Waste, fraud, abuse, repeat
Governments have poured trillions of dollars into fighting the COVID -19 pandemic on a host of fronts, and rightly so. But they’ve also wasted billions in the process.
Admitting that doesn’t make government spending all bad, or any less necessary, of course. If waste, fraud and abuse were reasons to simply cancel federal programs, the U.S. would have long ago stopped having a military.
But with Washington now spending another $1.9 trillion for pandemic relief, President Joe Biden proposing a multi-trillion dollar infrastructure package, and states like New York putting their own taxpayer funds into relief and stimulus programs, it’s critical that they learn the lessons of the past year.
Even in a crisis in which trillions of dollars are going out the door, the numbers are startling when it comes to waste and outright fraud.
The Small Business Administration’s inspector general has identified at least $81.7 billion in potentially fraudulent Economic Injury Disaster Loans and Paycheck Protection Proshuttered gram claims so far. And watchdogs tell Congress that’s likely just a fraction of the abuse in the pandemic relief and stimulus programs.
At the state level, too, problems abound. The state Labor Department is estimated to have approved $114 million in unemployment and federal relief benefits to people who were ineligible for the money. Now the state is telling people to pay it back — people who likely spent it already and who in many cases didn’t realize the state had made a mistake. Some lawmakers propose to forgive benefits for people who honestly didn’t know they were not entitled to them.
It’s a compassionate gesture and arguably a necessary one. After all, the state shares much of the blame here. Overwhelmed with applications for unemployment last year when the pandemic took hold and the economy largely shut down, the state lowered its safeguards, dispatching several thousand newly hired and hastily trained people to process claims in order to get help to people more quickly.
It cannot be overstated how necessary all this was to keep millions of suddenly unemployed people and businesses in New York and across the country from going under. And how necessary it continues to be. The pandemic isn’t over.
Similarly, President Biden’s push for a $2 trillion national infrastructure program is the kind of vital federal response this country needs right now to speed the recovery, not to mention to undertake long-overdue work on America’s aging roads, bridges, communications and energy systems. The country wasted the past four years waiting for former President Donald Trump to deliver a plan he was forever saying he’d have ready any day now and never did. Meanwhile, other nations, particularly China, are investing big in the kind of ways America once did before political gridlock became, for too many politicians, preferable to progress.
America can’t afford to waste another four years, nor can it afford to waste billions upon billions of dollars. In both Albany and Washington, we need a full and unflinchingly honest appraisal of how much was misspent, and assurances that realistic, credible safeguards are in place to minimize waste in the future. In short, we need to know our government recognizes its mistakes, and has learned from them.