
and like you say, Congress not holding them responsible and
requiring change, they've just driven these costs through the roof.
Speaker 1: Let's put this in perspective as well. I mean, we
are absolutely buried in debt. We all know that we
have basically mortgaged our children, grandchildren, their grandchildren's future to
pay for priorities so called and programs. Today. This represents
what you're talking about here in these improper payments one
thirty fifth of the entire thirty five trillion dollar plus debt.
That's an amazing figure for way.
Speaker 2: That's right, it is And obviously with that thirty five
trillion dollars in debt, Congress and the President should be
should be taking steps to address this. So getting into
some of these figures, Medicare and Medicaid, they've accounted for
forty three percent of improper payments last year. That's usually
the case. They're usually the biggest culprits of waste one
hundred and two billion dollars last year. Mismanaged COVID programs,
those continue to waste tax dollars. Dead people are receiving
money every year. They received about three hundred million dollars
last year. And that's simply because you know, the Office
of Personal Management IRS, any of these agencies that are
making payments to retirees, giving benefits to retirees, they don't
update their records when people die, so they're continuing to
get checks. Sometimes you know, relatives are cashing those checks,
they're not sending them back. Another one hundred and seventy
one million dollars was paid to prisoners, people in prison
who should not be getting these checks. The irs twenty
five billion they gave in erroneous tax credits. Five hundred
and forty six million went to families who claim they
had more children than they actually did. So these are
these are the wastes across all federal agencies. They're all
wasting money. You know, some of these payments do get recovered,
they're able to the government is able to claw back
some of it. About less than a third, about twenty
nine percent last year was recovered. But these these payments
should be made in the first place, you know, these
agencies should do their job and confirm that they're paying
the right person and for the right amount. And I'd
like to also mention that that this this these figures
don't include what the Government Accountability Office calls sophisticated fraud schemes.
These are just errors. These are financial errors. So there's
untold billions more in these sophisticated fraud schemes that are
taking money.
Speaker 1: Well, I tell you, it makes you feel good about
a hard day's work around grabbing up that cash and
then wasting it. If it's any consolation. By the way,
some of the deceased recipients of the government program checks
will show up on the voter rolls, So there.
Speaker 2: You have, they're getting paid on their voting.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, it's full circle. You mentioned COVID. I mean, we
haven't seen anything like the COVID stimulus funding so to speak.
The stemmy checks that have gone out the first part
of the pandemic a lot of money. They're trillions of
dollars in the name of, you know, trying to mitigate
the pandemic and its effects. A lot of waste there.
What are we looking at in terms of the again
the dollar figure and how all of that was handled.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the most recent figure we've seen is also about
one trillion, and that is that is over all COVID
nineteen payments. It's small businesses, it's stimulus, it's funds directly
to states and cities, and that's estimated. Again, these are
all estimates because it's hard to keep track of money
you spent improperly, right, So that trillion we have that
trillion dollar estimate of wasteful and or fraudulent covid AID.
That's that's money that's not going to get back. You
see the DOJ going after fraudulent actors and prosecuting them
and trying to claw back some of that money. But
percentage wise, it's got to be lower than the twenty
nine percent we're talking about here with improper payments in
some case, as you have people overseas who are able
to fraudulently get their hands on covid AID by stealing
identities and personating people, making up fake businesses, stealing social
Security numbers of back to dead people stealing their social
Security numbers. So the amount of fraud that went on
with the pandemic again that estimated trillion dollars, you know,
very little of that is able to get clawed back.
Speaker 1: Rachel, I'm curious, is there any way to track the
amount of improper payments or have you been able to
do this in this report. I know you've got a
lot of different categories, but I'm curious about the improper
payments made in one of the biggest issues facing this
country facing this election, illegal immigration and the housing the
resources involved with paying for the massive influx of illegal immigrants.
Does your report take a look at that, so.
Speaker 2: It doesn't break it down by necessarily program spending. In
some agencies, they do break down program program spending, but no,
in terms of these improper payments, you know, they may
not be when you're talking about funding for for uh,
you know, say like the city of New York where
I live. You know, billions and billions of dollars spent
on funding housing and food for for illegal immigrants. That's
not that's not considered improper payments. Unfortunately. That's considered a
valid payment. That is something that the federal government has
decided they're going to spend money on, or they're going
to help cities spend money on. And so unless, say
the City of New York gets paid for a million
immigrants instead of five hundred thousand immigrants, it's not considered
an improper payment. And so that wouldn't show up, right,
So things that we could consider wasteful spending or spending
on things that the United States government shouldn't be spending on,
that's not going to show up in these figures.
Speaker 1: That's amazing, it really is that the tracking on that
has been awful already, and the question of what kind
of money is actually truly devoted to that. That is
to say, did Congress make those decisions or was that
a discretionary decision by this administration? How much of that
is built into that as well?
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Speaker 1: Speaking of Congress, Congress has the I guess, ultimate authority
in this the power of the purse strings. How much
are they accountable for this trillion dollars at least in
this administration, and we'll get into how much this is.
These improper payments have accumulated over the years in Republican
Democrat administrations alike. But is Congress doing anything to hold
the executive branch accountable on the money they appropriate?
Speaker 2: Yes, you know, Congress does have to rent it, and
they are the ones that have the power to do that.
So right now, agencies are required to report their improper
payments payment accuracy dot gov. It is available to the
public for download. That's where we got it. That's where
we're able to analyze the year after year we watched this,
and so both parties in Congress admit this is a problem.
So there is a bipartisan group of cong members in
the House. They introduce the Improper Payments Transparency Act this May.
It would require the president's budget request to Congress to
identify trends in payment errors and that way there could
be a plan proposed to fix them. There's another bill
also in the House that's called the Enhanced Improper Payment
Accountability Act that would require those federal programs that have
budgets of more than one hundred million dollars per year,
would require those programs to get more detailed and timely
reports on their funding. Again, so that you could identify
these sort of trends in these these errors see how
these payments are being made and then have a concrete
plan to fix them. For instance, if an agency doesn't
have the correct information it needs to make a payment,
it should not be sending out a payment if it
can't verify that Bill Williams is the correct Bill Williams,
who should receive this check? You shouldn't be getting the check,
and so there should be more There should be more
checks in place to ensure that these payments aren't being
made to begin with.
Speaker 1: The problem seems to me there's too many checks in place,
asks going out to Bill Williams, and all kinds of
Bill Williams right may or may not be the right
Bill Williams. Doesn't this ultimately speak to this leviathan, this
massive monster of big government, and the fact that big
government has to ultimately be rained in You know, the
issue in America is most of us don't want to
pay this much money have our tax dollars. It certainly
go to this kind of waste, but seems to me
to be a byproduct of a government that just endlessly grows.
Speaker 2: Right, the fact that the government has a trillion dollars
to misspend is obviously evidence of a problem. So you know, Congress,
it's back in Congress's hands. They've got to. Of course,
they're the ones that approve spending. They're the ones that
have to brain in the spending and misspending a trillion
dollars is it is obviously not something that a business
would do. It's not something an individual would do or
a household. It's because the people who are spending these
these dollars, the bureaucrats and the agencies and the members
of Congress, they don't see it as their money. And
because it's somebody else's money, it's almost like play money,
and nobody's held accountable. If it were their own money
coming out of their own pockets, certainly there would be
a different approach to how they're spending it. So absolutely
it all comes down to performing, not only how much
money is spent, but how it is spent and how
it is kept in check.
Speaker 1: Indeed, any parent will tell you that it's a different
deal when you're spending somebody else's money. The kids send
that they're always much more cautious with the work money
and the alliance money than they are with you know,
here you go enjoy the day at the fair kind
of money. So our guest today is Rachel o'bryen, deputy
public policy editor for Open the Books dot Com. Open
the Books dot Com is fantastic work in monitoring the
expenditures your money, basically, what's what's going on with your
money in our government? And they've got a fantastic new
report out that tracks what looks like is on pace
to be a trillion dollars worth of wasteful improper payments
going out during the tenure President Joe Biden and Vice
President Kamala Harris. Final question on that front is, you know,
we again, this is a big problem. A trillion dollar
mark is massive over this administration. But this is a
bipartisan issue, is it not.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is this is something we see every year.
We track this every year, Republican Democrat, and so Barack
Obama going back to his administration, has he wasted about
four percent of his administration spendings on improper payments in
his second term. Donald Trump wasted about five percent of
the government spending and Biden is up to six percent.
So it's growing and growing again. You know, the Biden
administration has wasted thirty four percent more money on improper
payments than the Trump administration even adjusted for inflation. So
when you have out of control spending, just back to
what we were saying, when you have that out of
control spending, you're going to have out of control waste.
They go hand in hand. President Biden's improper payments were
at a high and twenty twenty one of two hundred
and eighty one billion dollars. So they have been going
down every year. Unfortunately, they're still incredibly high, higher than
ever in previous administrations. So they went down and down,
quote unquote down to two hundred and forty seven billion
dollars in twenty twenty two, and then just this last
year down to two hundred and thirty five billion dollars
in twenty twenty three. But that two hundred and eighty
one billion was so high to begin with, the country
can't make up for it. It's still going to be
this historic one trillion dollars in wrongful payments by the
end of Biden's term.
Speaker 1: It reminds me of the inflation argument, you know, we
hear from the Biden Harris administration. Oh, everything's all right now,
inflation is going down. Well, sure it's going down by
a fragment, but it's still at significantly high levels, and
just ask the consumer how much of that, of course,
is leading to the prices we're paying for for everything.
You know this again, trillion dollars is part of a
massive debt structure that has a definite, long term and
immediate impact on what consumers are paying.
Speaker 2: That's right, that's right. We're all seeing all of our
bills go up. Every single one of my utility bills
has increased, property taxes, everything goes up. Your grocery bills
are like fifty percent more than they were a few
years ago. So while you could say, sure inflation is
going down, or sure these improper payments are going down,
they're still incredibly and irresponsibly high, and we're paying for it.
We're the ones paying for it. Our kids and our
great kids, of course are going to have to pay
that thirty five trillion dollars in debt. And so some
concrete actions need to be taken by Congress. It looks
like there's a good start with those two bills I
mentioned earlier. They're bipartisan bills. Hopefully they will get passed.
Hopefully they will get passed by the Senate, and the
these federal agencies and the presidential administration that oversees them,
they will be held accountable and we can start seeing
these numbers go down lower and lower. There's no reason
why Medicaid Medicare should should spend one hundred billion dollars
a year in improper payments. It's it's it's it's it's
unfathomable that that's the amount that we're seeing and.
Speaker 1: It's robbing people who actually need the services. Let's let's
not lose sight of that as well. If that's what
we're going to do, if that's what the American taxpayer,
the American people want to do, that's their priority, and
they're sending members of Congress to do just that. You're
you're you're wasting the efforts, You're wasting the resources of
people who really need that. I'm going to turn our
attention now and I send my heartfelt condolences to all
of you had Opened the Books. We learned this past
summer that Adam Angievski, the founder of Open the Books,
passed away obvious, leaving a huge void in that organization.
The work continues, and the great work continues, but I
wanted to talk a little bit about Adam and his legacy.
You know, he drove home the point in the Watchdog
organization and the whole effort to scrutinize, monitor and make
government truly open. The motto has always been post every
dime online in real time. I know you are continuing
to do that, but again, just a tremendous voice for
transparency in government.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Adam, he began Open the Books about fifteen years
ago at his kitchen table, you know, just focusing on
the Chicago suburb where he lives, and that was holding
government accountable to taxpayers. He was described appropriately, I think
as a happy warrior. You know, under his leadership, Open
the Books has expanded, It became this highly respected brand
that we have. You know, if you were anyone other
than a wasteful or irresponsible public servant, you would be
happy to see Adam a great guy just just looking
to protect taxpayers, put transparency in front of people, making
government spending which should be accessible to everybody, making it
more accessible. And that's our mission every time online in
real time, you know, putting everything from federal spending to
state to city to village line item expenditures on our website,
in our reports. And so his incredible work ethic and
his energy and practical sense of optimism has been me missed.
It will continue to be missed. But we're continuing the organization.
We are thankfully a well oiled machine. We're going to
continue Adam's legacy. We have been. You know, we're opening
the books on government spending. We're exposing this waste, fraud,
and abuse that continues to rear its ugly head day
in and day out. So you know, the organization needs
to continue to exist so that we can can give
this information to the public.
Speaker 1: Most definitely, and I think one of Adam's greatest legacy.
You kind of touched upon it, and I had the
good pleasure of interviewing Adam on a few occasions, several
I think about it over the many years of different
outlets that I've been at, But he definitely made members
of Congress very nervous. He made politicians very nervous, and
you know, if you're making the politicians nervous, you're probably
on the right track.
Speaker 2: That's right, That's exactly right. One of my favorite recent
memories of Adam doing exactly that was while doctor Anthony
Fauci most recently testified to a Congressional committee several months
I believe was in the spring. Adam sat directly behind him.
Adam got to that hearing early. He was one of
the first people in the room. He sat, I believe,
right next to one of Fauci's lawyers in the row
behind him. He's in a few photos that were taken,
you know. So there he was, right on his back,
making sure Fauci knew he was there. You know, open
the books, had done years of reporting and tracking Fauci's
of course, not only his NIH spending, but his salary.
He was at the time the highest paid employee of
the federal government, making more than the president or any
other federal employee. And so we expose that and Adam
that his physical presence behind Fauci was exactly that manifestation
of what we've been doing, you know, on our computers
in tracking these people. Adam, Adam was there in person,
and that's exactly what it was. If you were, if
you're wasteful or abusive, you should.
Speaker 1: Heear him well, speaking of waste, fraud and abuse, you
you hit the trifecta with Anthony Fouchy. My goodness, you know,
and I think you know, we talk about these these
large scale projects that you do, and you do great
work on that. Obviously, this this latest report is an
example of the good work you've done over many years.
But this is also something you don't have to wait
for the reports. Americans. Citizens can get involved, go to
the website, say they're interested in what you know different bureaucrats,
so what their salaries are. That's a big reason at
the core of why Open the Books was created, so
that Americans can just turn to this stuff easily, as
opposed to having to weigh through all of the budget
eyed and the documents that you folks do all the time.
This is easily accessible information so that they can be
engaged in their government.
Speaker 2: That's right. We have a feature now on our website
called Benjamin the Chatbot. It's an AI box on the
bottom right corner. As soon as you go to our
website and you can type in the name of a
public employee and get their salary information or pension information.
You could get the information about what vendors have been
receiving money from governments. So if you want to know
how many state or local or even the federal government,
how many entities are our, say, for instance, paying for
Facebook services, you can search Facebook and you can get
that information. So we've waited through that. We file over
fifty thousand freedom of information requests every year, and so
that populates our databases with this spending information that the
public can now search easily through that Benjamin the chatbot,
and that's open the books dot com as easy as
you know it is to remember. That is our name,
that is our website name, and it's a repository for
all of that spending that Adam spent so many years
building up, and that we're continuing to build every year.
You know, twenty twenty three or twenty four rather is
coming to an end. We're going to file another fifty
thousand freedom of information requests to get all the total
stending from this year, you know, beginning in January, and
it's year after year those figures go up and we
continue to make it accessible to people exactly as our intention.
Speaker 1: Rachel. I wonder if Benjamin the chatbot, if he comes
with the emoji with the palm in face, palman on forehead,
that expression of oh dear Lord, these people just won't stop.
Speaker 2: I'm going to suggest that to our our grand design.
Speaker 1: I would say, put that little emoji in there when
things are really awful, and they they often are. They ultimately,
you know, the idea of the founders remains ever clear today,
and that is an engaged citizen and an informed citizen
leads to a successful republic. That's really the core of
openbooks dot com.
Speaker 2: Right, Well, that's right. So we pay our taxes, we'd
like to know, you know, where it goes, so we
can decide whether the people we've elected or doing the
right thing with our money. You know, back to the
the fauci uh you know, uh testifying before Congress. One
of the things that opened the books. We've spent years
on is gathering the records on the royalties that are
paid to the NIH. And it's scientists, right, So every
American was impacted by the pandemic and the shutdowns. People obviously,
you know, lost businesses, people lost income, Obviously, people lost
family members. But having shut down the country and had
those states that did have vaccine requirements, we started looking
into the NIH and found that they received two point
seven billion dollars in royalties since two thousand and nine.
And that's from companies that buy these licenses for these
for technology created by government scientists. So when they come
up with a vaccine or a divine medical device, companies
can buy up the licenses, and so we wanted to know, Hey,
the government scientists that are, you know, getting paid government
salaries through the NIH are they are they getting money
from these third party companies and is a conflict of interest?
And so we've been fighting them for years. We got
we found the two point seven billion dollars in royalties.
There's more to be found. There's still tons of redactions
there and the most recent, most recent thing that we
found is that now foreign licensees, companies in overseas countries
now make up the vast majority of those that are
buying up these NIH technologies.
Speaker 1: That is a calling just amazing and I don't think
Americans in general know that. So excellent work exposing that information.
I guess that leads me to my final question. This
is a big project we talked about today, the amount
of wasteful spending, improper payments. Clearly you are always in
motion filing tens of thousands of Freedom Information Act requests
trying to get this information. Can you give us a
hint at what your next big projects might be? Next
couple of projects coming out?
Speaker 2: Well, so we've done quite a bit of work on universities.
You know, universities now in many cases are collecting millions,
tens of millions every year in federal funds, including universities
that don't need it, wealthy universities that have huge endowments.
So we reported on that quite a bit. Private universities
getting grants, federal contracts, plenty of plenty of money, even
though again they have billions of dollars in their endowments.
So we're going to be doing some more there. We're
going to be reporting quite a bit on universities in
not only collecting federal funding, but in many cases universities
get foreign funding from foreign governments, including governments that are
not allies of the US. So that's one thing we're
going to continue doing, and you know, weekly, if not
even more more frequently. We're updating our website. We have
investigations going on day in and day out, and if
people want to reach us, Open the Books dot com,
you know, if you have an idea for an investigation,
feel free to reach out there. We're going to continue
doing this and we'd love some suggestions, not that there's
plenty out there already for us to report on.
Speaker 1: Sure Sure well, it's extraordinary work. It's extremely necessary work,
and I know it can be laborious, but I know
a lot of people who are very glad that Open
the Books dot Com that Adam started fifteen years ago,
is doing what it does getting the information out there
so that ultimately the citizens and hopefully their representatives will
hold these massive bureaucratic operations accountable. We look forward to
the next reports and all the great work that you're doing.
Speaker 2: Thanks so much, Thank you so much for having me, Matt, You've.
Speaker 1: Bet thanks to my guest today, Rachel O'Brien, Deputy Public
Power US the editor. We're openthebooks dot com. You've been
listening to another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm
Matt Kittle, senior correspondent at The Federalist. We'll be back
soon with more. Until then, stay lovers of freedom and
anxious for the Fray